Annie - Musical at Keller

Annie The Musical | Official Trailer (2017)
London Theatre Direct

I can't say as I enjoyed the show. Most of the singing grated on my ears. However I can't tell you whether it was the singing, the sound system or my ears. It sounded like it was being overdriven. Or maybe I am just used to the sound that comes out of my Blue Tooth speaker and live music is just different. Whatever, the kids were just horrible, most of the rest just blared. Daddy Warbucks and his personal assistant were much better, they actually sounded like music.

But it's a curious show. It's set in 1933 right in the depths of the depression. We have half a dozen Hoovervilles in New York City. Things are pretty grim. Annie is living in an orphanage with half a dozen other little girls and she suddenly gets plucked out of her miserable existence and deposited in a royal palace. It's a ridiculous fantasy but it gives us an opportunity to examine poverty and wealth.

The 'aww' exclamation from nearly everyone in the audience when the dog appeared on stage was surprising. It was also a bit puzzling. Hasn't anyone ever seen a dog before?

Complete Little Orphan Annie Volume 15

The show is based on the comic strip Little Orphan Annie. I used to read it when I was a kid. I couldn't tell you what it was about, but I do know most of the principle characters:

• Annie
• Sandy, her dog
• Daddy Warbucks, super wealthy industrialist
• Punjab, a mysterious dude from India
• Asp, another mysterious dude.

Punjab and Asp are mysterious because all I recollect is that they were characters in the strip. I know nothing else about them. I used the picture from Amazon because it was the only one that had all the characters in it. I don't know who the chick is.

The Wikipedia article is enlightening and entertaining. Among other things, Harold Gray, the creator of the strip, hated FDR and his policies. I've heard some criticism of FDR's policies, but he was in charge and that's what we got. It's not enough to have a better idea, you need to convince the people in power that your idea is better. The convincing part can be a hard row to hoe. In the show Warbucks and FDR were at least cordial.

The blurb from the Amazon book paints a pretty good picture:

A chronological reprinting of one of the most important comic strips of the 20th Century. Annie is a cultural icon--in both her red-headed, blank-eyed appearance, and as the embodiment of American individuality, spunk, and self-reliance. Even those who've never read the comic strip are keenly aware of the plucky orphan, her loveable mutt Sandy, and her adoptive benefactor, Oliver "Daddy" Warbucks, through the Broadway play, the hit movie, and the song "Tomorrow," made famous by both.

It's "Open Season for Trouble" as America's spunkiest kid, "Daddy" Warbucks, and his bodyguards Punjab and The Asp battle wily Communist spies, search for a potentially game-changing mineral known as QX-7, contend with small-town cheats, and make a frightful discovery about disappearing patients at a shady rest home. The action ranges from the played-out mining town of Fiasco, where "Daddy" made his first million, to the land of the genii, where Punjab dispatches his enemies. Meanwhile, Annie and Sandy are separated, but their inevitable reunion may be a silver lining inside a very dark cloud! Volume 15 collects the daily strips and full-color Sunday pages from March 13, 1950 to October 28, 1951 in five vivid stories filled with mayhem and murder. It's not for the faint of heart!

 

FDR on Communism

FDR

 "Only at the end of September, at the New York state Democratic convention in Syracuse, did Roosevelt formally open his pursuit of re-election. He called communism the campaign's red herring, pointing to his long record of public service as evidence of his devotion to he American form of government. Noting that communism thrived on widespread economic maladjustment, he blamed Republican mismanagement for the economic disasters of 1929-1933. "Conditions congenial to communism were being bred and fostered throughout this nation up to the very day of March 4, 1933," the president said. "Discontent and fear were spreading throughout the country. The previous national administration, bewildered, did nothing." The rest of the Syracuse speech prefigured his campaign theme: the Republicans had caused the Depression and brought misery and danger to the nation, and he, his party, and the New Deal had come to the rescue. Roosevelt never mentioned communism again that fall. - Landslide, American History magazine, August 2016

FDR was inaugurated on March 4, 1933. Doesn't sound like much has changed.

Return of the Sun God

After Priggery – What? (On Wicked Journalists) by C.S. Lewis Doodle
Interesting. The problem here and now is that the entire information industry seems to have been infected with an agenda of some sort. Most do not rise to the level of Cleon, but the general, overall tone of many web sites and print media has a decided slant, and this slant, if you are not well versed in the subject, can be hard to detect. There is something wrong with our society. I am not quite sure what it is, but the pervasiveness of bullshit is just one symptom, and the election of Trump is a reaction to that symptom.  What we need is a new sun god, along the lines of Amenhotep, or FDR, though I suspect FDR has achieved his near mythological status by having a war with the devil himself and defeating him.

