Steve Fey's Live From Las Vegas!

Okay, just to keep up with what's been going on, here for the record is my prediction for the balance of the Democratic campaign for candidacy.

First, if they settle things before the convention, as many say they must, I do believe that Obama has a chance. Maybe a good chance. Things have been blowing his way, so to speak, and he might just convince enough Democratic elected officials (the "superdelegates" from around the country) to support him to get the nomination. Or he may not. I favor Obama about 3 - 2 if the nomination is settled prior to the convention.

On the other hand, if it goes to the convention, then I stick with my original assertion, which is that Denver is situated at an altitude that causes uncomfortable stress in those not acclimated to it. It takes three or four days to six weeks to get acclimated. Therefore, many delegates, not all certainly, but enough, will be stressed by the lower air pressure of the mile-high city. When you are not feeling well, you tend to go with a known quantity. That, of course, favors Hillary over Barak. So, if the nomination goes to the convention, I favor Hillary, let's say 2 - 1, to be nominated.

I don't know the likelihood of them getting a nominee before August. They will not have one from the three remaining primaries, but after that I really have no idea. So, I can't really pick a winner. If it's 50-50 that it will go to the convention, then Hillary is my favorite. If not, well, you call it because I can't.

For the fall, Hillary or Obama will most likely win. You can like that or not, but the emotion of the country is in favor of a Democrat to be elected, and that sort of emotional logic is what always rules the day. Like I wrote once before, for those of you who just can't stand it, Canada is just to the south of Detroit. Eh?

;-)

Labels: Politics

I don't plan to make a habit of posting each time an article I write comes out somewhere else, but as this is my premiere effort for Living Las Vegas, I'm making an exception. It's a short piece about running in this desert paradise. You can see it by clicking the title of this post, or this.

Thanks for clicking!

S.

Labels: Info

I hesitated to write this review because the movie's been out long enough that most people who were in the primary audience have seen it. Never-the-Less, to quote Katherine Hepburn in The African Queen, I liked it enough to post this anyway. It did a lot to take the somewhat off taste left by that Indiana Jones thing away. And the critics who say Downey, Jr. does a great job, well, they're right. Good flick.

Labels: Reviews

There is a companion site to the Living Las Vegas site for which I write. It is called Road Trip America. It's a good travel site, and it has a collection of funny road signs. One of them is the Humped Zebra Crossing sign I mentioned in my posting about our trip to England. However, that's not the best one. You can pick your favorite by clicking the title of this post, which will take you to the one Tami took in Melton Mobray, and from there you can easily navigate the rest.

Believe me, there are some beauts. Some are a bit naughty, so you've been warned. But, do check it out.

Labels: Info

Well, ya know, it's better than that "Temple of Doom" thing, but my wife disagrees on that. She likes "Temple of Doom" better than I do.

Labels: Reviews

This isn't a philosophical discussion of term limits. I've always thought they were a bad idea, but my argument is taken from real life. Ripped from the headlines, so to speak.

The ring road around Las Vegas is officially known as the Bruce Woodbury Beltway. Bruce Woodbury is a Clark County Commissioner. In spite of being an elected official in Nevada, Mr. Woodbury has never attracted a hint of scandal, and his promotion of the beltway as a necessary step in building our transportation system is hailed even by the sometimes goofy editorial staff at the local paper. In short, he is the sort of elected official you wish you could have more of, and if you can't have that, you wish he could stay in office forever.

Unfortunately, a few years ago Nevada passed a strict term-limiting measure that almost without exception forces elected officials out of office. Now, I hear on the news and read in the paper that even some die-hard term limits supporters are pushing to have an exception made for Mr. Woodbury. That would be nice, that that isn't how the law works. Unfortunately, the honest, hard-working, public-minded electee is dumped along with everybody else, and whomever is elected to his seat is unlikely to do as much good for the county as has Mr. Woodbury. Not for nothing did they name a highway after him.

So you see my point. The reason term limits is a dumb idea is that the officials you'd like to keep in office forever are thrown out right along with the scoundrels. We have term limits on the national level, of course. Every two years a congressman has to stand for re-election. If you don't like him, work against him and throw him out. Every six years the same thing happens to senators. And the president, who really is term-limited, for no good reason that I've ever heard other than that Roosevelt was a Democrat (I honestly don't know Woodbury's political affiliation; nobody seems to care,) actually can be thrown out after only one term, as was, most recently, President Bush, and before him President Carter. There is no reason to artificially limit how long someone may serve, and there is a big down side if you get a good one who has to leave just when you need him the most.

That's an Initiative, for you. Great stuff, as usual.

