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YouTube Age-Restricts the News

After yesterday’s Boles.tv live stream I received a curious email from YouTube informing me I had violated some sort of community guideline, and they were “Age-Restricting” my entire VOD upload. That meant no viewers under the age of 18, and my video would not be shown to anyone not logged into YouTube. I wasn’t sure if they were dinging my previous live stream, and video podcast episode, about William Hurt Raping Marlee Matlin or not, but I quickly learned discussing rape is okay for kids, but showing the aftermath of a blood stain on a train platform from the New York City subway shooting yesterday is verboten. I wondered aloud if YouTube ever really checks the strange, and awful, videos that appear on their service that include nudity, and violence, and are not restricted.

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The Inescapable Return of Donald Trump

Donald Trump is a disgrace to America and a verified liar in the specific; and yet, I cannot get over this obligation of wonder that he has never left the consciousness of America. He is resurrected. He will return. Vengeance against us will be his. Trump still rules us from afar. He decides us. His hold over the feeble-minded, and the uneducated, is as strong as ever after his election loss and yet, for some reason, he is immaculately venerated by those he reviles. Does any reasonable person paying attention to abortion rights, the evisceration of voting rights, and the incongruous dismantling of OSHA worker protections not believe the game is already set and staged for a victorious Trump return in 2024? It appears to be all but inevitable now. The one chance we had to stop him — by standing up to the GOP in the Senate — failed miserably and miraculously. The Democrats are a proud, but unwily, gang of magnificent losers.

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Rise of the Divine White

The Covid Pandemic released a vicious wave of cordoned hatred that has been brewing in America since the Civil War: The Divine White. That invented birthright has been vigorously defended, and consumed with contempt for the foreign, and hatred for the unsimilar, and that bile has bubbled beneath the veneer of civility, decorum, and democracy — always dangerous, but evidently nascent in daily public purgings — that is until, 150 years later, when an American president came to glory on the heels, and the cruel deficits of, a rabid, and deadly, gang of sycophants who placed personality, and ego, above the law, and beneath contempt.

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Three Wednesdays in January

In 2021, on three consecutive Wednesdays in January, in a trium of blood-bound events, we survived a catastrophe, we served a correction, and we held a celebration. Democracy is, at times, a gory and brutal mess — an angry boil in need of lancing — and sometimes in need of a realignment of values based on the witnessing of a live horror, in real time, as we are confronted by the monsters some of us have become in the lighted dark of day.

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Toss Aways

There have always always been disposable people in a limited-use society, but it’s worse now. We, as a nation of lonesome people found alone in a decaying world, have become much more than merely disposable. We have become the toss aways. We have lost our value. We have forfeited the way forward. We find ourselves teetering on the precipice between the living, and the dismayed, and the balance of the affair solely belongs to us — the us of us.

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Mad eBay Dash to Mask Up!

With the novel Coronavirus in full flush, I have never been more self-educated in needing to know more about protective masks. Since the beginning of April, I have wondered at all the face covering options, while knowing, and accepting that the medical grade masks — the now non-ubiquitous N95 masks — are not available to the public. I’ve been searching everywhere for a lead on a KN95 mask or a surgical mask — the lesser protective cousin to the full N95 mask — or some sort of other, non-optimal mask that can protect Janna and me from the vulgarities of Covid-19. We are not having any luck.

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Ellen Degeneres: When Infamy Sucks Up to Corruption

Ellen DeGeneres made history this week by buddying up to George W. Bush at a Dallas Cowboys football game. Instead of being reflective, and condemning her ill-thought action after some internal reflection and contemplation, DeGeneres instead, like Trump, doubled down, and tried to spin her betrayal of the human spirit by arguing she was just being “kind” to those who don’t think as she believes. All of that would have been just fine if the person you were being kind to was a real person deserving your love and respect — and who also didn’t happen to be accused of war crimes against humanity — but the real insult in the moment was in DeGeneres’ apt refusal to just admit she was using her money, and her fame, to sidle up next to a faded presidential power. This was all about corruption of the spirit in exchange for a moment in the skybox with a decider, and it had nothing whatsoever to do with kindness.


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