What do you think is going to happen when, in a few months, consumer prices haven’t fallen? Answer: Fox News and the MAGA crowd will drop the topic like a hot rock, and pretend that Trump never promised to lower the prices of gasoline, eggs, etc.
America’s political sensibilities are moving to the right, along with many other countries like Hungary, Turkey, Italy, Slovakia, Croatia and the Czech Republic, and that’s sad, but it’s a choice that the people of the United States are free to make.
My problem isn’t so much that we’re surrounded by a growing number of poorly educated racists, but that, in addition to the “contemptible fools,” to quote Elon Musk, or the “deplorables,” to quote Hillary Clinton, we live among a much smaller group of billionaires who couldn’t care less about the well-being of the common American, much less the environment, and who are dominating public policy in Washington.
Worst of all, Donald Trump, a convicted felon, adjudicated sex abuser, and indicted traitor to his country, is at the heart of this transition. I think many people, myself included, would be better equipped to deal with this if a criminal sociopath weren’t at the movement’s very core.
Marc Andreessen, who’s been at the forefront of the tech industry since the dawn of the Internet 30 years ago, donated $4.5 million to Trump’s 2024 campaign, and in the video below he explains why.
What we need to learn from the content of the meme here is that the majority of American voters simply don’t care that their leader is a convicted felon, and that he committed treason against our country.
Many of us oldsters remember a time when this would have been unthinkable.
Most decent people support this. But guess what? Overall, in the United States right now, it’s a minority position.
At this point, we’re a nation dominated by greed and indifference to the well-being of others.
One thing we can observe about Aristotle’s writings from our modern standpoint is that we got a whole bunch of stuff wrong, and the quote at left is a good example.
In fact, this specific quote was parodied by someone in recent times (George Carlin?), who said “The idea of waging war for peace is like screwing for virginity.”
Private health insurance is a $1.7 trillion industry, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 6.08%. If you think the recipients of all this cash are going to step aside, just so Americans can enjoy the same benefits as the rest of the developed world, you’re out of your mind.
We may pretend we have compunction for our citizens, including our military veterans, dying of treatable diseases, but in the real world, we treat them with the same indifference as we do stray cats.
The position of many of today’s self-described “patriots” is offered at left. Apparently, the United States has reached a point at which we have to make a choice between:
a) being honest about our history and the mistakes we’ve made, and
b) teaching our kids to love their country.
Wisdom would suggest that lying to our kids is a bad idea, for the same reason that, as they say, honesty is the best policy. We’re rapidly becoming a nation of self-delusional lairs, and this is a truly terrible decision.
If you’re having trouble defining exactly what’s going wrong in the United States right now, you are to be forgiven. Yet, the words at left may be of service.
We seem to be having just the tiniest bit of trouble bringing the nation’s 45th President to justice, after he tried his heart out to overthrow our country’s government following his loss in the 2020 election, and his theft of thousands of highly classified documents.
The meme here came from a reader, whom I advise: If you have liars, haters, cheaters and disloyal people in your life, you don’t need prayers, and you don’t need a new year. You need a new life. Be brave. Seek it out.
At left is a good example of what I mean when I say, “It hasn’t been a good couple of hundred years for philosophers.”
In Locke’s day, the 18th Century, it was the province of philosophy to make statements that today are made by neuroscientists and epigeneticists. Moreover, we now know that what Locke said here is incorrect.
Similarly, until recently the subject of the cosmos and the building blocks of the universe was the purview of philosophers, metaphysicians in particular. Now, we turn to particle physicists for direction here.
