Yes, Iowa is a State with very little going on. Not overly populated. Not a center of arts and culture and the avant garde. In fact, it is a State so literally boring that it is a perfect place for someone like me with cancer of the imagination to live. I grew up in the town of Rowan, Iowa. 275 people if you count the squirrels (and believe me, some of the squirrels are premium corn-nuts). I confess to peopling the place with the characters and creatures that welled up from the crazy, dark depths of my imagination. Yes, they were real people, but the things I knew about their secret lives as international spies and alien invaders masquerading as humans were probably not provably accurate.
There was a time when alien potato people gave me an embryo to guard that would be raised as a human being. When I showed it to my friends, they claimed it was a carved potato with spherical-headed pins for eyes. Now how were they going to pass off a carved potato as a human being when they wanted him to take his place as a Russian cosmonaut to interfere with the space programs of two countries? And how did they expect a twelve-year-old boy to make a carved potato grow up to look and act like a human being? Alien potato people never adequately explain themselves.
And Iowa girls are something else that you have to see to believe. Are they pretty? Well, I went to Moo-U, Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa. Why did they always call it Moo U. or Cow College? Well, more than one of my friends told me that it wasn’t because it was an agriculture and mechanics sort of college. Oh, it was definitely that. But they suggested all the girls at Moo U. were fat and desperate and at college to get an M.R.S. degree with a specialty in ball-and-chain. I must admit to being chased by a couple of cow-shaped co-eds, but I always found Iowa girls to be absolutely fascinating. I always imagined them in bikinis and nearly nude, even though, with Iowa weather, there is really only about fifteen minutes a year in August when you could really say we had bikini weather.
I was thirteen in 1969 when Neil Armstrong first stepped on the moon. My dreams were space fantasies. My connections with alien invaders were nearly exposed by the potato-people’s embryo snafu, but most of my day-dreams took me to Mars alongside Alicia Stewart, the prettiest girl in my sixth-grade classroom. She was always wearing a bikini when we explored Mars… usually underneath her space suit… her see-through glass-and-plastic space suit.
So, as I claimed in the the title, space-girls come from Iowa. At least, in my mind they do. In my feverish retro teen-aged imagination they do. And if I can continue to successfully put fiction into print before I die, you will probably see a lot more of them.
The Republicans have found another scandal to pursue. Two FBI personnel were texting each other messages about how stupid and incompetent Donald Trump is. (As well as why one of them may have voted for him since they hated Hillary too.) The one agent who was involved in the Mueller investigation of Trump was immediately removed from the investigation when evidence of the possibility of lack of impartiality surfaced. This happened long before the Republican Conspiracy Elephants sniffed out the detail to make a big stinky in the media about it. Now, apparently the FBI has become a secret society wrongfully plotting against Trump.
Catch a Falling Star 
Liars Run the Animal Farm
Napoleon the PIG.
Napoleon the Pig makes himself ruler of the Animal Farm in Orwell’s 1945 book by lying about Snowball, his rival Pig, and blaming the destructive acts of the former human Farmer Jones on poor Snowball. He is driven away from the farm by the farm dogs whom Napoleon has taught to think since they were puppies. This, even though Snowball was actually the hero of the animal rebellion that drove the humans away. Collusion? Perhaps. But definitely a lie. And the PIG Napoleon, once in power begins to keep all improvements to living conditions for the PIGs. Other animals, he says, are happier with a simpler, hard-working life. The PIGs begin to dress like men and walk upright and wear long red ties.
Keith Olbermann in the video is very much like Benjamin the Donkey, who is cynical and skeptical about Napoleon’s methods. He also reads as well as any Pig. When Boxer the workhorse is wounded defending the farm against neighboring farmers who attack and destroy the windmill, he shrugs off the the wound and works at rebuilding the windmill until he collapses. Then Napoleon declares Boxer will only get better if he’s taken to the vet’s animal hospital. But he calls the Knacker (the man who renders dead horses into glue) to take Boxer away. Benjamin calls him out. He points out that it says “Knacker” on the van that takes Boxer away, not “veterinarian”. He points out that Russian Facebook trolls used targeted troll-posts to help get Napoleon his position of power. But Napoleon gets away with his lies. Boxer apparently dies in the so-called animal hospital.
Now, I am not sure which tiny animal on the farm Robert Reich is like, but he is pointing out in this video that once the PIGS got themselves into power on the animal farm, they lie in order to get their agenda operating, enriching all PIGs (or is that GOPs?) and their political donors. They are doing it all by LYING. Pigs lie. We should have learned that lesson by now. They don’t care who dies and gets rendered into glue.
In 1945 Orwell intended Napoleon to be a satire of Joseph Stalin in communist Russia. But I truly believe, as we are living on the Animal Farm now as the hard-working farm animals, that he has a bad wig on his head with whippy straw-yellow hair, and a distinctly orange face, with the same little piggy eyes he always had. And he is in power because he tells lies. And what’s worse, he gets away with the lies. As long as the PIGs are in power, controlling both houses of congress and the Supreme Court, he will not lose his lying grip on the farm. We are all doomed to continue being hard-working animals who eventually get rendered into glue.
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Tagged as Animal Farm, George Orwell, GOP, lying, Napoleon, PIGs, Trump