Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

When  archaeologists dig up a 10,000 year old village, and look at the  tools, and the houses, and even the bones of the people, and figure out things about how they lived and died, I am thrilled.  It adds to human knowledge, it puts a couple more pieces in the puzzle, and  it’s necessary.

People  10,000 years ago weren’t leaving any written records for the future, partly because survival was more of a full time job than it is today, and partly because they hadn’t learned how to write yet.

When we get some new piece of information because something has just been declassified, it generally pisses me off.  It’s information that would have been nice to know 50 years ago, and it was kept from us deliberately.

In 1969, about two months before the 1st moon landing, Apollo 10 circled the moon.   While they were on the dark side, blocked from radio contact with the Earth, the astronauts heard a strange sound.  A bit like wind, whipping  through  a narrow canyon; a whoosh and a whistle.  The astronauts had no good explanation for it.  Neither  did  NASA.

So, why did they  keep it secret until now.  Were they afraid that everybody would think it was aliens, and start running  through the streets naked and breaking windows?  Did they not  want Russian scientists to know there  were strange sounds over there?

Neither of those are good reasons.  In this case, I think it just came down to habitual government secrecy.  They are so used to not telling the public anything, that it has become their default mode.

And there’s no reason for it.  Military secrets?  Unless you’re actually at war, there’s no reason for those, and nobody should be at war with anybody.  To prevent public panic?  The public is just as likely to riot over a football loss (or a win, doesn’t matter) as they are to riot over something of substance.  Second, that should be up to the public.  If they want to panic, if that’s how they respond to the new information, then it’s on the public.

No, I am certain the  reason governments keep secrets is  because they don’t want their own people to know what they are up to, because what they are up to would not make them look good.

Let the truth be known.  All of it.  The  truth  will set us free.

(note- this is sarcasm; although the facts are all true, the quotes are completely made up)

Since media mogul Haim Saban, who has donated more than $2 million to Hillary Clinton’s campaign and vowed to do whatever it takes for her to win, purchased a controlling interest in ‘The Onion’ in January, they have failed to publish a single funny article.

The satirical site, which used to have readers laughing so hard they shit their pants nearly every other day, does not even seem to be trying to be funny.

Hillary Clinton with Haim Saban and his Smoking Hot Trophy Wife, Cheryl, in 2003

“O.K., maybe the Ted Cruz in bondage gear was a little bit funny,” admitted long time Onion reader Phil McCracken.  “Mostly, though, it was just gross.  And they haven’t done anything at all recently on Florida Man.  I refuse to believe that people in Florida have stopped doing comically stupid things.”
It remains to be seen whether the tactic will backfire, but Clinton spokesperson Mia Virginia defended the move.  “It had to be done,” she told reporters.  “Sanders is an old Jewish man from Brooklyn, who talks like Mel Brooks doing the 2,000 year old man.  He’s naturally funny.  We needed to level the playing field, and we leveled it.”

Pollster Ned Silverbergstein refused to commit to a prediction, but said “It appears that Clinton is still leading in South Carolina, but this may hurt her in later, funnier states such as Colorado, Alaska and, of course, New Jersey.”

I love social media, I really do.  I spend hours every day on facebook.  I write this blog, which I suspect 9 or 10 people around the world occasionally read, and I tweet at least once a day despite the fact I haven’t really figured out what the heck is the deal, and I’m pretty sure I’m not using it to maximum effectiveness.

My wife thinks I’m addicted and I probably am, so I can’t claim the moral high ground on this issue.  Nonetheless, I am about to bitch.

On Tuesdays, I teach at a gymnasium, 4 classes back to back, students in the 1st year are 16-17, students in the last year are 19-20, roughly.  For the most part, they are bright, interesting students.  Some are lazy, and not particularly motivated to learn, but I was like that in High School, too.

The fact that I occasionally have to tell one of them to put their phone away is not surprising.  The fact that I have to tell them again two minutes later is a little bit irritating.  The fact that after I’ve confiscated a phone and lectured the student for 5 minutes on how unacceptable it is to be checking their messages (one girl today, after I told her to put her phone away and she pretended not to hear me so I yelled at her to put her phone away just looked at me in big eyed innocence and said “But there are puppies.”) during a lesson, when they might actually be learning something that is of critical importance  to their lives and immediately applicable in the real world, and then the student sitting directly behind them is still looking at his  phone, is downright mind boggling.

