From this:
Federal judge calls out Trump for threats to judges and their families.
The photo here depicts a slice of life from 1905, before fire-fighting equipment had evolved into an early version of the trucks we have today. (To skeptics, of which I was one before I looked this up: both the source of water, the fire hydrant, and the modern battery to power the headlight were developed more than 100 years earlier.)
This is a reminder of how the last 120 years, due purely to improvements in technology, has made our lives safer, longer, healthier, more productive, and more convenient than they’ve ever been in the past. But, absent the improvement represented by developments in technology, many parts of our lives have gotten far worse.
In 1905, was it conceivable that today:
• The leader of one of our two political parties would be a criminal conman? Does any legitimate historian regard Teddy Roosevelt as a sociopath?
• The world’s #1 automaker, Volkswagen, which led #2 Toyota by over $32 billion in revenue as of June 2023, could have possibly decided, as a corporation, to rip off 11 million customers, and another 8 billion people on Earth who use their lungs to breathe, with its scheme to defraud emissions regulations?
• Wells Fargo, which was founded 41 years old before this bicycle was made, would be ordered to pay $3.7 billion in penalties and victims’ compensation for alleged illegal practices that caused thousands of the bank’s customers to lose their homes and vehicles?
We’ve made a trade, whether we want it or not, from moral decency to creature comfort and the gross abuse of the common American consumer.
All I can say about this personally, and I’m sure my thoughts are echoed by most of my peers who made their money in the late 20th Century, is that we were lucky to have lived and worked in a time in which business morality still meant something.
We’ve all heard the quote here attributed to everyone from philosophers to baseball coaches, but it’s a great piece of advice nonetheless.
It’s one of the reasons that I believe in the value of a liberal arts education. If you give a young person fours years to read great books, write clearly, and pose to himself the questions that have been on busying minds since the onset of humanity, you are very unlikely to be disappointed in the outcome.
At left are the words of the late British-American physicist Freeman Dyson, reminding us that science is always evolving in the direction of a better understanding of the universe around us.
The fact that we now have better vaccines against COVID-19 variants than we did in 2020 does not mean that epidemiology was worthless before these discoveries were made; on the contrary it represented humankind’s very best thinking on the subject.
In an earlier post I made the point that more than 90% of the January 6th insurrectionists who are serving prison sentences were sent away for assaulting police officers, but that Trump is referring to them as “hostages,” and promising to pardon them if he is elected.
So, in essence, the concept is: everyone who breaks the law deserves to be punished except for a) those who attack law enforcement personally at the direction of a former president, and b) the former president himself, who has complete immunity from criminal prosecution, regardless of the nature and severity of the crime he committed.
Does the word “hypocrisy” come to mind?
The cartoon here by Dan Piraro speaks nicely to that as well.
Trump’s approval rating is 42.5%, meaning that almost half of America’s parents are likely to put across a favorable image of the former president to their children in a homeschool setting.
Now, consider the other option: your kid is in school under the influence of a teacher who is paid by the government. Ick. Yes, we’re talking about a college-educated person with a teacher’s certification, perhaps even a master’s degree. Making matters worse, if your kid is young, that teacher is probably a female, the vast majority of whom care about women’s rights and resent the idea of being “grabbed by the pu**y.”
This whole environment, a classroom led by someone who is intelligent, well-read, law-abiding and compassionate, is lethal to Trump.
Might as well be serving the kid cyanide with his cookies.
Right now the mainstream media is making a fortune pretending that it seems like Trump and Biden are running approximately even, and that the people who recognize Trump as a sociopathic criminal should be terrified that he may be re-elected.
By the time November rolls around, however, it’s possible that some of Biden’s accomplishments re: healthcare, gun control, environmental responsibility, the economy, etc. may have leaked out, and, at the same time, Trump and his 91 felony counts may have disillusioned a great deal of his base.
As a result, the 45th president will get obliterated in the election.
Fortunately for the United States, not all Republicans stand with the Trump and the MAGA extremists.
Among the most visible outliers is Liz Cheney, who reminds us here that no sane human being supports someone who attacks police.
I responded to the reader who sent me the meme at left: Please forward the study from Spain.
I haven’t received a response, and I don’t expect to. That’s because this is 100% excrement.
Before responsible people share feces with billions of social media users, they should take a few honest steps to ensure their message has some merit. This, on the other hand, is pure doo-doo.
There are those who think that the Earth is flat and that climate change is a hoax; these are people who are a certain kind of “heads.”
Most Americans are searching for answers as to the popularity of Donald Trump among U.S. congresspeople. Virtually all our lawmakers are intelligent and highly educated; moreover they come from considerable wealth. So why are they so terrified of the prospect of withdrawing support of a criminal sociopath?
French/Algerian existentialist author Albert Camus has no definitive answer, though he has something important to say on the matter.
