Archives for May 2022

Friday, May 27, 2022

Dateline: San Francisco

10:53am

Made it back to U.S. late yesterday.

Took the BART out of SFO to Powell Street Station.

I had help from a BART attendant to get a card for the train system. Had the door literally close inches from boarding and had to wait another half hour for the next train. The BART system is terrific, but hard to figure out if no one helps you. The map in the car is electronic, lighting up the route you are on. As you move along the line the next station is enlarged slightly on the map and the display at either end of the car displays the next station stop. Meanwhile, the stations you have been to are de-lit (de-lit? Is that a word?)

Once I got to Powell Street Station there was a sign indicating an elevator. Great. But, no elevator. Lots of construction boarded over stuff. Hauled bags up three steps to escalator then to street level. The hot spell in the city must have passed because it was chilly. Fortunately, I was able to find my puffy blue jacket without ripping my bags completely apart. (I saved that for my hotel room when I looked for my wine opener.) At the top of the stairs I saw this sign post with Ho Chi Minh City listed a being 7830 miles away.

“Huh?” I thought, “I was just there. Less than 24 hours ago.”

The amazing thing about travel today is you can be just about anywhere in the world in 24 hours.

Ho Chi Minh City is the new name for Saigon, which I realized when I saw the airport code of SGN. I had been thinking I was going to Hanoi. I flew from Angkor Wat, Siem Reap Airport to Phnom Penh Airport and then to Saigon, I mean Ho Chi Minh City and then Vietnam Air to San Franciso. 

The flight over the Pacific Ocean was 13 hours and 50 minutes. There was nothing to see except ocean until the last 30 minutes of the flight. I watched two terrific movies and the rest of the selections were stuff I had seen or were old.

However, the two I saw were terrific. One was I’m guessing French, named “Eiffel.” It s the story of Gustave Eiffel and after building the latticework for the Statue of Liberty was commissioned to build something for the World’s Fair in Paris. He had to overcome severe doubters and obstruction before it was complete. At the same time it is the story of unrequited love. The love he had for a young woman, and she for him, many years before. How they met again in Paris, and how the flame rekindled. I don’t know any of the actors or actresses, but the woman playing the love interest is wonderfully beguiling. It’s a great story, not only of love, but of engineering and politics.

Speaking of politics, the other movie is “The Darkest Hour.” The story of when Winston Churchill became Prime Minister of England at the beginning of World War II. How he faced the possibility of the British army being wiped out at Dunkirk and how the “diplomats” of England wanted to sue for peace with Hitler. How he listened to the regular folks on the Tube in London and got the courage to stand up to those politicians and say he would never surrender. It’s a story with particular meaning today in light of what is going on in Ukraine. 

Oh wait, One more movie “Hail Caesar” The Cohen Brothers. Subtle, funny, not subtle – it’s the Chen Brothers. If you aren’t familiar with their works, you are missing two of the most clever people in the movie business today. And it’s got just about every star currently working in Hollywood today. Who knew Chatum Tanning could sing and dance?

Now that I’m back in the States I see a city that is filthy. There were some odd ducks on the BART at the last few stops. Not the usual sort. These were young people, not the disheveled winos. One young man was playing air guitar as he walked down the the train car, then he sat down and proceeded to play air drums and switch to air bass and air lead. Quite a performance, thought rather unnerving. Especially, for the young French couple sitting opposite him. I learned this morning that there is an air guitar convention in town right now, so maybe it makes sense. I don’t know.

I bought some wine from the desk late last night, when I got in. Didn’t even ask the price. Charge it to the room. I realized I better eat something. A place up the street was still open. Got a slice of pizza and a meatball sandwich. The guy with the shaved head around the sides and long fuzzy hair off the top and down the back with singed purple ends told me he was from New York and this is the best pizza in town. Good to know. The meatball sandwich was good, and very different. Grilled meatball and cheese, pressed. Well, they said they had panini, and this was in that category. Very good. 

Hey, and on the way there I saw the transvestite in black high heels and orange red leotards getting out of a car. (His car? Hers? So hard to know which possessive pronoun to use.) 

