David Bruce Collins—the Official Site

Hopeful, Not Optimistic

20/1/2021

Let us be as clear as possible about this: Speaking strictly for myself, I am not—repeat, not—rooting for the new president and his team to fail. Au contraire, I hope that they will be wildly successful on the many fronts where the outgoing president has wrought devastation. From what I've read and heard, the same is true of a multitude of progressive-to-radical commentators with larger audiences than mine.

For more than a year now, much of the lefty commentariat, including yours truly, has been shining a harsh spotlight on the un- and anti-progressive actions and rhetoric of Joseph Robinette Biden and Kamala Devi Harris, who today become our president and vice president. We have expressed our deep skepticism of any utterances or tweets from those two that feel like bones tossed to the political left and center-left.

During the Obama/Biden years, Congressional Republican leaders made it their mission in life to thwart President Obama's agenda, even when he proposed solutions first devised or implemented by Republicans. Unlike them, I have no desire to see Biden/Harris sabotaged at every turn. Just some turns, such as carrying out the perpetual mass slaughter that our capitalist empire has made its stock in trade.

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As Jordan and I Were Saying...

22/12/2020

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For a moment or two, I thought I was hearing an adaptation of my post from yesterday coming from Jordan Chariton's lips. But he stopped at the part where we know which Democrats have the effrontery to vote against Medicare for All during this pandemic; he did not continue on to discuss how a floor vote would also reveal the currents of evil running through the DNC and the Democratic Caucus.

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Left Twitter Needs a Time Out

21/12/2020

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OK, all you progressive voices on YouTube and elsewhere: Go to your rooms and don't come back out until you can talk to each other with civility and respect!

It's been going on for just over a week now, but it already seems much longer. People I admire and respect are spewing toxins at each other on Twitter, second-guessing each other's motivations, smearing each other as either neoliberal tools or saboteurs of the Medicare for All movement.

This needs to stop.

All these folks agree that this nation needs Medicare for All ASAP, as the ongoing pandemic has illustrated so starkly. The disagreement is a matter of legislative strategy...oh, and also of Jimmy Dore's having the temerity to criticize (sometimes harshly) Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for not living up to her campaign rhetoric.

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Green Maps Project Is Dizzyingly Impressive

10/12/2020

Today my @dbcgreentx Twitter account has had more notifications than I typically get in a month. Most of these concern likes and retweets of a tweet in which I was mentioned. What got the whole thing started was the unveiling of the Green Maps Project.

If you want to know the entire story of how this project got started, and who-all contributed to it, that's something you'll have to ask Christopher Lozinski. Lozinski isn't even living in the United States at present; he's in Poland. But through his connections in the US he is deeply committed to helping US Greens organize—or, in some cases, reorganize—toward becoming a bigger player in 2022 and beyond.

There's a particular variety of artwork of which I am fond and which I could never produce because I lack the patience. My term for it is Obsessive Art: It's the kind in which the detail-work is so intense even the details have details, and you can look at those details and say, holy shit whoever made this must have spent hours doing this one part. You can stare at the details until the room starts to spin around you.

I have the same kind of reverence for application developers who sweat the details. Lozinski is one such developer.

Hanging Out in Cittàgazze and North Jersey

9/12/2020

It's been about three weeks since the last entry here, but it's also been about that long since I did anything remotely political. Right now it's mostly about doing what we can to keep our bills paid on time.

The political activity will most likely recommence in January, as will the political bloggage.

Beyond that, I must confess that I'm watching more streams. For years I've insisted that the only TV I watched regularly was pro soccer matches. That's no longer true: COVID-19 has me staying home more and investigating other content.

Early this year, Kayleen and I bit a major bullet and switched our cable/Internet provider from Phonoscope to AT&T. I despise AT&T, but those are the only choices in our complex. We made the switch mostly for work purposes: We are both working from home, and Sharpstown-headquartered Phonoscope's service had been degrading steadily to the point of utter uselessness. We're talking week-long-Internet-outages-and-snow-on-almost-every-TV-channel degradation.

