Mykel's Blog for August 2019 or Someone Special

Mykel’s Post-MRR Blog

Number ??? August 2019

Someone Special

by Mykel Board

Sometimes it’s hard to explain how great it is being Mykel Board. It’s complicated… like explaining humor to a feminist. I’ll give you an example. Here’s an email I got early last year:

Dear Mr. Board,

I feel funny calling you Mister, maybe UNCLE or PROFESSOR would be better. I feel like I’ve known you for a dozen years. I read your column in MRR since I was 15. (Yeah, When they bit the dust I was happier than a liberal at a book-burning.) I’ve been following your blog since you were fired. I feel like I know you. And I also feel like you’re the only person in the world who would understand —maybe appreciate— my uniqueness.

I’m telling you about this now, because I’ll be in New York City for the first time ever. I’m arriving at the beginning of September and staying a week. I hope we can meet up. I’m as big a beer fan as you are —ALL Buds are for me— (LOL) so we’ll hit the bars. But that’s not what I want to tell you It’s something I’ve never told anyone else. Yeah, my mother knows but she never talks about it. We pretend there’s nothing special to talk about. LOL

Okay, I’ll stop beating off around the hairy bush. LOL. You ready? Well, here it comes:

I HAVE TWO ASSHOLES

No, I’m not talking about relatives. I’m not talking about a surgical drillhole for some artificial hanging shitbag. I’m talking about biological, rectal, anal me! I don’t know how it happened. One doctor said it could have been an undeveloped twin, like those two-headed babies in sideshows. Whatever it is, there are two of them.

Both are puffy, rectal rose-shaped. Both are sensitive to the touch. About 3 inches from each other. One is in the normal asshole position. The other about 3 inches up the crack. In case you’re wondering, I only shit out of one of them. But both of ‘em give me pleasure when I stick stuff in ‘em

I hope I was right in deciding to write to you about this. You’re the only person I “know” who would think this was cool. Everyone else would just go YUCK!

See you soon,

Jorge Matias

Holy… er… shit! Who else would get to meet a guy with two assholes? Despite prostate, penis, hairline, and stature problems… there are really some advantages to being ME.

Our email goes back and forth. We set up a date. He’s going to visit in September. I warn him against coming too close to Yom Kippur.

“What’s Yom Kippur?” he asks. “Is that a kind of fish? And why shouldn’t I come too close to it?”

I’m not sure if he’s joking or not. He does live out in the boonies. Besides, who knows what sense of humor a guy with two assholes might have?

He arrives just after Sukkot… knocks, doesn’t ring the bell like a native would. Um yeah, there he is. I hoped he’d be better looking… a modern version of a young David Cassidy… or with a name like Jorge… some skinny dark boy from the DR. Nope. It’s not that he is ugly. He’s just… I donno… plain. Light brown hair, just starting to recede. a chubby face that’ll probably droop into jowls by the time he’s my age. Taller than me… but who isn’t? Not fat, but soft… like a teen muscleman gone to seed at 30. His skin is the kind of white that nobody in New York is.

He’s smiling, but doesn’t say a word... just walks in the door holding an ART record.

  “First thing,” he says, “before we talk you gotta sign this. My friends’ll be jealous when they see it.”

“Are your friends better looking than you are?” I don’t ask.

I sign the record and we sit on the couch.

He wipes his forehead with the back of his hand.

“Sure is hot in New York,” he says.

“It’s September,” I tell him. “It’s 65 degrees outside.”

“Yeah,” he says, “hot isn’t it.”

“You want a beer?” I ask, getting up and walking to the refrigerator.

“Sure,” he says.

“Allagash or Founders?” I ask.

“Naw,” he says, “I’ll just have a beer.”

I laugh and bring an Allagash for him and a Founders for me.

We click bottles. “Baka yaroo!” I say.

His eyebrows move closer together.

“It means CHEERS in Japanese,” I tell him. (Actually it means you fuckin’ idiot in Japanese, but I like to tell people it means cheers.)

“Besa mi culo,” he says back. “It means cheers in Spanish.”

“Where are you from?” I ask. “You speak Spanish, have a Spanish name, but are whiter than a Klanman’s sheet.”

He laughs.

“I’m from Idaho,” he says. “You can’t get more backwoods than me. My mother picked the name. I guess she had a lot of choices…. I think it comes from some TV show or something… never knew my dad…. but enough of that. I want to show you my assholes.”