This morning I went down the breakfast bar and got a knock off Egg McMuffin, Danish and cup of coffee for 16 bucks. What a deal. The McMuffin was sad: egg product disk, melted cheese, bacon served microwave semi-warm with a side of sad pineapple chunk and 6 commercial grade tasteless blueberries. Hey, listen I was just in Cambodia where every morning I had real French croissants and fruit to die for. What is this – leftovers?

TV – Stephen Curry is being compared to other basketball greats. The NBA finals are on. Weren’t there on when I left three weeks ago? Weren’t they on three months ago? OMG, are they ever over?

There are a bunch of shows about people trying to be classy by showing off how tasteless they can be. There are reality shows where they are digging for gold or fishing for crabs. There are bunches of sports analysis shows where they only analyze two sports. Hey, where’s my badminton channel? Or Pingpong? No sumo-wrestling? WTF? Not even on rugby channel. Maybe a little soccer. I had at least four futball matches I could watch at any time over there. And the great thing was I had no idea who the teams were. “AZV versus LSZ” or something like that.

Sad.

People ask me if I’m worried being over there. Wasn’t I scared, etc. Hey. Listen, how many Cambodian mass shooting have you heard of in the last year? All the news from the U.S. I saw were shootings. We can’t seem to figure this out. In Cambodia, home of the killing fields – remember?, you can’t have a gun on the street unless you are police or military. Then you need a permit and … and authorization for that date to be carrying it on the street. If not, you go to jail. Hey, guess what? No shootings. Weird huh?

I’ve been saying for a long time if you want to end shootings, get rid of guns. Oh but but … No. Stop. Get rid of guns. We can’t. No. Stop. We can. Every other country in the world has done it. They’ve shown how. It can be done. The argument that we can’t is similar to the resistance Churchill faced at the beginning of WWII as shown in the movie “The Darkest Hour.”

People ask about rainy season in Cambodia. “Isn’t it rainy season over there right now?” Well, yes. It’s the start of rainy season. Guess what happens during rainy season? It rains. Weird, huh? I know. In rainy season it rains. It rains every afternoon, usually about four o’clock. Go out in the morning, it gets hot. By two or three you’re exhausted. Go back to your hotel, shower, have beer. Watch the rain. Then it’s cooler. 

Another thing I tell folks is, I know how to end poverty. Really? Yes, really. How? Give people money. But … but. No Buts about it. If people are poor they need money. Give them what they need. But…but. Shut up. If people have money to buy clothes, food, and shelter their lives will improve. They will be able to help others.  But..but…No. We give money to rich people and companies and politicians all the time. What do they do with it? Buy yachts. How many yachts did that idiot former Secretary of Education under Trump have? Six? Ten? And all from a family selling a mulit-level marketing scheme based on soap. 

Let’s stop being stupid. Let’s stop denying reality. W wasn’t bright, but at least he was trying to make things better. The current crop of Republican politicians are so out of touch with the regular folk, one s to wonder who they are beholding to. See Gary Oldham as Churchill on the Tube talking to regular folk, if you want inspiration.

My dad used to tell a story about going to a meeting in California where a job was in trouble. By this time he had been shuffled off to the side and I think they sent him as a last ditch bandaid for the customer. Dad said all these people were sitting around this big round table wondering what to do. The salesman wanted to take the job back to headquarters in Connecticut. 

Dad asked why. He then said, “You’ve got the best minds to solve this problem right here.”

And that’s when it hit them. They were the ones. They had to figure it out.

As Pogo said, “We have seen the enemy and they is us.”

As I sit here with my complimentary bottle of water that I had to open by gripping it with my teeth to twist off the cap and as I did the whole top of the plastic bottle deformed and i had to suck down water as I twisted, I wondered if we have the will, the gumption, to start solving our own problems.

When I was in Angkor in 2015 there were thousands of tourists there. Now, there are less than one hundred in the whole city. The postcard sellers were very aggressive. One lady was leaning into one of our tuk-tuks trying to get Dave to buy some cards. Dave said, “I don’t have any money.”

