Christopher Hitchens’ Prescription For An Ailing Planet

Christopher Hitchens

 

Christopher Hitchens

Christopher Hitchens’ prescription for an ailing planet

When discussing Christopher Hitchens’ prescription – or more accurately, prescriptions – for an ailing planet – the uniqueness of the thinker and author is almost impossible to ignore.  Christopher Hitchens was one of a kind. Read More

Cette semaine a neftlix

J’espere que mon aesthetique cinematique est beaucoup mieux que mon francais!
Mon recommendation mensuel est un film de Karin Viard dans le role vedette.
Ma Part du Gâteau ( ang. A Piece of the Pie).
M. Viard est travailleur dans un usine a Dunkerque qui devient le victim d’un
prise strategique par un financier a Londres. Il le fait liquider et la la
divorcee jouee par Ms. Viard tent de se suicider tant qu’elle s’inquiete
de son abilite de se soigner de ses trois filles.
Le destin s’entreviens apres quelques developments en forme d’un liaison
professionelle entre Mme. Viard et l’homme qui est responsable pour sa perte de boulot

Franchement cet film se depend beaucoup sur l’artifice de coindcidence, mais la
cinematographie adept, le contrast discretement expose entre les scenes des vie
ouvrier dans le port industriel de Dunquerque et les environs de bon ton a Londres
et Paris servent a creer un context interessant pour cet complot tellement interessant
a cause de l’element de coincidence.

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Who You Are and What You Get…a Poem

There comes a time when who you are
And what you get
Look like two sides of the same coin
They meet exactly and without quarrel
giving you at that point, at that time a living reality;
Comes a marriage – a two-ness that is closer than a oneness
And from this promising junction of this X of x’s
And this Y of y’s,
a spiral stairway takes shape and form;
And the DNA of your destiny begins to pulse
With a pulsing that is beyond all dreams

Categories: Poetry

This Thing Called War…a Poem

The thing I’d like to underscore
Is just how ridiculous
Is this thing called war
You’d think we’d have something better to do
Than to cut someone’s body in two
Just because he thinks different thoughts
Or talks to different gods
Or prefers his chips with flounder
While we all swear by cod
Or because he speaks
In a strange tongue
Or prefers a lethal dose of gas
While we prefer to see them hung.
Or differs from us
In ways middling and small
As when he likes his women fat
While we like ours tall
Wouldn’t it be just dandy
If we who are about to die
For reasons not fully explained
Gave our wives some candy
Or went and baked a pie
And left the masters of war
Foiled, failed and frustrated
Standing recruit-less
Out in the rain!

Categories: Poetry

Why Mitt Romney Lost the 2012 Presidential Election

Why Mitt Romney Lost
-by David Klein

“There are two Americas.”
-John Edwards
The presidential race of 2012 was too close to call for months before election day.
Was it “race,race,race” or “class, class, class?”
Though not entirely without merit , either/both of these explanations is/are too simple. Neither one nor the other can be pointed to as a deciding factor.
Democrats – and especially Liberals – are convinced that the average Republican voter – who earns about $30,000 per year – goes against his/her own economic self-interest by supporting the party that is perceived to be the “bagman” of the rich and super-rich.
And many Republicans are surprised to see , in the Liberal camp, luxury-car-owning white collar types who earn $150,000 a year or more voting to raise taxes on themselves.
Two questions come to mind here:
Why – after he came so close to winning – did Romney lose?
The Wall Street Journal, an icon of Conservative respectability, was – understandably -none too happy about the president’s re-election. They wrote off Obama’s victory as “the definition of winning ugly” and accused the President of painting the challenger “as a plutocrat and intolerant threat”
Who votes for whom, on an average day?
There was a heavy turnout for Obama among the young, African Americans, Latinos, single Moms, and union members – all dependable Democratic voting blocs.
Among the voting blocs that Republicans have counted on for quite some time now.
Rural White Americans.
Richard Nixon went South – in a manner of speaking – in 1968 and it won him the American presidency. Playing on the fear of steadily worsening racial animosity in the mid nineteen sixties – a fear that was exacerbated by footage of mass looting and entire city blocks engulfed in flame – Nixon employed what many deemed a divide-and-conquer strategy. It is a fact that he did change American electorl history by carrying both the (hitherto) Democratic South while winning many votes among another long standing Democrat bloc –White blue collar workers
Middle/Upper-Middle Class College-Educated White Males in Red States
Very much a question of which suburb or exurb you’re talking about; and in a college town you may even find significant pockets of Democrats
The toney environs of the nation’s capital helped to put President Obama over the top in hotly contested and often Conservative Virginia in both 2008 and 2012.
Similar zip codes went for McCain and Romney in those two elections; particularly if they were in such solidly Red States as South Carolina and Kansas.
A number of Republicans in these areas went for Obama in his first run for president but not in the second.
. In 2008, they believed Barack Obama to be much more favorable to their Recession-crippled portfolios and to/for their need for healthcare. Once the economy started to turn around and their home values , salary caps and net worth all started to recover from the Great Recession, they returned to the Republican fold and rallied around a can-do CEO who would keep their taxes down and stock evaluations on an upward tick.
Forbes opinion editor John Tamny writes that it was Romney’s economic advisers who cost him the election. Some say it was the bad advice of Romney’s economic advisors that cost hium the election. Romney’s failure to convince a larger electorate that the now-fabled “1%” could be counted on to bring the economy back up rather than drag it down; his call for support of the barely post- crash housing market at a time when it probably is not prudent to try to rekindle that market; his ignoring the need to convince the little guy that as a tried and true money maker/ CEO he could be trusted to use his professional skill and experience to help him get back up on his feet rather than face a lifetime of vassalage to big money and the socially conscienceless new American rich.
All these factors helped to keep him out of the White House.
Because, after all was said and done, the not-so-rich outnumber the rich; and the former group simply did not trust this guy.
Is there a “takeaway” in all this?
Perhaps it is this:
The America that Mitt Romney and many of his Republican followers seem to inhabit is an America that is quite real to them. Whether they live in the piney woods of the Deep South, on the wind-scorched prairies of the Dakotas, or in one of those gated fortress towns favored by your average Texan oil industry executive, they seem to have one thing in common: the world they are living in IS America…and there is no other that is worthy of the name.
Hopefully, there are a few of this group who are open to including the rest of us in their world view and definition of America.

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