When death fell from the sky

Many times have I marked with a post here this infamous date--on August 6, 1945, the first atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.

75 years have gone by.

Some day, sooner than later, I hope we will end this nuclear madness.

The following is a slightly edited post from August 2017.
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In response to one of my columns in The Register Guard, I received a letter from a then 96-year old woman--"a member of the WWII generation."  She wrote in the letter, which was in response to my op-ed on homelessness in America:

You and no one living in the USA at this moment would be where he or she is if my generation had not made it possible.  That includes the dropping of the bomb.

This pacifist hates wars. Hates conflicts. The older I get, the less I am able to tolerate fights and destruction even in movies.  Therefore, it is always jarring to me when people defend the destruction to civilian life and property from the bombs that were dropped in Hiroshima--on August 6th--and three days later on Nagasaki.

The interpretations of the historical happenings are conflicted.  I am biased; I believe that the war could have, would have, been brought to an end without America flexing its nuclear muscles. My preferences for peace are why I find it discouraging that there is a majority in America that agrees with the letter writer regarding the bomb:

Source

In his final year in the White House, Obama visited Hiroshima, ahead of the anniversary of the tragic event.  In all these years since 1945, Obama was the first sitting president to visit the Hiroshima Peace Memorial.  In a moving speech, Obama noted how the world changed since "death fell from the sky" on that cloudless August morning in Japan:

Those who died, they are like us. Ordinary people understand this, I think. They do not want more war. They would rather that the wonders of science be focused on improving life and not eliminating it. When the choices made by nations, when the choices made by leaders, reflect this simple wisdom, then the lesson of Hiroshima is done.
The world was forever changed here, but today the children of this city will go through their day in peace. What a precious thing that is. It is worth protecting, and then extending to every child. That is a future we can choose, a future in which Hiroshima and Nagasaki are known not as the dawn of atomic warfare but as the start of our own moral awakening.

These are dark times.  But, one has to be hopeful; what other choice do we have.  Here is to hoping that we will get on to the path of our own moral awakening after the 3rd of November.

Bombs Away!

Legal adulthood at 18 means that our war with Afghanistan is now a fully grown adult.  A month more than 18.

Who cares about that here in the US, right?  To tRump, it is a shithole and a Muslim country.  So, there. 

As for Democrats, it is not as if Obama was a peacenik either.  He too loved to bomb the shit out of brown people:

Our Peace Prize president has now been at war longer than any other American president, and has overseen the use of military force in seven countries—Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Pakistan, Libya, Yemen, and Somalia. In the latter four countries, virtually all the force has come in the form of unmanned drones executing suspected terrorists said to be linked to al-Qaeda or its “associated forces.”
That an antiwar president has found the drone so tempting ought to be a warning sign.

Obama loved them drones!

Since Obama took office, media outlets have reported more than 300 drone strikes in Pakistan targeting al-Qaeda or the Taliban, outnumbering the Bush administration’s drone strikes five to one.

And that was merely at the halfway point of his presidency.  I suppose he truly deserved the Nobel Peace Prize!

So, in case you wonder, yes, the drone war continues on big time. Especially in Afghanistan.

As of August 31 this year, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism had documented at least 4,251 aerial strikes in Afghanistan for 2019, more than double the total for the whole of 2018. Most of these, it says, are thought to be by drones. These attacks are exacting an increasing toll on the Afghan people.

Quite an awful toll :(

I don't mean to suggest that it is easy to end our entanglement in Afghanistan.  It is not.  I don't mean to argue for any hasty and unilateral withdrawal either.  If we did, then the maniacal Taliban and ISIS will take over the entire country.

All I ask is something simple to begin with: Can be at least begin to be more involved with what is going in Afghanistan, at least to the same level of passion that we bring to the football games every damn Saturday?  Because, if we are involved, then the elected public servants will actually want to work towards a solution. Else, they have no real incentive to remind us that we continue to bomb the shit out of brown people in a land far, far away.

Being Woke in a Messy World

What does activism mean in these times?

I have been struggling with this question for a while.  And not merely as a response to tRump and his toadies--though even in that context I am at a loss.  What the hell can I do?  I can tweet my rants, but that does not do any damn thing other than to release the pressure within.  I can blog. I can talk to the few remaining friends that I have.  Nothing really makes any meaningful impact.

But, this is more than merely about tRump. But, let's start with him.  His rise to notoriety and power was not through any conventional methods of debating public policy issues or organizing movements.  He called into radio and television shows. He tweeted.  He colluded with foreign powers. He got elected to the White House.

In a way, this old orange monster presents us with the reality--political activities are not conducted the old ways anymore.  He has transformed it.  Now, routinely statesmen and idiots, elected officials and basement dwellers, anybody, tweet out their commentaries and activism.

So, yes, what does activism mean in such times?

I got pissed off with the answer that Barack Obama gave.  I mean, mighty pissed I was.

“I do get a sense sometimes now among certain young people, and this is accelerated by social media, there is this sense sometimes of: ‘The way of me making change is to be as judgmental as possible about other people,’” he said, “and that’s enough.”
“Like, if I tweet or hashtag about how you didn’t do something right or used the wrong verb,” he said, “then I can sit back and feel pretty good about myself, cause, ‘Man, you see how woke I was, I called you out.’”
Then he pretended to sit back and press the remote to turn on a television.
“That’s not activism. That’s not bringing about change,” he said. “If all you’re doing is casting stones, you’re probably not going to get that far. That’s easy to do.”

Bullshit!

My immediate thought was about #MeToo.  And then I thought about #BlackLivesMatter.  Black Lives Matter started in the virtual world, remember?

The phrase “black lives matter” was born in July of 2013, in a Facebook postby Alicia Garza, called “a love letter to black people.” The post was intended as an affirmation for a community distraught over George Zimmerman’s acquittal in the shooting death of seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin, in Sanford, Florida. Garza, now thirty-five, is the special-projects director in the Oakland office of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, which represents twenty thousand caregivers and housekeepers, and lobbies for labor legislation on their behalf. She is also an advocate for queer and transgender rights and for anti-police-brutality campaigns.
Garza has a prodigious social-media presence, and on the day that the Zimmerman verdict was handed down she posted, “the sad part is, there’s a section of America who is cheering and celebrating right now. and that makes me sick to my stomach. we gotta get it together y’all.” Later, she added, “btw stop saying we are not surprised. that’s a damn shame in itself. I continue to be surprised at how little Black lives matter. And I will continue that. stop giving up on black life.” She ended with “black people. I love you. I love us. Our lives matter.”
Garza’s friend Patrisse Cullors amended the last three words to create a hashtag: #BlackLivesMatter.

