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Bad news today on two front and I don’t know which is worse.
In Standing Rock, police, who look a lot more like storm troopers than police, hit protesters with water cannon (in sub zero temperatures) and rubber bullets. 200 people were injured and one young girl had to have her arm amputated. Thanks, Obama. I say that with a bit of irony, but no humor whatsoever. I don’t know exactly what we can expect him to do about it, but his recent statement that “we’re going to give it a couple of weeks and see how things play out” is sounding pretty damned callous around now.
The other is the American Nazi rally. http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/11/richard-spencer-speech-npi/508379/?utm_source=fbia

They describe themselves as alt-right, and the press describes them as white nationalist, but they are fucking Nazis. They were all giving Nazi salutes and saying Hail Trump! and the featured speaker used a few choice German (in this case, Nazi German)words and the crowd chuckled like ‘yeah, we all know what you’re saying’ and they probably all have basements full of Nazi memorabilia because they are ‘history buffs.’ History buffs with a very peculiar specialty.
The keynote speech was full of sturm und drang, talking about how white people must conquer or die and how people in the mainstream media (Yes, he meant Jews. The Golem line seals it) are not completely human, and how America was built by and for white people (no, it was not.)
Think about it. Nazis. These people are Americans, they’ve seen all the same WWII movies we all have and when Robert Mitchum or John Wayne or even Ronald Reagan were heroically defending freedom and getting shot up by Nazis, these guys were rooting for the Nazis. This is like a Dr. Doofenshmirz level of evil. This is fucking weird.

In our family, we love Trivia games. We have three that are geographically themed: Česko,with all questions about the Czech Republic, obviously, Svět (which means world, and you have to get one card from each continent before heading to the center and victory,and USA (self-explanatory, really). So, Sam had some friends over, Friday I think it was, maybe Saturday (not relevant to the story) and we were playing Česko, and Sam said to his friends (sotto voce and in Czech) “Maybe we should play USA and give Dad a chance to show off how smart he is.”
Everybody laughed and it was kind of funny because the little booger knows me well.
So, today I’d decided to use my poetry books as a lesson – it’s a gymnasium, the kids are 16-17 – and one of them had kind of asked for it. Well, maybe that’s just me wanting to do it, because all she asked was “Do you have any hobbies,” but that’s all it really takes for me to show everybody my poetry books.
The thing is, though, I’ve tried this lesson before and it’s not always a great lesson. Oh, some of the kids are always a bit impressed, which I guess is a worthwhile goal, but sometimes they’re impressed, I suspect, for the wrong reasons. They’re impressed, for instance, that I’ve written books, and they’ve all got very professional looking covers and all. They’re not always completely knocked out by the contents. Half of them don’t even pay attention. I kind of feel, at the end of the day, that I’m taking advantage of my teaching position to hawk my books, and that’s even more true if it’s a successful lesson.
Well, the kids today,most of them just chose the shortest poems, and some of the cheekier ones zeroed in on anything with dirty words, but that’s O.K. Most of my poems don’t have anything really bad. So, I was thinking it was a failed day until one of the students came up to me after class,said he’d sent a message to an absent student that we were reading my poetry books and she asked where she could buy them.
Success!

I think everybody (discounting people who actually voted for him, which is about 25% of Americans, and maybe even some of them) is pretty well agreed that the next four years are going to be bad years.
It ranges from “Geez, give the guy a chance, he might be no worse than Bush,” which I can only assume comes from people who don’t remember Bush very well, to “This will undoubtedly be the end of life on Earth.”
I suspect, as with all things, it’s somewhere between the two extremes but rather than argue about the degree of badness, I’d like to speculate this evening on the nature of the looming train wreck.
His tweetnado after last night’s production of “Hamilton,” when veep elect and power-to-be behind the throne Mike Pence was jeered by the audience and schooled by the cast. Not professional, he said. They need to apologize, he said. The theater is supposed to be a safe place, he said. Ha! The arch conservative who mocks Mexicans, Blacks, Dead Veterans and Handicapped people is now saying he wants ‘safe spaces.’
Well, I suspect this will be the nature of his administration. There may be a crisis in Syria, or Lithuania, and the president will be arguing with Megyn Kelly, or Rosie O’Donnell, or Alec Baldwin (he got into a twitterspat with Baldwin as well, saying how Saturday Night Live was super, duper biased and he wants equal time and Baldwin said “Fuck off, you’re going to be the president, how much more time do you need” or words to that effect.
Some people think Trump might be the first president to actually be impeached. I think it equally likely that he will be the first president to be committed to a mental institution.
Keep it up, cartoonists and comedians everywhere! First one to make him cry will have the gratitude of a nation.