I still can hear the woman’s response. In a high singsong voice that ended on a rising tone she said, “I don’t think sooo!”

Can we solve our problems? Yes. Will we? I think of the postcard lady’s response to Dave.

Monday, May 16, 2022

I’m writing from Angkor Wat, Cambodia, which is eleven hours (and a day) ahead of the east coast time.

I briefly looked at the news and saw that the Dunham commission has found a crime and a criminal to prosecute! Well, la de dah. I dug deeper. It involves Hillary! Of course.

The crime? Lying to the FBI. Sounds bad. Who done it? A lawyer. Of course. His crime? Failure to disclose. Oh no. Exactly, what did he fail to disclose? That he had represented Hillary’s campaign and someone else when talking to the FBI about the Steele dossier or some such thing. Why didn’t he tell them? Oh. It wasn’t relevant to the investigation that the FBI was conducting.

This is equivalent to not mentioning to the EMTs that you take baby aspirin every day when they are treating you for a broken leg. OMG, is this all they’ve got?

Well, what did you expect? It’s like those Titanic jokes where two people on the stern of the boat are worried about the wake and not the fact that they just hit an iceberg.

Or how the Republicans in Congress are worried about who leaked the Roe decision and not the significance of it. The most likely betting is that it was a conservative intern worried that one of the five conservatives might chicken out. Or as Ted Cruz said when asked why he thought it was a liberal, “Became I’m not an idiot.” Yes, yes you are Ted. (ie Yes, you are an idiot. And, why isn’t that guy in jail? He stole government property, trespassed, and deposited said property at the White House during the government shutdown he helped create. Green Eggs and Ham, my butt. I mean naive Susan Collins is upset that someone defaced the sidewalk with chalk. What the heck is what Teddy did then? BTW Susan, is it true you haven’t held a town hall in 20 years? You were only going to serve one term remember?)

Tuesday, May 3, 2022

Late yesterday a draft copy of a Supreme Court Decision got leaked to the press. That in and of itself is unique. The decision is sweeping. It is the decision to overturn Roe, that allowed abortion to be legal in the U.S. The reasoning is, essentially, that the word abortion is not in the Constitution so therefore the Federal government should not be involved and it is up to the states to regulate abortion. This is legal BS plain and simple, written by the guy who told W he didn’t have to follow the law with executive decisions because it hadn’t been tested in court. This is extremist rhetoric as is the “it isn’t in the Constitution” argument, which is something conservatives have been advocating sporadically and selectively for decades. Yeah, you can pick out other things that aren’t in the Constitution but the federal government rules on all the time. Now, interestingly, those same radical anti-abortionists are talking about making a nationwide ban on abortion. Wonder how Alito will come down on that?

Let’s also look at the three court justices Trump appointed. They all voted for it. Huh? Amazing, right? Now YOU KNOW what you had to lose by electing Trump. But that’s not the end of this. The argument knocks down three Supreme Court rulings that were “settled law.” This now means that this radical conservative Supreme Court will go after anything they want, even if the cases had been argued and settled a long time ago. Not only will abortion be on the chopping block, but women’s access to birth control. On the horizon are other rights to be infringed upon: racial, sexual, religious. 

The case that the court ruled on was a law in Mississippi. That law makes no exception for rape, incest, or child impregnation. Recently, there was a case in a lower court where the rapist sued to have visiting rights to his child! Imagine that? Protecting the rights of rapists? That’s cool, right? I mean let’s just tell an eleven year old girl to suck it up, have the child, and be visited by the man who did the most terrifying thing to her in her life.

I’ve heard the pissing and moaning and righteous anger of anti-abortionists. They’ve sent me the pictures of the fetuses and asked, “How can you say that isn’t a human being?” That’s easy. It’s not. It might be one day, but at the moment it’s not. 