So, WTF is Obama talking about!

I decided that the guy has become like one of those people who get old and start to angrily shake their fists at younger people.  Which is also why I liked this response:

His eagerness to dismiss one part of what happens when young people stand up for what they believe in as “casting stones” is a reminder of a largely generational divide about whether it’s impolite to speak out in favor of the most vulnerable among us and the world we’d like to live in. While there’s some debate about which generation Mr. Obama belongs to, he’s solidly in the older camp.

Exactly!

The issues that my fellow millennials, along with even younger people in Gen Z, tend to be “judgmental” about are the same ones many of our parents and grandparents have been debating for decades. Being outspoken about climate change, women’s rights, racial justice, LGBTQ inclusivity and gun control — and critical of those who stand in the way of progress on these issues — is work that’s been left to us.

Of course I agree with this.  I am damn judgmental.  I have booted out the tRump toadies. People opposing gun control can go to hell. And about the old country too. The mOdi toadies have no place in my life. I piss off the brahmins too. I am tired of the old approaches that have pretty much resulted in injustices to continue.

Of course, Black Lives Matter did not merely exist in Facebook.  Me Too was not merely a Twitter hashtag.  These translated to real work in the real world.  I hope the young will translate their online activism into real votes in the real elections in the real world and boot out the evildoers.

I am cheering on the young "Woke" people.

Mr. Obama is right that “the world is messy.” But the messiness we see looks like people who are suffering because others stubbornly reject progress and refuse to show compassion. Millennials and Gen-Zers are doing what we can to take down the Goliath many of our parents have been rightfully casting stones at for decades. We have a tool that has helped democratize public debates about these issues, and we hope it will move us to a more just world.
It’s called social media. And we’re going to keep using it. 

Apartheid in America

In 1492, Columbus "discovered" India.

Jill Lepore's narration of the story of the United States from that moment is compelling.  Deeply disturbing, even if the facts are not always new.  To read them all in a single-volume book is immensely more powerful than I had imagined.

The 400 year anniversary was during the post-war Reconstruction.  The original inhabitants had been practically wiped out, and most of the rest driven out of their lands.  Humans from Africa had been imported, traded, held as property, and finally proclaimed to be free by Lincoln.  A destructive Civil War was fought, in which the slave states lost.  Meanwhile, Mexicans and Chinese were also given the rough treatment.

Throughout all these, while the citizenship of the European settlers and their descendants was assumed as a given, the citizenship of non-whites was, well, unresolved.  (This is, of course, an ongoing issue as well, with the party of whites desperately trying to deny citizenship to non-whites.)

The Fourteenth Amendment guaranteed freed slaves equal protection and due process of law, yes, but they were considered to be "Separate" in the post-war era.  Jill Lepore writes about the irony of the Fourteenth Amendment--business used that to further cement a legal fiction that corporations are persons!

In 1937, Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black would observe, with grim dismay, that over the course of fifty years, "only one half of one percent of the Fourteenth Amendment cases that came before the court had anything to do with African Americans or former slaves, while over half the cases were about protecting the rights of corporations.

It shouldn't surprise us that today's Party of Lincoln champions business interests more than human interests, especially the interests of disadvantaged non-white humans.  As Lepore comments, "rights proffered to the people were proffered, instead, to corporations."

In 1892, the country hosted "the largest-ever world's fair" in Chicago.  Frederick Douglass was the only eminent African American invited to address.  Otherwise, "as if to shame the Negro, they exhibit the Negro as a repulsive savage."

When the day came for Douglass to deliver his talk, "he arrived to find the fair decked out with watermelons, and white hecklers waiting for him."

That reminds me about the time when a white friend "joked" about how to get Obama to quit the presidency. (This friend--a born again evangelical Christian--is a GOP loyalist.)  This white friend "joked" that a trail of watermelons leading out of the White House would do the trick.  I gave that white friend the benefit of doubt, and considered that a reflection of his puke-worthy taste in humor.  But, in retrospect, I should have served the quit notice right then. Mea culpa.

Douglass offered his blunt assessment:

The problem is whether the American people have loyalty enough, honor enough, patriotism enough, to live up to their own Constitution.

This is how we can even frame the problem that we now have with trump's voters and enablers: Do they have loyalty enough, honor enough, patriotism enough, to live up to their own Constitution?  So far, the answer is a clear NO! :(

Four years after the 400-year anniversary of Columbus, in 1896, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of yet another atrocity, in Plessy v. Ferguson.  The court ruled that separate accommodations for blacks and whites were not unequal accommodations.  Separate but equal became the law of the land for more than half a century.

Jill Lepore sums it up well: "The Confederacy had lost the war, but it had won the peace."

trump reveals who we really are

Blogging serves me in many ways.  It helps me think and learn.  Sometimes, the posts are also bookmarks for me to use the materials in my classes.  And, yes, in the lonely life, the possibility of having substantive conversations in the cyber-salon ...

Above and beyond that, blogging, like any kind of writing, is therapeutic.  If not for the writing, I would have become a wreck from all the internal struggles.

Even when I have plenty of time, I usually post only once a day here.  It is all a part of the regimented life.  But then there are exceptions.  Like today.

I want to let go of an issue that has been bothering me for a couple of weeks.  Ever since trump shrugged away the brutal murder of a Saudi journalist, who was a permanent resident here in the US, by talking about the billions of dollars of arms trade with the Saudis.

Like many people, I too found that equation to be disgusting.  And tweeted in plenty.

But, there is more to it. 

America looking the other way is not anything new.  The US has a long and dirty track record of supporting thugs who abuse, torture, and kill their people.  We even affectionately called it the our-son-of-a-bitch policy, as in, "“He may be a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch."

trump merely makes that SOB approach public.  As with everything else, he is the most transparent politician we have ever had, except when it comes to his own taxes!

When it comes to important trading partners, or allies in some strategic geopolitical arrangements, the US has more often than not looked the other way when those partners commit horrible abuses.  We have always done that, as a government and as businesses.

We were crass then, and are crass now.  trump has merely revealed who we really are.

I have blogged in plenty here on this issue. My favorite is about how we treat the Dalai Lama.

