To the readers of my blog out there, however few you may be, I salute you and thank you for reading.  Whether you agree or disagree, you already know that the topics I post on are current.  And often worrisome to me, enough so that I sometimes lose my usual Spockian cool and rant a little.  From my sniffing around the internet, it appears my stuff is fairly tame, so I hope I haven’t bored you.  I tend to also go more in depth than posting one-liners in Twitter.  I like to consider my posts to be essays on the human condition.  If I appear wordy, I apologize.  I love to write, something that probably needs not be said.

The next few blog posts may actually come from Hawaii.  No, I’ll not be at any conference or anything as  impressive (or boring) as that.  I’ll be on vacation.  If I can figure out how to make all this great software work on the road, you’ll be hearing from me.  If not, there may be a couple of weeks before I get going again.  So have patience with a practicing Luddite.  (I work with computers all the time, so I’m a selective Luddite.  I know there’s probably a way to set things up so the posts are automatically spooled out.  But that’s not too current.  I usually don’t write posts that much ahead of time.) 

If anyone knows how to tell all those little Google bots that visit my pages that I’m on vacation, let me know!  (Google is the big brother watching for this post.)

The Supreme Court of California has just upheld the ballot initiative banning gay marriage.  This is an obvious case of tyranny by the majority.  O’Reilly is smiling.

Such a case supports the argument for activist judges, as I have stated elsewhere in this blog.  Neither the executive nor the legislative branches of federal or state governments are required or equipped to protect minorities.  They can be led by the nose to perform repugnant and immoral actions by an indignant mob, the majority.  California has had a history of such ballot initiatives, but this one went too far and the SC condoned it. 

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Memorial Day was designed to honor those that made the ultimate sacrifice in service to our country.  This is a good thing to do, of course, as most of us mean it, contrary to the many politicians that mouth their platitudes but never send their own sons and daughters to fight.  If you family or friends that have made this sacrifice, the day means something more to you than just a good day for BBQs and beer.  Yet, since the last few wars have a higher percentage of wounded, both physically and mentally, we should also remember that it is imperative to take care of the living veterans.  

Veterans, of course, have their own day, but I decided not to wait for that day to put this post out.  First, both days bring back memories of the living and the dead that fought in our wars.  Second, we can’t do much of anything for the dead, exept honor them, whereas we should be doing more for our veterans.  While a lot of lip service has been given to doing so, their benefits are always a tempting place to make budget cuts.  The moral imperative for us as a nation is to avoid this.  We cannot let people that return from our wars, or their families, for that matter, fall through the cracks.

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Garcia Marquez created a fictional place called Macondo which provided the setting for novels like One Hundred Years of Solitude (Cien An~os de Soledad) and Love in the Time of the Cholera (Amor en los Tiempos de la Colera).  His stories spawned a new current in 20th century literature called magical realism, in other words, how ordinary day-to-day events become cloaked with an aura of magic.

We now have our own Macondo.  A blustering old ex-VP, still practicing Machiavelli’s magical art of fascist repetitive doublespeak, is out challenging a sitting President little more than 100 days into his term, an extraordinary event in American politics which doesn’t bode well for eliminating the partisan rancor that has split this country into two camps in verbal warfare.  I am referring to Mr. Cheney versus Mr. Obama, of course.

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Government by the lobbyists, for the lobbyists!  The whole idea of Congress representing you, Mr. Average American, has become the joke of the Western world.  Lobbyists control the writing of most of the legislation in this country and they are making sure that Congress does it their way by using a whole spectrum of pressure tactics on those already elected and financing both sides of the ballot when an election will be close.  They have about sixty years of experience in doing so, and during that time the techniques have evolved to a fine art even though some do-gooders in Congress (few and far between) try in vain to control it.

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We now know that bankers are good for something besides transferring wealth from the middle class to the upper class.  I’m referring to the Seattle banker that shagged flying ducks much better than Manny Ramirez can shag flyballs, put all his ducks in a row, and led Mama Duck and her darlings to the nearest lake (this is an Eastern U.S. term – Seattle city dwellers call them rain puddles).  (I guess he had his fifteen seconds of fame – I can’t even find his name on CNN anymore and I would like to give him credit – my hat’s off to you, good citizen.)

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Traditionally in pop culture sci-fi there is a mad scientist.  Lex Luthor in Superman comics is an example.  The very bad grade B movies on the Sci-Fi Channel generally have one so they can call it sci-fi even though a lot of these movies are really just a series of blood and gore scenes for computer games (the scientist very often is lunchmeat for his own discoveries or creations).  In Jurassic Park we had our mad scientist, the same one that was in Independence Day (his purpose in the first movie was to spout nonsense about chaos theory while in the second he possessed prescient knowledge that told him the alien computer codes were the same as ours).  Yes, I know the names were different, but the actor played the roles exactly the same.

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A few days ago Mr. Jeff Jacoby, columnist for the Boston Globe, clearly stated what’s wrong with newspapers today (Boston Globe, Wednesday, May 6, 2009).  While this is one of the few times I agree with most of what he says, there are several questions he didn’t consider.

Mr. Jacoby, a conservative, was right to criticize conservatives for celebrating the impending closure of traditional rags like the Boston Globe and the New York Times.  The problem is endemic to the media, not the political slant.  As a matter of fact, most newspapers have a conservative slant, and they are having problems too.  Their business model was left behind in the dust of the technological revolution.  Huge costs are associated with the preparation of every morning or evening edition, costs in both labor and materials.  Advertising, notably classifieds, finance papers and if people don’t read papers anymore, the advertisers don’t advertise in them.  Without getting into a chicken/egg scenario, let’s analyze both these points.

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Writing is an unusual past-time.  Sometimes what you say in jest or describe in a sci-fi context becomes true and you wonder, “Wow!  That’s really strange!”  For example, certain cartoonists in Denmark got more than they bargained for a while back.  It turns out that we of the Western world really don’t understand the Muslim sense of humor, or lack thereof.  Mea culpa.

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The recent win of long shot Mine that Bird shows two things: science often bets on the wrong horse and the dark worse can win, no matter the odds.  On paper there was absolutely no reason to bet on this horse, even if you are in the habit of digging out 20-to-1 or 30-to-1 long shots to try to make the big win.

I have actually only bet at the races twice.  Betting is against my general principles since I think gambling is a secret way for the rich to tax the poor and can become just as addictive as any drug.  Here in Boston losing at the tables was the motivation behind the Craig’s List Killer – he had the habit bad, unbeknownst to his fiancée (who also didn’t seem to know about his other bad habits either, like murder).  Anyway, the first time we had dinner one racing night at the Meadowlands and my wife and I, mostly by picking names of horses that sounded nice, managed to pay for both our dinners.  I should have stuck with that system since the next time at Monmouth with my brother-in-law I actually read about the horses, compared their resumes, if you will, bet smartly, and was responsible for losing every bet my brother-in-law and I made that day (he has since forgiven me).  The irony is that our first system would have worked as Mine that Bird is a nice sounding name in a quirky sort of way and probably would have been flagged as our probable winner.

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