Let’s call the anti-abortionists what they are – Killers of Women. I know, they’ll say, “We aren’t killing women.” Oh yeah? How come whenever abortion bans are put in place women die from abortions? Oh they shouldn’t do that. Yeah, but for some reason they do. Hey, I’ve got an idea. Let’s pass a law nationwide saying what a women does with her body is none of the government’s business? I don see anyone running around advocating for not letting people put ink under their skin, or letting them slit their tongue in half, or put a bunch of spikes and bumps in their skin, or even cut off a leg. I know, being impregnated is an opportunity you say. For who I ask? 

It has been argued that the drop in crime in the early nineties was the result of the 1973 Roe decision, because as women were no longer forced to have unwanted children the kids that would have come of age 18 to 20 years later weren’t there. These were children that would have been neglected and abused. Later, to become criminals. Yeah, I know, it’s an opportunity. At some point we will have to get real.

Remember Richard Malthus? He was a 19th century demographer and economist. His core evaluation was that population will always outrun food supply, unless stern limits are placed on population growth. Now there is something I would think the Rabid Right could get behind. It’s got everything they want. You get to tell people what to do, take away their rights, etc.

Malthus’ work led to the Zero Population initiative, which was very popular for decades in this country. Then Reagan met with the Pope and killed it. Just what I want a no-nothing right wing politician led by a wife that consults with spiritualists and tells him what to do striking a deal with a religious leader in a foreign country telling us here in America how we should lead our lives. And now we see the results of this kind of policy: starvation, uncared for and neglected children, poverty, suppression of voting rights…

Some may want to argue the last point. Who is targeted with voter suppression? The poor, the neglected, those who have to move around to survive, the unrepresented. Let’s keep it that way, shall we? Wouldn’t want to actually help those in need.

BTW, do you know the country in the industrialized world with the worst outcome for babies and mothers who just had them? I’ll give you a hint. the initials are U S A. Yeah, that’s right. More babies and women who had a baby die within six weeks here in the USA. Why? You might ask. I’ll tell you why. There is no support for women who have babies. In simple terms the government doesn’t give a crap.Come on Ted Cruz pound the floor with that one. You have three daughters, right? Be a pity if one of them got accidentally knocked up. But you wouldn’t take her out of state, like to Cancun, to have an abortion would you? You’d stand by her and say things like, “Gee, that’s too bad Honey. “ And then when her rapist came on knocked on the door demanding to see her kid you’d let him in right?

Speaking of those in need, before this all came up the big question was student loan debt. There’s an argument that those who got into debt should just work to pay it off, like for their whole lives. Take the case of Laura Ingraham, she went to Dartmouth and then Virginia. Her mother, according to Ingraham, had to work as a waitress into her 70s to pay off Laura’s college debt. There doesn’t seem to be any thought on Laura’s part that she should have helped. I guess she was too busy partying at that row house in Georgetown with Carlson and Kavanaugh. What? You think I forgot that little tidbit? 

Speaking of Kavanaugh, my only regret in his confirmation hearing was that he wasn’t forced to explain that “drinking game” as he called it. The one where two guys put a woman on her knees and hands and enter her from each end. Now that’s something what’s his name and the pool boy at Liberty University would have done.

Hey Susan! Collins, I’m talking to you. Ya wanna see that clip of you saying that you believed Brett would let RoevWade stand? 

This all comes back to a central problem this country has – minority rule. The SC justices who decided this case are all appointed by minority elected presidents. This situation is going to get worse. Of course the solution is simple- popular vote. Or at a minimum let LA County have the same representation as the eight western states its population matches. What say you Montana?

Then there’s Joe Manchin. He’s dirty. He is making big bucks from the filthiest of coal and he’s not changing. Oh, he has concerns – Bull. And Kyrsten Sinema? WTF? She is so out to lunch.

Sunday, May 1, 2022

We watched the SNL rerun from January that featured the woman who is staring in West Side Story currently on Broadway. Just as it went off we caught President Joe Biden at the Correspondence Dinner and then Trevor Noah. Both were really good. Before that we watched the latest American Song Contest.

I gotta hand it to Snoop for the quote of the week, talking about the writers for the show. It went something like this, “You all make it so easy for me. I haven’t had this much fun reading since the third grade.”