I originally wrote this as a comment on Monday Evening, but because I had managed to string more that half a dozen words together, I thought it worth posting here as well.

And yes, I know that Amenhotep is not the sun god Ra, but viewed from a distance of 4,000 years, you will excuse me if I don't care.

Sectarian Strife

Musk vs. Trump

Once a big organization achieves some success, there are going to be conflicting factions. I don't know what they are arguing about and I don't want to know. I am willing to wait and see how this all plays out. I like the idea that they are cutting waste and fraud, but as I understand it, even though waste and fraud amounts to zillions of dollars, it is a miniscule portion of the federal budget. If we are ever going to rein in inflation, the budget will need to be cut, but that is going to be very tough to accomplish. There are too many powerful people with their noses in the trough, and they are not going to like being put on an allowance.

When FDR led us to victory in World War 2, he set the stage for the phenomenal economic boom of the 1950s. Never mind the details, the big picture is what I'm thinking about. FDR and his propaganda machine fostered a belief in the minds of many people that we were doing the right thing by going to war and spending zillions of dollars on building weapons of war. Basically, he built a religion.

But by the 1960s, people began to see that there were problems in paradise. So for the next 40 odd years we kind of staggered along, sort of fighting wars and trying various programs to try and fix the problems at home. Then Barack Obama came along and he sold the people a new religion. The upshot of this new religion is that it enriched his loyal supporters instead of the Military-Industrial complex. The thing about just giving money to your friends instead of actually buying stuff, is that different groups of people get the money. Your friends are going to either spend it on parties and useless junk, or invest it in the stock market, which might be why the stock market keeps going up. When you buy stuff, the company that makes it hires people, so the money gets spread around more and isn't so concentrated.

The Age of Conspiracy

Pyramids

This post on PJ Media is so great I just had to steal the whole thing.

The Age of Conspiracy by Richard Fernandez

Perhaps the reason there are so many “conspiracy theories” is because individuals are seeking to explain phenomena that they find difficult to understand or accept. The tide of homelessness, the perceived betrayal of the institutions etc. are like Egyptian pyramids risen suddenly on the plain. Conspiracy requires two essential ingredients to exist: mystery and mistrust. If you see a familiar kind of deer in the woods it doesn’t set your mind churning. But if you see something you never saw before — or didn’t even think possible — when no existing theory of causation seems to fit, then you get to thinking up new ones.

Mistrust has been rising for a long time. A UN study found that “In the United States, trust in the national government has declined from 73 per cent in 1958 to 24 per cent in 2021. Western Europe has seen a similar steady decline in public trust since the 1970s. However current European levels of trust are not as low as in the United States.” Social mistrust is often correlated with hard times. Economic decline reduces confidence in institutions; lower confidence reduces the public’s participation in those very same institutions and the downward spiral continues. Once mistrust starts, it keeps going.

It’s fair to say that the “conspiracy theories” go both ways. Many Democrats think Republicans are working for the Russians. And didn’t you know?

• Nixon: Sabotaged the Vietnam War peace talks to win in 1968.
• Reagan: Encouraged Iran to hold on to US hostages to win in 1980.
• Trump: Aided and abetted Putin’s covert attack on the US election to win in 2016.

This kind of thinking is understandable for exactly the same reasons of mystery and mistrust. The Democrats remember the good old days of FDR’s fireside chats, or the times when Walter Cronkite could say something and everyone would believe him. The present mistrust of the media, in this context, fills them with incredulity. To progressives, seeing Donald Trump in the Oval Office is like seeing a bipedal cryptid, nine feet tall and crowned with horns, in the woodlot behind your house. None of the regular explanations fit; they had to make up a new one. It must be the Nazis. It must be the Russians.

It must be the Other. Both sides are now bristling with extreme explanations.

But in a manner of speaking the rise of conspiracies mean that the current paradigm is now inadequate, because the Internet and social media explosion has created observables that can’t be explained away in the old manner any more. Just as the invention of telescopes revealed moons orbiting other planets,  what were once far-fetched ideas have to be incorporated into a new political orthodoxy, to reconcile them with the facts. They will eventually be resolved.

