Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

Personally, I’m surprised Joe Biden is polling over 5%. I’m surprised he is still in the race. Howard Dean’s career was derailed over a single awkward outburst of enthusiasm, Ed Muskie’s over a stray teardrop. (disclaimer: not a particular fan of either Muskie -even then – or Dean -in retrospect)
There just doesn’t seem to be any set standard in these cases. Gary Hart’s career was ended when it was discovered he was having an affair, but Ted Kennedy drove his car off a bridge blind drunk and left his date for the evening in the car to drown, yet continued on in the Senate for many years and is an adored icon of the Democratic Party.
It seems that some people can get away with shit and others can’t. That may be due to the low expectations of their fan base, some innate charisma, the way each incident is treated by the press, or some combination of the above. Nonetheless, there are limits. If Ted Kennedy had killed a few more of his college age girlfriends, his public might have eventually turned on him.
This is where we are with Joe Biden. It seems clear to me that he’s senile, what with all the confusing Ohio and Michigan, Vermont and New Hampshire, the 70s with the 60s, Parkland and Sandy Hook, Theresa May and Maggie Thatcher. I’m a Bernie supporter, though, so few people are going to take my criticisms of Biden without a grain of salt.
My question is, how many more of these misstatements will it take before his campaign collapses completely. Does he have to forget the names of his children? Because, apparently, forgetting Barack Obama’s name, or not remembering what decade Martin Luther King was assassinated in, is not enough.
When will there be a statement so blatantly wrong that he won’t get over it? Will there ever be a second dead girl in the car?

Not having any great ideas of my own to write about this evening, here is something I found on the internet which I think everybody should have a look at.
It’s under ten minutes long (which is about the maximum video length for something I’m willing to watch, so if you don’t click on the link you have an even shorter attention span than I do, and that’s pretty bad) and as entertaining as it is informative.
What it does is it lays out, in simple visuals, the alternatives facing society as we move forward into the future. Different visions of Utopian societies, different visions of dystopian societies, and a little bit about how to negotiate our way between them.
It is the format for the debate we should be having.

Greta Thuneberg is in New York and that’s good, I’ve enjoyed watching her trip across the Atlantic and think that was an awesome gesture on her part – keeping things carbon neutral.
In bad news, the DNC is still determined to keep Tulsi out of the 3rd debate and it looks as if they will be successful. They have made it completely clear that they will fight dirty, they will do everything they can to make sure progressives do not gain power. It’s a shame, really. Progressives did not start this war, but we can no longer ignore it.
In bad news from the U.K., Boris Johnson is actually trying to shut down congress, as if he’s a dictator or something.
In my own personal news of the day, I wrote and posted two poems this morning. There was one, about 8 stanzas long, all about how complicated our life on Earth is, how many things we have to keep in our heads all at once just to have a normal existence. It rhymed throughout, it had several beautiful, thoughtful, poetic lines. I was quite proud of it, really.
The other was an extremely silly 4 liner about how if you have an onion and divide by pi, you get an opinion. Just a silly play on words, and I questioned whether I should post it at all.
I posted both of them on 3 different poetry sites. On two of them, the short poem got boatloads of likes and inspired spirited conversation in the threads. On the 3rd site, admins review everything before publication, so there’s often a delay of a day or two, but I expect it will be the same kind of thing.
On the one hand, I’m glad people like something I wrote, even if I don’t consider it my best work. On the other, I’m kind of miffed that nobody responds when I write something that’s actually good (and took a bit of work, besides)
But long term it doesn’t matter. Both poems now exist, and will eventually find their way into my next book, which is probably about a year away.

The DNC, the “Democratic” national committee, has decided that there will be no debate dedicated to climate change. Their bullshit excuse is that they don’t want to put any one issue ahead of all the others. Therefore, they will also not have debates dedicated to the economy and jobs production, improvements to the educational system, health care, election fairness and getting big money out of politics, ending private prisons, foreign policy, legalizing marijuana, sexism, racism, or immigration.
It’s bad politics. The more debates you have, the more people become familiar with the candidates, including whichever person is ultimately chosen. It’s not as if there’s a shortage of time, because they have from now until February. If they had a debate a week and picked a different topic for each one they could just about cover it.
They also have decided, in their infinite whatever the opposite of wisdom is, not to allow candidates to appear in any non-party-sanctioned debates. In other words if, say, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren were to appear at a town hall together to discuss fracking, they would both be disqualified from the race.
The DNC really, really does not want their candidates talking about the environment. Why? It’s not politics. Politically it’s a winning issue. Although there is some disagreement about how great the danger is, almost everybody wants to save the planet. Almost nobody is openly pro-pollution.
So, the logical conclusion is that they don’t want to offend potential donors from the coal and oil industries.
What can be done about it? Well, there’s no rule (yet) against candidates participating in discussions on line. I’m no computer expert, so I’m just laying this idea out there for others to act on or not, but we should have a forum wherein candidates can present their environmental plans (Bernie’s plan, for a start, we could just download in toto), people could post questions, either for any specific candidate or for all candidates, and the candidates could answer as best they could. There would administrators to keep the hecklers (trolls) under control and the conversation polite and high toned, as well as to fact check the candidates’ statements. It would also be good to recruit the participation of some actual climate scientists.
We could talk about water use, tree planting, alternative sources of energy, public transportation including high speed rail, banning herbicides and pesticides, preventing the extinction of the honeybees, getting plastics out of the ocean, creating urban gardens, and much, much more.
If you like this idea, let me know. If you hate this idea, let me know.

A couple of my friends shared an article this morning from the Observer entitle “The Fall of Prague,” all about how the city is flooded with tourists and this changes its character and makes things unpleasant for residents. The comments sections were mostly in agreement, with a lot of people voicing their specific complaints: beer bikes,snake people, dancing pandas, etc…
The article talked about people living in the center (although they spelled it centre, of course) who were disturbed by the noise of the pub crawling gangs.
I disagree completely with this view. If you want to move out of Prague 1, you can sell your flat for a small fortune and move into one of Prague’s numerous quiet, green and leafy neighborhoods which are still within 20 minutes of the center by public transport, and have some cash left over. Of course there are going to be tourists in the center.
A lot of it is just the natural shift in perspective which comes with age. We were the drunken tourists once (98-99 in my case), and now we are married, have kids and live in quieter sections of Prague. So, ‘those crazy kids’ are now an annoyance.
Still, annoying as they are, I see them and I know that the things they do here, the barfing in the gutter, the singing loudly at 3 a.m., all of it, are things they will talk about with each other, and exaggerate more and more as years go by, and decades into the future when they are old and gray like me they will look at each other and say “Do you remember that time when we were in Prague….” and they will smile and laugh about how crazy they were when they were young.
It makes me proud to live here, and I wouldn’t change it for anything.