THIS PARAGRAPH HAS BEEN EDITED IN LIGHT OF KAYLEEN'S COMMENT BELOW: With our AT&T package, we have HBO Max included, and we're paying separately for Netflix, Starz, YouTube, all of which have content we're likely to enjoy (including our church's weekly services on YouTube). If we're paying for them, we may as well use them.

So we're watching one episode a week of The Sopranos and His Dark Materials via HBO, as well as occasional episodes of Dear White People on Netflix and rewatching Outlander on Starz. Dropping in on the Soprano family and crew after nearly two decades has been fun, especially serving as Kayleen's guide and Nablidan' translator through the series as she consumes it for the first time. (Credit to my first wife, who has Sicilian and Polish ancestry, for teaching me a lot of southern Italian dialect.)

InterReflections: Woker Than Thou but...Fun?

19/11/2020

Arianna diMatteo as "23" in The Zeitgeist Movement's "interReflections"

Since last month's post about epic docudrama from The Zeitgeist Movement, entitled InterReflections, a post in which I expressed the hope that I would soon post a full review...well, how soon is now? Things got a little hectic as we moved full steam ahead on a collision course with Election Day. I just got around to watching the rest of the flick yesterday.

If one word describes TZM, it's woke. This is not the wokeness of identity politics and Black Lives Matter; TZM scoffs at identity politics, viewing it as just another way to divide people. This wokeness is one of understanding that the systems created by an elite few are inherently oppressive toward the masses; that the sooner we recognize our common humanity, with many of the same basic needs, and that infinite consumption is unsustainable, the sooner we will create a world of peace and plenty that works for us all.

Peter Joseph & company have assembled something far from perfect but marvelous nonetheless. I really should watch the whole film again to absorb some details I may have missed; however, for that purpose, I would prefer to watch it in one sitting, which is difficult when one cannot carve out a three-hour block of time and the Zeitgeisters throw a lot of information at you that is hard to digest all at once.

I use the word assembled with a purpose: InterReflections is three movies stitched together into one. That stitchwork feels, well, forced and artificial, reminding me painfully of the final episode of Lost. The viewer can almost forgive this because, as the three movies merge, the dialog alludes to the hokiness and semi-desperation of how it all comes together. As a novelist of a sort, I can attest that endings are the most difficult parts to write unless you begin the writing process from the ending.

Updates Added to "Life As a Green" Page

7/11/2020

Every once in a while, I have to look over a certain page on this website and be embarrassed at how out of date it is. Whether anyone reads it or not, I cringe when I see something that may have been true when I wrote it a few years ago but is no longer reality.

This morning, after waking up far too early for a Saturday, I gave this page an overhaul to include events up through the 2020 general election. If you've never read it, or haven't read it lately, I recommend giving it a good long look. It contains some historical observations that will some day be used when somebody writes a dissertation about the history of the US Green Movement in the early 21st century.

I also tweaked the Index page a bit, now that my run for US Senate is over and I can get back to being just a blogger for a while. Those tweaks may require further tweaks, but that's the nature of the WWW, ain't it?

Europeans Learn That Our Electoral System Sux

6/11/2020

A couple of weeks ago, I had a chance to visit with two representatives from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe's Office of Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR). Jana came from Germany; Veaceslav, a Moldovan by birth, came from Ottawa. Alfred Molison was there with us at Good Dog Houston's Montrose location.

I wish I'd remembered to take pictures. Because I didn't, according to my Millennial friends, this meeting didn't really happen. But I was there, awake, and quite sober. I enjoyed my usual, the Texican with a tofu dog, with a Texas-brewed craft beer (darned if I remember which one though).

Alfred and I spent a little more than an hour telling Jana and Slava the history of the struggle to keep a Green Party alive in Texas. After that meeting, the two moved on to their observational work in Austin.

