The Earth, the human civilization that lives on it, and the other life forms that make up the entirety of our ecosystem are all in trouble. At the same time, there are more than 200,000 groups on the planet, each with the mission of environmental and/or social justice.
My wife frequently mentions that she’d like to leave this country, that the sickening level of cruelty and stupidity has brought her to a point that she’s extremely uncomfortable here.
If you’re physically capable of watching this video, hard to do as it may be, you’ll see exactly what lies behind her thinking.
The only real hope for America is that stupidity is not normalized.
At left is a reminder that the 45th president is missing some important faculties.
As a nation, we need to get to a point at which we all recognize that Trump was a mistake, that he was both intellectually and morally incapable of running a country.
It’s common knowledge that the rate of change that our civilization is experiencing is increasing at an incredible clip. This applies to technology, of course, but it’s also true of the general activity that we see in our society.
It’s easy to be pessimistic about all this because, let’s be honest, there is a lot of scary stuff out there, with the racists, the QAnon people, anti-vaxxers, the climate deniers, the stolen election folks, and the rest.
But look at all the progress the United States has made in just the last few months, and the meme here is an excellent example. During the Trump administration we saw a member of Congress stand up and make the nonsensical claim that there is no evidence that school lunches improve student performance. And here we are, just a couple of years later, on our way to universal school lunches.
As suggested here, we really do have a problem in America regarding the distribution of wealth. Ever since I was a young man, I’ve believed that this is the inevitable end-game of free-market capitalism, a system of government that is totally amoral. Note, it’s not immoral; it doesn’t deliberately hurt innocent people; it just couldn’t care less about their well-being. (more…)
The 1992 United States presidential election saw Democratic Governor Bill Clinton of Arkansas defeat incumbent Republican President George H. W. Bush (as well as Ross Perot).
I was lucky enough to live in one of Bush 41’s whistle stops, Woodland Hills, CA, and listened to a speech in which he asserted that Clinton was such a thoroughgoing liberal treehugger that, if elected, the entire nation would become overrun with (the endangered) spotted owl. (more…)
I’m reminded of the time then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo challenged NPR’s Harvard/Cambridge educated Mary Louise Kelly, arguably the most senior news broadcast journalist in the nation, to identify Ukraine on an unmarked globe.
I just signed up to receive a daily e-newsletter called 1440 whose ad reads:
Overwhelmed By Opinion Disguised As Fact, And Relentless Clickbait? 1440 provides an impartial view of what’s happening in the world so our readers can form their own conclusions. We scour hundreds of sources each day to bring you a single morning briefing thoughtfully curated by experts.(more…)
Whoever created this meme got it right–in the main. The reason we had four years of Donald Trump isn’t our 614 billionaires; it’s our 74 million people, many of whom are undereducated, who are easy marks for a talented conman, especially when he’s feeding them exactly what they want to hear: Your American Dream has been stolen from you by the “radical left,” who let immigrants pour unchecked across our borders, while you pay high taxes that support lazy people with brown skin to stay out of the workplace.