Monthly Archives: July 2020
Where’s Bountygate?
You gotta hand it to the Republicans. They may be nuts, but they’re great at slurs and slogans. Just look at how clever phrasing can cut — and, perhaps more potently, undercut — at issues of importance to them.
Consider just recent phrasing by the party writ large: Obamacare, Right to Life, Creationism, ANTIFA, Snowflakes, Cucks, Gun Rights, et nausea. On the personal front, look at the Great Leader’s knack for insult: ‘Lyin Ted,’ ‘Crooked Hillary.’ ‘Sleepy Joe’ might have been an offensive smack at Joe Biden — had the idea of a presidential nap, perhaps quite a long one, not been so tempting.
Meanwhile, Democrats can’t help but rule by committee when it comes to chants. “Defund the police”? Did anyone think that name through? At the very least, why not “Re-fund the police”? It doesn’t need an explainer, is more accurate and doesn’t make the ear flinch.
Speaking of ears, how are Dems not pinning Trump’s back on his continued genuflecting to Vladimir Putin?
Quick poll: when was the last time you heard a story on allegations that Russia was paying bounties of up to $100,000 per American soldier head? It had dropped so precipitously off the news radar I thought it had been disproven and CNN/MSNBC simply let it fall unnoticed.
Nope. The New York Times ran a story on July 14 that American intelligence is now looking at whether a 2001 car bomb that killed three Marines was tied to the plot. An investigation that is ongoing.
How the fuck are silent about this? How is this, at the very least, not worthy of a catch-phrase? I propose Bountygate. But whatever you pick, Dems, PICK SOMETHING. Make it stick. Add it to the hit parade. Tack on an indictment.
Putin’s Puppet Theater. Russia-Lovers. The Red 9. The New Confederacy. Anything.
Come on, Joe. You don’t have to come out of the bunker, but pick a fearless VP who knows how to tweet and take this fool down. Between Bountygate and Trump’s unidentified storm troopers snatching up Portland protesters, we should be taking the man to more than task. Nancy, why don’t I see you front and center, proclaiming “If he hadn’t put us through the agony of one impeachment, Donald Trump would be facing jurors for this.”
I know Republicans will go to extremes to deny a blue platform. Deny global warming. Deny masks. Deny science.. Deny the reality in which the vast majority of us reside.
But I haven’t heard one Republican warm up to Russia. Not one who will admit or accept that Trump has the distinction of losing The Cold War.
But look at Putin’s s spoils of a won war. He helmed an American election. He is plundering COVID research. He’s placed a bounty on heads, the kind American Western movies love to depict. How is this left unspoken? How is Trump not painted in a McCarthy-era Better Dead Than Red scarlet sash?
I understand a Democratic political strategy of letting Trump impale himself on his own blade of insanity — and allowing his Dwight Schrutes to follow suit in a communal hari-kari. And Biden has a double digit lead in the polls, so perhaps it’s a sound plan.
But America wasn’t founded on being silent. And if we don’t speak up before Nov. 4, we may not have a say-so in any ballot box.
A Grazin’ in the Sun
Here’s the good news about the pandemic, which finds us hunkered and bunkered while COVID and Science duke it out in the heavyweight bout of the millennium:
Science will win.
We know this because, while coronavirus is adaptive as hell, Science gets stronger every day. Why, just look at what it did with the other hand while battling coronavirus, like Neo batting away Mr. Smith after his enlightenment. Just last week, the Solar Orbiter came within 48 million miles of the sun’s surface, the closest we’ve ever had a camera.
In honor of the achievement, a FactSlap column, solar edition, illustrated by some of Orbiter’s best tourist snapshots.
- The sun is the most perfectly round natural object known in the universe.
- The Sun accounts for about 99.86% of the total mass of the Solar System.
- The beautiful symmetry of a total solar eclipse happens because —by pure chance— the sun is 400 times larger than the moon, but is also 400 times farther from Earth, making the two bodies appear the exact same size in the sky.
- The theory that the Sun is the center around which the planets orbit was first proposed by the ancient Greek Aristarchus of Samos in the 3rd century BC.
- The Sun does not have a definite boundary, and in its outer parts, its density decreases exponentially with increasing distance from its center.
- 1.3 million Earths could fit inside the sun, an average-sized star.
- Six ten-billionths of the Sun is gold.
- The Sun is thought to have completed about 20 orbits during its lifetime and just 1/1250th of an orbit since the origin of humans.
- A third of all Russians believe the Sun revolves around the Earth, according to state pollster VsTIOM.
- As passengers on Earth, we are all carried around the sun at a mean velocity of 66,600 mph.
- Your eyes can get sunburned.
- A bolt of lightning is 5 times hotter than the surface of the sun.
