The crossroads beckoned up ahead
The weary traveler stopped
And looked about in fear and dread
Which path should he adopt?
One road led on to Brussels Fair
Bright roses lined the way
The other led to who knows where
What price be there to pay?
He chose the road where roses in
Profusion did proclaim
Bad weather never closes in
And one wins every game
And so it was for many miles
Bright skies and weather fair
While in the distance Brussels smiles
And becks the traveler there
A gleaming city on a hill
Aglow with golden light
He bade his racing heart be still
And walked on through the night
Oh at first ‘twas as desired
On the carousel, content
Even unemployed were hired
And the city paid the rent
But the wine soon left the fountains
Some folks worked while others played
And the debt grew high as mountains
And the city grew afraid
As the leaders wept and dithered
While great fissures were laid bare
And the roses died and withered
On the road to Brussels Fair

Against the dark forbidding sky
Competing with the distant stars
The flickering yellow tower light
Aligns with red ascendant Mars
The Wizard, lonely and unseen
Is hard at work, his spells uncast
While in the tower minions toil
To craft new versions of the past
The Wizard takes no company
His life is hard, his pleasures few
He sits alone in tower high
Entranced by his own brilliant view
Unseen by those inside the walls
Unfelt the tremors grow apace
Until the tower stone by stone
Disintegrates, and in its place
Another tower climbs the sky
Another wizard treads the stair
To gaze at stars beyond his grasp
And never know they do not care

We are in another of our frequent feeding frenzies, this time destroying men who have merely been acting like men have been acting for the entire existence of the human race. Their crime? Patting a woman on the ass. Sexual assault is one thing, patting a woman on the behind is another, and yet the two have become the same thing. Feminists have criminalized fooling around, something formerly enjoyed by both sexes. Get the predators out, put them in jail, but ruining the life of a man who did no more than pat a woman on the behind is insane. We all know that the female praying mantis kills and eats her lover after sex, and that is where we now are. And no matter what we do, you cannot change human nature. There will always be guys who pat women on the behind and there will always be predators. And there will always be willing women in the typing pool.

Once secure in certain knowledge
That the right tie and right college
Will protect him as he treasures
Life in all its many pleasures
The celeb who once so ruthless
Finds himself now weak and toothless
As the women he once fondled
Whether red, brunette or blondled
Are now rising to denounce him
And his boss turns to pronounce him
As a cad and loathsome being
Only now he’s truly seeing
But of course he’s one of many
Who’ve been waiting for just any
Chance to show he’s good at mating
And the typing pool is waiting

The car in front of me kept switching lanes, blinkers flashing, first in front of me and next one lane over. We both pulled into a diner and I asked him why all the lane changes since we were the only two cars on the road. He shrugged and said,

I’ve been progressive all my life
Progressive kids, progressive wife
But now I practice what I preach
And fear the dangers of free speech
I used to think dissent was good
But now it seems it’s understood
Dissent is just disloyalty
To our progressive royalty
And so I drive with blinkers on
And wonder why deep thinkers fawn
On black masked rioters who’ve learnt
To cheer and laugh at buildings burnt
Professors teaching to despise
Their country with the darkest lies
And so I my friend, my tale of woe
I know not which the way to go
I do not know the dusk from dawn
And so I drive with blinkers on

In early April 1862, P.G.T Beauregard’s Army of the Mississippi had pushed U. S. Grant’s Army of the Tennessee back to Shiloh Church, threatening to destroy it, when Don Carlos Buell arrived with reinforcements, announcing his arrival with the words, “If stupidity and hard fighting are what you need, here we are.” Contrast this with the news that scientists will soon be able to create a baby from human skin cells that have been coaxed to grow into eggs and sperm and used to create embryos to implant in a womb. Think about this – two men could have a baby that was biologically related to both of them, one man producing the egg and the other the sperm. Who is the stupider? Don Carlos Buell or a 21^st century biologist? That may be unclear, but we know who is the more dangerous.

A stupid man is dangerous
And mostly as a bore
But things can get insanegerous
When brilliant minds explore
The meaning of creation
And become as star-lit gods
And without hesitation
Turn us all to mindless pods
The more brilliant mind a man has
Will set fires their minds fuel
Yet I’d rather have a man as
Stupid as Don Carlos Buell

At times the thermals drove me high
At times I nearly left the sky
As downdrafts plunged me close to earth
As gulls and petrels screamed in mirth
Yet here I am, near journey’s end
Just counting down the days I spend
In searching for the sea
Surrounded by spare arctic birds
Who sang of flight with magic words
We followed moonlight’s frantic race
To the far edge of deepest space
We crossed the galaxy below
The stars as bright as new blown snow
And laughed in sheer delight
We found the universe’s edge
And flew above the windblown ledge
That gazed upon the vasty deep
Where all the fallen heroes sleep
Forgiven, and are now unsinned
Then slowly turned into the wind
And headed home