Labels: Politics, Social Commentary

To: Barak and Hillary

Thank you so very much for making my assets look less like they need covered in the latest set of primary contests. I really do appreciate your efforts to bring it all down to the convention in Denver, which is coming right up as I write.

Now, don't forget who I predicted as the eventual winner as well, okay?

Thanks again,

Steve

PS -- The right David won Idol.

Labels: Politics

Okay, two posts in two days. Going for a record here. But I read this story and I just had to say something about it . . .


I just read a story from Reuters that casts doubt on the "Technical Virginity"
theory that teenagers are engaging in oral and anal sex in order to remain "technically" virgins.
In short, the article says that while teenagers are doing those things, they’re having plain old sex too. This does not surprise me. For one thing I teach high school and see the students, most of whom appear to be healthy humans. Healthy humans above the age of thirteen, sometimes younger, engage in some sort of sex. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t be healthy. For another thing, the wave of "abstinence only" sex education we’ve been indulging in since Reagan, in some cases longer, is the biggest crock of un-useful scam on the youth of America since the war on drugs.

I really was abstinent in high school. Want to know why? Because I was a cowardly mama’s boy, that’s why. I’d have been hitting on anything remotely like a girl if I’d had more nerve. I knew almost nothing about how things really worked, so the odds are that I’d have made some girl very unhappy, made myself very unhappy, maybe both, or plain old ruined a couple of lives if I’d had sex. If I’d known what was what in terms of sexuality I might well have still been celibate, but for good reasons. (Cowardice is no good reason for anything.) If I hadn’t been celibate I’d have been careful not to cause any harm. If, that is, I’d know what was what with sexuality.

So how is one to know? Certainly not by listening to stupid lectures about how abstinence is the only way to go. They lie, those people, by saying that condoms are not reliable (they are) and by overstating any emotional damage that might accrue from sex as a teenager. I’ve had a lot of friends who were sexually active before I was, and they have been at least as well adjusted as I am. Maybe more, since they weren’t obsessed with their lack of sexual experience during a crucial time of life. One might know by getting the actual facts about sex and sexuality. As a matter of fact, if you know the facts, abstinence until you’re ready to marry whomever you have sex with is a reasonable thing to choose. You don’t have to, but with all the dangers inherent in having sex as a child, you might just decide to. Let’s face it, there are some really nasty sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) out there, a couple of which will surely kill their victim. And there’s the emotional toll that comes with sex.

Emotional? Sure, emotional. Sex is really about how we feel about ourselves, and sometimes the way we feel afterwards if more important than the way we felt before. What I mean is that sex, like any meaningful activity, involves your whole self, and should not, therefore, be entered into lightly. I’ll confess here that I’ve tried casual sex, and it was okay, but no better than what I could get on my own, if you get my drift. There is, for me at least, no point in pursuing a casual sexual relationship. But, with a woman I really care about, sex is a wonderful way to make things even better. I learned all this though trial and error, over a lifetime. A couple of religious groups have a program that they call Our Whole Life (OWL), which is a lifetime learning program about sexuality and relationships. The groups are the Unitarian Universalist Association and the United Church of Christ. Okay, they’re to the left of the evangelicals, but as I said up at the beginning, the "abstinence only" approach many evangelicals advocate is just plain stupid. (To me, it’s an example of a situation in which idealism makes people do stupid things.) The OWL program is tremendously successful in a couple of crucial areas: preventing teen pregnancy and preventing teens from getting STDs. I seriously doubt that it stops teens from having sex, but when they do, the consequences aren’t dire.

I guess it depends on what you want: idealistic abstinence pledges, STDs and pregnancies; or teenagers who are healthy and not pregnant. I know what the idealists choose. Care to guess my choice?

Labels: Politics, Religion, Social Commentary

Well, okay, there is a possibility that I could be wrong about who will win the Democratic nomination. Just a possibility, but still, one must cover one’s assets, right?

So the thing is that everyone has written Ms. Clinton off. I suppose for those who really, really hated Bubba this is a good thing, as the worst case scenario just eased up a bit. I mean, like I said earlier, it isn’t like Barak Obama is a black guy, after all.

Still, I wouldn’t write the Senator from New York off. For one thing, she got to be the Senator from New York about six weeks after she moved to the State. Not a bad trick, that. For another, there is no law that says the delegates have to vote for anyone in particular at the convention. Ethics, yes, but then this is politics, and in particular the superdelegates are free to wander at will. And then there’s . . .

