Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

It’s been a slow week and a gradual easing back  into work after Christmas vacation, which makes me  a bit frustrated. I’m actually anxious to  get back to a  full teaching schedule and  there definitely is such a thing as spending  too much time on facebook.

But, tomorrow I’ve got my 7 a.m. class and it’s now 11 p.m., so I’m writing whatever (and the space bar is jamming, so I have  to go back over  every sentence)

My morning class canceled today, and then  the first of my afternoon classes, so all I had was the German kindergarten.  If any of the parents of  the children in that group are readers of my blog (unlikely), I’m  sorry, but you  are raising a little monster.

The youngest boy wasn’t much of a problem, but one of the girls burst into tears because  he  made a little mark  on her paper crown with a  crayon and you would  have thought she was burned by spattered grease.  The other little girl kept screaming  at me that I’d ruined her life, I had no idea what she  was  talking about.  The oldest boy just  kept giving  deliberately wrong answers  to everything and  thinking he was funny (he is most definitely not funny).

After that fiasco, I met Helena at the book  launch of an artist friend, which was a nice event.  It was at  a  wine bar but neither of us  drink wine, and they did a reading  from the book, which I didn’t understand much of, it was in Czech, but  it was just a lovely atmosphere, made me feel all cultured  and shit, and I saw  a couple of people  I hadn’t seen for a long time, so it  was a nice wind down to the evening.

It’s something, which is better than nothing, and  nothing is what the Republicans would have us have.  So, at least it’s spitting in Congress’s eye, it’s taking a stand.

At first read, though, it doesn’t seem to be much.  The 23 actions mostly deal with background checks and I’m sort of confused as to why 23 actions are necessary when it should be 1, i.e. check everybody’s background when they want to buy a gun.

Credit where it’s due, though, one of them is something I hadn’t even thought of, which is background checks on the guys who own gun  stores.

Some of them are pie in the sky, like the one about ‘more research into how to manufacture safer guns,’ and that seems to be one of the more expensive ones, too, but research is good.

One thing gives me hope, and that  is that we’ve sort of been here before; with Obamacare.  Of course, he had to get that through congress, so it’s a bit different, but I remember complaining at the time how watered down it was and how it couldn’t possibly do much good, and why oh why did he back away from single  payer.

Obamacare, for all its limitations, has been a huge success.

One of the reasons for that  is while people  like  me are thinking in sweeping generalities, and have little  patience for details, Barack Hussein Obama is digging in and doing the work.  He didn’t just come up with these today, before the press conference.

One of the reasons Obamacare has been such an amazing  success is that it has withstood all court challenges.  It  was a damned well crafted law.

I think we’ll see the same with these  23 executive actions.  They will withstand court challenges (which are inevitable, the Republican party is  like that  guy on your block who is constantly suing everybody for whatever their dogs or their kids did, no matter how petty, just because he’s a dick) and they will do a little bit of good.

Like Obamacare, they are not enough (we really need to ban assault weapons), but they will accomplish some good.  Today was a good day in the fight for sanity.

Snow is  a relatively uninteresting blog topic but seeing as how all anybody’s talking about in the news is those goobers out in Oregon and I wrote about them last night, and in  view of the fact that  we’re well into January and this  is the first snow of the year and this  is Prague, snow is my topic.

We did have a slight  dusting one  day in November, but it didn’t last.  This has been coming down all day and now that it’s night time and cold, it’s certainly not going  to melt before morning and, being  a starless night, it might well snow more.

Good.  I certainly hope they got  more in the mountains because Isabel is on  a school ski trip and if they don’t get any time on the slopes at all, she’s going to be disappointed.

As much as I’m not a fan of snow, and wouldn’t mind  horribly  living in a place that never had it, it’s sort of an essential part of the environment here, and two successive nearly snowless winters in a row is a very  bad sign.  Global warming is coming on fast, and Prague is going to be like Italy in a few years.

That does have it’s advantages, but it’s going to be real hard for the farmers to adapt.  Different crops.  Apple trees will stop bearing fruit and die.  Cherries, too.

This is the world’s biggest problem today, the one that threatens our existence as a species.  Maybe we should take a break from all the war stuff and deal with it.

Even when technically  correct, a headline can be misleading.  “Right wing protesters occupy Federal Building” conjures up an image, for me, of the Federal Building in Los Angeles, a gleaming, multi-story building where we marched up and down in 1990, shouting “No blood for  oil!” and it  seemed to me that no government  had ever before waged such a horrible war  on such an obviously bullshit pretext but it was, after all, just the beginning of the long and ugly descent which has brought  us  to where we  are today.

This is the place.

Another image conjured up is that of the Oklahoma Federal Building, brought  down by Timothy McVeigh, who has a great deal in common with the  guys who are currently occupying the ‘Federal Building’ out  in Middle-of-Nowhere, Oregon.  It is, indeed, a federal building, i.e. a building owned by the federal government, but it’s not exactly as if they are issuing passports and trying  federal  cases in that building.

It’s the visitors’ center at a nature reserve, it looks like  a  big house in the  middle of  the forest, and it was closed  for the holidays when a couple  of Cliven  Bundy’s sons and a dozen or two  other gun loving wackadoodles walked in and took  it over.

They have said  they  won’t leave, and if federal authorities try to  force them out,  they  will open fire.

I’ve seen a lot of suggestions for how to deal with the situation  on  facebook, from  drone  strikes on down.

What Obama is likely to do is ignore them, just like he ignored their father, Cliven Bundy, when he refused to pay his grazing fees.

Letting them break the law, apparently, doesn’t work.  They just break the law harder and stupider.

The solution  is simple.  Block the  road that leads to the  cabin.  (I’m sure there’s only one.)  Then wait.  Shut  off their  water and electric.  Let’s see what great survivalists  they are.

If they want to come out, arrest them.  Otherwise, they can stay there, in their self-made, self-operated prison, forever.

Interesting development in the Middle East.  Saudi Arabia recently executed a whole bunch of people, which they do every now and then and it shouldn’t offend Americans who are proponents of the death penalty too much, we do the same, except that they do it by beheading people, with a sword, the old fashioned way, just like Daesh.

(I’m going to use Daesh because people in Daesh really hate it, it’s like calling Teabaggers Teabaggers)

One of the people they executed was a Muslim holy man type, who was apparently quite popular in Iran.  So, crowds in Iran have stormed the Saudi Embassy and torched it.

It puts the U.S. in a rather awkward position.  Of course the U.S. government hates, hates, hates Iran (even though Iran is also opposed to Daesh, and the U.S. government, for some reason (oil) or combination of reasons (money and oil), loves, loves, loves Saudi Arabia and gives them billions of dollars every year for brand new airplanes so they can fly around in the desert and be useless.

So, it seems like it should be pretty easy for the U.S. to say “Hey, you’re over-reacting, you shouldn’t burn down buildings just because some other country is beheading people right, left and center and one of them is somebody you care about.” (lots of people get executed who nobody cares about, like women who’ve committed adultery).

Except then, the U.S. would very clearly be on the side of people who behead other people with swords.

The best thing for  all concerned is if the U.S. steps back and lets Iran and Saudi Arabia sort it out. And maybe stop giving the Saudis military aid, because the people who rule that country are shit people.