The Good Place

I can't imagine jumping into "The Good Place" at this late date and making any sense out of it. We missed a couple of episodes after the pilot last year and became totally lost. Lucky for us, they ran some re-runs and got us caught up. It's just a silly sitcom, but what makes it interesting is you never know what they're going to do next. I don't suppose seeing what they do next would be effective if you don't know what they have done before. I missed tonight's episode because "Young Sheldon" is running in the same time slot on CBS. That's the new spinoff from "The Big Bang Theory" and we don't want to miss that, having been loyal Big Bangers since the series started over a decade ago. This weekend, I plan to go to the site that Old Dog recommended and see if I can watch the rest of "The Good Place" episodes, starting with the one I missed tonight.

I was wondering, just the other day, what ever became of Guantanamo. One of Obama's campaign promises was that he would close it down, and I think he really tried, but he couldn't get it past Congress. The biggest problem is what to do with the prisoners. They don't want to put them on trial, and they don't want to release them. I blame Bush II for the whole fiasco. This is not hind sight, I said so at the time. They should have been classified as either prisoners of war or common criminals. As criminals, they would had to have been tried long before this and, of course, they would have had the same rights as US criminal defendants. As prisoners of war, they could have been held until the war was over or exchanged for US prisoners that were being held by the bad guys. What would have been wrong with that? I seem to remember that Obama did exchange a few of them, but I don't know why he didn't exchange them all and be done with it.

I read a book once about how the Chinese were big on exploration and discovery long before Columbus sailed the ocean blue in fourteen hundred ninety two. The book turned out to be historical fiction, and I looked it up on Wiki to separate the historical part from the fictional part. While most historians doubt the author's claim that the Chinese made it to Western Europe and North America, they acknowledge that they did sail all up and down the Asian Pacific Coast, and possibly the African Coast as well. This is impressive, considering that their ships were all junks. If they could have replaced their fleet of junks with more reliable ships, who knows what they might have accomplished. You know what I think? I think they couldn't modernize their fleet because all the Chinese ship builders went bankrupt due to corporate mismanagement, and then squandered their government bailout money on executive bonuses. Like some famous guy once said, "Those who will not learn from history are condemned to repeat it."