As he speaks, he unbuckles his belt buckle, unsnaps his pants and lowers them to his shins. Then he lowers his boxers, turns away from me and bends over… hands resting on his knees. Normally this is a guest position I’d relish, but there is something oddly… I donno… non-sexual about this.

“Come on,” he says, “look close. You can touch ‘em if you want.”

I bend to inspect that dark crack. Right in the middle —where you’d expect it— is an asshole. I rub my finger against it, and it puckers as rubbed assholes are wont to do. And sure enough, there’s another one a few inches toward the backbone.

I put my middle finger in my mouth getting it nice and wet. Choosing the uppermost of the two holes I press it against the puckered muscle.. The sphincter sucks it inside. It feels softer and wetter than when I do it to myself.

Jorge groans.

I remove the finger so I can bring my hand to my lips again. I suck on the previously inserted finger. There’s a faintly familiar taste… something like... marmalade? This time, I also wet my index finger and bring both to the same opening. I press them in together.

“Yaaaa!” he moans sounding more in pain than in pleasure.

Then I pull out and move up to the other hole.

This one is looser… the slide in is easy. Both fingers… deep and immediate. This must be the poop chute. It’s more relaxed… more flexible.

I unbuckle my belt and drop my pants. I’m hard and ready… I spit into my right palm… twice… then rub the spittle onto my throbbing three inches of love muscle.

Then I plunge in.

Grabbing him around the waist I push my hips forward, burying myself in his lower hole. I can feel him tighten around me. It feels like a fist… a very friendly fist.

Oh yeah, baby! Ride ‘em cowboy! Buck that bronco! Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes!

I pull out and hand him a kleenex, taking one for myself.

“Thank you for that, Mykel,” he says. “Until just a few minutes ago I was a virgin.”

“You’re shitting me,” I say… instantly regretting the phrase.

He wipes himself... pulls up his pants... and turns to me shaking his head.

“Mykel,” he says, “I’m a freak. A side-show attraction that didn’t happen… How many people do you think want to screw a mutant?”

“There must be a ton of ‘em,” I say. “Back in the days where people actually looked at things on paper… turned pages… there were whole magazines devoted to sex with freaks. You have no idea how many pages got stuck together from semen spilled over freaks.”

“You don’t get it, do you?” he asks, still shaking his head. “I’ve read you for years. I know you grew up in a normal family, in the suburbs, near the city. I know you acted weird because you were afraid of being normal.”

“My father only had one arm,” I tell him.

“I know that,” he says. “But that wasn’t you. That was a war vet… almost normal for the time. You tried to be different to avoid normal. But you don’t get what it’s like BEING different, and trying to pass for normal.”

I must look puzzled, because he sits on the couch and sighs deeply… taking a slug of Allagash. He talks to me like a special ed teacher trying to explain algebra to a retard.

“Look Mykel,” he says, “the reason I never had sex before is because I’ve been hiding my difference. Screwing… guys or girls… anybody… would give away my secret. How long do you think I could last in Podunk Idaho as the guy with two assholes?”

I shrug, trying to figure out what percentage of girls are willing to fiddle with your asshole. A small number according to my own peter meter… but I let him talk.

“Okay,” he says. “Let me put it this way. You write about how people should celebrate their differences... how homos… as you call them... should demand the right to flame, rather than the right to get married and be like everybody else… how Negroes… as you call them… should demand the right to be different… celebratory… unique in culture… rather than the right to work as a clerk in a law office. That’s because you’ve been normal your whole life.”

“Hey,” I say, “that’s not fair.”

“But it’s the reality, Mykel,” he answers. “You can deny it, just like some straight guys did the homo thing because of David Bowie… But the reality is… you’re one of THEM. A little shorter than average… a little smarter… a little more sawed-off, maybe… but when push comes to shove, you’re one of THEM.”

I can feel tears welling up. Normal… every day… average… these words are curses to me. Maybe the only taboos I have. And now... someone I’ve just fucked in the ass is… if not saying those words... at least implying them. No fuckin’ LOL here! I blink and hope he doesn’t notice the eye liquid.

He continues, “Before now, I never even tried to have sex. I’ve been afraid that once someone finds out I’m… you know… different... our relationship will change. Either they’d back off because I’m a freak… or they’d want me more… because I’M A FREAK!”

He’s shouting now.

“I picked you,” he continues, “because you have no fetishes, or maybe all fetishes, I donno. And you have no fear.”

“I’m afraid of getting Alzheimer’s,” I tell him.

