Gone Phishin

I'm on vacation for a couple of weeks. We're off to fabulous Bisbee, Arizona. Check it out on your map. It's below Tucson, below Tombstone, almost on the border. Yes, Bisbee - Gateway to nowhere, home of nothing.
We've picked it as a possible place to live someday. After much searching and discussion with friends, it seems like a possible choice. Apparently it's full of crazy lefties and artists with no good sense. Lots of galleries. They have their own brewery; Copper Queen Beer, and they have their own coffee roasters. This is a good sign. Elevation at a mile high reduces the temperature a bit and it's situated in a canyon near an old copper mine that hopefully keeps the blue haired republicans away. We'll see.
Then off to New Mexico for the Very Large Array (do a search), Santa Fe where you can see enough art in a day to make you puke, and then to very groovy Taos where we will stay at a bed and breakfast that sports a shrine to Jerry Garcia! Not your basic Holiday Inn but we'll just have to tough it out.
A report when we return. Bye, kids.

It's Full of Stars

Recently, the official meeting of official astronomers decided that pluto doesn't qualify as a planet for reasons concerning it's size, shape and other irregularities. So, we're back to eight planets. They have reclassified poor pluto as a "dwarf planet".
That seems lacking to me. There needs to be some new classifications for all of the various heavenly bodies out there if we have any hope of keeping it straight. So here are a few ideas I conjured up. I am open to any additions you might come up with.

I think pluto should be a planette. In Mexico it might be a planito; in France a planeaux; in Italy maybe a planitacinni.

Maybe a double star system would be homobinary or a same-star couple.

How about some asterlites? Or meteoresques? Or lunies? Or moonies?
Saturn might have some ringlettes.
If a small star exploded, would it be a novallo?
If a big star exploded, would it be a novapaloosa?
I don't know, you tell me. I await your suggestions.

Boiling the Frog

*Excuse this post if I have repeated myself

In the late 1700’s arguments ran hot and heavy about what form this new country would take. Many argued that it should be a republic; that is, among other things, that only landowners should have a vote. Of course, by landowners, they meant rich, white men. Others argued that there was before them a rare opportunity to form a true democracy where everyone could participate in the direction of the country and, therefore, of their own fate. Fortunately, the latter opinion prevailed, although it took decades before women and minorities could join in.
There is a paradigm going around, if you will, amongst hard-core conservatives that we’ve lived out this democracy folly a little too long. They argue within their own ranks that it’s now time to get this country back on track and dump the messy notion of a government by the people and for the people. It’s so inefficient and anti-business and besides, they argue, most people don’t want to be bothered with the complicated and sometimes exasperating business of running the ship of state on a daily basis. As long as we have our TV sets, our cell phones and our SUVs, let the politicians run the show.
This would seem to be more left-wing conspiracy babble if it wasn’t showing up in the news on an almost daily basis. The growth in the legal status of business versus human rights, the waning of the power of those pesky unions, the rapid erosion of our liberties and rights in the name of security, the increase of raw power of the Executive branch by way of a weakened Legislature and Judiciary and so on. A detailed list of the damage done to true American principles would be a multi-chapter report even without the supporting charts and graphs.
This pack of scoundrels and the thirty-something percent that support them don’t like democracy. It’s that simple. They can’t say it out loud but all of their actions take us inexorably towards the republic model if not to an out-and-out dictatorship. These people are very smart. They have figured out the American electorate. If you chip away at this rather fragile democracy in a gradual manner and speak the words “freedom” and “security” in a repetitious mantra, nobody notices until it is too late. If you put a frog in boiling water he will jump out immediately. But if you put him in cold water and slowly raise the heat, he will remain until he is cooked.
To me, at this moment, it feels like we are just about medium rare.

The New Bigots

For centuries, literally, American bigots have argued that the slavery of blacks in this country was not only legal but also morally correct. They often used passages of the Bible to back it up. Many if not most American citizens were sympathetic to this line of thinking until the civil rights movement of the sixties managed, through much blood, sweat and tears, to create a paradigm shift.
With the images of southern police clubbing and hosing peaceful marchers showing up live on our TVs, it became harder and harder to justify racial inequities. The Ku Klux Klan, dressed in silly outfits standing in front of burning crosses didn’t help the bigot’s image either. It became unacceptable in most of our society to use certain derogatory language and historical assumptions concerning a whole race of people.
This re-evaluation of historically acceptable attitudes about African-Americans began to spill over to include other people of color, other ethnicities, and other beliefs. And people of the old way of thinking were, in most circles, criticized and even shunned for their crude and hateful attitudes.
There are many similarities to the sea change around cigarette smoking. Bogart and James Dean and others were considered very cool in the forties and fifties to have a cigarette dangling from their lips. Now, only a few decades later, it’s considered very tacky, if not offensive.
Now consider the self-righteous defenders of “traditional marriage” holding the very same Bible over their heads and proclaiming the moral correctness of persecuting yet another group of our citizens: gays and lesbians. Apparently it is imperative for some people to always have another group to hold down.
Why is it that the most hate filled people you meet in this world are always the followers of a man than professed love and forgiveness for his fellow man?
So, we have the New Bigots. Same as the old ones. They’ve just picked a different group to trash. And I guarantee you that in twenty years, when we look back on this period, they will be seen as pathetic hate-mongers, remnants of a backwards time. The only problem is, there will undoubtedly be another horrible little hate group to replace them railing against fat people or skateboarders or sunbathers. And they in turn will be the New Bigots.