Well, Barak could call Hillary up (maybe at 3AM) and make her an offer. That would mean Vice-President, I mean. That isn’t as bad as President for the Bill haters out there, but it’s close. Still, if that happens, it’s curtains for McCain and that’s the truth. Not that I care that much for his chances at this early date. On the other hand, like Big Brown at the Belmont, neither Barak or Hillary is really tested in the long run, so we’ll see what we shall see. Shall’n’t we? (I made up that “shall’n’t” thing.)

Labels: Politics

I watched a show on Showtime last night called “This American Life.” It is produced by Ira Glass, from National Public Radio (NPR.) On it he featured a young Iraqi guy, who was an English major and speaks idiomatic American, sitting at a booth with a sign that read “Talk to an Iraqi.” He got a lot of lectures, naturally. Several of them were about freedom, because that’s what we’re there for, of course, to give the Iraqis freedom. When he asked what that meant the only responses he got were along the lines of how you could “go out and say whatever you want.” I won’t tell you his comeback to that, but it did get me thinking about what it means to be free. I think it’s more than being able to say what you want.
[This is aside from the issue of whether I can really “say what I want” without fear, by the way.]
The fact is that nobody is free in the sense that he can do anything he wants to do. That seems to be a common notion about what freedom means, but that would only be true if you were the only person alive. If it ever comes down to it, the last human alive will be perfectly free to take any action whatsoever without fear of recrimination. Failing that, we all have to answer, really, to our fellow human beings. Here in the Wild West there’s a lot of sentiment calling itself “Libertarian” that seems to think that individual will is the best judge of what should be done. That not only flies in the face of social reality, as I said above, but is mathematically untrue according to John Nash, the subject of the movie A Beautiful Mind. He won a Nobel Prize for his work in game theory in which he demonstrated that there comes a point in any competition where the only way for anyone to gain anything is for all parties to stop competing and start working together. That’s the start of a whole other post, but for now it will suffice to show that the “Libertarian” position of some Westerners just isn’t tenable. You listening, Review-Journal Editorial Board?
But that still begs the question of what it means to be free. The best explanation I’ve ever heard came from an Irish musician living in Denver. He wrote in an article in one of the Sunday papers there that being free means that you get to choose how you are going to contribute to society. I think that’s actually about it. You don’t have the option of not contributing, because society helps you every day in a great many ways. You can not walk down the street except that society has built the street. You can not pick up a letter except that society operates a postal service. In the West our forefathers were granted land, mineral rights, grazing rights and transportation by society, in the form of the (gasp) Federal government. I’ve posted earlier about the real nature of money. Well, it’s good will, of course, and therefore without good will you have no money. If you need money you need to do something for somebody else to get it. That’s what I mean by contributing, and if you are free, you can pick and choose any means you wish to deliver whatever it is you choose to deliver to the rest of us. You don’t have to be what your father was, or what your teachers say you should be, or what your preacher thinks you should be. You can be a butcher, candlestick maker, software designer, apple-pie baker, whatever you think will earn you a living. That, it seems to me, is what freedom is all about.
As for doing whatever you want whenever you want to do it, you’ll just have to ask us all if we think it’s okay. Sorry about that.

Labels: Politics, Social Commentary

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This is to serve notice that I am now a regular columnist for a site called "Living Las Vegas." The link to the staff page is in the title of this post, if you'd like to see my picture again as well as pictures of the other contributors. It is a site about living in the real Las Vegas, where we pay for those strip shows about as often as does the average single mother from Cleveland, and where there is, if you can believe it, a rather nice Western city waiting to be explored if you'd care to. Some recent posts have included a bit about the Pinball Museum (not a tourist attraction per se, just a local thing, although tourists are welcome to play a few games of course) plus reviews of local attractions. I am scheduled for the fourth Wednesday of the month. This month will be an article about running in Las Vegas. Later I'll do other topics that I hope are of interest. To the left, in my list of links, is a permanent link to Living Las Vegas. Check it out, you might be surprised at what you'll find!

Labels: Info

In amidst the clamor of the election season I hear a lot of opinions about which party is better for this and that. Such as who is really for state’s rights, and who is for the rights of individuals, and who is just a clone of the other, stuff like that.

Recently HBO ran a miniseries based upon the book John Adams. It didn’t really teach me anything about Mr. Adams amazing life and times that I didn’t already know, but it did serve to remind me about the origins of our “deep national division.” Such as it is. Mr. Adams was a reasonable man. So much so that, had he been in charge of setting up the country by himself two things would have happened. First, we would have been granted a government based upon the most reasonable principles of efficiency and utility, which would have truly served the needs of the new country with an unselfish and unbiased hand. Second, that first thing would never happen in the known universe, so we wouldn’t have a country at all. Adams was the figurehead, at the very beginning, of one side of our ongoing national debate.