Going forward there are likely to be three kinds of conspiracies history must deal with: 1) the cons, 2) the heresies that turn out to be wrong and 3) the heresies that turn out to be right. The way to spot the “cons” is to follow the money. From this point of view it is actually climate change ironically that looks most vulnerable. Heresies that turn out to be wrong tend to get empirically weaker over time, while heresies that are ultimately right become gradually more accepted. The lab leak Covid origin theory may prove an example of a conspiracy that eventually proves true.

What used to be called “conspiracy theories” now characterize the way left/right, democrat/republican sides routinely regard each other. What’s worrisome is that both sides have hung up the phone. In a sense nobody cares about fixing the model any more, just getting even. And in the silence each side is thinking: “I tried, really tried to be reasonable. Gave you the chance to say sorry and you didn’t. Was even willing to include some of your points in the plan. I really tried. What happens next is your effin fault. Die MF. Die.”

Obamacare

Jack  Says: If memory serves employers offering healthcare came out as a response to FDR’s wartime price controls. As it was a way to attract people / incentivize them. In the abstract having your employer be your agent on finding a 3rd party medical payment plan is very strange. We don’t get our car insurance or our home loans through our employers…

From a comment found on Say Uncle, via View From The Porch.

Weak

I'm a funny kind of guy. Sometimes I am mentally energized can delve into fascinating subjects, other times I am reduced to listening to classic rock and playing solitaire.

Skimming the blog postings that show up on Feedly, I came across a couple that on a more energized day I might pursue, but today we're lucky to have some links.

RobertaX writes about the growing political divide in science-fiction fandom and mentions that Heinlein (Robert A.) worked on EPIC (End Poverty in California), Upton Sinclair's plan to socialize California during the great depression. Some people think his program served as a template for FDR's New Deal programs.

The Relative Size Of Particles
Click to Embiggenate

Bayou Renaissance Man Peter tells us about problems with African dust in BMW cars and M-16 rifles. Wikipedia has an article about dust. The stuff can get get really small. Sand particles are larger than dust. Watching Matt's Off Road Recovery videos, I learned that a little ground moisture can be the difference between getting your car's wheels buried and driving right over it. Also, it doesn't take much rain to turn some clay surfaces into skating rinks. Clay particles are smaller than sand particles. Clay particles may even be considered dust.

The Silicon Greybeard considers the unemployment conundrum. The signs are very clear that we are headed for some kind of economic catastrophe. Why can't I see what's going to happen? We have a growing homeless population, employers are having a hard time finding workers, the rent moratoriums might end. Some simple things are obvious. Prices are going up. Employers can solve their worker shortage by raising wages, but that means prices will go up even more. They will have to be careful though, raising prices will necessarily cut sales. Cut sales too much and you go out of business. Might be better to limp along with the workers you have and demand for your product exceeding your ability to produce. If the rent moratoriums end, lots of people are going to be out on the street, but that will mean lots of empty apartments and commercial buildings, which will mean lower rents. Not ending the rent moratoriums means those landlords who are carrying mortgages are going to lose their properties, but who will buy them if they can't collect any rent? You can bet that there is some serious pushing and shoving going on.

Language Log writes about people crying about certain words. Effing morons. At the end he quotes from a story in The Atlantic:

But these sanctions are based on no general agreement among even sensitive, sociologically concerned people. Couched as compassionate counsel, this list is mostly a series of prim concoctions by people who, one suspects, simply need more to do. In the end, working to change conditions is much more important than obsessively curating the words and expressions we use to describe them.

 Right on, dude!

When the Allies settled in Berlin (1945)

When the Allies settled in Berlin (1945)
CHRONOS-MEDIA History

Just a curiosity that caught my eye. Just after the one minute mark there are couple of images of FDR, Stalin and Churchill. I wonder if the pictures of Stalin are still there.

National Kaiser Wilhelm Monument

I am pretty sure that the National Kaiser Wilhelm Monument appears briefly (3:35-4:08). It was erected in 1897 and demolished by the communists in 1950. Must have been in East Berlin. There might be a lesson here for all those morons running around screaming that all the old statues must be torn down. Well, there might be a lesson here, but I doubt those shitheads could comprehend it, much less learn anything.

Monuments are built for a reason, but that reason may not survive. But the fact that the monument was built can be a lesson for succeeding generations, if they are willing to think. Yeah, I know, thinking is passe. Screaming is what's happening now.