“Come on,” he says. “You visited that girl in the hospital who just had a kidney transplant… You wanted to look at the stitches. You never met her and —for you— what people don’t talk about… their taboos… that’s what fascinates you. That’s what you go for first.”

“Did I write about that?” I ask. “I forget.”

He nods… and continues almost whispering, “I knew I’d be an adventure for you. I’ve done it. It felt good, but what now? Why can’t I just be normal?”

Me? I’ve spent my literary life celebrating not being normal. I’ve scolded homos for wanting to get married, have children, live like every suburban clone. I’ve complained about women who take offense at being complimented by strangers on the street… instead of just ignored like everyone else. I’ve railed against punkrockers who take jobs on Wall Street. The idea of being normal has disgusted me for almost three-quarters of a century.

And now what do I do?

ENDNOTES: [You can contact me on facebook or by email to god@mykelboard.com. Through the post office: send those... er... private DVDs..or music or zines... or anything else (legal only!) to:
Mykel Board, POB 137, New York, NY 10012-0003.
If you like my writing, you can be notified when anything new is available. Subscribe to the MYKEL'S READERS Yahoo group:
readmboard-subscribe@yahoogroups.com]

-→Full of shit dept: Japan Travel reports that a new museum has opened in Yokohama. It is a TURD (unko, in Japanese) museum. Its focus is on attractions rather than academics. The travel site says it’s designed for the Instagram generation, Unko Museum is less education and more interaction. Step on turd-shaped projections in an interactive game, try your hand at unko mini games, explore unko art and poop-inspired goods from around the globe, and come face to face with feces at the photo section.

-→Kill the Messenger dept: Facebook has come under fire for its super-duper face recognition software that will soon not only identify everyone on the platform, but all their friends… whether they’re on facebook or not. And even if facebook doesn’t sell that information… or the technology (yeah, right)… It can be hacked. Just this month hundreds of facebook users were infected with the MESSENGER virus. It was transmitted by a link to a fake YouTube site. IS THAT REALLY YOU? Asks the fake message over the link. Click on it and you’re infected. From there, the virus sends similar messages to all your friends. That means your face too is now in the hands of… I.C.E.? ISIS? Who knows?

-→Have your cake and eat it too dept: The Times Record News reports that a woman in Texas was banned from Walmart after she ate half a cake in the bakery section. Then she brought the other half to a cashier and demanded to be charged half price. In what appears to be a new non-police policy, the store didn’t call the cops. Instead, they banned her from Walmart for the rest of her life. I’d like to know how they KNOW which banned people are trying to enter the store. Are they getting their facial recognition software from facebook? Can you say shoplifter database?

→ Pimp yourself dept: I’m rebuilding my LINK CONNECTION database. If you have a cool blog, or newsletter, or something else with a URL, let me know (even if you’ve already done so). You show me yours… you’ve already seen mine. If I like it, I’ll link to it and let you know. Then you link to me. It’ll give us both two extra points in the Google search engine. If I’ve linked to you in the past, send me the link again and I’ll relist it. Send the link via email to god@mykelboard.com Subject: LINK EXCHANGE. No YouTube links allowed.

In the meantime, I’m pimping a couple links here. Ones that I’m sure of.

My spiritual foil, who calls me on my shit Richard Goldberg has a great photo-centric blog at: https://goldberg.wordpress.com

Jailbird noise musician and intense critic, Kyle Nonneman has a blog at: https://apothelema.blogspot.com

→Belated Thanks Dept.: I want to thank my editors Marlene W and Ray D. Between them they have straightened out my writing, though that may not be the best verb to use considering the topics.

See you in hell,
Mykel Board
 

Mykel’s Post-MRR Blog

Number ??? July 2019

Johnny Pissoff vs 
Mykel Pissed-Off

by Mykel Board

FLASH TO 1968: The Fugs release one of their greatest albums: It Crawled Into My Hand, Honest. On that album is a song called Johnny Pissoff Meets the Red Angel. I don’t really understand what it’s about, but I love the name. Johnny Pissoff! I can see him… dressed in black… wearing a fedora-- like Dick Tracy… walking into any room… just his personality making people clench their fists and want to get up and leave.

FLASH TO MARCH 2019: The facebook message comes from some guy named Gary. I never met him in person, and don’t know anything about him… except he likes NO FX, “but I never wear shorts.”

