Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

For a long time, people who for some reason don’t want to believe that Global Climate Change (I don’t want to use the phrase Global Warming since it apparently confuses people) is caused by human activity (and why they so adamantly want to believe this, I don’t know -maybe it has to do with some mistaken notions about ‘jobs’ or, even more nebulously ‘the economy’) have clung to the fact that “not all scientists agree on this.”

That is true. Although the ratio is something like 97% to 3% that is, indeed, less than 100%.
Well, it just got a lot closer to 100%, and in rather dramatic fashion.
Wei Hock “Willie” Soon, one of the most often quoted scientists among that 3 percent, was exposed a couple of days ago. It turns out that he’s been paid over a million dollars by the oil industry to make that point. The ‘donations’ came from a few different companies, probably so it wouldn’t be too obvious, but a couple hundred thousand of it came directly from the Koch brothers.
So, his credibility is shot. You can’t quote him any more.
The strange thing is, I don’t really blame Soon. Sure, he was willing to sell out future generations for a lousy million bucks, but a million bucks is a million bucks and a lot of basically decent people would have been sorely tempted. I’m sure he said to himself things like “If I don’t do it, they’ll just find somebody else,” and maybe “Well, it COULD be true.” Nah, he probably never said that second one.
But the first one is true,and now the billionaire’s money will flow to the next sell out scientist in line. In the interests of truth, it would be a good idea at this point to investigate the finances of all scientists who deny man-made global climate change.
The number who believe it’s really happening might turn out to be 100% after all.

Well, since the kids are both out of town, Isabel at the grandparents and Sam with a friend, Helena and I were due for a date night. Since Birdman won the best picture Oscar and since I am a big fan of Michael Keaton, his portrayal of Beetlejuice was one of the great characters of all time and that movie where he cloned himself had one of the greatest lines of all time, i.e. “She touched my peepee, Steve. I liked it. I liked it a lot,” we decided to go see Birdman, at Lucerna, a classic Prague cinematic experience, with the very elegant cafe where you can hang out until showtime. I had a coffee and Helena had a chlebicek and a coke.

I was a bit disappointed in the film. I can see how critics considered it a great film, there were brilliant performances. Michael Keaton did not disappoint, and Emma Stone as his daughter was brilliant, but Edward Norton, as the other insane actor in the onstage battle of egos, stole the show. There was some excellent dialogue, maybe too much excellent dialogue. The whole thing was so loaded with meaning that it was more of an intellectual experience than a film, right from the first five minutes where he’s staring into his dressing room mirror and there’s a little note stuck in the corner of the frame that says “The thing is what the thing is, and not what we say the thing is,” I may not be remembering that word for word but it was a nice thought, a true statement, and set the tone.
I liked the scene where his daughter tore into him for not having twitter, or facebook, and failing to accept that he was already irrelevant, it spoke to me and the reasons I blog, the film was very much about old men trying to remain young, as in the Edward Norton speech where he said to Sam (the daughter) that he’d like to take out her eyeballs and put them in his own head so he could see New York the way he’d seen it when he was young. I liked Keaton’s argument with the critic in the bar, when they discussed the various merits of films vs. live theater, and what it meant to be an actor vs. being a critic.
Wasn’t terribly impressed with the scene where he was flying, I thought that was kind of stupid.
It didn’t quite make it into the ‘great film’ category. My definition of a great film is one where you’re so wrapped up in the story, you forget you are watching a film and the moment it ends is a surprise because you had forgotten.
That didn’t happen. I give it about a 7 or a 7.5 out of 10, but if this was the best film of the year,then it wasn’t a great year.

As we debate the important issues of the day, it is important  that we all use the same words to mean the same things.  Of course, the problem is that the language is changing and it’s changing fast and it’s sometimes hard to keep up.  So, tonight I’d just like to weigh in on a couple of words, how they are used, and how I think they should be used.

Every time the argument turns to Israel,  as it tends to do, because to people who are interested in that unhappy little corner of the world there is nothing more important, any argument against the actions of the Israeli government will be met with the charge of anti-semitism.  Invariably, that argument will be countered by  some pedantic person who is more interested in linguistics than in  Zionism, who will be quick to point out that Arabs are semites as well, and therefore the word is irrelevant.

Shut up.  Although that may be the etymology of the word, everybody knows that it now means anti-Jewish.  If somebody wants to say anti-Arab, they say anti-Arab.

