Occasionally, a reader will tell me that I must have too much time on my hands, otherwise, I wouldn’t write blog posts on subjects that are fairly unimportant.
Ladies and gentlemen, let me introduce you to Nathan W. Pyle. Well played, sir!
The rapid decay in the Republican party’s moral fiber is one of the most shocking and disgusting phenomena in American history.
To put it another way, they refused to commit war crimes by participating in an illegal and immoral war.
At left is something that theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer said shortly before he was executed by the Third Reich for his protest against the fascist regime.
Most of us have had the thought he expressed here. We may be talking with an old friend who went to a prestigious college and showed when we were young considerable intelligence, who now, when it comes to world politics is now limited to the talking points of Newsmax and Fox News.
How did this happen?
Nobody knows, but, over the last couple of decades, this subject has caught the attention of neuroscientists who believe that liberals’ and conservatives’ brains are internally connected differently from each other.
As an example, tests show that the brain activity of self-identified liberals and conservatives are vastly different when experimental subjects are shown photographs of potentially threatening animals, like spiders and snakes. Those who think of themselves as conservatives have brain activity that show fear and hatred, while self-described liberals’ brains suggest that they perceive such animals as simply members of the planet on which we live.
Maybe no one is to blame; perhaps we just live in different worlds of consciousness.
Those hankering for a great read on this subject, albeit fiction, should check out Ian McEwan’s masterpiece “Saturday.”
At left is an interesting thought exercise. Here’s everything I can think of, and it’s not much. When I was in elementary school in the early 1960s, it was believed that:
The main types of rocks: sedimentary, metamorphic, and igneous, had been in place and remained the same since the formation of the earth. Now we have the “rock cycle,” where rock compounds are known to be continually changing form over very long periods of geologic time.
Every atom in our bodies and elsewhere on our planet is the result of the explosion of stars somewhere in the universe. As Neil DeGrasse Tyson puts it, “You are in the universe, and the universe is in you.”
The support for Alberta’s seceding from Canada is about 5%, according to a physician I know up there.
I know it’s hard to believe, but Fox News is a thoroughly dishonest organization.
The closest you’re going to come to a society that suits the human spirit, aka a utopia, is social democracy.
People work, but within reason; they don’t need two or more jobs to keep their heads above water. They get lengthy vacations and parental leaves.
They pay higher taxes, but they receive valuable benefits from the government, e.g., free education and healthcare.
Moreover, they have a sense of community, of taking care of one another. Perhaps the most soul-killing aspect of life in America is that so many of us are indifferent to the needs and suffering of others.
Not sure why Bono chose the word “casino” here.
“Fascist dictatorship” would have worked for me.
All dictators need organizations like ICE, i.e., 22,000 armed thugs that can be deployed to make life miserable in any city that does not support the autocrat.
Lebanon, New Hampshire saw more than 1300 protestors at its “No Kings” protest last Saturday.
This is remarkable, if only because a) the population of the town is only 14,000, and b) it’s located in the middle of a purple state, where Trump got 48% of the vote in 2024.