I read an interesting story today. Well, I didn’t read the whole story, just the headline and the two-sentence blurb before the blue ‘more,’ because thre’s so little time in the day, so many stories to read, and it seemed to be a piece by a Hillary person trying to make other Hillary people not feel so bad about her having lost the election, the election everybody, even some of her worst enemies, expected her to win handily.
You get the gist of the story, the most important stuff, right there. You get the fact that the story happened, that this is a thing, that this can be discussed. Then you can go to the comments section and get the full range of responses from that Rorschach test of a story, because every story is a Rorschach test. Everything in life is a Rorschach test.
Anyway, the story was that, according to the multi-verse theory, all of the Hillary supporters are currently co-existing quite happily in the universe in which Hillary Clinton won.
But that made me realize, as a Sanders supporter,that somewhere there is a universe in which Sanders got the nomination, and won the election. That’s the usual interpretation. And somewhere, among the infinite number of universes out there, there is one where Vermin Supreme won, and everybody is registering for their free ponies.
But that’s not even where I’m going with this. Say you are a person who, like me, did not want Hillary to win. If so, like me, you probably had lots of arguments with friends and family about it. Now, after the election split the universes just as surely as a parked car in the middle of a roundabout, we are living in the universe that Trump won, but maybe some of our friends are living in the one where Hillary won. Oh, their counterparts are still here. But, if person A (which is you) is split into person A (still you) and person B (you, but in a different universe, then so is person C (your friend) split into person C (who remains in this universe) and person D (who know thinks Hillary won the election.
So, maybe this election has caused more ruptures than we know. Maybe the people you thought you knew aren’t even a part of the same universe as you any more. Scary thought, huh?

O.K., must hammer out a blog quickly and get to bed because we’ve got a house full of kids and somebody’s going to need the fold out bed in the living room so I’ve got to vacate this computer or make things very awkward, and awkward is not good, I hate awkward.
A lazy, uneventful day, though. Yesterday was the Czech National Holiday, so that means a 4 day weekend, just about anything is enough excuse for a four day weekend in the Czech Republic, though, it seems to me they have about 12 of them a year. So, sat around the house most of the day, spent a lot of time on facebook and watched a thing on Discovery Channel where a guy took a cockroach brain and had it flying this blimp type structure around a railroad station, I thought that was pretty cool but when you think about it it means autonomous drones, and if they are weaponized we are in big trouble.
Which, of course, we are. Despite Donald Trump’s nice acceptance speech, his choices to fill various positions are as bad as we could have possibly feared. Jeff Sessions for Attorney General. This Banon guy as Chief of Staff. Chris Christie as food taster. (just kidding).
And I feel awkward criticizing Trump while still fighting with the Hillary Clinton people. I should understand them, I suppose. I did not want to give up after Bernie got swindled out of the nomination, and still don’t, so I guess it’s logical that Hillary people don’t want to give up even though she lost, they’re like saying “No, she didn’t.”
Well, I wonder why Hillary herself isn’t calling for audits of the machines in all the states she lost? Why is she going gently into that good night? Could it be that an audit would reveal how many votes she stole from Jill Stein? Don’t know. Will never know.
But, here’s my turn to admit a mistake. Many long years ago, when computers were
a newer thing and I was young and innocent, I was a big advocate of automated voting, thought that was the way of the future and would reduce errors and cheating. Well, I was sure wrong about that. We need to go back to paper ballots.
That’s more important than the Electoral College.