There was a figurehead for the other side as well, of course. That was Mr. Jefferson of Virginia, a walking contradiction of whom better writers have gone on at length. The important thing is that, had Jefferson set up the country by himself we’d have been blessed with, at most, a loose confederation that would have been unable to do anything for anyone, ultimately failing as a national government. Some still see this sort of outcome as a good thing. However, unlike Mr. Adam’s plan, they tried this one, and all it led to is what we have. However, I’m not here to argue today. I’m here to look back. At the very beginning, at the Constitutional Convention, we had backers of Adams and backers of Jefferson hashing out the document that serves as the basis for our country today. These people were, for the most part, pragmatic and able to swallow the portions of the constitution that obviously offended them for the sake of the nation as a whole. For the record, in my humble opinion, a dose of that sort of pragmatism would do us all good today. However, as usual, I digress.

The second President of the United States was Mr. Adams. He was known as a Federalist, because he advocated a strong Federal government with such powers as a national currency, a standing army, and as much constitutional authority as he could manage to take from the various States. Mr. Jefferson’s party was, perforce, the Anti-Federalists. The Anti-Federalists believed in power rising up from the bottom, with what Jefferson called “The People” as the supreme source of power. Power should be pushed as close to “The People” as practicable for a given purpose according to Jefferson's party.

Adams may have done better if he’d been more personable, but he lost his re-election bid to Jefferson, and Jefferson’s party, now called the “Republicans” because they advocated a republican form of government as opposed to the supposed “monarchist” aims of the Federalists. The Federalists, for their part, were by now simply calling themselves “Whigs.” When Adam’s son John Quincy was elected to succeed Jefferson, he ran on the Whig platform. Perhaps in response to the Federalists changing their name, the Republicans changed their, also. They were now not merely content to be republican, but they wanted to emphasize the bottom-up nature of their platform, so they added a word and became “Democratic Republicans.” There’s a phrase to scare the anti-communist crowd, huh? “The Democratic Republic of the United States of America.” Yow! (I am not making this stuff up.)

The founders of the country were all gone by the time the Whig Party succumbed to a wave of idealism sweeping the nation in the first half of the nineteenth century. It was the time of Thoreau, Emerson, Dred Scott, the Missouri Compromise, and increasing divisiveness along the lines of Federalist vs Anti-Federalist, to take it back to its roots. The Whig Party was gone by the mid 1850s, replaced by the only third party ever to succeed in America, the Republicans. They could use that name because the Democratic Republicans had long since decided that even the term “republic” was a bit much, and settled on plain old Democrats. By 1856 the parties had familiar names: Democratic and Republican. Somehow the Republicans went on to become the “Grand Old Party,” although the Democratic Party is quite a bit older, but arguably not so grand.

When the Civil War came it was essentially a fight between the Jeffersonians and the Adamsians, if you will. That is, strong central government against diffused power. No secret which side won that war. The reasonable Adams was right about the efficiency and utility of a strong central government. And, since the Civil war, people no longer say “The United States Are,” but rather say “The United States Is.” That’s a significant change in verb case. Therefore, the Republican Party, the party of Lincoln as they like to say, was the dominant party in the country for a long time. The Democratic Party, especially in the South, was more than a tad bitter about the outcome of the war. The Democrats were, up until the 1960s at least, the party of State’s Rights, and, in the South, the party that tended to guard the institutions of post-bellum reality, like separate but equal schools, at all costs.

Then came Lyndon Johnson, a Texas man who wasn’t the most pleasant person to be with, by some accounts, but who managed to remake American politics all by himself. Or so it seemed. What he did was go against the wishes of the Democrats generally in pushing for the Federal Civil Rights Acts and subsequent legislation. Not that all Democrats believed in the segregationist movement, because most of them really didn’t, but they all did believe in limited central government, to which of course that act ran entirely counter. That act of Johnson, more than the Vietnam War, upset the American political process in a way that is still reverberating loudly today.

For one thing it allowed a group of self-styled “conservatives” to first infiltrate, then more or less take over, the leadership of the Republican Party. By mouthing what had been Democratic platitudes they managed to convince themselves and others apparently, that the Republicans were the party of limited government. They found, in my opinion, a perfect patsy in Reagan, who managed to sit the fence wonderfully while the real machinations went on in the background. Meanwhile, of course, I hear people who are surprised that the Republicans actually favor central government and big business. “Bush lied to us!” they scream. Really? No kidding? How about that? Bush may have mouthed untrue words, but he’s been true to his party’s historical roots, so where’s the surprise?