Because we "value" the trade with China, we have always prostrated before the Chinese and obeyed their commands on how we dealt with the Dalai Lama.  Back in 2009, I even authored an op-ed on this.

Remember who the President was in 2009?  Yep, the "liberal" and "principled" Obama.

I wrote there about "the remarkably under-reported news that President Obama has “quietly postponed an audience with the Dalai Lama until after he visits China in November.”

Why did Obama postpone his meeting?  Because he wanted to keep the Chinese leaders happy.  The very leaders who were making life miserable for the Dalai Lama, the Tibetans, the Uighurs, and, heck, the entire country.  Human rights and freedom were not what the Chinese leaders cared for.  And Obama said ok to them.

I wrote there: "The postponement of the meeting confirms, yet again, the triumph of realpolitik over principles."

That was a mere meeting.  With somebody who does not even have an army.  Whose only "weapons" are words of kindness and humanity.  Yet, Obama wussed out and did not want to stand up to the Chinese leaders.  Tell me again why trump's comment on the Saudi arms sales is different from Obama's behavior?

We have always played fast and loose with moral principles.  We were selective about morality.  trump takes that to a logical conclusion by revealing the stark nakedness of our situation.

Of course, the torture and murder of an individual is atrocious. Of course, we should rise in protest.  But, keep this in mind whenever a Democrat is in the Oval Office too.  Do not give her a pass just because she is from your party!

Like I said, getting all these out is therapeutic.  I can now go on about my day!

Eid Mubarak!

"What did you cook for Eid?" I asked my sister.

Of course, there is no Eid celebration in the traditional Hindu household.  But, she played along.  "I should have cooked mutton."

The month-long Ramadan fast comes to an end.

Here's a thought: Have you asked yourself how people in Yemen or Syria might observe Eid when they are in the middle of terrible wars?  Especially in Yemen, which the United Nations has declared as one hell of a humanitarian crisis?

First, a recap of conditions in Yemen:

Yemen’s civil war has already led to what the United Nations described as the world’s worst humanitarian crisis — at least three million displaced by fighting, a cholera epidemic that is now the largest outbreak ever recorded, and eight million people on the brink of starvation.

You think people there were thinking about Eid in such a situation?

Source

And, guess what?  Saudi Arabia, which is where Islam began, and the country leading a coalition in order to fight the proxy war against Iran, decided that such a humanitarian crisis is not enough.

Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and UAE-backed Yemeni forces launched an assault to retake Hodeidah, a Houthi-held port city through which 70 to 80 percent of commercial and humanitarian supplies enter Yemen.

Why is this a big fucking deal?

“A military attack or siege on Hodeidah will impact hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians,” Lisa Grande, the U.N.’s humanitarian coordinator for Yemen, warned in a statement  before the offensive began. “In a prolonged worst case, we fear that as many as 250,000 people may lose everything — even their lives.”

The misery is well into three years now:

The Saudis and Emiratis intervened in the war three years ago with hopes of a quick victory over the Houthis, whom they see an Iranian proxy. Instead, the two nations have been stuck in a quagmire.

Perhaps you wonder what the US is up to here.  After all, America rarely stays away from any opportunity to bomb the shit out of brown people, as George Carlin liked to say.  Right?  Especially when we now have a President who hates brown-skinned shitholers and he also hates Iran.  So, this Yemen war is a twofer:

With little public attention or debate, the president has already expanded US military assistance to his Saudi and UAE allies – in ways that are prolonging the Yemen war and increasing civilian suffering. Soon after Trump took office in early 2017, his administration reversed a decision by former president Barack Obama to suspend the sale of over $500m in laser-guided bombs and other munitions to the Saudi military, over concerns about civilian deaths in Yemen.

But, don't ever think that Obama was any angel of peace.  I have blogged a lot about that when was the President.  In this August 2016 post, for instance, I worried that Obama's legacy will include droning the shit out of brown people!

While who is the Oval Office might make a difference in domestic affairs, when it comes to dropping bombs over brown people, it is a free-for-all.

From 2009 to 2016, the Obama administration authorized a record $115bn in military sales to Saudi Arabia, far more than any previous administration. Of that total, US and Saudi officials signed formal deals worth about $58bn, and Washington delivered $14bn worth of weaponry.
Much of that weaponry is being used in Yemen, with US technical support.

trump has merely taken that to a whole new level!

Like much of his chaotic foreign policy, Trump is escalating US military involvement in Yemen without pushing for a political settlement to the Saudi-led war. His total support for Saudi Arabia and its allies is making the world’s worst humanitarian crisis even more severe.

So, at best, it will be a subdued Eid celebration in Yemen :(

We didn't start the fire? Yes, we did!

I don't make friends. And I piss off friends that I manage to make.  All because I want honest conversations, and it turns out that how much ever people are educated and worldly and sophisticated, well, unlike me most are good at making unprincipled tradeoffs as long as their objectives are met.  What an awful loser I am!

I would love to talk with rabid Barack Obama fans about his use of social media, given all the brouhaha over trump and bannon dealing with cambridge analytica.

Keep in mind that I am no trump sympathzier--I have not only been anti-trump from the day he announced his candidacy, I have banished from my social life trump voters, including friends and neighbors.

Back when Senator Obama launched his candidacy, he and his campaign worked the social media, which was a new thing at that time.  A couple of days after his historic election, the NY Times reported:

For Mr. Kennedy, it was television. For Mr. Obama, it is the Internet.
“Were it not for the Internet, Barack Obama would not be president. Were it not for the Internet, Barack Obama would not have been the nominee,” said Arianna Huffington, editor in chief of The Huffington Post.

We set out on a new election campaign approach--the internet and the social media.

The highly organized Obama team correctly figured that "the electorate could be seen as a collection of individual citizens who could each be measured and assessed on their own terms."

After the voters returned Obama to office for a second term, his campaign became celebrated for its use of technology—much of it developed by an unusual team of coders and engineers—that redefined how individuals could use the Web, social media, and smartphones to participate in the political process. A mobile app allowed a canvasser to download and return walk sheets without ever entering a campaign office; a Web platform called Dashboard gamified volunteer activity by ranking the most active supporters; and “targeted sharing” protocols mined an Obama backer’s Facebook network in search of friends the campaign wanted to register, mobilize, or persuade.
But underneath all that were scores describing particular voters: a new political currency that predicted the behavior of individual humans. The campaign didn’t just know who you were; it knew exactly how it could turn you into the type of person it wanted you to be.

