I pretty much sit all day, mostly working on the computer or reading. I have done this all my life. I am told that I should exercise more but have not done so, due to a combination of laziness and other factors. I now see a report that says that my daily routine of largely sitting is going to kill me and that occasional walking would not have helped anyway.
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Now that Roy Moore has won the Republican senate primary in Alabama, the chances of the Democratic candidate Doug Jones of winning the election on December 12 have gone up slightly, though they are still not great given that we are talking about Alabama where religious extremism thrives. The question is whether the Democratic party establishment throws its weight and resources behind Jones. Jones has been quietly raising money for his campaign.
Jones has some good credentials but the party has not as yet enthusiastically embraced him.
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The local newspaper the Plain Dealer has quite a few daily and Sunday strips but their policies puzzle me. Most strips run seven days a week. But one strip called Baby Blues appears only on Sundays and not weekdays but another strip Judge Parker appears on weekdays and not on Sundays. I cannot fathom the reason for this. Surely it would makes sense to pick either Judge Parker or Baby Blues to run seven days a week and drop the other? This would not require more space on the comic pages.
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One of the features of capitalism is the growth of monopolies. As a result of their emergence either because of mergers or by the purchase of smaller companies, we end up having less competition and that results in higher prices and less innovation, leading to inferior products and services. The government’s anti-trust division is supposed to prevent monopolies but that long ago became a toothless tiger.
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The BBC has compiled some statistics that give a glimpse of what things are like inside that secretive country. Meanwhile, Peter Maas says that for all its bellicose and defiant rhetoric, North Korea is one of the most predictable nations on the planet and that it is the US that has become the wild, unpredictable card in the dangerous game of nuclear poker.
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Roy Moore won a runaway victory of 55-45% in the Alabama Republican primary yesterday, easily defeating the candidate that Donald Trump and the entire Republican leadership had backed strongly. I don’t think too much can be read into this result and whether this portends a series of successful insurgent wacko extremist candidates in Republican primaries against the merely extremist incumbents. Although Moore is an extremist, so was Strange. Moore just went a little further. Also Moore had widespread name-recognition, having run for many statewide offices and won twice for the position of chief justice of the state Supreme Court. Other insurgent candidates may not have those advantages. But in politics, perception often takes precedence over rationality and many incumbents may be extremely fearful of what is in store for them in next year’s primaries.
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One result of Donald Trump boorishness is how much his coarseness has brought out into the open those ugly aspects of the nation’s psyche that had formerly been hidden. Thanks to Trump, white nationalists, neo-Nazis, racists, misogynists, homophobes, transphobes, and xenophobes have felt emboldened to strut their stuff in public.
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My personality is such that once I start work on solving a problem or fixing some thing, however trivial it is, I will carry it out to its conclusion, usually working on it straight with hardly a break. This is true with yard work, work around the house, writing projects, science and math problems, anything. Once I start, and as long as I believe that I can succeed and that effort and my own skills should be sufficient in arriving at a satisfactory solution, it becomes a kind of obsession and I will plug away until I see it through to the end.
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One measure of how concerned the Republican party leadership is about the possibility of wacko judge Roy Moore winning the Alabama primary today is that they have decided to go flat out in support of their man Luther Strange.
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The latest travel restrictions imposed by the Trump administration adds Chad, North Korea, and Venezuela to the former list of countries (Iran, Libya, Somalia, Yemen, and Syria) but dropped Sudan. Why add Chad? Who the hell knows? The addition of North Korea and Venezuela seems, as is the case with Iran, to be out of spite at the refusal of those countries to bend to US coercion. Adding North Korea and Venezuela to the list also deflects criticisms that the administration is targeting Muslim-majority countries.
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