Wee, Whee!
Put aside all your plans for Wednesday evening. Weddings, funerals, emergency room visits, drop-ins to your parents’ house in hopes one or the other will slip you a couple of twenties — everything. Go instead to Bear’s Place for this month’s edition of Science Cafe.
Subject: Tiny Is Beautiful: Science and Emerging Technologies of Nanocrystals.
Atomic Structure Of 5-Nanometer-Diameter Nanocrystal
[Image: Berkeley Lab]
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Speaker: Xingchen Ye, chemistry prof at Indiana University’s Chemistry Dept.
The gray-matter orgy begins at 6:30pm. Be there. I will.
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Bad Guys
Time for an update of my list of American Villains (1901-now):
- Father Coughlin: The very first electronic media personality to become a superstar by pandering to the deep-seated hatreds and panics many Americans — too many — harbor in their hearts.
- J. Edgar Hoover: The pathologically sexless inventor of the FBI; he repressed his natural carnal urges resulting in his reign of terror upon civil rights, dissenters, the harmlessly misinformed, and, in the words of author/baseball player Jim Bouton, “little old ladies in tennis shoes” who dared speak out against the Vietnam War.
- Joseph McCarthy: A sick little man who devoted his life to rooting imagined commies and perverts out of US Gov’t, academia, newsrooms, and from under everybody’s beds during this New World’s second and more brutal witch hunt.
McCarthy (R), With Attorney Roy Cohn
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- Andrew Breitbart/Steve Bannon/Roger Ailes: These three pishers don’t even deserve their own individual bullet points, the cucci, even if their sins against the truth and reason have turned this holy land into the planet’s punchline.
- The brothers Allen and John Foster Dulles: — “Deep state” spooks in the Eisenhower years — Allen was the CIA director and John Foster the Sec’y of State — who orchestrated numerous coups around the world, including the sacking of democratically-elected Iranian president Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953, sparking a decades-long campaign of Middle East terror and fundamentalist radicalism that bedevils us to this day.
- Lil Duce: You know who he is.
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Lickspittle Spat
A fellow on Democracy Now! this AM characterized a lot of the top-level in-fighting in the President Gag administration as a battle between Cabinet officials with “diehard business interests” vs. Gag’s “incoherent ideology.”
I buy it.
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Power Mad
News Item: President Gag says he has “complete power” to issue pardons.
Dig: No sitting president should be talking so cavalierly about granting pardons — to others, to his family, or to himself. In fact, no president should ever even bring up the idea of pardons except when s/he issues them. That’s it.
The real granting of pardons is not some funny-haha power like that silly ritual presidents traditionally engage in around Thanksgiving. You know, where the sitting Law-Enforcement-Officer-in-Chief pardons some big white turkey. [And, by that I mean, Meleagris gallopavo, not any of the 63 million-plus jerks who voted for Li’l Duce.]
This (L), Not That
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See, just throwing the word pardon around sends the wrong message. Y’know, like, Hey, just come to me for your Get Out of Jail Free card.
It’s like Kohl’s posting a big sign where you walk in, reading: “If you raise enough of a stink, we’ll refund your money on anything, no matter what.” That may, indeed, be the store’s policy but its managers don’t want to plant the idea in your coconut.
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