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Bernie Sanders, the Independent (capital I) Senator from Vermont,  says he might just go ahead and run for  president, if he doesn’t have  anything better to do.  It wasn’t so  much a formal announcement as it was an off-handed  remark during a magazine interview, but somehow news of it got out on  Friday, which is shrewd political timing, maximum viewage.  It’s possible to be a cool, old, Hippie Senator from a state which is proud to be next to Massachussets, and  still be a political thug, and I mean that  in a good way.

Oh, and did I mention he’s Jewish?

I like Bernie.  He’s a liberal, in a world where there are no more liberals.  I think he would make an awesome president.  Nonetheless, I see a couple of ways this could go bad.

First, if he runs as an Independent (and not in the Democratic primaries), then Hillary gets the Democratic nomination and Bernie becomes Hillary’s Ralph Nader and the  world says hello to President Chris Christie, provided  he doesn’t actually have to do  time for that little incident where he closed the bridge during rush hour just for the laughs.

If he runs in the  Democratic primaries, and wins, he might lose in the general election because the word ‘socialist’ gets thrown around a lot, and here’s the weird thing:  I seem to recall that Bernie Sanders used to identify as a Socialist, and recently niced it up to Independent,  so I went over to his Wikipedia page and didn’t see the word ‘Socialist’ once, but I’m sure the Black Ops boys over at the underground Republican bunker are aware of it and will use it.  Say hello to President Christie.

Maybe I’m underestimating Sanders, and maybe I’m underestimating America.  Maybe people are starting to realize that maybe just a smidgin of socialism might be a good thing – better public transport would be a start.

In the early days of 2008, I thought  “This is nuts.  The only way the Democrats could possibly lose this election is if they nominate a black guy.”  But, he did well in my home state of Iowa, and not too bad in Senator Sanders’ beautiful state of Vermont, which I’d love to visit someday.  New England and Alaska are the only two parts of the U.S. I haven’t been to.

But, I digress.  I’m a little bit high, like Michele Bachman is a little bit crazy, and need to tie this up: If Sanders runs and wins, it’s great, but that’s not how I see it playing out.  I hope he’s taking the risks into consideration.

We live in wonderful times, there’s never a dull moment.  When technology isn’t changing our lives, raw science is busy making huge strides behind the scenes, creating the environment for tomorrow’s life changing developments in a never ending cycle.

Who knows what we will find in that strange, strange world

Especially in space.  When JFK made his famous we’re-going-to-the-moon speech, everybody got totally focused on that milestone.  Now, although I’m sort of bummed that we don’t actually have colonies on the moon, our efforts in space have diversified, not waned.  We’ve got the Voyager twins, now drifting endlessly through interstellar space, a letter in a bottle that will still be going on and on a thousand years from now.  We’ve got a couple of little mini-tank robots rolling around on Mars and taking pictures faster than a Japanese tourist on coke.  Mars!  There’s also a plan to colonize Mars, with people selected from a reality show.  You don’t hear about the international space station that much any more, but it’s still up there.  Mankind has a permaent foothold in outer space.  Dreams of the space elevator are alive and well and, as materials continue to be invented that are lighter or stronger, I suspect that it’s only a matter of time.  Once that puppie’s up there, everything changes.  Tourism will become common.  Ships will do routing mining runs to the asteroid belt, used again at again, with little wear and tear and almost no fuel cost.

Now, there are hints and rumors that NASA may try to land a craft on Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons, by 2030.  This could  turn out to be nothing, of course, but…. Europa has something Mars doesn’t, our own  moon doesn’t, and Venus and Mercury sure as hell don’t: water.

I am excited by this mission for a few reasons.  It seems to me that since water is the first building block of life on Earth, it’s likely that it harbors life wherever it is.  So, we’ll be exploring a totally hidden, alien world with an undersea, underice environment.  It will be awesome.  Knowing that there is other life in our solar system will undoubtedly encourage us to continue to look for intelligent life further afield.

If it’s a big bust and there’s nothing below the ice, then it will be a world we could colonize.  We win either  wau/

It’s totally covered with ice, but scientists reckon there’s water underneath that.  So, the plan is to drill through the ice, send a robo-submarine down there, and take lots of pictures.

I’m

I  teach at the  Iranian Embassy School in Prague, which has its positives and negatives.  On the one hand, my students are delightful.  I’ve got kids from 7 to 12, about evenly mixed between boys and girls, and every single one of them is co-operative and eager to learn.  Of course, some of them speak better English than others.  There are three who I could actually have a free flowing conversation with, two or three who haven’t got a clue, and four or five in between.

I am kind of weirded out by their culture, though.  I don’t like it that the women cannot shake my hand, and they all have to keep their hair covered -it’s not a full burka, they aren’t Saudis or Afghanis, but I still feel it’s repressive, and I feel like I’m enabling that repression.  I sometimes wonder what I can say and can’t say, and I find it weirdly disturbing that a couple of the girls always write “In the name of God…” at the top of their homework.  Also, I’m a poet and very aware of the fact that a poet was recently hanged in Iran, for writing poetry that the authorities didn’t like.

