Last post of 2017
New Year's is my least favorite holiday what with the noise, the stray bullets, and the freezing temperatures. In parts of Iowa this year, we could see low temps for the New Year's Eve revelers not recorded in any of the last 130 years.---
America's not a police state or anything, but a man can effectively take out a hit against another man by calling a local police department, pretending to be the other man, making physical threats against others, and the SWAT team will show up shooting to kill, no questions asked. At this time, we are not doing a particularly good job of making America great again for your old-fashioned private hit men that work on contract. Can we achieve some police reform if we promote the free market angle?
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President Trump is praising the tens of thousands of anti-government protestors taking to the streets in Iran, the largest such protests in that country in almost a decade. He announced-- in a tweet naturally-- that "the USA is watching very closely for human rights violations."
Good for him. I would have done five things differently.
1. Mention that the U.S. is also going to be more mindful of its own behavior in-- to borrow language of the day-- "swatting" down protests here at home.
2. Remind the world of the C.I.A's role in the 1953 coup of Iran's democratically-elected prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh, that eventually led to the disastrous blowback of the Iranian Revolution in '79.
3. Assert that the U.S. will not be engaged again in "regime change"in a sovereign country despite our support for the rights of the protestors and our concern for the people of Iran.
4. Point out the retroactive wisdom of Trump's predecessor, President Obama, having lifted sanctions on Iran two years ago. For years, many Iranians believed that these sanctions were causing their economy to suffer. That has led directly to these protests as the people of Iran now recognize that the stagnation continues and that they were being lied to.
And 5. Lift the travel ban he put in place for these same protesting Iranians he now claims to support.
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In a conversation with a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, Willie McCovey defends Barry Bonds against historical revisionists already enshrined in the Hall of Fame: “Guys took things ever since baseball existed. It may not have been steroids, but guys took things like those greenies and stuff so they could play the next day. You’re telling me everybody is clean as a whistle? You played against guys who were doing the same thing he was doing, so what the heck?”
In 1889, future Hall-of-Famer "Pud" Galvin, then of the Pittsburgh Alleghanys, whose pitching repertoire was said to make hitters "look like pudding," used the Brown-Sequard mixture, containing monkey testosterone, before a game and newspapers at the time took note of it with neither criticism nor controversy.
My question, though: Does monkey testosterone clear up frostbite?
posted by CM @ 11:09 AM
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