It is like an episode of Twilight Zone/Night Gallery/Tales From the Crypt (which were all the same show, btw, just with different theme music and, in TFTC, a different narrator) in which their minds have all been taken over by these devices, and they are no longer part of the real world.

Like in Rhinoceros, with Gene Wilder, or Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

I have said it before and I’ll undoubtedly say it again before this is all over: Hillary Clinton cannot win the nomination except by employing dirty  tactics.

Now, we have to draw some distinctions.  There is hardball politics, there is dirty but not illegal, and then there is illegal or at least ought to be.  Getting the pledges of the superdelegates in advance is in the first category, it was sort of expected of her as the early favorite with the inside connections.  Having the support of the DNC is kind of dirty in my opinion, I don’t know that anything is actually illegal in an intra-party battle, but the DNC should have been neutral from the beginning, and they most definitely have not been.

In Iowa, there were rumors of county chairpeople switching delegates, which would probably be illegal, but that was never proved and the allegations were drowned out by the debate over whether it was a tie or actually a Hillary win.

She won Nevada by a slightly larger margin, but there have been a lot more allegations of dirty politics.  First, push polling, and that has been confirmed.  Again, I’m not sure if it’s illegal, but it sure as hell ought to be.  It is slander, it is false advertising, it is a Republican tactic, it is unacceptable and team Hillary did it.

Second, there are the allegations that she rounded up homeless people to caucus for her, paying them a bit for their trouble.  I’m pretty sure that is illegal, at least it would be in a general election.

Third, the allegations that campaign workers switched T shirts, effectively disguising themselves as members of the nurses union.  Hell of a risk, that one, because actual nurses might get seriously pissed off, and that’s a group she needs.  Not illegal, though, because in the end a red T shirt is only a red T shirt, and you have to give her people credit for a bit of creativity.

Then there is the allegation that a Clinton precinct chairman told people not to vote for the ‘socialist Jew.‘  I think we should ignore that one for now, for the following reasons.  First, there’s no tape of him actually saying it, just tape of Sanders supporters saying he said it.

I can believe it happened.  In a heated political debate, people say shit.  It wasn’t Hillary who said it, and if we’re going to hold the candidates responsible for everything one of their supporters says, well…I may have said a bad thing or two myself.

So, my complaints about  Hillary after Nevada are the push polling, and maybe the homeless voters thing(but, on the other hand, homeless people have the right to vote, too) and the T shirt thing, but mostly the push polling.  That’s bad enough.  And without sleazy tactics like that, she can’t win.

I got invited to watch an internet town hall sponsored by Democrats abroad, at a friend’s flat, so I went.  I expected like 30-40 people, wearing Bernie T Shirts and carrying signs as we watched convention like events at different places around the world, and I suppose that was sort of the idea.

The reality was that  we had 4 people, it was kind of a bad attempt at a group skype, Madelaine Albright spoke for a long time without saying anything of substance, then a guy standing in front of an American flag that looked like it was made out of crepe paper tried to contact the various house parties.  It  went something like this:

Hello, Luxembourg?

Yarrhh, argle bargle, lots of unintelligible noise

Well, as you can tell, they’re having a lot of trouble with their audio.

Let’s go to Geneva, Switzerland.  Geneva, Hello

Dead silen

Hello, Geneva, are you there?

And then he told people how important it was to vote, and asked for money, and they showed videos of Al Franken and Kirsten Gillibrand and Corey Booker saying how important it is to vote, and that’s how they stalled for over an hour before Bernie showed up, spoke for about 10 minutes, max, answered two questions, and then had to go.

It was a disappointment, but Hillary did not participate at all.  One interesting thins in our group:  One guy left and one woman showed up, but she was a Hillary supporter and defended her candidate valiantly, even though in vain.

It was the real world version of so many arguments I’ve been having on the  Internet so, reassuring in a sense.  What we say here does relate, slightly, to real life.