Timothy David Snyder is an American author and historian specializing in the history of Central and Eastern Europe and the Holocaust. He is the Richard C. Levin Professor of History at Yale University and a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna.
He has nailed it.
It’s akin to George Carlin’s routine: Hydrogen bombs exchanged, Moscow and Washington in flames, and the Yankees beat the Dodgers, 4 – 2.
We’re hearing a lot about Trump’s dereliction of duty associated with his letting the insurrection continue for more than three hours before putting a stop to it. (See video linked above.) No doubt there is a case to be made here.
We all need to hope that the committee investigating January 6th comes up with something more substantial and that a few hours of poor decision-making isn’t the charge that takes Trump down.
Obviously, I’m sugar-coating what Trump did (didn’t do), but I don’t think we want to be in a position where all future presidents can go down for dereliction for simply failing to rise to some occasion or another over a short period of time.
Please don’t try to tell me there is no solid evidence of election tampering; I don’t believe it.
A reader notes: Donald Trump just endorsed Viktor Orban. Orban is an anti-Semitic, racist, authoritarian despot who has crushed democratic institutions in Hungary, attacked the free press, and politicized rule of law. No wonder Trump likes him.
All our lives we’ve heard the word “unAmerican.” It’s normally used to say that something is unfair or unjust, that it violates our core sensibilities with respect to what is right or wrong.
We find ourselves at a crossroads. We need to decide if the concept of being an “American” in this sense is something we value, or do we want to cross a line and become an authoritarian nation like Turkey.
Before we make up our minds, we need to consider that such steps are very hard to retake. Once things like a free press and free speech are taken away, they almost never return.
If, in 2015, you had wanted to bet me that I would be writing these words in 2022, exhorting this formerly great nation to pull itself back from the abyss of fascism, I would have given you odds of $1000 against a dime that you would be wrong.
Yet here we are.
This stat on Republican scientists sounds about right, but that’s simply a result of the movement of the GOP to the ultra-right and its present-day radical anti-science position.
Go back 70 years and look at the demographics at that time. I can’t find any studies on this, but let’s use common sense. Remember the Cold War and the rational discussion that surrounded it?
Our respect for science was high, and our political ideologies played a far more subservient role.
In some respects, the grand old days.
The investigation into January 6th is representative of what constitutes the Republican party today: a small group of horrible people at the top, and a limitless mob of hateful idiots at the bottom.
From a legal perspective, the mob is obviously the easier target, insofar as there are thousands of photographs and videos that show these folks in action, attacking the Capitol Police and smashing their way into and through the actual building. The criminal courts are slowing processing them, and sending them to jail at the rate of perhaps one per week.
Getting at the top of the food-chain here is going to take more work, but the purging effect it will have on the country will be a thing of true beauty.
Here’s a piece from The Economist that takes on the question: Now that we know how terrible coal is for the environment, why is it so devilishly difficult to remove?
Well, it’s economics, obviously, or it wouldn’t be covered in the august publication, but it’s complicated. Rio Tinto became the first big miner to abandon coal, and its competitors followed suit. But then, drama.
The COVID-19 pandemic has morphed to the point where we have a fairly mild but extremely transmissible disease.
What’s next? No one knows. At least, that’s what my old school chum and now extremely senior epidemiologist Peter Spitzer, MD says. We all hope that there are no further mutations, and this ends up being a permanent, though manageable part of public health, like the flu, though there is no hard data to establish this belief with any certainty.
One point of our consternation is the clogging of our hospitals, which are overflowing with unvaccinated slobs, which means that innocent, responsible people have to wait for critically needed services. Can’t hospitals put a hard limit as to the percentage of ICU beds they will assign to these human swine?
Another worry is that mutations happen in countries with very low vaccination rates. Although there is an argument to be made for vaccinating Americans first, this may be self-defeating in the long run.
In any case, my hat’s off to whoever made this fabulous book cover.
I do very little self-loathing….except when I read Andy Borowitz and think: goddammit, why couldn’t I have done this?
We all have access to the same information. Why is it so hard to connect the dots?
Dot #1: Marjorie Taylor Greene, mean-spirited world-class crackpot says Jewish space lasers are igniting wildfires in California.
Dot #2: Twitter suspends Marjorie Taylor Greene’s account.
If I really wanted to challenge Borowitz, I’d build a small database of the top 20 public figures in U.S. life (especially politics), update it with every new story, and constantly be trying to put two of these data points together in some humorous manner. After all, that’s what he’s doing, though I’m sure it’s all performed in the mind of this comic genius.
The point being made here may sound obvious to you, but that’s because you’re an educated person who understands a) this core tenet of public schooling, and b) that you’re not well equipped to craft school curricula.
Is there anyone so naive as to think that Joe Manchin feels the pinch from a mining union in West Virginia?
He has nothing but contempt for the people in the state he “represents,” and the money coming into him to stonewall the Build Back Better initiative puts thousands of time more pressure on him than any conceivable influence from some pathetic mining union.