"Turn you into the type of person it wanted you to be."  That is from a 2012 essay in MIT Technology Review.  Political advertising had been successfully weaponized. PhDs were writing algorithms to microtarget voters.

Few events in American life other than a presidential election touch 126 million adults, or even a significant fraction that many, on a single day. Certainly no corporation, no civic institution, and very few government agencies ever do. Obama did so by reducing every American to a series of numbers. Yet those numbers somehow captured the individuality of each voter, and they were not demographic classifications. The scores measured the ability of people to change politics—and to be changed by it.

Yep, every American was reduced to a series of numbers, who could be influenced by well-targeted ads.

We had started down a slope that was soon bound to end up in the hands of evil.  JFK mastered the television medium, yes.  But then it was also the same television through which another election was swung with the notorious Willie Horton ad. 

Yes, the trump team committed flagrant fouls. Egregious ones.  But, most people are sports nutcases and they will easily understand the following comparison: It is not uncommon in team sports for coaches and players to intentionally commit fouls in order to win games.  I find it deplorable. But, that is how it is done in sports and in politics.  And, often, fans cheer when their team commits those fouls and win games, but jeer when the opponent does that and wins.  As Michael Kinsley put it in the context of John Kerry being swift-boated: "People tell pollsters they are sick of nasty politics, then they respond to it every time."

The problem is not that fouls are committed, but that people--even the religious ones--have bought into the bottom-line:  "Winning isn't everything, it's the only thing."

The American Carnage

When visiting with the folks, which typically happens in December, every morning I wake up, have coffee, and head out for a five-mile walk well before six.  As I exit the compound, it is almost always the same time when a group (all-Brahmim?) goes by reciting the Vishnu Sahasranamam.

Most of the words echo deep within my memories--I used to recite those verses when I was an obedient teenager ;)

The sing-song recitation in the pre-dawn darkness when the rest of the city is quiet is a sound that is soothing.

As I walk towards the public park, which is where I walk the laps, I pass by a masjid.  Their sing-song recitation of the Quran in the pre-dawn darkness when the rest of the city is quiet is a sound that is soothing.

I thought about these when I read about mike pence reverently visiting the Western Wall in Jerusalem.  And that reminded me about trump at the Western Wall a few months ago.

Which is when I got to thinking ... Has trump ever been to a mosque?  At least once?  Either as a private citizen, or as the President?  Has pence ever been to a mosque?  Have they ever been to a Hindu temple?

I wonder what the response would be if a journalist were to ask trump that question.  Perhaps he will simply ignore the question.  After all, his base would not want to hear him say anything other than bashing up Muslims as evil.

I wonder how many of the trump voters, including past commenters and neighbors, have ever participated in a religious worship gathering that was not Christian.  I wonder if any of them have any in their immediate or extended families a person who married outside their religion.  Chances are nil, I assume.

In these aspects, too, Obama was truly presidential and one who set a wonderful example for impressionable kids and youth.  Obama even hosted Iftar dinners at the White House!  Imagine trump or pence ever doing that!!!

At the Iftar dinner in 2015, Obama said this about "those who seek to divide us by religion or race or sect.:

Here in America, many people personally don’t know someone who is Muslim.  They mostly hear about Muslims in the news -- and that can obviously lead to a very distorted impression.
We saw this play out recently at a mosque in Arizona.  A group of protestors gathered outside with offensive signs against Islam and Muslims.  And then the mosque’s leaders invited them inside to share in the evening prayer.  One demonstrator, who accepted the invitation later, described how the experience changed him; how he finally saw the Muslim American community for what it is -- peaceful and welcoming.  That’s what can happen when we stop yelling and start listening.  

In contrast, we now we have a President who constantly feeds the yelling and screaming, and actively promotes hate.

In wrapping up that speech, Obama said:

Together, we can overcome ignorance and prejudice.  Together, we will overcome conflict and injustice -- not just with words, but with deeds.  With what a hero of mine, the civil rights icon John Lewis, calls using our feet -- getting out in the real world to organize and to create the change that we seek.  

And we know how trump described John Lewis.

We have fallen a great deal over the past two years, and we continue to descend deep down into darkness with the Republican "leaders" that we now have in the White House and Congress.

Hobson's Choice with the shithole President

I called up a neighbor/friend and asked if they were home.

"I am finally over my jet lag and have sorted things out. I have brought a gift for you from my old shithole country," I said.

She laughed.  He joined in. "Oh, are you also one of those people?"

"You are also one of us. We all are," was my response to my fellow-brown-skinned balding man, who, in his youth had one huge afro, he says.

Meanwhile, the friend worries that by repeating "shithole" we are allowing the racist to define the narrative.

True. But he is not one that we can ignore.  The awful human being is the President of the United States, after having been elected to that office by 63 million racists.

We can't ignore his spoken and tweeted words.  We wish we could.

We have all lost.  Big time.  The waters have been muddied. Awfully.

Imagine the hassle that journalists face.  They have to be on the alert from the moment that the racist is up, which could be even at 3:00 am in DC when he gets up to pee and gets on the smartphone!

Not even the nincompoop politicians in the old country degraded the public sphere like how this "Christian" President has.

Trump’s racism isn’t news, and we are very unlikely to learn anything new about the inner workings of Trump’s mind and soul, which seem remarkably uncomplicated. What is news is his public behavior and the way it is changing the country.

Obama's election was supposed to have changed the country towards a post-racial America. Ha!  trump masterfully tapped into the racism that never went away and rode that tiger all the way to the Oval Office.

"Trump’s transgression is twofold. First, his vulgar remark broke a taboo against racist speech." So, what is the second transgression?  "The news is that he insists on dragging the rest of us down with him."

Trump’s “shithole” remark presented the media with a starker version of the daily Trumpian Twitter conundrum. To fail to report his tweets or his “shithole” remark is to fall down on the job of reporting the news. To report it is to participate in the ongoing degradation of the public sphere.

Like I said, we have all lost.

All because of 63 million racist voters.

The day the music died!

My first full-fledged experience with the American presidential election was when Bill Clinton was the candidate, campaigning as a "new Democrat" against the Republican Bush and the independent Perot.  I did follow the 1988 elections, but I was still new in this country.  By 1992, I was well seasoned in Americana.

