Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

She’s smarter than Trump, and speaks in complete sentences, but Hillary Clinton has the same tendency to say things that are totally insensitive and offensive.  She can’t  help it, it seems.  Like a weird form of Tourettes.

It’s bad enough that her book sucks.  Not like sucks a little bit,  is a bit below the standards of Stephen King or John Grisham, but full-blooded, pro-actively sucks.  (I’m talking about  the pony page.  Even when the book is actually released, I  don’t  intend to read it.  Maybe a few years  down the road, when the book is in a box with a hand printed label saying “All books, 5 kč.”)
But today, while promoting it, she invoked the name of Heather Heyer, who was murdered less than a month ago while standing up to neo-Nazis in Charlottesville.  Heather Heyer was not a Clinton supporter.  She was a Bernie supporter, and we have it from her mother that she didn’t vote for Hillary  in the general.
Here’s the quote:  “I have been thinking lately about bravery – the bravery of citizens like Heather Heyer who lost her life fighting the organized forces of hate and divisiveness, of volunteers who are rescuing strangers in the wake of Hurricane Harvey, and of young DACA recipients who are fighting for their future in the only country they know and love.”
So much wrong in that statement.  First, Hillary, you may have been thinking a lot about bravery, but we’ve seen precious little of  it throughout your political career.  It’s nice, I  suppose, that she mentioned the Dreamers, who may well be totally screwed if Trump gets away with  what he wants to do, but we need to remember that Hillary was against DACA before she  was for it.

Then, there’s the mention of Heyer.  This reminds me very much of her comment in the late stages of the 2008 primary race, which she lost to Barack Obama, and people were urging her to back out, and she had no intention of backing out.  “We all remember what happened in July of ’68.”  Well, if any of you  reading this DON”T remember ’68, that’s when Bobby Kennedy was assassinated.  So, she was effectively saying she was staying in  the race in case Obama got killed.

Because she’s got no class at all, or human empathy.  And she insists on constantly reminding us of this fact.

I just wanted to use that headline because I think it’s funny and wanted to get it out of the way  before Miami Beach sinks into the ocean and this shit ain’t funny any more, actually it’s already not, plenty of death and destruction in the Caribbean, but I know people in Florida.
Or, I could have used the title Irmagettinouttahere, because that’s what everybody should have done already, might be too late now if they haven’t.

There’s not too much to say about it, really.  Hurricanes are bad, very destructive, please be careful, blah, blah, blah, so there’s not a lot to say about them unless you want to talk about global warming, and I do.

The people who say ‘It’s all a hoax, this happens every year around this time’ do not seem to be getting the ‘this storm is different’ concept.  What will it take?  Harvey didn’t convince them.  Sandy or Katrina didn’t convince them.  The fact that entire islands in the Pacific have disappeared didn’t convince them.  (in fact, that hasn’t been reported much at all, but I know it’s happened at least once).  No, they’re not going to be convince until a large, and noticeable land mass has slipped into the ocean.

And it’s all so silly.  What they are actually arguing in favor OF is air pollution, and  when you put it like that, nobody can say  it’s a good thing.  But, people love their cars, and can’t even imagine not pumping them full of gasoline, which is what we’re going to need to stop doing if we ever want to reverse this.  Also, we’re going to need to put up a huge number of solar panels.  Roofing every mall parking lot with them would be a nice start, would not displace anybody or damage any pristine, beautiful landscapes.  We need to have wide prairies covered with windmills, which does change the landscape and some may not think they are beautiful, but cows will grass between and among them so they don’t interfere much at all.  We need billions and billions, maybe even trillions of new trees, which sounds like a lot until you divide it  by all the billions of people on Earth and all the treeless  places on Earth where they could be placed, and the side benefit is a boom in fruits and nuts.  We need high speed, electric powered trains, which are really cool as well as  making it quicker, easier, and safer to get from point to point.
And we need it all right now.

Today was back  to school day for  me, teaching my 4 gymnasium classes, which is an easy  and  fun gig because it’s a good school and most of the kids are reasonably smart.  A few are not quite  as motivated as I  would like, but I have  taught so many classes (even a couple at  that school) where the students were somehow perversely motivated to resist having  a normal conversation and maybe accidentally improve their  English a bit, that a simple lack of over achieverism, does not bother me.

