Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

Morning make up blog here because I smoked too much pot last night and couldn’t zero in on a topic.  I was just scrolling through my feed over my second cup of coffee when I remembered that fact, and was looking at a very interesting meme at that moment, so here goes.
The meme showed a marble statue, a standing nude female, Amazon like, holding a sword in one hand, and a man’s severed head in the other.  And the caption said, “Be Thankful We Just Want Equality, and not Payback.”
I have very mixed thoughts about this.  First, from memes like this, and remembering the absolute glee with which women celebrated Lorena Bobbitt, it is clear that some women really, really do want payback.  And, yes, that scares me.
On the other hand, it is a very funny, and totally justifiable meme.  There are many men walking around the world today of whom it could be said, that the greatest contribution they could make to the world would be their absence, their sudden transfer into non-existence, the having of their head suddenly severed from their shoulders.  For various reasons.  On the other hand, some of the more rabid feminists would include me in that group, and some include all men in that group.

It’s like so many things, I guess.  Funny, if you’re willing to look at it as a joke, and progressively less funny the more literally you take it.  There are a lot of memes out there like that.  On many different topics.

It was a long day, and not my favorite way to spend one, but I don’t have to do it very often, and it did have some highlights.
Isabel had a dance competition in the lovely town of Jindřichuv Hradec (Henry’s Castle), and Helena had to work in the morning so couldn’t take her, so I was up at 6 to accompany her on the train down, and it didn’t end until almost 9 p.m. Helena drove down and caught the last couple of hours, and we got home at about 11:30.
I’m not being at all sarcastic when I say ‘lovely town.’  That was among the highlights.  There’s a lake, there’s a river, there’s the castle, there’s a church that’s probably bigger than the castle, there are some nice parks and a very pleasant pedestrian zone.   The funniest moment was when I was walking with Isabel after lunch and we saw a couple of ducks in the middle of the street.  Traffic stopped.  Cars just had to wait.
The noise at these competitions is deafening, but I managed to tune it out well enough to finish all the proofreading I had to do, so that was good.  If I’d have been at home, I would have watched Netflix and smoked pot all day, so it was a less distracting distraction.
On the one hand, I find it a bit disconcerting that 12 year old girls are dancing gleefully to songs where every second word is fuck, and a bit pathetic that kids who are so, so white are trying so, so hard to act black, but that’s the style of dance and half of them have no idea what the lyrics are,. anyway.
On the other hand, it’s kind of an amazing pageant.  There are hundreds and hundreds of Czech children, all with amazing dance moves, and some with some wicked gymnastic skills thrown in.
They are the future.  There are aspects of that future I don’t like, but it’s one that is going to be impressive as hell.

More on Julian Assange.  What’s the charge, the real charge.  It’s certainly not the sexual impropriety, that’s been dropped and it was kind of embarrassingly overblown from the get go.  It’s not even about the leaked Hillary stuff, although that’s why all the Hillary people are very happy to see him go to jail.  Bitter lot, those Hillary folks.
It’s about the war crimes tapes, from back in 2010.  Which proved that U.S. soldiers committed war crimes in Iraq.  On camera.  Caught red-handed.
Now, a lot of people are saying that they think he should be charged, for hacking into U.S. government secrets.  Which Assange did not do, as he just accepts material from others and publishes it.  After some verification process, of course.  I don’t know what that consists of, exactly, but it’s an effective one because he’s never had to retract a story, which is a far better record than most major media outlets.
But, here’s the way I see it.  Governments keep secrets from their people because governments are screwing their people.  If they weren’t screwing their people, or killing civilians, for sport, by shooting at them from helicopters, for sport, there would be no need for secrets.  Therefore, governments should not have secrets and, if they didn’t, the world would be a much safer, happier place.
So, if a hacker breaks into a government computer, and reveals the nefarious doings of that government, I am all on the side of the hacker, whatever the law says.  Knowledge leads to freedom. Information is knowledge.  Information wants to be free.
Let the cool breeze of revelation drift across all lands.  Let the secrets be revealed.  Let the world breathe again.