As for the Democrats, they need to find a new center. They have a big chance this year. The thing is, given the realities of our population and geographic size; it’s going to have to be “relatively” strong central government versus “relatively” dispersed power. In fact, some of that sort of back and forth dialogue has been going on lately, although no one has stated it just that way.

Given our history, though, the best thing we can do is look to Adams and Jefferson as models of how to get along through it all. As they said in letters exchanged after they were both out of office, nothing more really can be added to the debate. What’s important in the end is friendship and liberty, and of those two things we have a great deal in America, no matter who sits in the White House.

I just posted a second funny page for the year. It's sort of intellectual, so you've been warned. It's all about ancient history and stuff. Really high class. Honest.

Labels: Info

I realize that it's been out for a while, but the chatter about Windows Vista goes on. Just for the heck of it, I'm going to weigh in. Obama and Clinton are chugging on, I haven't left town in months (going this weekend, though), nothing new in the racing front. Why not, then, put in my $2 worth. (Two cents isn't worth the pressure to type it in any more.)

Vista was a rewrite, so I expected something different. I was disappointed. I have computers around the house, mostly because there's no market for used ones so I find some purpose for them. One or two of them have Windows 2000 installed, which was the most stable OS I've ever used that had a Graphic User Interface (GUI). Yes, I include the MAC series, because up until about nine months after W2K came out, they used the old cooperative multitasking model, which if you've ever lived with Windows 95 for a while, you know can drive you crzay. Most of them have Windows XP Pro, which works fine. One of them, a new tiny toy my wife got for free somewhere, has Vista. I've also used Vista on other computers I've set up, for a daughter as well as a couple of other people.

But, to go for the worst first, even though I once commented on Apple in a bit of a mocking way, including the observation that their ads are not entirely honest all the time, they got one thing right. That would be the annoying way that Vista asks you if you really, really, really want to do, well, almost anything. In fact, the Apple ad, which I'll say right out is funny as heck, as are most of them, is way short of reality. The reality is enough to make you want to flush your new computer down the toilet. Luckily, what Apple fails to reveal is that if you right-click on the balloon that pops up with the annoying message, you're given the option of turning the feature completely off. If you get a machine with Vista on it, you'll be happier if you do that first thing.

Other than that I only see one real problem with Windows Vista. It is a really lovely interface, with default stuff like a clock and news on the desktop (sounds familiar to Mac users, I'm sure,) but there isn't anything it does for you that XP doesn't do, particularly if you're a business uesr. For strictly home use, I suppose it has it's advantages. It's mindlessly easy, for one thing , and it really is a lot more secure than any other version of Windows. Of course, most computer borne trouble these days is sent via e-mail and aimed at your bank account, not at your hardware, but that's a different story entirely. In short, to end the digressions, the trouble with Vista is that there's no compelling reason to buy it. I'd be okay if it came on my new computer, but I wouldn't go to the trouble and expense of actually getting it and installing it on a machine that was already working.

The other complaint I've heard, compatibility, has I believe been pretty well fixed by Microsoft by now. Certainly I've had no problem using my six year old printers or any other equipment.

So, to sum, Vista is okay, very pretty, tremendously frustrating until you shut off that damned security question feature, and not worth the trouble to obtain. Stick with XP. I'm betting Microsoft will be, too, at least for a while.

Labels: Reviews

I just returned from seeing Ka at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas. That's the corner of Tropicana, if you know the area. It's big, it's green, it's the MGM. This wasn't the first Cirque du Soleil show I've seen. Let me assure you that there is no shortage of Mongolian acrobats along the famous Strip. It may not even be the best one I've seen, which just may still be Mystere, but it was pretty good. It even has a pretense of a plot

Pretense is the right word, too. The resolution is pretty damned easy for good drama, but there is a story line for those who care to follow it. There is also what may be the prettiest pas de deux I've ever witnessed, as among other things they didn't bother respecting gravity when they designed it. I would have been happy enough if I'd paid for the show, though, so I'm able to recommend it to anyone visiting Vegas with ninety minutes they'd like to fill with some top-notch entertainment. (I won the tickets in a radio station contest.) The story? A couple of Imperial twins, boy and a girl, get separated when the bad guys invade the kingdom. After some travails, they are reunited and defeat the baddies. Much fabulous acrobatic skill is displayed along the way.

Speaking of Cirque, I learned from a reliable source where the name "O" comes from. It seems that it's a water show, and Cirque being French Canadian they used the word for water, eau. Apparently they thought us Yankee hicks would pronounce it wrong. Hard to mess up the spelling they used, isn't it?

Labels: Info, Reviews