Category: News

  • Debate

    That happened last night. I watched 10 Democratic candidates, not really debate, just gave well-rehearsed sound bites a try for two hours.

    Yes, I am being very cynical about it.

    There is still a part of me that feels like this is too early for us to be talking about who the next President will be. The 2020 election should start in 2020. Having this being in 2019 just perpetuates the issue of the industrial complex of unending campaigning.

    But being cynical, I know that this system will not change. Money and politics have been locked together from the beginning.

    Yet, as I watched the 10 talk last night, it didn’t make me feel optimistic. Even if one of the 20 does defeat Trump, my fear is the actions of the next Republican who wins. The way I see it, it has been a slow descent for conservatives from Nixon to Trump. Each conservative has been a little worse. From Reagan’s welfare queen, to Trump’s everything awful that comes out of his mouth, and all the crap in between.  The next Republican will just try to dismantle whatever the Democrat did.

    This is the cycle we are in.

    I think the real problem, honestly, is that modern Conservatism, that came out of the 50’s and early 60’s is nothing but a reaction to liberal policies. Where are the conservative policies that move the county forward, other than cut taxes and regulations?

    The real debate is, Democratic ideas vs Stopping Democratic Ideas.

  • Another Billionaire Problem Solver?

    I have nothing personal against Howard Schultz. As far as I know, and I will give him the benefit of the doubt, is that he is a good husband and father and friend to all.

    But he is a businessman billionaire. And going into 2020, that is a huge albatross around his neck. Is he going to try and convince me that a billionaire businessman isn’t qualified to be president, so we should elect another billionaire businessman?

    That’s going to be a tough sell.

    He isn’t making his case any easier by going after Medicare for all. (The only point I will give him is that no one is addressing how to pay for it, and he is right to point that out.) But it is completely a false equivalency to compare national health care to the boarder wall.

    There is national healthcare in the world, it does work. And if he is really worried about the insurance industry going out of business, then he should look at Germany’s system of national and private healthcare.

    The boarder wall plays on some people’s hate and racism. That doesn’t work.

    But here is where he has already fumbled the ball; he is trying to defend health insurance companies over patients, because effectively, that is what he is saying. He isn’t even politically savvy enough to at least say that putting insurance companies out of business would unemployed so many people, and that isn’t fair. (That’s a good old solid Republican line…) If he is trying to run as a centrist, and trying to get middle America to vote for him, then he needs to understand that this part of the electorate is living paycheck to paycheck (government shut down just hammered that home) and their experiences with insurance companies is adversarial. People have an emotional response to insurance companies, and his first steps out of the gate shows that he doesn’t understand that.

    Don’t show up to the emotion fight with logic, because you will lose every time. You fight emotion with emotion, and logic with logic, and the best politicians know when each is called for in the argument.

  • Here We Go Again…

    Not that I claim I know more than everyone else, but I was not surprised that Trump gave in a stopped the government shut down just hours after Roger Stone was arrested. I pointed out that this is Trump’s behavior back on my January 10th post.

    The day started off with really, and I mean really, bad news for Trump; another person was arrested who took part in his campaign. There was no way the President could let the news cycle for this weekend be dominated with stories of the walls closing in on Trump, and what does Mueller have next up his sleeve? No, Trump had only one card to play today to stop the press from going nuts, and that was to end the shutdown. “Hey look, America! Another bright shiny object to obsess over for the next 24 hours, while you forget about all that really awful stuff!”

    And it will work. All the news about the Roger Stone arrest will just become background noise as the press and people start their stories about getting their checks back, and paying bills, and the wall fight that will be protracted for three weeks. And what does this mean for the State of the Union Address? Ahhh… Roger Stone who?

    Trump is a really awful president, (Only Trump could make James Buchanan look good) but he knows how to make the media do his bidding even when they don’t want to. It really is too bad, and we just can’t shake free from it.

  • That Possible Space Probe: Oumuamua

    This has been one of my favorite stories to read of late, and if you aren’t aware, please check the wiki page. Even The New Yorker did a story on it. I just find it fun that we can have a scientific debate on the physics of this object moving through our solar system, and from the data, it is possible that the object was created and sent by intelligent beings from another planet.

    That’s pretty cool.

    From what I can tell from the data, Oumuamua was in the Neptune distance from the Sun around 2014, and it will leave our system in the 2023 ballpark. So, if this thing was sent by an intelligent being, it sure isn’t in a hurry. I would think that if I could send a craft to, let’s say for the sake of argument, a neighboring star, that I would have a little speed to it, so I would be able to appreciate the discovery. But maybe it was built with the idea that the information would make it to the next generation. They have other things to do while they wait for the data. Maybe…

    Or, maybe they saw us, and don’t want to have any part it. Maybe, having studied how humans behave, the aliens realized it was better to slowly “ghost” out of the system, because humans quickly forget stuff that isn’t in their face.

    You know, like when you walk into a store, get greeted by an employee, but then you realize that you should leave, but you still go through the motions of looking at stuff, so the employee forgets about you and then you can leave.

    Again, if it’s intelligent life, they would know that about us.

  • Gen X: Still a Bunch of Losers

    And I feel completely justified in saying that because I am Gen X, and we are a bunch of losers.

    On SNL this weekend, they had a sketch called “Millennial Millions,” and the clip is below…

    This is a subject matter that I have hit on before, which is that Baby Boomers are ruining everything for everyone, making life way more difficult than they had it.

    Anyway, the part that made me really sit up and laugh was at the 3:15 make when Kenan Thompson as the host laughs at a contestant, then adds, “I’m Gen X. I just sit on the sidelines and watch the world burn.” And there we have it; Nothing better encapsulates my generation than that statement.

    The first person that I know who threw all this shade at us was my friend, and artist Erin Orr, also Gen X, who made this point about three years ago. Her logic to us was more along the lines that Gen X should be moving into the political forefront, as we should be established in careers, earning real money, have families, and the first wave of us just hit 50. In 15 years, retirement will begin to set in. With all of this happening in our generational lives, where are we? Why aren’t we demanding to be on the political scene to have our concerns heard? It’s like we can’t shake our loser persona, and the rest of the world has just moved on to the next group.

    That’s why I’m not real surprised that this story happened, and Gen X got left out again.