Timeline from the YouTube blurb:

  0:00 Driving on the German Autobahn in direction to Berlin

  0:50 Entering the US Berlin District

  1:00 Picture of Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill

  1:15 Soviet soldiers marching, probably on Straße des 17. Juni in direction of the Siegessäule

  2:40 German refugees pulling carriage

  2:56 Trümmerfrauen "rubble women" at work

  3:25 destroyed Berliner Dom (Cathedral)

  4:15 US military visiting the Neue Reichskanzlei

  5:40 Berliner U-Bahn

  5:56 Olympia Stadion (olympic stadion)

  6:59 Olympic swimming pool

  8:11 American Beach Club / Amerikanisches Strandbad

  8:52 Trümmerfrauen "rubble women" at work

  9:34 Galopprennbahn Hoppegarten

10:11 Strandbad Wannsee

13:37 US military playing golf

The Problem

I suspect there is something wrong with society, but I am not quite sure what it is, much less what caused it. Say you identify the problem, you know what the problem is. Say it's taxes, or immigration, or too many people with hair. If that's the problem, why hasn't society already fixed it? Why is that? If this thing you have identified is the source of the problem, surely everyone else would realize it too and we would put someone on to fixing it and it would get fixed. Surprise, surprise, it doesn't seem to actually work that way.

So we back up a step. The problem isn't whatever is wrong, it's that not enough people (or not enough of the right people) know about the problem. So what we have here is failure to communicate. (Previous posts on that subject here). 

But we have many means of communicating (all the old methods, like talking, letters, telephones, newspapers and television, and all the new methods, like computers, internet, smartphones). Here the problem is not the mere transmission of information, but reception, processing and analysis. You can jabber all you want, but if nobody is taking it in, it doesn't mean a thing. This is how people get followings, they say stuff that connects with some people.

Now if you want to change things, if you think you have a solution to the problem of what's wrong with our society, you need to get those people who have followers on your side. And when you are talking to a bunch of people with diverse world views, you need a message that has very broad appeal. And that's where we get political parties.

We are getting a lot of noise about all kinds of problems with our society, loss of freedom, the homeless, rising levels of crime and drug addiction. I suspect the noise we're hearing wouldn't be quite so strident or offensive if the economy was doing better. I mean, even if the economy was going great guns, we would still be hearing noise about 'problems with society'. That's like a feature, not a bug. Anyway, the 'noise' wouldn't be so shrill.

There is an opportunity here for someone to step up and offer a solution that will band the disaffected together. It could be another Hitler or FDR. Or maybe that's how we got Biden. Problem is that I don't think Biden or the democrats have a solution. They are all part of the 'I'm gonna get mine, I don't care about anybody else' clan. As long as there is something in it for them, they'll vote for it.

None of the entrenched powers are going to give up anything. They are all banking on having a zillion dollars socked away in some investment, like real estate or the stock market. If you want to sell them on something, it can't cost them anything. It would be better it if paid them something, then you might actually get some votes. So that's what Biden is doing. He's sending out a zillion dollars into America. Some of it might actually get to working people, some of it might go to 'the poor', but you can bet the bulk of it will end up in some fat cats pocket where he will invest it in something solid. This, of course, will drive up the price of the those investments. The increase in price looks good on paper, but it is essentially meaningless. The investment still has the same real value, it's just that the value of the dollar has gone down. Some investments do increase in real value, but do not confuse the price with the real value.

So when the dollar goes down in value, all those people with a solid chunk socked away (a million dollars might be enough today) are going to be okay because they have a solid base to stand on. All those people who haven't acquired a base are going to be in worse shape. Wage increases have not kept up with inflation, so every time the government prints another trillion dollars that it doesn't have, inflation goes up, the value of the dollar goes down, wages don't keep up, and the cost of a solid base to stand on gets even farther out of reach.

But while more people are getting crushed, more people are also finding a place to stand:

The most interesting part of the 2015 Pew report, though, was its finding that the middle class is shrinking not only because more people are poor but also because more people are rich. The percentage of lowest-income earners—those earning less than two-thirds of the median income—had grown four percentage points, from 16% to 20% of the population. Over that same period, though, the percentage of Americans in the very highest-income households also rose by five points since 1971, taking that group from 4% to 9% of the population. - Investopedia

Will things ever get so bad that a majority of the people will realize things have got to change? Maybe, maybe not. As long as the majority of voters think things are okay, nothing is going to change, and being as people who are invested in the system are doing okay, they are not going to vote for change. Those who are being crushed are not going to find a lot of sympathy. Oh, there will be people making sympathetic noises, but no one is going to risk upsetting their personal applecart for those without applecarts.