Hi Mykel, starts the message, your columns lately, I donno, they seem like retreads. I’ve been reading you since like 1942, so I guess I’ve got more on you than most. But what I want to know is what is it like being Mykel Board. I mean, what are your days like. What do you do in ordinary time, when people are just driving to work or walking down the street? These days, you just write about politics, but I can get that anywhere. Please, Mykel, be punk again.

FLASH TO JUNE 2019: My long-term pal and Jersey Beat editor, Jim Testa, is talking to me. Jim has become a regular at our salon at the Algonquin... with Dorothy Parker. Dorothy is quieter than she’s known for being. It might have something to do with being dead. The rest of us take up the slack.

Mykel, says Jim, your columns lately, I donno, they seem like retreads. I’ve been reading you since 1942, so I guess I’ve got more on you than most.

“Okay Jim,” I answer. “I’ve heard this before. What do you want? You want me to be punk again?”

“No Mykel,” he says. “I want you to surprise me.

Wow! An interesting pair of messages… and honest too. I guess I HAVE been just treading beer lately. So maybe I should chronicle a day or two in my life. Maybe that’d be punk enough for Gary…. and surprise Jim.

But allow me one paragraph of opinion.

OPINION: Fat asses never look good on guys. On gals, they’re unpleasant when they bulge from the sides, like a deformed peach. They work wonders when they protrude from the back, coming out 3-D like one of those Gambian koras-- an instrument that look as beautiful as it sounds. Those master-asses make you want to nestle your face between the folds, and dig your pink oral organ deep… forcing the sphincteral flesh to tighten around your eager tongue.

FLASH TO MOST ANY DAY ON A NYC SIDEWALK: The three young women walking slowly ahead of me all have the width-- not the depth.

The cliché is that it’s only the tourists who creep along NYC streets...the time-obsessed locals maneuvering behind them… trying to pass to get wherever the fuck they need to go.

That’s not true in 2019. It’s not only tourists. It’s every one with a fuckin’ cellphone who walks slowly on the NYC streets. And here are three of them… walking ass to ass… leaving no sidewalk space to get by.

I come up behind them.. breathing loudly… panting. It doesn’t help. Their ears are plugged white with some Apple doodad that frees them from the responsibility to watch where and how they’re going.

I rest my hands on the nearly touching shoulders of the two girls closest to the street. I press slightly… to separate them.

They turn towards me… simultaneous what the fuck expressions on their too-made-up faces.

“You left half an inch for someone to pass,” I say. “If you spread out just a bit more, you can have the sidewalk completely blocked.”

The three girls shirk back, as if I’d asked them to look at my penis.

I pass between ass number two and ass number three and continue walking.

On the subway now, I stand, having given my seat to some geezer even older than I am. It’s only a 20- minute ride anyway. I can read my H. L. Mencken standing up.

“GRAND CENTRAL STATION!”

Time to get off the train.

The doors open. The crowd outside the steps forward. Two guys in particular, both young… jockish… wearing almost identical blue business suits… one with a navy tie with Greek letters… the other a black tie with small yellow polka dots…. push their way into the car before those of us leaving can leave.

WAIT! I shout at them.

They turn to look at me.

“Fuck you,” says the one with the Greek letters on his tie.

They’re the kind of macho muscled men that give both Wall Street and heterosexuality a bad name.

“Look,” I say, “Just because you can get married now, doesn’t mean you have the right to push people around.”

I watch his eyebrows come together until he figures out what I’m talking about. By then, I’m outta there.

FLASH AHEAD: The scene is K-Mart. I’m here to buy a cheap alarm clock. Mine broke when I was trying to set it while drunk., It slips from my hand… plunges from my sleeping loft to the hard wood floor below… smashes to plastic shards. I’m here to buy a new one. My self-imposed spending limit is $10.

A colored girl, in a red and white t-shirt is patting the blankets at the bottom of the escalator.

“Excuse me, Miss.” I say, “could you tell me where the clocks are?”

“I don’t fuckin’ work here,” she shoots back. “And I’m a MISSES, not a miss.”

She huffs off and I feel like shit.

I wander the aisles looking for clocks. A guy in a suit… light grey with fine black lines through the material… bright white shirt... a black tie with LV and those kind of symbols all over it in brown. I didn’t take a picture of him, but I found a similar one on the internet:

He’s in his early 20s with one of those haircuts that you see on posters for BUSINESS SOLUTIONS. carefully parted, trimmed-- like he gets a haircut every day… one lock precisely dripping on the forehead, saying I’m suave. He reminds me of a slightly more sophisticated version of those two guys who pushed past me on the subway.