I object to the term being used in the overly defensive manner it is, to shut down any criticism of Israel.  Lord knows, there is plenty to criticize Israel for.  But I accept that it means anti-Jewish.

When the conversation turns to UFOs, there is always some person who thinks they’re a genius when they point out that UFO  just means unidentified flying object, so it might actually just be some swamp gas, or a classified military experiment.

Shut up.  We all know the acronym.  When we say UFO, we mean a spaceship with aliens inside it, and when we say aliens, we mean people from another planet, not just another country.

Now we  come to GMOs, and that’s the one where I think the definition is causing serious problems.  When we talk about genetically modified organisms, we are not talking about cross breeding plants, or even grafting.  GMOs at that level of technology have been with us for hundreds of years and are socially acceptable:  orange carrots, Golden Delicious apples, and almost all of the marijuana that is on the market today.  No, we’re talking more about something at the genetic level.

Even so, I don’t want to be an enemy of science.  If I thought that GMOs were being manufactured in order to fight plant diseases, make them more pest resistant, or even just to give them a longer shelf life, I’d be all for ’em. But that’s not the case.

GMOs means Monsanto and Monsanto, as everybody who is not employed by them either directly or in their capacity as a government official agrees, is an evil corporation bent on destroying small farmers and gaining total control of the world’s food supply.  So, the way the word is used today, I’ve got to be against them.

Sort of like communism and eugenics.

Hillary Clinton is a slick and practiced politician.  She has, after all, learned from the master of all slick politicians. By itself, that’s not a bad thing.  Bill Clinton was quite successful as president, and he was about a million times  better than the Republican nightmare that followed.  Barack Obama is also a very slick politician.  But, it does mean that we need to pay very close attention to her words, and treat  everything she says with a great deal of skepticism.

At a recent “Clean Energy” summit in Las Vegas,  she said that fracking should be “heavily regulated” especially in “areas where it is dangerous.”  Heavily regulated is a very flexible term, but essentially it means “enough regulation so that we can cover our asses and say there’s regulation, but not so much that it  interferes with the oil companies making money.”  Areas where it is dangerous is an even more deceptive term.  It’s dangerous everywhere,   but it’s only dangerous to the people nearby, the ones who are going to be drinking the water that will be polluted by it.  So, when Clinton says “areas where it is dangerous,” she means areas where she or her rich friends have homes.  Anywhere else is fair game.

I doubt that it will, of course, but this should end consideration of her as a serious candidate.  There is no  doubt that the Republican candidate will be a fracker.  If Hillary Clinton is the Democratic nominee, the voters in the center, that thin band of people who don’t go into the next election with their minds already made up, will just say “Yeah, Jeb Bush made a lot of money out of fracking, but Hillary’s not opposed to it either.”  The issue will be off the table; neutralized.

Surely, among all the potential candidates in the Democratic party, we can find one who believes that water should not be flammable.

Eisenhower gets a lot of credit for warning us about  the military-industrial complex but the thing is, he was president and all he did was warn us about them, he didn’t exactly bust them up.  He didn’t fire Nixon even when he had the chance to, and that cost us in the long run, but Nixon wasn’t the beginning of the MIC, they were probably pretty well entrenched by the end of WWII; noble cause though it was, there were still people who made money off of it.

Lyndon Johnson was in deep with them, his sponsor corporation (according to Robert Caro, who probably knows as much about LBJ as anybody) was Brown and Root, later known as Kellogg, Brown and Root, then KBR, then Halliburton.

Obama may be trying for peace, but there’s no doubt the MIC is still there,  and they’ve got the CIA, and a lot of people inside the government.  Those who love war, who see the world as an arena for combat, are still very much in power.

On the Russian side  you have Putin,  who is ex-KGB, and definitely an old cold-warrior.  Throughout the Middle East and Africa, you have an endless succession of warlords, because unemployment is high and warlord is just about the highest paying position there is.

The world is being run by people who want war.

On the other hand, Russian scientists get along with American scientists just fine.  Iranian poets get respect from Western poets, Nigerian football players have no problems getting along with British football players (sure, some of the fans are assholes…as visible as they are, they are still a minority).  People get along just fine with people, as a general rule, when they find themselves in the same room with each other.

The problem is the politicians.  We are just going to have to find some way to move towards a future of  peace and prosperity for everybody without them.  In fact, without them it would be a piece of cake.