There is a slim chance that someone will come up with an idea that would somehow improve the lot of the poor while not having a negative impact on the rich. Ideally, that idea would make the rich even richer, because who doesn't want to have a fatter cushion to sit on? I don't know, but Amazon might be one such idea. Amazon put a lot of people to work. Of course, they also destroyed a lot of retail jobs, but they definitely increased the demand for delivery drivers. These jobs don't pay much, but for some people it's better than nothing. Or maybe it's not. Maybe it's just another step on the road to oblivion.

---

I don't know about retail work. From what I hear it's just as rough as the restaurant business. Long hours, low pay, but every now and then you latch onto something that's going great guns and that makes you think it's actually worth it. The part that bugs me though is the waiting. You've got waiters waiting in restaurants, and you've got clerks waiting behind counters, waiting for a customer to show up, a customer who typically doesn't want to spend any money and will eat up your time just because they don't have anything better to do. I might be able to that now, now that I have more patience, but I certainly couldn't do it when I was younger, like as recently as last year. I have to be doing something, my mind has to be engaged, even if it is doing something like playing solitaire. I hate waiting. Anyone who has a job that involves spending long hours waiting has my sympathy and admiration.

War

Korean War Refugee with Baby

Iaman sent out a video about war profiteering to our clan of troglodytes. I wasn't impressed with the video. California Bob had a couple of things to say that are worth repeating:

 I caught about a half hour of a WWII documentary last night.  Couple notes: 

1. Lots of boomers talk about the sense of unity and duty that Americans felt during WWII, common purpose, etc.  In fact most Americans were bitterly opposed to involvement all the way up to Pearl harbor.  FDR has to frequently skirt the legislature, supreme court and public to implement lend-lease, start building an army, etc. 

2. Current references to Islamist radicals as "an existential threat" are patently absurd compared to WWII.  How can we feel like we're fighting for our lives when we haven't seen so much as a sugar ration, let alone wholesale re-engineering of the economy and society as seen during the 40's? 

(Nevertheless, I am fully in support of wiping out Islamist radicals.) 

For every hawk that demonizes the adversary, there's a rational humanist arguing for restraint and understanding.  Human emotions are easily stoked, and often the call for "action" wins out over "restraint" or "understanding."  I mean, this is axiomatic. 

Consider that maybe the causality is reversed.  Rather than a handful of conspirators plotting a war, and tricking people into supporting it, as a means of gathering war profits, consider perhaps that random events occur which stoke an ignorant and impulsive populace to call for war ("Remember the Maine!").  This creates opportunities for journalists and arms dealers, who naturally take advantage of them. 

Everyone knows and agrees that "war is bad," and has know and agreed on this throughout 10,000 years of modern human history, yet war has been a constant feature of history over that period, continuing into today. 

I think conspiracy theories about "who starts wars" are pointless.  You have to feel sorry for the schmucks who get drafted and sent into battle, but there's never a shortage of people to feel sorry for.  It's a full time job. 

If one feels strongly enough about it, one can join an anti-war movement.  Personally I like to try to be aware of what's going on and try to avoid getting caught up in any trouble. 

Considering that it's a regular feature of the human experience, maybe war is natural.  I mean, it's hard to say that "People have always engaged in this activity, regularly and repeatedly for thousands of years, and it's completely abnormal and unnatural."  Perhaps war serves some cleansing or cathartic purpose on a macro level.  Macro levels don't care about individuals.

Doom & Gloom

Dollar Value

Inflation is our enemy. Inflation crushes us all. The stock market goes up by leaps and bounds, but all this apparent gain is an illusion. The value of a pound of steel or wheat or oil has the same value it had yesterday, it's just that the dollars you are using to try and buy that stuff are worth less. The increase in the number of people not working is because companies are trying to survive in trying times. They are doing everything they can to cut costs, and workers are often the biggest expense. If they can't find a way to do more with fewer people, they are going to find themselves going down in flames because other businesses will find a way to cut costs.

Inflation is entirely due to our goddamn government, especially congress. They vote to spend more money than they raise through taxes, so we have more money flowing into the economy, but that just makes every dollar worth a little bit less.

Okay, none of this is new, this has been going on for decades. I don't know when it started, maybe when FDR became President, maybe WW2, maybe when Nixon let gold float. I dunno. Is it going to change? I don't see any signs of improvement, though maybe we are not sliding toward the abyss quite as fast as we were last year.

