Someone told me the other day that he expects Trump to be impeached and convicted in the next few months. And it does appear that the president is losing the support of congressional Republicans, which stands to reason. Would you like to be remembered as a protector of a would-be dictator? Wouldn’t you at least want to be able to say that, at a certain point, you’d seen enough and stood up on behalf of the American people and the U.S. Constitution?
A reader notes: They should put that cocaine-pedaling Honduran president on one of those drug-running speed boats and send him back to Honduras with a detour to the coastline of Venezuela.
Does all this undermine his “drug war?”
Obviously. But his supporters will always invent a new narrative, as bolstered by the “news” channels that work around the clock to invent stories that make Trump look like America’s hero. Not sure what this one is going to be, but his supporters have a perfect track record in explaining away their hero’s criminality.
In preparation for my first book, “Renewable Energy – Facts and Fantasies,” I interviewed Ray Lane, then managing partner of Kleiner Perkins, one of the world’s great venture capital firms, who told me about his stance with his prospects, “You build the first one. I’ll invest in the next 20. Then we’ll take the thing public and use that cash to build the next 5000.”
I’m 99+% sure that the “first one” of these will never be built, i,e., installing these VAWTs at the base of functioning wind farms. The concept is asinine, as it defies the laws of fluid dynamics.
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This line from Kurt Vonnegut calls to mind what George Carlin said about the Earth’s expelling the human race. On two different occasions he used the following similes as to what the planet is doing:
Shaking us off, like a dog ridding itself of fleas, and
Evicting us, like a landlord getting rid of bad tenants.
When I ask people from foreign countries about their nation’s feelings on Trump, they commonly say, “We just feel sorry for you. We never thought this could happen in the United States.”
The words at left of the ancient Greek playwright Aristophanes on the subject of demagoguery tell the story here: “ignoramus and rogue.”
The website A Word a Day features “A Thought for Today,” normally from a notable author born on this date.
Here’s one from writer Ann Patchett (pictured), born 2 Dec 1963: The question is whether or not you choose to disturb the world around you, or if you choose to let it go on as if you had never arrived.
Patchett uses the word “disturb” in the sense of interfering with the normal arrangement or functioning of something. And Lord knows there are plenty of things in the world around us that need to be disturbed.
To take the two most obvious examples:
If left to proceed in a business-as-usual manner, we’ll soon live on a planet that is greatly compromised in its ability to support life, and
we Americans will live in an authoritarian state.
I’d like to have a conversation with the product packaging guy who thought he needed to provide instructions as to the use of coffee stirrers.
I’m surprised to see so much chatter to the effect that Trump is losing his grip on reality. He doesn’t seem any worse today than he did when he retook office almost a year ago. Yes, he’s criminally insane, but that’s nothing new; his antics are identical to the Trump we’ve come to know:
• Takes actions (legal or blatantly illegal — it doesn’t seem to matter) that are calculated purely to build his personal wealth and power.
• Accuses others of committing the crimes that he himself has committed.
• Surrounds himself with loyalists in key governmental positions, regardless of how dangerously unqualified they are.
• Dismantles all aspects of government that provides value for the common American.
• Pardons convicted felons, regardless of how atrocious their crimes, if they’re supporters of him.
• Deploys economic policies that are universally deemed as folly by professional economists.
• Pressures the Justice Department to prosecute his enemies and political opponents.
Seems like business as usual.
When I was a boy, I believed that humanism would replace the theistic religions in a fairly short period of time, perhaps within my lifetime. I based this largely on the growing presence of science in our lives.
We now know, I reasoned, that thunder, disease, and the multiplicity of languages are not the result of God’s displeasure with us.
We’ve figured out that there are approximately 5.5 million species of insects alone, and that penguins did not live in the part of the known world in biblical times, making the story of Noah’s ark highly improbable.
To my dismay, none of this seems to have cut much ice.
My mom was an avid Fox News acolyte and Trump supporter, but our family didn’t “cut her off.”
We were both amazed and saddened that a Bryn Mawr graduate and voracious reader could have the same political sensibilities as the folks from Alabama, but no one took it any further.