No idea what he’s doing here. Maybe he wants to see how the 99% live. Maybe he’s just getting a snack for the train to Scarsdale.

I walk over to him and tap him on the shoulder. “Excuse me, Mister” I say. “Could you tell me where the clocks are?”

I wish I had a picture of the look of horror in his eyes. But it makes my day… certainly makes up for the faux pas with the red t-shirt girl-- at least in my Johnny Pissoff mind.

LUNCH TIME: Flash to SWEETGREEN… an awful vegetable-oriented (pleonasm?) restaurant. They billboard advertise all over the city with close-up pictures of teens with something green stuck between their teeth. I’m eating here because I feel I SHOULD. I don’t want to die from lack of lettuce.

I’ve got my salad ordered at the counter. Someone mixes a bunch of green stuff together and hands it to me. In order to make it half-palatable, I ask her to throw in some chicken. Maybe I mishear, but I could swear the salad makes a TSK TSK when I ask for the chicken.

I carry the bowl of salad from the counter to the cashier… who looks a lot like the woman I mistook for a K-Mart sales lady. She rings it up. “That’ll be $14.85,” she says.

I fix my face in a way that tries to show I’m used to paying $14.85 for a salad. I pull a twenty from my wallet.

“I’m sorry,” she says, looking not sorry at all, “we only accept Visa, Mastercard, or American Express.”

“What the fuck?” I say, finally losing it. “I have 8 credit cards here, but I’m not going to give you one! You know what credit card only means? It means that new immigrants who don’t have bank accounts yet can’t buy your $14.85 salad. It means that people on the lam from ICE… people who don’t want to leave a paper trail… can’t buy your $14.85 salad. it means that people who hate banks, who don’t want every transaction to be processed for a fee that goes to Chase or Citibank can’t buy your $14.85 salad. It means that cash, paper currency LEGAL TENDER (I speak those words in capital letters) is no good in your shop. I’m outta here.

I walk out, leaving my $14.85 salad on the counter.

Sometimes, I wonder what it is that creates the need to piss people off. Of course, that’s what punk is all about, but punk didn’t create the need. It WAS CREATED by that need. As time passes and the facebook world makes is easier and easier to piss off and be pissed off… the world does not get any punker.

Of course, those of us who live in America live under the punkest president ever… but-- even then-- I’m still not sure I get the whole thing. I’d like to look at it up close. Examine piss-offedness under a microscope. What is it? What does it do? Are there different kinds of piss-offedness? Is there good piss-offedness and bad piss-offedness?

Ben Weasel, who is no slouch when it comes to pissing people off, once said that I don’t intentionally try to piss people off. It is simply the fact, says he, that I so strongly believe in what I do, that the inevitable result is people getting pissed off. Those aren’t his exact words, but the meaning is close enough.

I donno.

I don’t try to piss off people… at least not people who are poor or those who have enough of the world against them already: cripples, the chronically depressed, those working shit jobs for shittier wages, the homeless. Sometimes, though, I can’t help it. That cashier in Sweetgreens was probably a minimum wage working poor. I wish there were a way I could piss off SWEETGREEN without pissing off the poor shlubs who work there. Let me know if you find one.

ENDNOTES: [You can contact me on facebook or by email to god@mykelboard.com. Through the post office: send those... er... private DVDs..or music or zines... or anything else (legal only!) to: 

Mykel Board
POB 137
New York, NY 10012-0003.

If you like my writing, you can be notified when anything new is available. Subscribe to the MYKEL'S READERS Yahoo group: 

readmboard-subscribe@yahoogroups.com]

-→Shoot if you’re sad to be gay dept: Philippine President Duterte made a speech to Philippine expats in Japan. In that speech he said that he “used to be gay” but cured himself with the help of several beautiful women. After his marriage, Duterte said “I hate handsome men… and now prefer beautiful women.”

→Forty Days Dept: This Week magazine reports that the owners of a full-scale replica of Noah’s Ark are suing their insurance company for rain damage. The arc is connected with the notorious Kentucky “Creation Museum.” The owners claim they didn’t get enough money for the damage suffered by the arc from recent “heavy rains.” I have no comment-- except a smiley face-- on this one.

→Fact is funnier than fiction dept: Congressman Devin Nunes filed a $250 lawsuit against Twitter for making fun of him. The reason? A tweet said “the Nunes cow” was “udderly worthless and it’s past time to mooove him to prison.” In 2017, Nunez Nunes co-sponsored a law called the “Discouraging Frivolous Lawsuits Act.” It did not pass.