The part that bugs me the most about inflation is that it is impossible to tell what a good price is. Inflation has become so ingrained that nobody is surprised when things cost more, or at least you shouldn't be. It's still annoying though.

We have numerous propaganda campaigns currently running in this country, shaping the opinions of the great mass of people. Maybe what we need is a propaganda campaign aimed at Congress telling them to quit spending so much money. Since you are only talking about an audience of 500 or so people, it shouldn't be that expensive. Any right thinking billionaire should be able to finance it. 

Most Congress critters are more concerned about getting re-elected than stopping inflation, so a targeted anti-inflation campaign is going to have a tough row to hoe. We also need a campaign to target the voters. That one is going to be considerably more expensive, and is going to be even harder to sell because no one wants their favorite government program cut. In a country of morons, we are all doomed.

Soong Mei-Ling

1943 Soong May-ling in White House Oval Office gave a press conference.

The clue for today's Jumble is "Eric Gugler’s 1933 Oval Office redesign was underway and things were —". Seems the oval office was an FDR thing. Here I thought it had been there forever. I go looking for pictures and I am not finding much, and then I trip over this one. Since China seems to be feeling their oats, building all kinds of infrastructure all over the 3rd world, stomping on personal freedom in Hong Kong, and pushing everyone else out of the South China Sea, this photo makes me think it might be time to pause and reflect on how we got here. It wasn't pretty. 

Soong May-ling has appeared here before, though she spelled her last name Mei-ling then.

Meta State of the Union

State of the Union 2016
Digital Colorization by Ben Park; By Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images.

From Left Business Observer's Doug Henwood:

Back in 2013, I old-fartishly complained about the declining complexity of State of the Union Addresses:
Obama is a highly literate and thoughtful guy, yet this speech adhered to the depressingly low standards of American public discourse. It was written at a 10th grade level, slightly below the 11th grade level of his 2009 speech, and even more below the 12th grade level of Clinton’s 1993 state of the union. At least it was above George W’s 9th grade level speech in 2001. (See here for the texts of all State of the Union addresses; see here for the grade level analyzer.) Remember, 87% of Americans over the age of 25 have a high school diploma or more, and over 30% have college degrees (Census source), so the president isn’t addressing a nation of dropouts.
How we’ve come down in our expectations. As recently as 1961, when only 41% of Americans had completed high school, John F. Kennedy’s address was at a reading level associated with a year of college. Back in 1934, a time when fewer than 20% had completed high school, FDR’s first state of the union was at a level associated with three years of college. In 1861, when 20% of the population was illiterate, Lincoln’s first State of the Union (which admittedly was written and not spoken) was composed at a level comparable to a college graduate’s.
And what about Obama’s last night? Down to a 9th-grade level (9.4 to be exact)—back to W territory. God bless America.

The other Chuck kibitzes:

"having" a high school diploma isn't quite the same as earning one.   Just because they own it, doesn't mean they earned it.
Smart people already know he's smart.  Why wouldn't he want to make an appeal to 100% of americans instead of 87%?  The government doesn't revoke your voter registration if you're in the 13% with no diploma.
Makes perfect sense to me.

Just for grins I pulled up the grade level analyzer and loaded it with last night's speech, and this is what it gave me:

Number of characters (without spaces) :	28,210.00
Number of words :	6,180.00
Number of sentences :	453.00
Average number of characters per word :	4.56
Average number of syllables per word :	1.52
Average number of words per sentence:	13.64

Indication of the number of years of formal education that a person requires in order to easily understand the text on the first reading
Gunning Fog index :	9.66

Approximate representation of the U.S. grade level needed to comprehend the text:
Coleman Liau index :	8.89
Flesch Kincaid Grade level :	7.68
ARI (Automated Readability Index) :	6.89
SMOG :	10.11

Flesch Reading Ease :

64.31

Grade level I can understand. Flesch Reading Ease means nothing to me.

The American Presidency Project has a few things to say about the State of the Union Address. They start off like this:

State of the Union Messages to the Congress are mandated by Article II, Section 3 of the United States Constitution: "He shall from time to time give to the Congress information of the state of the union, and recommend to their consideration such measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient;" 

That's just the beginning. It's an interesting read.

As for Obama's speech, I didn't listen to it, I didn't read it, and I don't think it's going to have any significant effect on anyone except perhaps newscasters and pundits.

Via Indiana Thomas