For a year now, beginning with the day after the November 2016 presidential election, the Democrats have tried to blame the loss by Hillary Clinton, whom all good Democrats believe to be the most qualified person on the planet to be president of the United States, to a vulgar New York hillbilly outsider named Donald Trump. They instantly blamed the Russians for stealing the election that was rightfully theirs, and despite no evidence at all after a full year, the investigations go on, the screams of outrage from the Democrats and the press goes on, and there seems to be no end to it. And I’m getting sick and tired of it. We know why Hillary lost. She sold her country out for money by placing secret government documents on her kitchen counter email server to make it easy for the Russians and the Chinese to read in real time, and who, just coincidentally made millions in contribution to the Clinton Foundation, and was paid 145 million dollars by the Russians for one fifth of our uranium reserves in a money laundering scheme. Hillary Clinton is a criminal and a traitor, and that is why she lost. And one day, one hopes, the Republicans will get some spine and appoint a special prosecutor to put her in prison, along with certain other members of the Obama administration that also betrayed their country.

I’m tired of all this Russians sh**
I don’t believe a single bit
Of all the lies that Schumer cries
Or all the fears Pelosi hears
In that blank space between her ears
I’m tired and so I quit
We all know why the pantsuit lost
We all knew we could not be bossed
By someone who should be in jail
She sold her country by email
With secrets lying there for sale
And yellowcake that wasn’t hers
She sells to Russia for some furs
Plus cash from all her Russian friends
Which if elected never ends
I weary of the constant cry
Of weeping Dems who wonder why
They lost to someone so uncouth
And never do they see the truth
The Donald told her she was fired
And as for us, well we’re just tired

The bones of the hominin Homo naledi were discovered in a cave in South Africa in 2015, and are said by anthropologists to be a new species of genus Homo. That makes at least five at last count, and we can be certain there are more to be stumbled upon. Anthropologists are now trying to fit naledi into the homo sapiens family tree, but suppose he doesn’t belong in a tree falsely leading from ape to us? My view is naledi does not belong in our direct line of descent, and neither does the giant homo heidelbergensis, from whom we are all supposed to be descended, nor does homo neanderthalis or homo denisova belong on the tree. I believe we all had a common ancestor possibly as far back as seven million years ago, but that common ancestor gave rise, through mutation, of several lines of ancestry that resulted in individual lines of descent for our primate cousins the ape, monkey, chimpanzee and so forth. Australopithecus, humans, neanderthal, denisova and naledi are cousins, in much the same way horses and donkeys and zebras and so forth are cousins. There is no one line of human descent, as often pictured in anthropology texts, a line where every hominin discovery must be fitted into its proper place in line. They are not in our line, they are in their own lines, with their own lines of descent from the mutated offsprings of our common ancestor. Not all of these mutations need have, or would have, occurred at the same time, but seven million years is a long time, and much could have, and did, happen. Remember this: anthropology, as a science, is not sacred. It stopped licking fossil bones with their tongues to determine age only recently. The out of Africa fakery was concocted somewhere around the turn of the twentieth century by a couple of anthropologists from the Frankfurt school of cultural Marxism, led by Franz Boas, in order to fit Karl Marx’s vision of a utopian human past. At this stage in the science, anthropology is a guess, and their guess is as good as mine, though mine seems a bit more logical than trying to fit everything into one line of ancestry.

Into the deep dark caves they crawl
Listening to the siren call
Of Nobel prizes for them all
If they can only find
The holy grail they know is there
As in their lights the bones lay bare
Collecting with exquisite care
Bone fragments of all kind
We honor them for all they do
The sacred knowledge they pursue
To find what led to me and you
The end for which they long
They place the bones in one long line
Of ancestors both yours and mine
But in the meantime I opine
That they are mostly wrong

News anchors breathlessly tell of the purges in Saudi Arabia, where the Crown Prince has arrested all manner of princelings who, according to the Crown Prince, have committed massive crimes on their way to becoming billionaires. Who cares? If anything, good riddance to fake royalty who believe they have been born to the purple when in fact they were created by the Standard Oil Company.

Who gives a damn
I know I am
Fed up with ersatz princes
Descended from
A desert bum
Who Standard Oil convinces
To let them drill
And barrels fill
With black gold from the boonies
The family Saud
Begat the fraud
Of royal family sunnis
Where camel jocks
Now wear silk socks
And swagger as if kingly
And if I could
I surely would
Hang all at once or singly

His name was Viggen
Just a puppy
I used to watch him dream
His little legs moving fast, running
Dream growls
I dreamed once that I had wakened him from a dream
And he didn’t recognize me
Why didn’t he recognize me
I didn’t know
I thought I was me, like always
But I must not have been me
Sometimes I wonder why I am not me anymore
I try to remember the time when I was me
And Viggen knew who I was
Some say I no longer fit the narrative
But no one will tell me what the narrative is
I asked Viggen what the narrative was
And he said his mama didn’t want him to talk to strangers