Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

In the ongoing argument between supporters of Jimmy Dore and supporters of AOC, as in every other online debate, the battle lines have been drawn and people have dug in their heels. It’s like a big tug of war over a mud pit, with fairly evenly matched teams.
On the one side, the Jimmy people are definitely showing some bad manners, and using some provocative language (this is the side I’m taking, but damn, some of these people need to show a bit of restraint), while the AOC people are actually sounding a lot like Biden people, or Hillary people before that, saying that this is not the time for an argument and AOC knows what she’s doing and we should just trust her.
One of them made a pretty good argument that I saw a couple of minutes ago, that by holding our leaders to too high a standard, and arguing over every little thing, we are potentially limiting our number to too small a group. It was a good argument, but I think it’s wrong.

It’s the big tent vs. the small tent argument. If you keep the tent small, you have fewer people and therefore less power, but if you have a big tent, you lose focus and there is a greater risk of a schism, because anything over a certain size is going to have factions.The silver lining is that it’s not an either/or choice. Let me put it this way: On a scale of 1 to 10, one being a single person shouting out their ideas on a street corner, but they are so specific they can’t agree with anybody and nobody can be with them, and 10 being everybody is welcome, we don’t even care what you believe.The correct tent size may be a four, or it may be a seven, but it’s definitely not a 1 or a 10. I see the big government v. small government debate the same way.

I’m not an expert on House rules, so I’d appreciate any comments from people who actually are (and not from people just saying shit like ‘you have to be realistic, Nancy Pelosi is the only choice,’ because Nancy Pelosi is shit and if that’s the best choice possible, the U.S. has failed as an experiment in democracy and the human race is likely to go extinct because the oil producers have a complete stranglehold on the most powerful country on Earth), but I do know where the battle lines are drawn, and to me the math seems simple.
If AOC, and the ten or so representatives Jimmy Dore named (basically, the newly expanded squad) refused to support Pelosi for speaker, then she won’t be speaker. Despite all of the threats coming from centrist Democrats, who really do not deserve the name Democrat, which was once applied to people like FDR and Harry Truman, who actually gave a damn about working class people, that if Pelosi doesn’t become speaker, someone even more right wing and horrible, maybe even a Republican, can be swiftly dispatched by saying “We won’t support them, either.”
For a Republican (i.e. Kevin McCarthy) to become speaker, as I have heard seriously mentioned, would require crossover Democrat votes. Certainly progressives wouldn’t support them, either. Especially since Medicare 4 All is the key issue, the key reason why they should refuse to support Pelosi.
If Democrats did cross over, and vote for a Republican speaker, it should at least prove once and for all time to those blinkered vbnmw voters that some of the ‘Democrats’ in congress are actually Republicans at heart. They feed at the same trough.
That might be a Pyrrhic Victory, but it would be a victory, of a sort. It would keep the movement alive and intact, keep the embers of the fire burning, and possibly convince the ‘any democrat’ crowd that they’ve been had.

One of the great joys of having children, when they’re small, is that you get to watch a lot of cartoons. So, I have seen Peppa Pig, and I like the show.
So, when I saw one of my Facebook friends saying she was thinking of boycotting Peppa Pig for what she deemed an unacceptable joke, I was a bit taken aback.
Apparently Mama Pig told Peppa “Mother’s Day is real but Father’s Day is just made up.” Now, I didn’t actually see this episode, as my kids are teenagers now, but I can pretty much picture the scene. The line was undoubtedly followed by piggy laughter, which is literally snorts. That’s the whole thing about the show, lots of piggy sounds. It’s very funny.
The joke itself is kind of funny in a classic TV battle of the sexes way. It’s like Al Bundy saying “Women’s golf is not a sport.” And, it’s funny because obviously both holidays are made up. All holidays are made up. The calendars and the days of the week are made up. But, I’m getting off topic.
She had allies and they went on a bit about parenting roles, and gender stereotyping, and sending kids the wrong message, and so on. I guess their intentions are good, but this is PC gone hog wild.
Everybody loves Papa Pig.

I was trying to teach “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” to a bunch of 6 year olds today, attempting to corrupt their little Ježišek loving minds with the more Americanized version of the holiday, and it was not going well. They were much more interested in running around the room, trying to hide, and sneaking around behind me, that was their favorite.
So, through constant repetition, I began to have a different opinion of the song. “He sees you when you’re sleeping, he knows when you’re awake.” Well, first, that’s seriously kind of creepy, but in addition to that, it’s very similar to Christian thought. Jesus is theoretically watching you all the time, like Big Brother. In the Czech Republic, there is St. Nicholas (Mikulaš), who comes around on December 5th, along with devil and an angel, and the bad kids get put in a sack and taken away, which is a terrifying moment for some of the very young ones. Someone is always watching, your misdeeds will be punished, Christmas, which is really just a ripoff of Yule and Saturnalia, is all about control.
Anyway, when they weren’t running around, or hiding under their desks, some of them were sort of mumbling the words and I was coming frightfully close to losing my temper, but then, but then, as I was straining to hear them to see if any were actually getting it right, I heard, loud and clear “He sees you when you’re sleeping, his nose is on a rake,” and, well, I just started laughing.
Any illusion of discipline was shattered, but at least it all ended on a happy note.

Partly it’s the lockdown, I suppose, and partly it’s the fact that I’m kind of a natural born couch potato, but when I binge watch, I binge watch. Today is was a documentary, in 4 one hour segments, and I watched it straight through, even though some of it was depressing.
It was all about genetic engineering, and I thought it gave a balanced view of the pros and cons and I was quite interested in seeing the different people involved in it. The dog breeder with no college degree who said science was for everybody, the guy who used to work for NASA (I began to wonder why he left) with the multiple piercings, who is very emphatic about spreading the technology, he sort of sees himself as the Johnny Appleseed of CRISPR, but he had a bit of a change of heart mid-documentary when he realized that some people really were taking it a bit too far and he’d encouraged them, the nearly blind kid (who was cured), the couple who had a 3 parent baby and were quite pleased about it, the guy with HIV who was trying to cure himself with untested, uncertified drugs, and many more.
There was a bit near the beginning where the punk NASA dude injected himself with something on stage, to give himself bigger muscles, and my first thought was, well, it’s like steroids, but a different technology, and then my second thought was “Holy shit, he’s talking about creating superheroes” and then the second and a half thought, because every thought contains it’s opposite, and a few other variations besides, “Holy shit, he’s going to wind up creating super villains.”
Scientists may create a world in which nobody ever gets sick, and everybody is attractive, intelligent, and athletic, but the ratio of good people to bad people is likely to be exactly the same as it is today.