Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

It is hot.  Hot and stuffy, the kind of day when you think it’s going to rain and sweet, blessed relief is going to pour down from the sky but it doesn’t.  The kind of day when you start to sweat just by walking a couple of blocks outside, at least if you are fat like me.  The kind of day when you will cross the street just to walk in the shade.  “Hotter than the inside of a baker’s oven on a July night in New Orleans” was the line, I believe it was from one of Kerouac’s books, but that line has always stuck in my head as an example of great writing because you read it and you think “Damn, that is hot.”
Of course, this is Prague, moderate, calm, unextreme Prague, with lots of trees and a river meandering through it.  We say “Dang, it’s hot.  Maybe let’s go swimming this weekend.”

There are a lot of places that are hotter.  There’s a rather largish section of India where the temperatures have reached dangerous, like fatally dangerous levels.  People have died.
Imagine that.  You’re just sitting there in your darkened home, trying to keep cool, and you die because the air around you is so hot it sets fire to your lungs when you breathe it in.  Maybe that’s not literally what happens, but the result is the same.  Just by being in that place, your life is endangered.  You could be baked alive.
That is not normal.  That is not O.K.  And we need to do something about it.

I remember a time, not long ago when a careless comment could ruin a politician’s career.  Remember how Al Gore was mocked for saying that he was influential in the development of the internet (even though it’s actually true, he was very influential)?  Remember Howard Dean’s scream (which really wasn’t that big of a deal)?  Remember Dukakis in a tank?  Remember Ed Muskie shedding a tear in New Hampshire?  Maybe I’m dating myself with that one, I’m sure very few people under 60 remember Ed Muskie.
But today, Joe Biden said if elected he would find a cure for cancer.  It will probably get some well-deserved mockery on social media, but I doubt very much if it will totally cripple his run.
There’s just so much wrong with this statement.  First, if he’s got some idea of how to cure cancer, maybe he should tell people what it is.  Secondly, he’s not exactly fighting for Medicare for All, which would allow everybody to get regular check-ups, and a lot of cancers might be caught earlier if that were the case.  Third, a lot of cancers are environmental, and Joe Biden is not exactly a champion of green causes, or a particular enemy of the oil industry.  Fourth, Joe is adamantly opposed to the legalization of marijuana, and there’s lots of evidence that marijuana, and some more pill looking things that are marijuana based, can cure some cancers.

So, he’s not as anti-cancer as he presents.

Undoubtedly Biden fans (which includes almost all of American media, apparently) will write this off as a bit of over enthusiasm, a noble goal rather than an actual plan.  I see something darker (which might be just because I hate Biden, so readers are allowed to take this with a grain of salt.  Just a grain, mind you)
It seems to me that Biden may be the one candidate in the race who has paid attention to Trump’s electoral success.  Trump says “I’m a genius,” and his followers love him for it, so Biden says “I can cure cancer.”  He has realized that saying extremely stupid things at least gets you headlines, and there’s no downside.
Certainly, the press is not going to hold him accountable.

Hillary Clinton once famously said that she had “public and private” positions.  She got a lot of flak for that but it was probably one of the most honest things she ever said.  I’m sure every politician has some private positions.  Even Bernie Sanders must have at some point thought “Damn, that Wasserman-Schultz bitch is a conniving weasel” or “Corey Booker really is as much of a toadying corporate tool as everybody says he is, isn’t he?” but I have never heard him express those thoughts in public.

Once you realize that’s the case, it becomes easier to dissect their statements, and get a bit of triangulation on where they stand.  Let’s take Tom Perez for example.  He said that it would be ‘impractical’ to hold a debate dedicated to the environment.  That’s actually his public position, dumb as it sounds.  He said that all the debates are going to be on all topics, because if you have a debate about the environment, next thing you know you’re going to have to have a separate debate about Medicare for All, or immigration, or education, or how to make taxes fair, or closing private prisons, or legalizing marijuana, or….well, you get the idea.
But, it really wouldn’t be impractical at all.  Logistically, it means renting a hall and sending out invitations.  Not much more difficult than that.
Since every debate means TV viewers, it’s the closest thing to free advertising that you can get and any party leader worth their salt is going to want to have a million of them.
So, what is Perez’ private view?  His private view is that they must stop Bernie at all costs, and if you have a debate on the environment, precisely 4 candidates are going to come out looking good: Bernie, Tulsi, Mike Gravel, and Jay Inslee.
And he does not want that.

This could well be the stupidest story of the last 10 years that hasn’t had “Florida Man” in the headline.  Justin Bieber has challenged Tom Cruise to a cage fight.
Why, I don’t know.  And, if Tom Cruise is a rational adult, he could just ignore the request and then there will be no story at all.  However, I’m not sure being a rational adult is Tom Cruise’s strong point.  I don’t know, I don’t know the guy, but he’s a Hollywood mega-star, with all the ego and the madness that involves, and he’s a scientologist.  I don’t know if that will make him more or less likely to accept the challenge, it just adds an extra element of weirdness to the whole thing.
Would it be a good fight?  Who, in fact, would win?  Don’t really know, don’t really care, but…Bieber is 30 years younger, a couple inches taller (but only a couple), and looking rather fit.  On the other hand, Tom Cruise does his own stunts, so they say, so he’s probably pretty fit.  Most people are thinking Cruise would kick his ass, but mostly they’re basing that on his film roles.
As far as I’m concerned, it’s a win/win.  I’m not a big fan of Cruise, I’m like the opposite of a fan of Bieber, and I see cage fighting as a strange phenomenon, perhaps a worrying sign of our civilization’s decadence, but a hell of a spectacle.
You can bet I would watch the hell out of that fight.

Last night I blew off writing my blog because I’d smoked too many joints and found myself, at 11:30 in the evening, staring numbly at the screen and not able to type, much less form a coherent thought.  Then, this morning, I forgot all about it.  So, it is noon and this is my make-up blog and I’ll write another one tonight.
On the positive side, as I was strolling through Facebook this morning, oblivious to my neglected bloggerish responsibility, I did get a couple of poems written, on a couple of points which people are discussing now.

The first was political:

Democratic Socialism
Socialist Democracy
the order of the words you use
does not mean all that much to me
words are labels that we choose
to name the ideologies
when, in fact, we ought to be
more focused on the policies

I see people raising this point, saying Bernie is not really a Democratic Socialist, he’s really a Socialist Democrat, and they might indeed be well meaning Berners who are just terminally nerdy, or they might in fact be trolls, I don’t know.  I am, however, always reminded of a scene from Life of Brian

The second one was in a discussion of Rocket Man, the Elton John biopic, which it seems most people are liking.  I haven’t seen it yet, and, I must confess, I haven’t seen Bohemian Rhapsody yet, either.  Everybody loved that one, too, but some die-hard Mercury fans complained that it cleaned up his life story a bit.  As I said, haven’t seen it, so my opinion isn’t really valid, but in theory I side with the director on that one.  If films followed real life with slavish accuracy, we’d just hate everybody.  So, I wrote this.

A biopic of a popular person

is, in fact, required to be

if you want to please the fans

a hagiography

And that’s it for last night’s blog this morning.