→ Pimp yourself dept: I’m rebuilding my LINK CONNECTION database. If you have a cool blog, or newsletter, or something else with a URL, let me know (even if you’ve already done so). You show me yours… you’ve already seen mine. If I like it, I’ll link to it and let you know. Then you link to mine and I’ll link to yours. It’ll give us both two extra points in the Google search engine. Send the link via email to god@mykelboard.com

See you in hell,
MB

You’re Still Wrong Mykel's Blog for June 2019 or MAKING SHIT UP

Mykel’s Post-MRR Blog

Number ??? June 2019

Making Shit Up

by Mykel Board

Everything was made up by people that were no smarter than you.

--Steve Jobs

I’m tellin’ ya’. I saw it with my own two eyes. We’re recording the extra tracks for GG’s HATED Roir cassette. Yeah, the cassette… musta been in 1986. GG insists on a mic where he can stand and throw himself around. I think Chicken John is on guitar. Evans is definitely the drummer…. a live recording. GG is singing “I WANNA FUCK MYSELF. ” At the end of the song GG screams I WANNA FUCK MYSELF. FUCK MYSELF.

He walks back to Evans and rips a drumstick out of his hands. Then drops his pants and shoves the drumstick up his ass. Up and down… back and forth… Splinters anyone? But that’s not enough… pulling the drumstick out from his ass, he shits on the floor. Not a splatter shit, but a dogshit shit. Individual turds… cucumber size… lying stacked like French bread in a bakery.

But wait! There’s more! One by one, he picks up those turds and shoves them BACK into his ass. Moving his stomach like an Indian fakir, he sucks each one back into its ancient home.

None of that happened. I made it up. You believed it because you know about GG… and you know about me. You’ve heard rumors. You want to believe it’s true. That’s what I want to write about this month. Making shit up.

Making shit up is different from lying… or maybe it’s a kind of lying. Lying is just saying something that isn’t true… usually for your own face-saving benefit.

“The dog must have farted.”

That’s a lie.

Damn, there’s that neighbor’s dog. I love it… I always keep dog cookies on hand for when it paws the door and begs to come in. Leaves a slime over my face after licking me hello. I love her, but she does have poor digestion. Farts up a storm… the smell lingers in the corners like a nerd at parties… You never know when it’s going to make an appearance…

That’s making shit up.

There is some creativity in making shit up. Some extra believability that comes from the surrounding stories. A novel is making shit up.

Though there are always cries of LIES! LIES! LIES! in politics, much of it isn’t lies, but people making shit up.

Most of what you think you know is just stuff people made up. Here’s some of it:

• THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE WAS INVENTED TO PRESERVE SLAVERY
• IF YOU DON’T VOTE FOR THE DEMOCRAT IN THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION, YOU’RE VOTING FOR TRUMP
• DONALD TRUMP SAID THE RACISTS AND NAZIS WHO MARCHED IN CHARLOTTESVILLE VA  WERE GOOD PEOPLE
• SUPPORT FOR GAY MARRIAGE AND TRANSSEXUALS IN THE MILITARY IS PROGRESSIVE

All that shit is made up. Some is “inspired by real events” but most of it comes from the same process that created Alice and the White Rabbit.

Let’s take the Electoral College. For the non-Americans and I’ll explain.

The Electoral College is the US system for deciding the president. Instead of just counting the raw number of votes for each candidate, there is a group of electors. More populous states have more electors than less populous states. Every state, though, has at least three electors. Alaska has three electors. California has 55. (NOTE: Alaska was never a slave state.)

The reason for this system was to give some voice to the rural/farming states. If elections were decided by pure vote tallies, the populous states-- with the mega-cities-- would decide every election. The needs of farmers, ranchers, and small town dwellers would never be met. A candidate would only have to win the cities to win the elections. Fuck everyone else. With the electoral college, Wyoming doesn’t have a BIG voice (3 electors), but it has a voice. With direct election, it would not. (Wyoming was never a slave state.)

So where did the idea that the Electoral College was related to “preserving the rights of slave states” come from?

In an article called, “The Electoral College was explicitly designed to protect slavery,” The Raw Story website writes:

In order to guarantee that the nonvoting slaves could nevertheless influence the presidential election, Madison favored the creation of the Electoral College. 

