Wayward Landlubber

     It is said that the states are the laboratories of democracy, and that may have at one time been true. In our present day, the states have become the petri-dish from which monsters emerge. Not all states, it must be admitted, but a significant number of them. States where elected office-holders cannot tell when the word democracy should be capitalized. States where a prominent politician from its dominant party thinks that bacteria is grown in "peach-tree dishes" and conflates Gestapo with a cold tomato soup (you can bet MTG doesn't pronounce that particular fruit, to-mah-to). Another state, not too far from the left coast and which is desirous of increasing its size to become some sort of "greater" entity, has a state Senator whose inflated sense of humor led him, a dairy farmer of four decades, to opine that his experience milking cows gives him a sufficient understanding of women's rights. He was forced to apologize for that faux-pas but the damage h...

     "I'll  break his goddamned neck, that's what I'll do, I'll break his goddamned neck!"  That was my line and it was not selling. I knew it, Doug knew it, Dr. Sitton knew it, even Brad in the projection booth knew it.       Doug and I had become good friends since we first met when he was playing the lead role in, Beckett, Or the Honor of God. He had even introduced me to Frank Peter's, who owned the bar Doug worked in, Frank Peter's Inn, on 4th and Taylor. Peters was opening a new bar on 3rd and Burnside and was looking for workers. At first to harvest the wood from Coos Head Timber Company in Coos Bay, which he sold to developers of upscale shopping centers in California. Old dimensional timber, 4x4's, 8x8's, 4x8's and other wood that had begun life as old growth timber in a time when old growth timber in Oregon's forests was massive. Frank Peter's saved the best pieces to construct his bar. Doug was an actor who worked a norma...

      I don't know if there is a book on making fun of people. I suspect that if there were, some people would still not understand the nuance between making fun of power and cruelty, that might include me. But unlike Dennis Miller or Jesse Watters, the first who did a face-plant on Foxnews and disappeared and the second faceplants on Foxnews daily and has not disappeared, I don't get paid for my wit. Or lack thereof.        It's not likely that any of my readers would know who Andrew Tate is, or they wouldn't have before the most spectacular self-own in the history of really stupid self-owns. For those who did not know what he did before he became the laughingstock of MAGAdumb, he is, or was a kickboxer. It is not likely he will be involved in professional kick boxing for quite a while, since he now faces indictment for human trafficking in Bulgaria, along with his brother. So feel free to kick the kickboxer while he is down. While that is not enough ...

     I am not well experienced in diplomacy on a world-wide scale. The best advice I have recieved is to walk away from a confrontation. My social media history would demonstrate my inability to follow  that advice, but I have lived through a number of diplomatic crisis, whose importance I was old enough to understand. Others were an important part of the histories I would later read.      Before my political awareness, I remember reading in My Weekly Reader about when the Premier of the Soviet Union, Nikita Kruschev, hosted Vice President Richard Nixon to an exhibit in Moscow that featured American products not available to the beleaguered people of the Soviet Union. This became popularly known as the Kitchen Debates. What I was able to learn as I matured is how this exhibit was designed and paid for by the State Department to demonstrate in front of a television camera the benefits capitalism offered the much beleaguered American housewife. Another d...

     Hillary Clinton has demonstrated yet another talent that Donald Trump can't claim; she wrote a book without a ghost writer. To be fair, she is credited with being a co-writer, her companion writer being a familiar name in political suspense novels, but we all know that Hillary can assemble a sentence effectively. I am pretty sure her name is not on the book as a publicity device. Besides the people who hate Hillary don't read much anyway, those who read would be more inclined to give her a good reception. I do not know how this book is being reviewed but it's a pretty good read. And clearly, Secretary Clinton was more than a passive contributor.      The story is of a female Secretary of State who was appointed by a president that wanted to ruin her political future. We are not told why she is hated by her president, which I think is a plot weakness. After all, these kind of internecine battles are practically a cliche in thriller/fiction, as in real l...

     We have honored thinkers for longer than we have had a "Western Democracy". For those who watch Foxnews, that was about 2500 years before John Wayne. People think about many things, philosophy, science, physics, political science, medicine and many things that require sustained thought about serious issues, and a published record of accomplishments. Most people stopped thinking about how deeply people thought prior to the Greek philosophers of ancient Athens, even though there were Egyption pyramids 2000 years before classical Greece. Somebody had to do some serious thinking in order to accomplish all of the schools of thought necessary for that construction. From cutting and transporting the massive limestone and granite blocks, to the method of lifting them into place (still not understood), to the design of the various internal chambers. Adding to that we must think of the construction of the barges to transport those massive blocks down the Nile to the constructi...

     Many years ago, about 10 years BTM, before Trump mistake, I was watching the Dylan Rattigan show on MSNBC. I liked his show because he discussed economics, a science that most of us incompletely understand, which is why republicans can get us to believe such crazy stuff as the Laffer Curve and Trickle-down economics. Rattigan's guest on this day was a fellow who billed himself as a "stand-up economist". He was at the time a Professor of Economics at Reed College. Clearly not Harvard or some other fancy-pants university, but anytime somebody can find humor in what is called, "the dismal science", they have my attention. He had a pretty good shtick. He was able to explain such economic models as Keynesianism, Free-market economics, and other issues, while finding the humor most of us would miss. Before I get too far here, have you considered the irony that an economist could be funny? Have you ever listened to Allan Greenspan try to explain irrational exubera...