I don’t talk about that stuff, though.  My job is to teach them English.  Everybody needs to learn English, and I need the work.

Anyway, I started a new class today, because one of the mothers decided her daughter needed some extra lessons at home (she’s in that in-between group).  I’d decided I was going to try a writing exercise with her, but as soon as I got there, her mother suggested that the 4 year old little sister join the lesson.  So, I dumbed it way down, farm animal flashcards, and still couldn’t keep the little one’s interest.  Fortunately, the mother also realized fairly quickly that it wasn’t going to work.

Then, we were joined by two other kids, one 8 year old boy from the class and his older sister, who is quite good, so I had 3 students (which is good, it is easier than working with just 1) at wildly different levels.

It worked out O.K., because they are all friends and the bigger girl was quite nice about helping both the others.

When I first started teaching, I thought “I’m going to direct my lessons to the fastest students, and let the others try and keep up.  It will do them good.”  That teaching philosophy collapsed on first contact with reality.

Unfortunately, after 16 years of teaching, I still don’t know what to  do when students are at different levels.  You hope that the smart ones will help the slower ones, but you can’t count on that.  You try to give the smarter ones a bit more of a challenge, and show a little bit more patience to the slower ones, but it does slow things down.

One muddles through, as one must.

I am not talking about the Academy Awards.  Haven’t seen hardly any of the films, don’t really care who won the awards, it doesn’t affect my life, and if John Travolta mispronounced somebody’s name, that may indicate a lack of professionalism and  perhaps even arrogance on his part, but I actually had no idea who Idina Menzel even was.

Reeva Steenkamp

No, I am talking about Oscar Pistorius, the valiant runner with the artificial legs who fought to compete against able-bodied athletes and represented  his native South Africa at the 2012 Olympics;  the one who murdered his girlfriend on Valentine’s Day, a little over a year ago.

Yes, I know that legally, there must be the presumption of innocence, but I’m a blogger, not a lawyer, and it’s pretty clear to me that he’s guilty as sin.

First, there is no doubt that he shot Reeva Steenkamp and killed her.  He’s not denying  that.  His bullshit defense is that he thought she was a burglar.  Even after she’d barricaded herself in the bathroom.  Even after all of her screaming, if the neighbors can be believed, and I know of no reason why they can’t.

Secondly, if you’ve got a burglar in your  bathroom and your standing outside the door with a loaded gun, crisis over.  You can call the cops and then  wait calmly, your  gun trained on the door, until they arrive.  Even killing a burglar under those circumstances would be a bit extreme.

What bothers me is why it took a full year for this to come to trial.  If Joe Normal shoots his girlfriiend, he gets arrested and the trial starts  in a week or so – actually, I’m just talking out my ass, I have no idea how long it takes, but it’s not a year.

What  do they police know now that they didn’t know a year ago?  How does this serve justice?

I suspect that he will get away  with it.  He’s wealthy, he’s famous, he’s got good lawyers (they managed to delay the trial for a year), and that’s the way these things seem to go.  But he’s guillty, and I hope he  spends the rest of his life in jail.

Just got back from Alchemy, my regular first Monday of the month poetry fix.  Some good, some bad, as usual.  Actually, I felt it was a bit above average in some ways.

The featured speaker was a Czech kid, well, kid to me, I’m pretty sure he was under 30, who wrote Science Fiction novels, and is actually published, so I was kind of jazzed about that, because I really like science fiction.  But when the hero keeps a pistol and a watch on his nightstand, and everybody calls him Admiral, it’s  hard to believe they are 6,000 years in the future.  A bit heavy handed on the military stuff, and probably came across better on the page than on the stage.

Basically, I cringe at novels and short stories at poetry readings, because they take too long and everybody feels they need to do the voices, and almost nobody does them well.

Then, one guy who usually does the most horrifically morbid short stories got up and read a poem, a rhyming poem, and it was still all about death and violence and disgusting stuff, but it was actually powerful and good.

There were a few other pieces that had both power and comedy in them.

I  just read 3 poems, but I thoink all of them were well received.

The high point for me, though, was a conversation I had during the break, about how everybody is connected to the internet  group mind and as such we are the  guiding force behind the new, hybrid, artificial intelligence which is coming into being, emerging into tangible existence, it is what was once known as the noosphere, but it is about to cross the boundary, if it has not done so already, because how the hell would we know, between theory and actual, honest-to-God existence, perceivable on the physical plain, and the beauty of that is this: the territory which we are mentally colonizing, this brave new world, did not actually exist until we populated it, with our fevered fantasies and our warped versions of reality.  It was not just virgin ground, it was non-ground.

Som property values are low and access is high.