Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

Reaction’s to the State of the Union address are as predictable as rain in Seattle.  Democrats loved it.  Republicans hated it.  Democrats say that Obama came across as a champion of the people, that he appeared confident, and that he put the hecklers in their place.  This is very true.  Obama gives a great speech.  It’s what he does best.

Republicans insist (despite a world of evidence to the contrary) that he is the worst president ever, that he is ruining the country, and should be impeached immediately.

Actually, this time I think they might have some momentum going.  I’m going to go on the record right now and say I am convinced that in less than 2 years, Obama will be out of the White House and a new president will be installed.

I haven’t listened to the whole speech.  I’ve been having computer problems since last night and I’ll be lucky if I can finish this blog before it conks out again, but a few things strike me just from the excerpts and things people have said.  There was a lot of talk about income equality.  Liz Warren has had an impact.

Robert Reich wrote a really good piece on this a couple of days ago.  He pointed out that if Obama was really interested in raising taxes on the rich and giving the middle class a break, he’d have done it 6 years ago, when he had a congressional majority.  Now, with zero chance of passage, talk is cheap.

Obama will go down in history as a great president.  His accomplishments have been impressive, especially in view of the hysterical, fanatical opposition.  But he’s not nearly as great as he could have been.  I’m afraid I’ll always remember him as a disappointment.

re the Republican response from Joni Ernst: I think Democrats are making too much of the shoes wrapped in bread bags comment, just like we made too much of the pig castrating comments.  These may sound comical to people in New York and L.A., but pig farmers do castrate pigs and plenty of parents, I’m sure, have employed bread wrappers as galoshes.  It looks stupid but it works.

Joni Ernst is crazy, she is every bit as delusional as Michele Bachmann.  We have plenty of real reasons to criticize her without focusing on sound bites which sound crazy but, to her audience, are not at all.

Fox News lies.  That’s a plain, cold fact.  Well over half of their regular viewers believe that weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq whereas, in fact, they were not.  They mislabel countries on maps, they identify congresspeople with a D rather than an R if, as so often happens, they are an R who is involved in a scandal, and they call people ‘experts’ who are, in fact, just loudmouths with an ax to grind.

Generally, nobody calls them on it.  Liberals just shrug and say “Eh, there goes Fox News lying again” and conservatives actually think they are telling the truth.  They get away with it because lying is not, in fact, illegal.  It is totally covered in the concept of ‘free speech.’

Slander, however, is illegal.  Or libel.  I always get those two confused because it seems to me an irrelevant distinction.  One is spoken and one is in print, but either way it is the crime of lying, and damaging somebody’s reputation by lying.  Also, I’m not sure where Fox News sits on that spectrum.  They are not print media but, they speak to millions of people at a time, and their words do get written down and spread around in print.  They are like a virus that can be transmitted in more than one way.

So, finally, somebody is suing their lying asses, and it’s not just some random Democratic congressman.  It’s the city of Paris.  Fox said that some neighborhoods of the city were off limits to non-Muslims, which is obvious bullshit to most normal people, but Fox viewers would probably believe it.  ‘France’ and ‘Muslims’ are both foreign, so it makes sense.

I don’t know how this is going to work out.  A foreign municipality suing an American network raises all sorts of questions of jurisdiction and which laws to apply, but it’s going to be fun to watch.  I hope they ask for a gazillion dollars, and win.

People go on and on about how much they hate Monday, they want to shoo-oo-oo-oot the whole day down, they say Thank God it’s Friday but Oh, Shit it’s Monday, and I can understand the sentiment, lots of people have jobs they hate and plenty of people who have jobs they don’t totally hate still love to complain about them because people love to bitch, they actually seem to derive pleasure from complaining about their misery.

But, since I have an unconventional job, I have an unconventional schedule and Monday’s a pretty good day for me.  My first class (and today, the only one) is about two minutes from my flat, an undemanding conversational lesson with a pleasant and very attractive young lady in her office.  What better way to enjoy the first cup of coffee of the work week and ease into it?

Then, I had to go to the courthouse out at Prazskeho Povstani to get that little piece of paper which confirms that I’m not a convicted felon and have never been in prison, because one school where I teach is demanding it.  I thought that was going to be a huge pain in the ass because, when I arrived here in ’98, it was.  Hundreds of people milling around outside, at least a two hour wait, and grumpy clerks who would find some reason, any reason, to make you come back.

