Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

For everybody bitching non-stop about 2020 being the worst year ever (which I agree with, btw, but 2021 will be worse, and 2022 more so, until there’s actually a hurricane that visibly alters the map and humanity gets its collective butt kicked into gear), it is now 5781 in the Hebrew calendar.
Maybe that should be a sign for optimism except, of course, that that is when Ruth Bader Ginsburg died.
Here’s what’s going to happen now. I predict this with no joy, but a high degree of confidence.
First, Trump will appoint somebody. Probably within the week. It will be somebody horrible. Trump has said it will be a woman, which may appease women a bit, and at least she’s not likely to be a sexual predator like Kavanaugh, but his nod to identity politics doesn’t mean it will be a good woman. After all, Betsy DeVos is a woman.
So, it won’t be the Kavanaugh hearings redux, but the outcome will be the same. The nominee will be a horrible person, with a horrible record, and lots of Democrats will make stern, impassioned speeches against her. Nancy Pelosi may tear up a piece of paper, or something.
But, in the end, they will vote to confirm her.
It will be close, they will put on a good show, but they will vote to confirm her.
Because they are all on the same side. And it is not ours.

I’ve been hearing about this group for quite a while but, for a few weeks now, I’ve actually had a true believer on my Facebook feed, so I’ve been seeing all sorts of stuff about how Princess Diana is still alive and Queen Elizabeth II is actually a shape shifting lizard person, stuff like that.
I tell her I think she’s wrong, but I haven’t had any reason to block her yet. People are entitled to their opinions.
I don’t know her in real life, or at any rate I don’t think I do. She’s Czech, and I live here, so it’s possible that I know her, or know people who do. She has one of those very common Czech first names. I’ve taught classes where there were three, once even 4, women with this same first name. So, maybe she was a student of mine at some point? Don’t know. Her English is good. Better than most American Trump supporters, for sure.
At any rate, today is September 18th. I have been waiting for this day for a couple of weeks because she predicted, very confidently (read the link! open your mind! wake up!), that the internet would go down, globally, sometime between the 10th and the 17th.
If this were football (soccer, to the Americans) it would be a free kick, if this were hockey it would be a double power play, if this were a test it would be open book. All I had to do was wait until this morning and then remind her of the date.
I doubt I will actually change her mind about anything. But I did score a point which is, of course, the whole point of arguing politics with people on Facebook. So, hooray for me.

It’s effect on the campaign will be minimal. Most people already know how they are going to vote. And it’s not as if it’s a policy thing, where he said something stupid, like “I am not going to ban fracking” or “I will veto any Medicare 4 All Bill that crosses my desk” or “Nothing is going to fundamentally change.” It was just a lame, awkward performance, and Biden supporters are plenty used to ignoring those.
While campaigning in Florida, Joe Biden took the stage and said “I’ve only got one thing to say” and then pulled out a phone, took a moment to figure things out, and then played ‘Despacito.’ I guess because he was introduced by the guy who recorded the song, but it’s also because he’s not doing so great with the Hispanic community. (I should be tired of rubbing it in, but I’m not – Sanders was extremely popular with the Latino community).
I don’t think it will do him much harm, but it certainly didn’t do him any good. First, this is not even a question of how it played with that audience. That audience (which isn’t shown in this video) seemed (from the amount of applause) to consist of about 10 people, maybe 20 tops. When there was applause, you could actually distinguish, audibly, the different people clapping, it was not like the wave that goes through a larger crowd and blends into one single, powerful sound. No, this was all for TV, and it looked pretty bad.
It reminded me, for some reason, of Hillary Clinton saying “Pokemon Go to the Polls.” Just a lame cultural reference, without any of the necessary comic timing or spontaneity needed to pull something like that off.

As fires continue to rage all up and down the West Coast (I believe there were some fires as far north as British Columbia but, as with Covid-19, the authorities have dealt with them in a more effective manner), Hurricane Sally is fixing to smack into Mississippi, Alabama and North Florida on Wednesday. It’s a one-two punch.
My question is, how did we get from Laura to Sally so fast? It seems they just skipped over some letters, or maybe Hurricanes have become so common that they don’t all even get reported.
Also, another huge chunk of Greenland ice just slid off into the ocean, which adds to the rising sea levels, which feeds more hurricanes.
And it’s not going to get any better. Sooner or later there will be a hurricane so severe that it will change the map, or some major city will be totally gone. Maybe then people will notice. Maybe then it will be too late.

To be fair, the headline in the article linked to here says ‘signs of life’ have been detected on Venus, and not, as I optimistically read it at first glance, life has been detected on Venus.
They do that on purpose. They know there are a bunch of us out here who would just love to hear about extraterrestrial life, and they are willing to dangle that carrot for the sake of extra readers.
But it’s still pretty exciting.
Of course, the only sign is the existence of a gas which, on Earth, is produced organically within two life forms – pond scum is one, and the other is penguins. Specifically, the poop of penguins which, when you think about it, probably freezes just about as soon as it hits the ground, so there’s probably lots of penguin poop in Antarctica just waiting to get hauled to a lab for study. So, that’s how we know about phosphine.
Anyway, it still sounds unlikely because Venus is super hot, like hellishly hot, like hotter than actual fires on Earth can even get, and nothing could live in that, right?
Well, this gas was discovered in the upper atmosphere, and when you think about it, there has to be a point between the boiling lava and hellish landscape of the surface, if you can call it that, of Venus, and the beginning of outer space, where it’s got to be cool enough for life to exist.
Any life is probably some kind of bacterium, or weird little small thing we haven’t discovered yet, and it’s free floating in the no-man’s land between Venus and space, so to say it’s not ‘life as we know it’ is kind of an understatement.
To say there is almost no chance of it being intelligent life is also a no-brainer, because it would be real hard to develop a civilization when you can never touch the surface and everything around you is fire. Not ‘on fire,’ just fire. What intelligent creature would want to live like that?
But still, it’s exciting. It would be one more item checked off on the old Drake Equation, and a rather big item at that.