And Joe? We caught him just as he said, “We had three really bad years, then we had the pandemic.”

He also pointed out that Fox News folks were there, and they were all double-vaxed and boosted.

Trevor? Wow. He walked right up to the line, many times and then jumped back. but his best was (and I paraphrase), “Fox News is like Waffle House. Everything is fine during the day. Then the sun goes down and things get weird.”

This week there were many memorable moments in cowardice and treason:

Rand Paul advocating that we shouldn’t help Ukraine because it was part of the old Soviet Union and Putin should be allowed to do what he likes there.

Don Jr saying Ukraine is one of the most corrupt countries in the world and we shouldn’t give it money.

(He seems to forget that it was Putin who was responsible for keeping it corrupt and his dad who tried to corrupt it more.)

And the MTG (Marjorie Taylor-Greene) who has the worst memory in the world or is a terrible liar – maybe both. She can’t recall whether she told the President of the United States to impose Marshall Law to overthrow the government. Just, slipped her mind. Huh. Weird. (Yes, it should have been ‘Martial’ but that’s not what she wrote.)

Kevin McCarthy is caught on tape actually speaking the truth and admitting what needs to be done. Then like so many Republicans he wusses out.

Ron DeSantis pushes a bill through the Florida legislature that repeals Disney’s special status because DeSantis doesn’t like their standing up for people who aren’t like him. The Gov didn’t realize that he was causing the state government to pick up a one billion dollar tab. In fairness, he did realize he was causing a $136 million tax increase, but when you throw in the one billion it makes it the largest tax increase in Florida history. This is what Republican conservatism looks like today.

Elon Musk’s bid for Twitter may be in trouble, and if it falls through it may cost him one billion dollars, which would finally make Twitter profitable. Currently, Twitter appears to be profitable because part of the compensation employees get is stock and the accountants can claim the rise in stock as profit to the tune of $630M. Take that out and the company is in the tubes. If Musk’s deal goes through then he has to figure how to pay those folks. Tesla stock got pummeled, which means he’ll need to throw more in the pot to make the deal work, etc. etc. etc. Yikes.

Kids may soon get a vaccine from Moderna. So their stock went down on the news. What is wrong here?

I don’t get it.

Ah me.

Well, that’s it boys and girls.

Wait. The summer entertainment – The Jan 6th Committee public hearings will begin June 6th. You know what I love about this? All those law and order types who believe the election was stolen, etc. Will watch their heroes be pummeled by facts and truth. Well, I hope. I also hoped the Mueller investigation would do the same.

And then there’s that wheelchair Congressman from North Carolina talking about Cocaine fueled sex parties that the Republican politicians are having. What? Chuck Grassley maybe? Oh, no MTG’s sidekick, the one who looks like Butthead. How come he hasn’t been charged with sex crimes?

Speaking of sex crimes a member of Parliament resigned after being caught looking at porn while sitting in the House of Commons. He claimed the first time he was looking for tractors, but the second time he did it. Wait, what do you put into Google looking for tractors that turns up a porn site? I can’t think of the right terms to enter or the website to misspell to do that. If it was Dick’s Sporting Goods okay. I get it. But tractors? Wait. Maybe you put in “Dear” instead of “Deere”. Like Green twitted “Marshall Law” instead of “Martial Law.” Big sale on law and order, maybe? 

The fundamental thing that is going on in this country is an all out attempt to overthrow our government from the inside. The tactics are right out of Stalin and Hitler. Heck, so are the words.

The Republicans are trying to claim the Dems have moved to the left, while ignoring, as one pundit put it, comparing the political landscape to a map of the U.S. that they have left the country while the Dems have moved a bit from the center, maybe.

Or as Rob Reiner twitted, “You’re Not Voting Republican, You’re Voting For Autocracy.”

And that is the fundamental issue. Will you help preserve our democracy? It’s that simple.

In the final stages of preparation for my trip to Angkor Wat. Here I am in 2015 with an old friend – the multi-headed Naga.