The Convention then accepted the idea of an Electoral College. By this time the Convention had already agreed to count slaves for representation under the three-fifths compromise, counting five slaves as equal to three free people in order to increase the South’s representation in Congress. Thus, in electing the President the political power Southerners gained from owning slaves (although obviously not the votes of slaves) would be factored into the electoral votes of each state.

Yo, buckaroos! The 3/5 compromise is a COMPROMISE… get it? It was included to stop an impasse between the slave states who wanted the entire population counted, and the non-slave states who didn’t want the slaves counted at all. It was NOT about preserving the slave states… but only about representing them. [NOTE: My pal Richard mentioned that, at the time of the Constitutional Convention, EVERY STATE was a slave state. So the idea that the E.C. was created to protect slave states is ipso facto ridiculous!]

The 3/5 compromised decides the NUMBER of electors in the electoral college. Yes, it is unfair. Counting a population that can’t vote to decide votes is nasty and wrong. But that doesn't mean the electoral system should be abolished. Saying so would be like saying convicts who have served their time are not (in most places) allowed to vote. That is unfair. But it doesn't mean that all voting should be abolished.

So while there was a relationship between slavery and the WAY electors were chosen… the connection between the electoral college and slavery is just…. well, made up. And worse, this is 20-fuckin’-19! I can guarantee that in the 2016 election, NO SLAVE STATES were benefited by the electoral college and they won’t be in 2020. (Actually, they’re ALL slave states… but that’s another blog.)

Related to this is the incredible notion that if you don’t vote for the Democrat in the 2020 election “you’re voting for Trump.”

By now, you already know that we have an Electoral College… and it has a useful function. It may need some tweaking, but it doesn’t need abolishing. Even if you don’t agree with that, you know that it won’t disappear before 2020.

The reality is that most states are either Democratic or Republican. In those states, ALL the electoral votes will go to the Democrat-- or Republican. It doesn’t matter how the individual voters vote. NOT voting for the Democrat in New York… or not voting for the Republican in Alabama… won’t change the fact that New York’s electoral votes will go to the Democrat and Alabama’s to the Republican.

I could vote for my penis, and that would have absolutely no effect on the outcome of the election (or, for that matter, on the outcome of my penis.) Only in the swing states-- that is the states that change from year to year-- do individual votes count. Those states are: Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Michigan, Nevada, New Hampshire. North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin. About a quarter of all the states.

Some of those states are BARELY swing states. Arizona, for example, has voted Republican in nine of the last ten presidential elections. And Wisconsin has voted Democrat in eight of the last ten elections. Not very swingin’.

So if you’re not in a swing state (and nearly ¾ of voters are not) … not voting Democrat is… well… not voting Democrat. It is registering a complaint… If anything, it’s a vote for NONE OF THE ABOVE, and a message to whichever party… I don’t like the shit you’re throwing at me.

That is a far cry from voting for Trump. That part is completely made up.

Next comes Trump calling the Nazis and Klansmen of Charlottesville, VA “good people.”

Here’s what happened: A demonstration was organized in Charlottesville, Virginia. The general organizing theme was around the removal of statues associated with the confederacy and southern history during the US Civil war. There were as many counter-demonstrators as demonstrators. One man drove a car into the counter-demonstrators, killing one person.

On a news show, Donald Trump said the following:

You’re changing history, you’re changing culture, and you had people – and I'm not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally – but you had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists, okay? And the press has treated them absolutely unfairly. Now, in the other group also, you had some fine people, but you also had troublemakers and you see them come with the black outfits and with the helmets and with the baseball bats – you had a lot of bad people in the other group too. (Complete text of the TV interview here.)

On Twitter, Nation Magazine sports writer, David Zirzin says Condemning Israel is not anti-Semitic… calling Nazis and White supremacists “good people” IS anti-Semitic.

I searched for the exact Zirzin quote, it looks like it was deleted. There were a ton of comments that he just made it up. It wasn’t his idea, of course, and I don’t blame him for thinking Trump said Nazis were good people. Lots of folks believe it, even though it was made up. Trump’s comments, in fact, CONDEMN neo-Nazis and white nationalists. But that story doesn’t fit the narrative. So someone just made up the story… putting the “fine people” together with “neo-Nazis”… reconstructing the whole speech… making up a new one… and POW! People believe it.

Now let’s look at the support for Gay Marriage and Transsexuals in the military. Supporting these institutions is PROGRESSIVE. While opposing them is FASCIST.