One of the coolest things in 1992 was Bill Clinton playing the saxophone while being a guest on Arsenio Hall's show.  It was not his sex, er, sax skills that impressed me.  I didn't care, nor do I even know how to rate such skills.  I was mighty impressed that a candidate to lead the most powerful country was not all stiff. and that there was a lot more color to his personality.

Clinton's presidency also marked my transition from graduate studenthood to life as a real adult, in America.  Like real Americans, I too started watching a lot of TV!!!  Except that mine included quite a few hours of C-Span and public television.

It always fascinated me that music programs were hosted at the White House and also broadcast.  I got to watch pop stars and opera stars alike performing in an intimate setting--right from my living room.

One of my favorites was a rather recent one (recent given my 30 years in America), when musicians performed Paul McCartney's songs in the White House.




Obama leading the crowd with Amazing Grace in a very emotional setting was memorable, yes.  It was also phenomenal leadership during a very tough time.

And now we have an uncultured and uncouth horrible human being, who is seemingly at ease only with everything that lives and breathes in cesspools!  Culture he hasn't shown.  The Economist writes that "The White House has become a cultural wasteland":

IT IS hard to imagine a presidential duty as easy, uncontroversial and plainly enjoyable as hosting the nation’s greatest artists, writers, actors and musicians at the White House. Such events offer a reprieve from politics and partisanship. They bestow glamour on an administration. They are a routine part of the job—a means of recognising and supporting the indispensable role of the arts in a great civilisation.
Yet for Donald Trump even this duty is proving difficult. Artists have snubbed him since the inauguration, when musicians like Elton John, Céline Dion and Garth Brooks refused invitations to perform. “Anything that gives aid and comfort to the adversary is a poor idea,” tweeted Joyce Carol Oates, a novelist, in support. By contrast, Barack Obama’s inauguration in 2009 drew together the very best in American culture—Aretha Franklin, Yo-Yo Ma, Itzhak Perlman, John Williams, Elizabeth Alexander and (for the Obamas’ first dance that night) Beyoncé. 

Of course, I will be labeled an "elitist" by the fuhrer's followers.  But, hey, I am talking about art that survives the test of time.  Puccini's arias and Aretha Franklin's songs will be around for way longer, well after we are all dead.  But, this president knows not such art, and the artists know better than to perform in this madman's presence.

After his comments on Charlottesville, all 16 members of the Presidential Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, established by Ronald Reagan in 1982 to advise on cultural policy, resigned. “We cannot sit idly by, the way that your West Wing advisors have, without speaking out against your words and actions,” they wrote in a letter.

Art--written, sung, spoken, drawn, painted, danced--helps us understand our existence.  We understand ourselves much more and much better thanks to the artists who help us with their creations and renditions.

But, this president does not care about what it means to be human.  He knows not what empathy is, and cares only for one thing--himself!

In the face of concerns like North Korea and neo-Nazis, Mr Trump’s rift with the art world seems insignificant. But it is another indicator of the tenor of his presidency and how drastically it breaks with previous administrations of both parties. Indeed, artists have usually attended White House receptions even when they disagreed with the sitting president. Bill Clinton honoured Charlton Heston, a staunch conservative. George W. Bush hosted Barbra Streisand, an ardent Democrat.
Mr Trump’s stance toward the artists who criticise him suggests he would rather take after, say, the Kremlin if he could: last week, Russian authorities placed Kirill Serebrennikov, one of the country’s leading theatre directors, under house arrest. In America artists still roam free. Will their resistance matter? 

I hope the resistance matters a lot.  Else, we are doomed!

Our own moral awakening

More than a year ago, I received a letter from a then 96-year old woman--"a member of the WWII generation."  She wrote in the letter, which was in response to my op-ed on homelessness in America:

You and no one living in the USA at this moment would be where he or she is if my generation had not made it possible.  That includes the dropping of the bomb.

This pacifist hates wars. Hates conflicts. The older I get, the less I am able to tolerate fights and destruction even in movies.  Therefore, it is always jarring to me when people defend the destruction to civilian life and property from the bombs that were dropped in Hiroshima--on August 6th--and three days later on Nagasaki.

The interpretations of the historical happenings are conflicted.  I am biased; I believe that the war could have, would have, been brought to an end without America flexing its nuclear muscles. My preferences for peace are why I find it discouraging that there is a majority in America that agrees with the letter writer regarding the bomb:

Source

A year ago, Obama visited Hiroshima, ahead of the anniversary of the tragic event.  In all these years since 1945, Obama was the first sitting president to visit the Hiroshima Peace Memorial.  In a moving speech, Obama noted how the world changed since "death fell from the sky" on that cloudless August morning in Japan:

Those who died, they are like us. Ordinary people understand this, I think. They do not want more war. They would rather that the wonders of science be focused on improving life and not eliminating it. When the choices made by nations, when the choices made by leaders, reflect this simple wisdom, then the lesson of Hiroshima is done.
The world was forever changed here, but today the children of this city will go through their day in peace. What a precious thing that is. It is worth protecting, and then extending to every child. That is a future we can choose, a future in which Hiroshima and Nagasaki are known not as the dawn of atomic warfare but as the start of our own moral awakening.

These are dark times.  But, one has to be hopeful; what other choice do we have.  Here is to hoping that despite the effects of the fateful elections this past November, we will get on to the path of our own moral awakening--sooner than later.

The Maduro Diet

The fuhrer is trying to suck up all the energy.  It is a daily struggle to look past him, and to make sure I don't accidentally let his voice come through on the radio.

I cannot believe that 63 million voters, including past commenters at this blog, voted for him!

But, hey, I will survive, yes.  There are plenty others, even in this country, who won't--some even literally.

South of us--way south--things are getting worse.

Venezuela has the world’s highest inflation—estimated by the International Monetary Fund to reach 720% this year—making it nearly impossible for families to make ends meet. Since 2013, the economy has shrunk 27%, according to local investment bank Torino Capital; imports of food have plunged 70%.
Hordes of people, many with children in tow, rummage through garbage, an uncommon sight a year ago. People in the countryside pick farms clean at night, stealing everything from fruits hanging on trees to pumpkins on the ground, adding to the misery of farmers hurt by shortages of seed and fertilizer. Looters target food stores. Families padlock their refrigerators.
Three in four Venezuelans said they had lost weight last year, an average of 19 pounds, according to the National Poll of Living Conditions, an annual study by social scientists. People here, in a mix of rage and humor, call it the Maduro diet after President Nicolás Maduro.