The whole purpose of these paragraphs is to provide a narrative framework for my reason to post the attached PDFs, which Jana and Slava sent me this week. The short one gives you a good idea of the ODIHR's findings (there were way more than just the two of them checking out our election processes in multiple states). The long one gives you the gory details of the findings.

Have fun.

us_general_elections_-_preliminary_statement.pdf
File Size:	640 kb
File Type:	pdf

Download File

us_general_elections_-_press_release.pdf
File Size:	316 kb
File Type:	pdf

Download File

Lost to the Undervote Again

4/11/2020

Table showing vote totals for four ballot-line candidates and one write-in, from the Texas Secretary of State's Office. Total votes are 11,023,457, which is 164,000 fewer than the votes in the presidential race.

Texas's total vote for president is currently 11,187,793, 164,000 more than the US Senate total.

Votes continue to trickle in, so we can't really report any final scores yet. However, I am fairly confident something about which I can humblebrag: in Texas's 2020 US Senate race, None of the Above outpolled me.

As of now, the Secretary of State's tally shows more than 80,000 votes in the Green column. The difference in total votes cast for president and US senator is about double that. I can't provide a link to it here, since the SOS elections results page is temporary, to be replaced eventually by the standard archival HTML page (like this one from 2018).

This is eerily reminiscent of 2014, the tale of which I have recounted numerous times since then. In that general election, incumbent county judge Ed Emmett received 403,763 votes to my 80,486; the undervote for county judge was over 203,000. This is not a case of 200,000 Harris County residents saying we don't like either of those clowns, but rather, we voted the straight Democratic ticket and totally didn't notice that there was no Democrat in that race.

The Republican-dominated Texas Legislature retired one-punch voting back during the 2017 session, to the great disgruntlement of Democrats on Austin's Capitol Hill and elsewhere. Very few other states even allow it.

At least Libertarian Kerr McKennon, with his 207,000 votes, can claim to have defeated NOTA. He didn't earn the necessary 2% to extend ballot access for his party, but four other Libertarian candidates did in their statewide races. The undervote totals were considerably larger in those races, in the range of 300,000.

Mainewhile...
In Maine's US Senate race, Green-Independent nominee Lisa Savage drew 4% of the vote, which is pretty respectable for a third-party run but far less than we'd forecast. With four candidates on the ballot there, Ranked Choice Voting would have kicked in if incumbent Susan Collins (no relation) had not polled more than 50%. Collins's tally hovered around 59% for much of Election Night, but as late returns came in, her share drifted below that 50% level. She rebounded to claim a bit less than 51%.

If independent candidate Max Linn's second-choice ballots had been distributed, I'm fairly sure they would have put Collins back over 50%; if they didn't and it came down to Savage's second-choices, Democrat Sara Gideon may have made it a tight squeeze for New England's sole Republican in Congress.

Too Early to Call

4/11/2020

a TV screen with election results on KTRK, ABC-13, showing mugshots of Senate candidates John Cornyn (the apparent winner), MJ Hegar, Kerry McKennon, and David Collins

Our TV screen at about 10:30 on Election Night

I have a lot to say on this Election Hangover Day 2020, but I don't plan to say it all in this post. There's too much of the election as yet unsettled. A lot of what I have to say isn't very polite, in part because I didn't get much sleep: got to bed around 2, woke up around 6.

For this post I'll stick to some of the main headlines from a Green perspective, with details and links to follow (maybe).

<<Previous

Hopeful, Not Optimistic

As Jordan and I Were Saying...

Left Twitter Needs a Time Out

Green Maps Project Is Dizzyingly Impressive

Hanging Out in Cittàgazze and North Jersey

InterReflections: Woker Than Thou but...Fun?

Updates Added to "Life As a Green" Page

Europeans Learn That Our Electoral System Sux

Lost to the Undervote Again

Too Early to Call

DBC Sez...

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