If you want to watch a video to learn what the ultra-right-wing Hillsdale “College” says about the decline of the American citizen, you’ll have to Google it, because I’m not going to link it.
We often discuss the World Happiness Rankings, and how the Scandinavian countries are consistently at the top.
It’s interesting, as I learned when I visited a customer’s home in Denmark, that kids don’t start school until they’re seven years old. Does this contribute to happiness?
As my friend told me, “The rat-race starts soon enough. Yes, the French and the Germans are ahead of us academically for a while, but by the time our kids are in high school, we’ve completely caught up. Why not let them be kids?”
Yet there must be some who admonish that children’s minds are like sponges, soaking up whatever’s in the vicinity. Would you rather it be cartoons or arithmetic/reading?
Also, there is the subject of socialization, which is why common wisdom would suggest that there is value in having four- and five-year-olds growing up surrounded by the peers.
I honestly don’t know.
What changed the world forever in 2016 and set Trump’s sociopathic criminality loose on this planet was Hillary Clinton’s flippant remark to the effect that Trump supporters were “deplorable” human beings (see below).
Guess what? Nobody wants to be told that they are wrong, stupid, or despicable. Most of us learned this somewhere along the line, and one would have hoped that her Wellesley College / Yale University education would have clued her into this important fact.
Human civilization would be in a completely different place today had she simply said, “I will be a president for all Americans, regardless of their wealth, physical and mental health, ideology, or level of education.”
In today’s United States, the only solution we allow is making rich people richer.
Things like climate change mitigation, affordable healthcare, dealing with hunger and poverty, and quality education are ignored, based on the false presumption that government can do nothing good.
I thought the meme was funny, and, like all forms of humor, it works because it’s at least partially based on truth.
Progressives actually do care about the wellbeing of others, and when it’s being denied, we’re not happy.
Does this impact our personal happiness? Maybe. But it’s far better than being a cold, cruel, selfish ass****.
. . . that appeals to hateful idiots.
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.”