In normal times, we would have paid attention to the unfolding events in Venezuela--despite the typical American attitude to not care about the rest of the world.  But, these are extraordinary times.  Unchartered waters.  So, now we couldn't be bothered with the humanitarian crisis in Venezuela.

Please, please read the entire WSJ report

Perhaps you are wondering whether the president has done anything regarding Venezuela.  Yes, he has--he took the half-million dollars that were donated to his inauguration gala.

Trump’s predecessor, Barack Obama, took a principled stand in US dealings with Venezuela, imposing sanctions to rein in rogue behavior, a policy that drew broad bipartisan support. The Trump administration needs to stay the course, especially as lower oil prices have weakened the Venezuelan government’s hand. Instead of bashing Latin America, the US needs to show it can be a steady and principled friend that will not be swayed by corrupt bribes of any type.

"principled"?  This pussy-grabbing president? This president who mocked a disabled reporter?  Hah!

Meanwhile, more agony in Venezuela :(

Nero to succeed Marcus Aurelius!

I know I have been harsh on Barack Obama the President.  As President, Obama always came across to me as a souped up combination of Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush.  He seemed to lack the inner drive to go out there and strike deals.  Sometimes,  I even think that this personality trait of his has also contributed to Democrats getting cleaned out not only from the White House and Congress, but--and more importantly--at the state level in the legislatures and governors offices all over the country.

As a person, Obama has been a model human being at the White House.  Like how Carter was, and continues to be after his presidency.  Kids all over the world can--and should--look up to the likes of Obama and Carter and tell themselves, "I want to grow up to be like them."

I am equally proud of the remarkable level of intelligence that Obama has always demonstrated.  An intelligence that is not abrasive nor audacious, but humble.  Kids all over the world can--and should--look up to him and tell themselves, "I want to grow up to be smart like him."

A reader, as much as he is a writer and an orator:

During his eight years in the White House — in a noisy era of information overload, extreme partisanship and knee-jerk reactions — books were a sustaining source of ideas and inspiration, and gave him a renewed appreciation for the complexities and ambiguities of the human condition.

Yes, the complexities and ambiguities of the human condition.

What a contrast to the incoming president who has not for a nanosecond demonstrated anything about "the complexities and ambiguities"; in fact, he has taken to a whole new level the previous Republican president who made it clear that he did not do nuances and that he viewed the world as us-versus-them.

For Obama:

reading gave him the ability to occasionally “slow down and get perspective” and “the ability to get in somebody else’s shoes.”

To get into somebody else's shoes is what empathy is all about.

Not even the incoming president's fanatical bootlickers will think of their Dear Leader as capable of empathy!

Obama reads widely, including fiction:

He points out, for instance, that the fiction of Junot Díaz and Jhumpa Lahiri speaks “to a very particular contemporary immigration experience,” but at the same time tell stories about “longing for this better place but also feeling displaced” — a theme central to much of American literature, and not unlike books by Philip Roth and Saul Bellow that are “steeped with this sense of being an outsider, longing to get in, not sure what you’re giving up.”

In contrast, can you imagine the demagogue having anything substantive to say about Diaz or Lahiri?!  As one reader phrased it in his comments to the NY Times piece:

Like Blunder Woman Sarah Palin, Trumpty Drumpty always struggles to name a single book he's ever read.

Oh, I owe to another commenter at the NY Times the title for this post.

Obama's guaranteed legacy: Droning the shit out of brown people

Consider this:

Our Peace Prize president has now been at war longer than any other American president, and has overseen the use of military force in seven countries—Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Pakistan, Libya, Yemen, and Somalia. In the latter four countries, virtually all the force has come in the form of unmanned drones executing suspected terrorists said to be linked to al-Qaeda or its “associated forces.”
That an antiwar president has found the drone so tempting ought to be a warning sign.

Here is the scariest aspect of this war legacy--neither major party candidate will scale this back!

The killing of people in other countries--sometimes even US citizens--without the politically hot "putting boots on the ground" is one awful, awful direction in which Obama has led as the commander-in-chief.

I have blogged about this plenty of times before (like here and here) and other than the peace-loving greenies in the Democratic coalition, most of the Democrats don't seem to care.

Further, this is not a legacy that Obama leaves behind merely for his successor.

Other countries are unlikely to be reticent about resort to unmanned aerial warfare to “solve” problems beyond their borders. Already, Israel, the United Kingdom, Iran, Iraq, Nigeria, and Pakistan have joined the US in deploying armed drones. China is selling them at a list price of only $1 million. In short order, most of the developed world will have them. And when other nations look for precedents, Obama’s record will be Exhibit A.

What an atrocity!

Of course, when it comes to drone-killings, there is practically a bipartisan unanimity.  On the other hand, try talking to the esteemed politicians about potentially helping the homeless and they will throw you out!

The question for President Obama is whether he wants to be remembered as the leader who ushered in the era of permanent, low-level drone warfare. His actions will be looked to for justification by those that follow, here and abroad. As Daniel Reisner, former head of the Israel Defense Forces legal department, has said, “If you do something for long enough, the world will accept it…. International law progresses through violations.”

I suppose we have reached a point of no return as far as war and killings are concerned.    Obama's legacy "will be as the Nobel Peace Prize winner who pioneered a dramatically dangerous and ethically dubious form of warfare."

Meanwhile, a lengthy essay in the Atlantic, "Is America any safer?" the author concludes:

As Trump’s hard-line rhetoric about the president being weak on terrorism demonstrates, Obama and anyone who follows him and tries to continue on that path will be an easy target for opponents who will claim that transforming homeland security from the fantasy of never-again prevention to a combination of prevention and mitigation and recovery is throwing in the towel.
That this is still a debate in an election season 15 years after the 9/11 attacks is evidence that although we’ve made progress, we’re still a long way from adjusting—politically and psychically—to this new normal, where, unlike during the Cold War, there is no relying on deterrence for protection.

The droner-in-chief is labeled "weak" on terrorism!  Which only further confirms George Carlin satirical comment that we like war :(

Who cares about human rights! Business as usual in DC.

“You campaign in poetry; you govern in prose” the late Mario Cuomo often said.  And what wonderful poetry we had from Barack Obama when he was the candidate. There is poetry and then there is prose.  The dull and boring prose of the reality of  governance and international realpolitik.

