Wayward Landlubber

     Russia has just demonstrated an anti-satelite killer missile. As a child of the Cold-War and spy-fiction of the time, the old USSR played a pretty credible game of brinksmanship. They had their classic fuck-ups, as did we, but it was more "Day of the Condor" than "Spy vs Spy". This latest achievement was right out of "Doctor Strangelove"; Trumpian in its incompetence. The old Soviet satellite which they Rittenhoused, spread a debris field that endangered the Spacelab, comprising an international crew, including a Russian. This very real threat to their lives, and the science being carried out, endured through nine orbits of the earth.        In the old days this event would be kept off of the front page. It would be something they would allow to be leaked. So that we are pretty sure of their new capability, but not too far away from deniability. And they would have shrouded the evidence from public notice. Not so today. The Russian general in char...

     Both political parties have advocates of a thing called American Exceptionalism. In general the left sees it as reflecting the noble achievements we have blessed the world with (there are many), without ignoring where we have failed to achieve nobility. I cannot say for sure, but I imagine that is what characterizes Critical Race Theory, but being a liberal I may be too close to the subject.      The right, while extolling American Exceptionalism from every pulpit and podium, have a more cynical view of our exceptionalism. It seems to be a sermon on how there are certain norms that apply to all nations except, when the truth is finally out, us. Very much in the same way that the Evangelical views their own religious exceptionalism.       It is a character flaw of colonial nations that they see themselves as exceptional, bringing culture, or the deity, or capitalism, to the savages of the hitherto unexceptional nations. As Mark Twain...

    I'm currently blocked from Facebook (now Meta: which in Hebrew means, dead. [I wish I could write jokes this funny]). Early in my banishment I got a reply to a remark I made on climate change. This fellow made the preposterous comparison between climate change and a sunburn. Such stupidity can no longer be addressed politely. There was a time we could smile inwardly and turn our backs. That was before the tea-party emerged from the republican party like a hot turd through a hemorrhoid. There is an abundance of information available on climate change which people like him appear to be unaware of. He claimed to live in Australia, which is having its own threats with wildfires and drought brought on by global warming, even worse, it is an island nation, vulnerable to rising ocean levels, and bleaching of coral. These very real threats threaten the very land this fool lives on, the sources of his nutrition, as well as the rest of the planet that surrounds it. HEY STUPID, you a...

    AN OPEN LETTER TO ELIZABETH GAULT: It is commonly assumed by what passes for conservatives theses days that Google is biased against conservatives. In one sense, they have a point. Truth has a bias. Truth in this case may be compared with the scientific meaning of theory; something that has not been disproved after multiple blind experiments. There is more to it, though, which people who actually use Google as a resource will readily admit.      Confronting that argument made by people who are merely repeating tropes used by those people who are their only sources, the bias could be true if the sources listed were from a small number of news sources with doubtful credibility. Or, as once was the case,  information could be kept near the top of the list by an algorithm that could be manipulated by repeated use of a desired answer. That has not been the case for some time. The former practice evolved from the pre digital media practice of astro-turfing, w...

     There is an economics principle called Gresham's Law: bad money, whether coins of baser metals or, presumably bitcoin, drives out the good. It applies equally to democracy, though as the monetary value increases, the quality of democracy diminishes. Too much money cheapens democracy by allowing plutocrats and oligarchs to steal government from the consent of the governed. The Supreme Court has been on that path since they ruled that money is free speech. The final coda was put in place on Friday, at the end of the 2021 session, when their ruling knocked the legs out of article 2 of the Voting Rights Act.       It has been a long torturous process, accomplished one small step at a time. We have a tiny few very wealthy donors to thank for it, chief among them Charles Koch and his now dead brother, David. By contrast, the perennial boogeyman claimed by the right, George Soros, uses his wealth to promote an open society and progressive policies. How d...

     I went to a triple A baseball game a couple Saturdays ago. After a year of limiting my social contacts to a few people, I was eager to be part of a crowd. A small crowd, as it turned out, but a crowd none-the-less.      It has been the better part of a lifetime since I've attended a baseball game. And then only a handful of times. Once in the mid-to-late 50s, my family went to a Portland Beavers baseball game. In the early 1970s I went to a few Portland Mavericks games. I have written about that time. Later, in the early 2000s, I had a girlfriend who was passionate about baseball. She had an autographed picture of the 1955 Brooklyn Dodgers in her breakfast nook. She offered to take my two kids and I to a Beavers game, we went but my kids had no interest. Neither of them had ever shown an interest in sports, though Quinn did crew as an undergraduate. They chose the academic path for their lives. I chose to encourage that. I met a guy in a bar in Novembe...

     There aren't many conservative humorists deserving  of the name. Dennis Miller was a funny guy on Saturday Night Live, but his career tanked when he was hired byFoxNews.  Conservative humor is not ironic it is cruel, as befitting Libertarianism, sometimes called the death of altruism. P.J. O'Roarke is a notable exception. I have chuckled at his humorous ripostes over the years even as he slid the knife across liberal throats. He is that quintessential Libertarian. A political orientation that thinks of itself as better than the more prosaic Democrats and Republicans. Never-the-less, when the votes are counted they are spooning with the Republicans. Paul Ryan would be one of them but like most Republicans, he is not funny.      One of my favorite quips of O'Roarke's is, "the Democrats are the party that says government will make you smarter, taller, richer, and remove the crabgrass from your lawn. The Republicans are the party that says govern...