The arrest of Julian Assange has, quite predictably, rekindled a lot of old, but still simmering arguments.  Those of us who are in favor of free speech and believe that the government keeps too many secrets, like about shooting people from helicopters, and rigging elections (although Hillary Clinton was not, technically, a government official at the time, she was definitely well connected with the ‘deep state,’ and lots of government officials actually were involved with closing polling places early, closing polling places entirely, culling people from the voting rolls or changing their party affiliation, forcing them to vote with provisional ballots which were then thrown away) are outraged at his arrest and think it’s a travesty of justice.
Plenty of others, who I’ve been hearing from on Facebook, are saying things like “the creep deserves whatever he gets.”  For the most part, these are Hillary supporters, who seem to think that Assange cost them the election.
Of course, their argument is somewhat minimized by their also having accused Bernie supporters, Bernie Sanders himself, Jill Stein of the Green Party, and, of course, Russia of causing her defeat.
But, I’m willing to entertain the possibility that Assange, by reporting things that happened to be true, may have damaged Hillary’s campaign.  I doubt it, because no objective poll from July to November showed her with a significant lead over Trump, she blew off half of her own party, ran a lackluster campaign, and never gave anybody a real good reason to vote for her, but I’ll entertain the thought.  For argument’s sake.
Let’s say that Assange’s reporting of Hillary Clinton’s actual election rigging, her refusal to let the party rank and file’s voice be heard, cost her the election.
They are not angry with Hillary Clinton for having done those things.  They are not angry with Clinton for having lied to them, saying “there is no rigging.”  No, they’re cool with that.  They are angry that she got caught, and they are angry at the person who caught her.
It’s as if they were neck deep in a pyramid scheme, but didn’t realize it, and the FBI jumped in and busted it up, and then they are mad at the FBI, because that worthless swamp land in Florida that they were promised was filled with golf courses and condominiums, is now revealed to be worthless.  Even though it’s not the FBI that made it worthless.
It’s like if your girlfriend was cheating on you with the whole football team and a friend tells you about it and then you’re angry at your friend.
I can kind of understand the emotion.  But when you look at it objectively, they’re really off target.

You should never shoot the messenger.

Please do not misunderstand me.  I am, indeed, very impressed that scientists have managed to take a picture of the event horizon of a black hole that is 55 million light years away.  55 million.  That means that the stuff we just saw a picture of was in that position, in that state, 55 million years ago.  The dinosaurs had only been extinct for about 10 million years.  Nothing resembling a human being would walk the earth for another 50 million + years.  But, that’s how long it took for the light to reach the Earth.  In other words, that black hole is very, very far away.

The picture looks like a big, glowing doughnut, as if a celestial doughnut shop had a sign out, a large doughnut shaped sign with a light inside it.  That’s because it’s not really a picture of the black hole (which would just look black), but of the stuff in the event horizon.  It’s sort of like a photograph of the rings of Saturn, without Saturn.
The photo is impressive, both scientifically and in terms of the intenational co-operation that went into it.  Telescopes all around the world, even one in Antarctica, were linked up.  This is both impressive, and a good omen for the future.  The world’s politicians might be corrupt, self-serving, back-stabbing, inept morons, but the world’s scientists are capable of co-operating and pulling off a thing as big as this.
It makes me wonder, though.  All the exoplanets that we have discovered, it’s through analysis of data from radio telescopes, and not actual images.  If we can photograph something that’s 55 million light years away, why can’t we focus our telescopes on Proxima Centauri, which is only about 4 light years away (i.e. 54 million, 999 thousand, 996 light years closer to us), and get close up, finely detailed images of the planets which are circling it.  I know, they are obscured by the light of their sun, but there are filters for that kind of thing.  We might see clouds.  We might see oceans.  We might see cities.
That’s what I want to see.