Case in point: the Armenian genocide.

“As president I will recognize the Armenian genocide,” Barack Obama vowed in January 2008. He even had his top campaign foreign policy adviser, self-styled “genocide chick” Samantha Power, issue a plaintive YouTube vow to the Armenian American community that this time they wouldn't be double-crossed.

But, that was the candidate sweet-talking with poetry during the courtship of campaigning.  After the election, the title Senator was replaced with President, which then meant that old campaign promises are meant to be broken:

In his annual statement on the mass death of Armenians at the hands of the Ottoman Empire in 1915, President Barack Obama once again declined to use the term “genocide” — breaking a campaign promise he made eight years ago.
In his commemoration on the mass killings, which may have claimed as many as 1.5 million lives, Mr. Obama paid homage to the victims and vowed to “to learn from this tragedy so it may never be repeated.”
His lengthy statement released Friday, however, did not use the term “genocide” — the source of a major geopolitical dispute between Turkey and Armenian about the historical context of the massing killings.

As I noted in this post from six years ago, the victorious candidates apparently lose their testicular fortitude and elections are nothing but castrations!

Why care about something that happened in 1915?  Well, the actor who has all the good looks and presence that I don't have says the very thing that I would like to say:

Take the case of George Clooney. The irrepressible actorvist feels so strongly about the recognition issue that on April 24 — officially known in the U.S. as the National Day of Remembrance of Man's Inhumanity to Man — he will be in Yerevan to award the inaugural $1 million Aurora Prize for Awakening Humanity, presented “on behalf of the survivors of the Armenian Genocide and in gratitude to their saviors.” You can't prevent tomorrow's genocide, Clooney plausibly argues, if you can't even use the G-word to describe something that happened 100 years ago.

If the leader of the mightiest government on the planet does not have the balls to label the incidents from a hundred years ago as "genocide"--the term that he boldly stated during his campaign days--then how confident can we be that the leader of the free world will lead the fight against ongoing crimes against humanity?

Meanwhile, the developing situation in Burundi has people worried.  "Today in Burundi, many people hear echoes of 1994" notes the Economist.  We can expect poetry from the Democratic candidates.  Only from the Democratic candidates because the wannabes from the other side author nothing but toxic prose even while campaigning!

Ah, democracy!

This day ... three years ago (2)

(Re-posting from 2012)

It is ok for Obama to kill people because he is not Bush?

This graphic ((ht) says a lot, right, about how we have escalated the killing campaigns?:

As if the old stories on the kill list (have my colleagues nominated my name to be in the list?) were not enough to make us worry about due process and the constitution, the Washington Post reports:

Over the past two years, the Obama administration has been secretly developing a new blueprint for pursuing terrorists, a next-generation targeting list called the “disposition matrix.”
The matrix contains the names of terrorism suspects arrayed against an accounting of the resources being marshaled to track them down, including sealed indictments and clandestine operations. U.S. officials said the database is designed to go beyond existing kill lists, mapping plans for the “disposition” of suspects beyond the reach of American drones.

WTF!

I thought "kill list" was enough of a new and unwanted phrase in our dictionaries.  "Disposition matrix"???

As I expected, Glenn Greenwald is furious about this, and he is way smarter and informed than I ever can be:

The Post's Miller recognizes the watershed moment this represents: "The creation of the matrix and the institutionalization of kill/capture lists reflect a shift that is as psychological as it is strategic." As he explains, extra-judicial assassination was once deemed so extremist that very extensive deliberations were required before Bill Clinton could target even Osama bin Laden for death by lobbing cruise missiles in East Africa. But:

Targeted killing is now so routine that the Obama administration has spent much of the past year codifying and streamlining the processes that sustain it.

To understand the Obama legacy, please re-read that sentence. As Murtaza Hussain put it when reacting to the Post story: "The US agonized over the targeted killing Bin Laden at Tarnak Farms in 1998; now it kills people it barely suspects of anything on a regular basis."

Oh my freaking lord!

To hell with Obama and Romney!

More Greenwald:

It is literally impossible to imagine a more violent repudiation of the basic blueprint of the republic than the development of a secretive, totally unaccountable executive branch agency that simultaneously collects information about all citizens and then applies a "disposition matrix" to determine what punishment should be meted out. This is classic political dystopia brought to reality (despite how compelled such a conclusion is by these indisputable facts, many Americans will view such a claim as an exaggeration, paranoia, or worse because of this psychological dynamic I described here which leads many good passive westerners to believe that true oppression, by definition, is something that happens only elsewhere).

Need I remind you that Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize . What a wonderful living illustration of George Orwell's 1984 scenario ofwar is peace :(

Drill, baby, drill. Who the frack cares!

One event and so many different headlines!

Who you gonna believe?

I wonder if it always was like this, or whether such contentious interpretations day in and day out are a modern phenomenon.  Even for a junkie like me, this is simply head-spinning.  Perhaps all the more why many simply decide to shut themselves off from this cacophony and instead rely on their favorite news sources.  You know, like the Faux News people!

What was the event that triggered all these headlines? In a weighty tome that can put anybody to sleep, the US EPA found "no signs of “widespread, systemic” drinking water pollution from hydraulic fracturing."

But, we are talking about energy and politics.  Not really science.  Which means:

it’s widely believed the Obama administration is deferential to natural gas fracking companies because the industry is more environmentally friendly than Big Coal but also robust enough to help drive much-needed economic growth. That attitude is shared by other members of the president’s part

Fight coal, but then a wink-wink towards natural gas.

Except, even the fighting coal is not really happening, notes the Pulitzer-winning writer at my favorite magazine:

So, where do all these  leave us?  Do the President and his people have any real energy policy at all? Kolbert writes, "the White House’s energy policies remain a muddle."  Great!  Can anything be done?

the Administration is undermining its own best efforts. But such a muddle is probably the best we can expect until and unless American voters demand something more coherent.

Ah! American voters demanding something coherent?  Good luck on that!

All these mean that after November 2016, we will most likely end up with a President and a Congress that will be a lot more fossil-fuel friendly than the friendly environment that currently exists.  Meanwhile, there is a climate conference coming up in December:

Good luck on that, rest of the world!

Toilet Paper and Pee, aka, the TPP

Sometimes--ok, more often than not--I wonder why I think I am qualified to write about whatever it is that I write about.  Egomania? Egotism?