Of course, the  youngest  class was  brand  new and I didn’t find anybody who doesn’t already speak of bit  of  conversational  English.  Then again, I wouldn’t have.  The ones who can’t speak  English just avoid speaking much and I can’t push too hard  because it’s  time-inefficient.   I get these kids once a week for 45 minutes, I don’t want  to waste it on kids who are being dullards.

I will always remember a piece of advice from a teacher before I became a teacher, who was explaining why he didn’t use red ink (not that I would refuse to use red ink, little  boogers  can be traumatized if their skin is that thin, but the principle holds): “It’s not as if they’re selling nuclear secrets to the  Russians or something.  So, they failed a test.  It’s not a crime.

My back to school resolution (which hold a bit more weight for me than a New Year’s Eve Resolution) is to pay a bit more attention to that advice; to try and  teach everybody but not to sweat it too much if they don’t learn.

Aung San Suu Kyi joins a long, long list of politicians who’ve disappointed everybody once  they  finally got into office.

Of course, I don’t know if this is her adjusting to the situation, and admittedly I’ve only got a sketchy idea of what that situation is, or if she was never  exactly what we thought she was.  She also joins a long line of politicians who’ve won Nobel Peace Prizes (Menachem Begin,  Barack Obama) and then turned out to be not so peaceful.
I’m speaking, of course, of the persecution and de facto expulsion of the Rohingya people, who are Muslims.  She says that the military is  just responding to terrorism, and blames fake news – I’ve really come to hate that phrase.

It sure looks like there are a lot  of refugees.  They are filmed beside their boats, both leaving Burma  (I know it’s Myan Mawr – Burma is much easier to spell, and pronounce, and since you  never know when it’s going to change back again, I’m going to continue using it for  now) and after arriving in Bangladesh, and they tell  horror stories.  Of course, that’s not proof.  I remember the horror stories of Iraqi troops pulling babies from their incubators in Kuwait hospitals, which, of course, turned out to be 100% not true and the one ‘nurse’ they interviwed over and over again turned out to be the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the U.S., and quite a fine actress.
The thing I resent about the phrase ‘fake news’ is that, even though there’s a lot of fake  news  out there, we don’t all agree about which news sources, we don’t always  agree about which  one.  When I say fake news, I mean Breitbart, and  the Daily Caller, and of course Fox News.  When Trump says fake news, he means every network that’s not Fox.

So, we are at an impasse.  If only there were some way to determine the truth…

Quite a bit of news today.  First, if you are in Florida, good luck.  I’d strongly suggest you get out.  Take that drive north and spend a few days in Georgia.  Sleep in your car if you have to.  It’s not like you’re going to be able to do much.  The best possible result of hanging around is that you won’t actually die, and you dramatically increase your odds of that by leaving now.

This business of canceling the dream act is a mistake on Trump’s part.  Of course, he’s being cruel, and petty (none of the dreamers have ever hurt him or, in fact, the U.S.), but the thing is, it’s so unnecessary.  If he  hadn’t done this, most people would be totally  unaware that the Dream Act even exists, and he would have lost no votes by doing nothing.  He goes out of his way to screw things up.

We have now seen some excerpts from Hillary’s book, “What Happened.”  Incredible arrogance on her part not to put a question  mark after that.  Instead of investigating what happened, trying  to figure out what happened, she presumes to tell us what happened, and gets it completely, 180 degrees wrong.  Basically, she blames Sanders.

Come to think  of  it, maybe she’s not wrong.  As soon as Sanders appeared  on the scene, the contrast between him and Hillary Clinton was striking.  An honest human being, sincerely working for the good of all people, versus a slimy, calculating, issue straddling politician.
After that, it’s understandable that people were unwilling to support Hillary Clinton.

It’s like you go  into a restaurant and they say “Oh, sorry, we’re out of lobster, we can give you a peanut butter sandwich instead.”  And you say “No, you had the lobster, you just threw it in the garbage, we saw you.”  And then they’re surprised when you  get up and walk out of the restaurant.

That’s what  happened.