But, the Czech Republic has changed.  It was quick, it was efficient, it took about two minutes.

At home, I got a little bit of work done on my next book, a collection of very short poetry, but not much.  Mostly, I just read a book called  “The Thirteenth Step: Zombie Recovery,” by Michele Miller.   Normally, I wouldn’t bother with a zombie novel, but since it was just 99 cents on kindle and the author is my cousin, I went for it. But I really enjoyed it. The characters were interesting and varied, the scenes were vivid, the dialogue felt genuine, and the action was fast paced. Thumbs up all around.

I read it on the Metro on the way to pick up Isabel for her ballet lesson, read it while I waited for her, and then finished it after I got home.  The baseball bats were swinging and the zombies heads exploding all over the place.  Very satisfying.

It’s amazing how much we know, and it’s amazing how little we know.  We have discovered over a thousand exoplanets, we have seen to the edge of the universe (or, at any rate, this universe), and we’ve got robots crawling all over the surface of Mars.  (cool story from yesterday: one that was sent up in 2003,  The Beagle, but lost contact immediately and was presumed dead, has been found, by a more recent robot, and may even be reparable).

This is what one of them might look like, if either of them actually exist

Yet, up to a couple of years ago, we considered Pluto a planet.  Now, scientists say  there might  be two (not one, but two!) planets in our Solar System out beyond Pluto.  We haven’t seen them because they were hidden behind Pluto.  So, it’s not a planet – it’s the smudge on the lens.

I don’t really understand how scientists have figured this out – just because you can’t see something, doesn’t mean that it’s actually there.  But, they’re a smart bunch of folks, so their guesses are a lot better than mine.  Not only do they figure that there are two more planets out there, they reckon they are approximately the same size  as Earth, which means they are likely rocky planets like Earth, and not gas giants like Jupiter or Saturn.

No chance of life as we know it, of course.  Well outside of the Goldilocks zone.  There might be ice, though, and they might be potential refuelling stations for the ships we’re eventually going to send on interstellar voyages.

I just hope if they find them, they give them cool names.  I’ve always remembered the planets by the mnemonic “My very eager mother just served us nine pizzas,” which doesn’t work without Pluto.  Maybe give us a V and a T, and she can serve us nine vodka tonics.  For example.

As you read through the news, you see two kinds of articles: those which are about real problems, and those which are not.  People seem to get equally  excited about both of them.

This is Serious

Washington State, where marijuana is now legal, has a marijuana surplus.  As soon as it was legal, a whole bunch of people decided to grow ahead and grow it,  figuring it would be more profitable than apples or potatoes, and the market got saturated.  This is not a problem.

A sportscaster (I didn’t actually read the article, so I can’t give details) has been suspended because he was caught with a prostitute.  Personally, I have no problem at all with prostitution.  Back  in my single days, I was an occasional customer myself.  But even if you consider it immoral, the guy is a sportscaster.  He’s not running for President, he’s not a kindergarten teacher.  This is not a problem.

A guy on some stupid shopping program displayed his ignorance of astronomy when he said that something looked like the Earth as seen from “the planet moon.”  Not a problem.  You don’t need to be a rocket scientist, or even have a basic knowledge of the solar system, to hawk shit on TV.

A young, Christian boy who, if the pictures are an accurate guide, is seriously ill, wrote a book in which he  said he’d been to heaven and back.  It was a big seller in Christian bookstores, I guess.  He confessed that he’d made it all up and his publisher recalled the  book.  Not a problem.  Anybody who actually bought the book because they took him literally is not the most discerning reader in the world.  It’s not as if they would have spent their money on “Finnegan’s Wake” if they hadn’t been deceived.  So, no big deal.

On the other hand, the  recent report that we may have passed the point of no return as far as polluting the world’s oceans and life on Earth as we know it is now doomed to extinction is seriously  important.

I don’t want to believe it.  It seems a bit defeatist, I’m sure  there are still things we can do.  The  oceans are vast and it’s not a closed system.  If we stop polluting the air and the ground, the rivers will start to run clean and the oceans, after a time, will recover.  But, despite these warnings, we aren’t taking many  steps to clean up the air and the land, either.

It’s definitely serious.  Far, far more serious than a surplus of  recreational herb, a sportscaster’s sex life, a TV character’s ignorance of science, or a little white lie by an overly Christian Christian.