But then I tell myself that I write about very, very, very few topics at all.  I have never, for instance, blogged about art history, or Mendelssohn, or rocketry.  I know enough to know that I don't know a damn thing about most things.  I stick to what I know and what I can understand at least a little bit.  What a tiny, tiny, tiny sliver of knowledge this is--so tiny it would not even blip in the knowledge screen.

Klout even tells me what its algorithms think about my expertise!

Well, enough about you; let's talk about me! ;)

Back when NAFTA was being debated, I remember being conflicted about it.  There are very few things in life that I am certain about, and two decades ago I was a cautious and doubtful supporter of the trade deal.  But then I am almost always suspicious of anything the suits put forward!

Now, it is the TPP, which doesn't have a neat aural effect as NAFTA.  TPP doesn't easily roll off the tongue.  When I read or hear TPP, my mind thinks about TP and pee.  Maybe it is my problem.  Well, enough about you; let's talk about me! ;)

Anyway, about the TPP, John Cassidy at the New Yorker, writes:

Many moderate Democratic senators have been put off by the secrecy surrounding the putative agreement, which has been in negotiations since 2010 and whose provisional text is classified

My suspicious mind is always inclined to worry about any agreement or bill when the material is classified.  What are they trying to hide from you and me?  How much of a secret is the text?

When Senator Barbara Boxer went to inspect it in a secure room at the Capitol, a guard told her she couldn’t take notes.

Pause for a moment and think about it.  TPP is not any national security document from which we can find out how much the government has been spying on you and me.  It is a freaking trade deal. What are they trying to hide from you and me?

A number of legal experts, however, including Yale’s Judith Resnik and Harvard’s Laurence Tribe, have raised similar concerns to the ones Warren expressed, warning that the T.P.P. could allow corporations and investors to challenge the laws and policies of member countries, including the United States, outside the scope of their existing legal system. In a recent letter to congressional leaders, the experts referred to a known provision of the T.P.P., which would see disputes resolved not by the courts but by a new conflict-resolution panel, the prospective makeup of which is far from clear. This panel “risks undermining democratic norms because laws and regulations enacted by democratically elected officials are put at risk in a process insulated from democratic input,” they warned.

But then an idiot like me wants an example of these concerns.  Which is what Joseph Stiglitz does in his commentary:

The real intent of these provisions is to impede health, environmental, safety, and, yes, even financial regulations meant to protect America’s own economy and citizens. Companies can sue governments for full compensation for any reduction in their future expected profits resulting from regulatory changes.
This is not just a theoretical possibility. Philip Morris is suing Uruguay and Australia for requiring warning labels on cigarettes. Admittedly, both countries went a little further than the US, mandating the inclusion of graphic images showing the consequences of cigarette smoking.
The labeling is working. It is discouraging smoking. So now Philip Morris is demanding to be compensated for lost profits.

Pause for a moment and think about it.  We know really well that cigarettes are not dietary supplements and that they kill.  So, we have laws restricting it even while allowing the sale to be legal.  The manufacturer then turns around and sues for the compensation that it "loses"?  This surely merits a WTF!

Stiglitz writes:

The proceedings are so expensive that Uruguay has had to turn to Michael Bloomberg and other wealthy Americans committed to health to defend itself against Philip Morris. And, though corporations can bring suit, others cannot. If there is a violation of other commitments – on labor and environmental standards, for example – citizens, unions, and civil-society groups have no recourse.
If there ever was a one-sided dispute-resolution mechanism that violates basic principles, this is it. That is why I joined leading US legal experts, including from Harvard, Yale, and Berkeley, in writing a letter to President Barack Obama explaining how damaging to our system of justice these agreements are.

This egomaniac has nothing else to say, other than quoting Elizabeth Warren and Rose DeLauro:

Congress should refuse to vote for any expedited procedures to approve the TPP before the trade agreement is made public. And Congress certainly shouldn’t vote for expedited procedures to enact trade deals that don’t yet even exist.

Source

Campaign slogan for 2016: The Public Sucks!

Ah, politics!  I can describe it the way women have been joked about by men: you can't live with them, and you can't live without them!

Ouch, ouch, those rotten eggs that landed on my face stink like crazy ;)

Where was I?  Women?  No, no, I was talking about politics.

Today, yet again I am thinking that Obama is one damn good Republican president and I have no idea why the GOP is always upset with him.  Maybe it is because he is black?

Consider this.  Obama even came here to Oregon, to talk up the fast-tracking of the trade deal across the Pacific.  He even chose an appropriate Republican venue for it--the campus of the University of Oregon Nike, which liberals love to hate.  Guess what happened at the US Senate?  

Senate Democrats on Tuesday blocked consideration of giving President Obama power to accelerate a broad trade accord with Asia, a rebuke that the president helped bring on himself.

That's right.  The Democrats, with one exception, blocked it, and the Obama-hating Republicans voted to support him.

Isn't politics the best theatre that money can get!

It gets even more entertaining: Obama is pissed off at the Democrats.  Hehehe, fun times!

Mr. Obama has said Democrats have been spreading disinformation about the Pacific trade accord and the authority he is seeking, singling out Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts for her role in opposing the accord.

The GOP's mood?

Republican leaders were pleased with the turn of events.
Senator John Thune of South Dakota, the Senate Republican conference chairman, said Democrats were “throwing their own president under the bus.”

Ok, enough about that.  Let us move on to one more exhibit of how Obama is the best Republican president that the GOP can have, shall we?

Remember that old GOP slogan "drill baby, drill!"?  Republicans are almost always pissed off at the Democrats because of the opposition to drilling offshore or in the Arctic.

Obama being the best Republican president has, of course, approved drilling in the Arctic:

Mr. Obama — acting on his own, since these are all executive actions requiring nothing from Congress — has opened huge swaths of the Powder River basin to new coal mining. He’s still studying whether to approve the Keystone XL pipeline, though the country’s leading climate scientists have all told him it would be a disaster. And now he’s given Shell the green light, meaning that, as with Keystone, it will be up to the environmental movement to block the plan

Thus writes Bill McKibben, who "teaches environmental studies at Middlebury College and is the founder of the global climate campaign 350.org."

You know what?  I take back that comment about comparing politics and women.  Because, politics is infinitely more entertaining than women are.

Ouch, ouch, ouch--stop pelting me with those lumps of coal, you crazy women! ;)