STATE OF THE UNION

Last Tuesday was the traditional State of the Union address. We needed an inspiring orator to convince us that we were out the woods on the road to see the Wizrad of OZ.

 Cicero was the superlative orator in the roman senate . He was so good that eventually it cost him his head …and his hands. President Roosevelt had a clear metallic voice emphasized by the mikes of the times. His aphorisms were memorable but short of oratorical recollection. Nixon was a good story teller about dogs. He carried the conviction of Al Capone protesting of his innocence. JFK was the utmost orator with his tousled hair taking us to the moon with Camelot. Bill Clinton is a superb orator as long as he does not deceive us into an impeachment.

President Obama last Tuesday in his State of the union address appeared as a chastened leader after a drubbing in the November election rather than the rock-star politician who swept in 2008 into national consciousness with such clarity of voice and vision.  

Obama wants to use government to revive the US economy. He has calculated that he can only do so if Americans believe he is tightening the belt on the bloated monster in Washington. At times Obama sounded more like the CEO of a failing company with a $1.5 trillion debt, a Social Security in the red with funds exhausted by 2037. He voiced the classic unsuccessful proposals: a government spending freeze, ineffectual budget cuts, unworkable earmarks suppression , an unfeasible simplified tax code and problematic investment in a bullet speed train, one million electric cars and nuclear energy plants.

 As Alexander said:  “Investment is a bad word when it’s used as a cover for just more random spending.”

Maybe by next year the economy will have completely recovered and we can believe again In the promises of the young orator who catalyzed the voters before.

JACQUES

a new start is always welcome

I am starting a new blog at the beginning of this 2011year.
This one will not contain personal information unless recounting one of my experiences in our fast evolving society. Mostly lucubrations about life in the twenty first + 10 century.
Thanks for your reading and comments,
JACQUES

Imagine that the following was an actual blog entry from me on the internet. Impossible since the internet in my story is down!!!! But maybe someone found this note scribbled on apiece of paper in my destroyed house.

From what we understand a cyberattack last week, on January 30, closed down the distribution grids for electric power first on the West Coast then the rest of the country and part of Canada. No more lights, no internet, n0 banking , no transportation, empty supermarket shelves, no clean water from the faucet, no TV, no cell phone, still radio on a portable with almost exhausted batteries, no newspapers, no mail, no gas in the car.I saw our neighbor yesterday come to get water from our pool. He carried a rifle.
Yesterday there was an army truck at the club house. They handed out ration boxes. Tuna fish in hermetic plastic bag and a powdered drink.
It is 6 o’clock soon and getting dark. We are burning pieces of our wooden kitchen table in the fireplace. It is getting down to 50 during the night in our living room where we congregate. We heard that the restoration of power is delayed because of the lack of large transformers .
We disconnected the downspouts from the gutters and collected rain water during last week storm. Pool water has chlorine not recommended for dinking. I wonder if a water truck will come like you see in scenes from Africa. We have almost finished all the frozen stuff from our refrigerator. Not much on our pantry shelves.
Who would think that a bug planted in a Utilities computer system by a possibly Al queda malevolent hacker could explode in such a national cataclysm with a complete debacle of our lives?
JACQUES

here we go

so one has to start some day somehow