Is Friedrich Engels FASCIST? As one of the founders of Communism (for the millennials, Communists are not fascist… or Nazi), Engels wrote about marriage and how it is used as an oppressive tool to maintain women in a subordinate position. Marriage and its associate rules push people into forming family units where there is a bread-winner and a housekeeper. It makes one person reliant on the other for sustenance… and even gives a financial value to that dependence. The value makes its appearance in ALIMONY when the marriage breaks up.

In order to encourage marriage, the US government… and private enterprise… awards several bonuses to married people that are not awarded to individuals in other relationships. Take insurance… please!

In civilized countries, the entire population is entitled to tax-payer funded medical care. There is only government-provided health insurance… and it doesn’t matter if you’re hitched or not. In the US, medical insurance is paid for by employers. The law requires employers to pay for the SPOUSES and children of workers. If you’re not married, it only pays for you.

In recent times, there was a “domestic partnership” provision, that required companies to pay for people living together (het or homo), if they registered. They didn’t have to be married. This cost employers a ton of money. With gay marriage, domestic partnership is dead. If you’re not married, someone loses insurance. The employer doesn’t have to pay. The insurance companies don’t have to insure. Thousands of people who had the legal freedom and independence that comes from NOT being married, have suddenly lost that. They’re pushed into marriage for the insurance. And some for the tax benefits of joint filing.

But wait, there’s more: ADULTERY is a valid legal reason for divorce. Divorce means a big payment in alimony. So marriage pushes people into MONOGAMY. A religious rule turns into a legal rule with the stroke of a wedding ring. The free love ideals of the REAL progressives dies in a religious fury encouraged by the government. Gay marriage is NOT progressive. Marriage itself is not progressive, it is government control of love and sex? Does that sound Progressive to you?

Interestingly, there have been some new voices talking about the evils of family… and THEY are progressive.

And Transsexuals in the army? Oy vey! It’s like an antebellum southerner asking Should transsexuals be able to own slaves?

That’s not the question! The question is should slavery be abolished?

Since WWII, the US military is a murder machine... killing more people than all other countries combined. Should transsexuals have a right to participate in that?

Of course not! NO ONE should have that right.

And the last made up stuff I want to talk about is something I’ve written about before, so I’ll be brief.

Lack of gun control causes mass killings and school shootings in the US.

In Switzerland, every family has a gun.Wikipedia reports that Canada has a million more registered firearms than the US, with a population of 10% of that of the US. Canada is one of the most peaceful countries on earth.

Gun violence is not caused by guns. It’s caused by violence. You’ve already read that-- in modern times-- the US has killed more people in other countries than all other countries combined. And, it has cheer-led even more. America is a country that thrives on war movies… or superheroes winning the day… by killing.

America puts less value on life (except, for some, unborn life) than any other country in the world. It’s just made up that guns make violence. It’s easy to see that a culture of violence creates violence. As for local/legal murder, aka The Death Penalty, the US (with the exception of Japan: one death penalty in the past 20 years) is the ONLY first world (sic) country that still has that penalty. So you tell me, how is it GUNS that make the violence here?

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-→Nice quote dept: Speaking of gun laws, Morgan Freeman had some nice words about mass killings in America. He included America’s fascination with CELEBRITY (he is one)… and it’s certainly something to consider.

It's because of the way the media reports it. Flip on the news and watch how we treat the Batman theater shooter and the Oregon mall shooter like celebrities. Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris are household names, but do you know the name of a single *victim* of Columbine?

People who would otherwise just off themselves in their basements see the news and want to top it by doing something worse, and going out in a memorable way. Why a grade school? Why children? Because he'll be remembered as a horrible monster, instead of a sad nobody.

-→Unfortunate simile dept: You know what a fan I am of Godwin’s law… which states that given enough time, every internet discussion will bring up Hitler or the Nazis and after that further discussion becomes useless. Can you imagine climate change?

William Happer, chosen by Trump to evaluate the risks of climate change, said:

The demonization of carbon dioxide is just like the demonization of the poor Jews under Hitler. Carbon dioxide is actually a benefit to the world-- and so were the Jews.
End of meaningful discussion.

--> Jokes become reality dept: Just like 4chan’s successful attempt to provoke the easily-offended left. (They pretended that the OK sign was a secret WHITE POWER sign… and thus made it one.) It’s clear that this is another case of a joke becoming reality. I think 4chan is the Yippies of the right. 

 

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