Skip to main content

Lord please, Mercy

 


Now the end of August, thankfully both political parties have now had their conventions, a pair of far more mind-numbing events than usual this year. Normally one at least has the actual nomination vote to watch with those over-inflated declarations of the grandeur of one's state before a delegate submits the vote count from their state to be tallied.

What made those micro-speeches fun were two things....

First he/she was in all likelihood suffering from the mother of all hang-overs after a week-long binge of cheap booze and partying hardy away from work and family.


Which made his/her staid deliver to the cameras one heck of an acting job.

Second, the odd little bits of trivia they were boasting about were for the most part actually true. Not that anyone else cares that much about Illinois, the folks who live there consider these factoids very important.

What was to be avoided were the headliner addresses. Delivered by either a war-horse or sometimes an up-and-comer, these often lengthy speeches are meant to fire up the party base. The real purpose is to serve as a launching platform for higher office. Here we'd get the full load of tall-tales, lies, and innuendo -- bleh.


Which is bad enough as is, but people never stopped playing that game after the last presidential cycle. Instead of a couple months of being fed stories so bad that a tabloid editor would reject them we've been fed this slop for over four years!

This does not bode well for after the election either.  No one I know wants to deal with more "expositions" on Twitter, Facebook, or nightly news. Now if just the politicos got that message.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Closing a chapter.

My last post was so full of darkness, I hate to follow on with another sad article. Life does not always allow for happy moments interspersing the less happy. For countless years ( honestly, I can't count this time in the morning ) I have been engaged in a hobby project writing a fairly massive software library of routines for use in adventure and combat simulations I call Zulu. When I started the project way back whenever I did weeks of research trying to determine the " best " game engine to use. Factors like ease of use, rendering quality, support, and cost all were gathered, then ground in the number-cruncher to determine a winner. In the end, Unity3d was the clear winner. In the last two weeks Unity announced a series of changes to its Terms and Conditions including how it charges for applications built using Unity that put a huge burden on developers, especially the smaller groups.   Th...

Just a country kid.

I've done a bunch of things in my life. Was one of those smart kids in school. A hard-core bookworm with emphasis on the sciences. Got a Bachelor of Science degree. Worked as a chef. Wore a few stripes working for Uncle Sam. Then spent close to 25 years in California working at a nuclear weapons research facility. Retired. Now a tutor, a mentor, and writing software when I have time. I'll always be a kid from the country. My parent's home is on a large hill. There were farms all around us, alfalfa fields bordering us to the south, west and east. Every season was special, but summer had one activity that was so routine back then and now you rarely encounter. In the shade of a covered porch, my dad and I would sit in our favorite chairs. Some iced tea, lemonade, beer, or a soda along with a cooling breeze made even the muggy days feel nice. We even enjoyed watching the occasional T-storm from that porch - the lightning bolts making quite a show from our dry and safe locat...

Things are bad, or are they?

This year we experienced a pandemic, the first since 1918 the experts say. People were told to stay inside their homes, avoid getting too close to others, and wear masks when having to travel outside. A lot of authorities saw fit to impose measures not everyone felt comfortable with. Restaurants, pubs, bars closed. Then most businesses shut down. The economy ground to a standstill. But this plague kept marching on, new cases and sadly new deaths. People failed to understand, they had the 1918 Spanish Flu in mind. Given how COVID-19 can spread, how deadly it is in some cases, how effective the countermeasures were they should have been looking at 1665 London, the year of the Great Plague. People then tried quarantines, social isolation, sterilized money, even wore masks. All for nought. Some religions refused to comply with the emergency regulations. Members of those groups were hit hard, some even were accused of deliberately spreading the infection. Today the urban areas in the US wor...