Saying Goodbye To 2020
We’re surrounded by reminders of how 2020 has been a year of events that make no sense.
Here’s a photo of a contemporary furniture design that underscores this very point.
Tagged with: 2020 has been a year of things that make no sense
“Few are the giants of the soul who actually feel that the human race is their family circle.” – Freya Stark, explorer and writer (1893-1993)
Imagine that a survey had been taken annually since the inception of the nation, in which 1000 randomly chosen Americans were asked if they agreed or disagreed with Melville’s statement here. I’m guessing that a large majority would have agreed with only a few exceptions throughout U.S. history, e.g., perhaps the Second World War….until about 1980, with the onset of neoliberalism, along with all its components and derivatives: greed, selfishness, indifference to others’ suffering, robo-consumerism, hatred of immigrants, the rapid decay of ethical standards, and the return of socially acceptable overt racism.
Of course, this is represented in the type of people we elect to lead us; we’ve gone from Jimmy Carter to Donald Trump in just 40 years.
Some of us have not given up. My email signature is the title of this post. Please feel free to make it yours too.
Dedication to Environmental Sustainability
You’ll not find a single organization on this planet more dedicated to environmental sustainability via the removal of waste in our lives than the Story of Stuff. I met SoS founder Annie Leonard after a talk she gave a few years ago, and couldn’t help but fall all over myself, praising her for the terrific work she’s been doing in sharing ideas along this lines.
Here’s one I love: renting a Christmas tree (see description at left).
Of course, people who own property that would support an additional conifer would be better simply to buy a live tree and retire it immediately, i.e., planting it after Christmas.
Tagged with: environmental sustainability
‘Our Carceral System Laid Bare’: Trump Pardons Cronies Stone and Manafort as DOJ Proceeds With Lame-Duck Execution Spree
From this:
“A flow of pardons for the wealthy and corrupt, yet Brandon Bernard was left to die when his own jurors and prosecutor begged for mercy,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) said late Wednesday, referring to the 40-year-old Black man the Trump Justice Department killed earlier this month for a crime he committed at the age of 18. “Our carceral system laid bare for the world to see.” (more…)
Tagged with: Trump's disgusting abuse of the justice system
Melania Trump
Needless to say, most supporters of the president are fans of Melania as well. One of her boosters put this on Facebook, and began his comment, “She fled a communist country, …..”
No, she didn’t “flee” a country, and the country she left (Slovenia) hadn’t been communist for several years before she left it. Outside of that, there are no errors in this boob’s first five words.
If you want to tell me that she’s been treated unfairly by the press, I have no facts to argue otherwise. That said, she’s married to one of the worst people in the history of our civilization, which doesn’t say too much for her character.
Tagged with: Melania Trump
Love and Hate
This might not be the best day of the year to write a post about an atheist, but there is never a bad time to note what the late Christopher Hitchens thought about people like Donald Trump.
The world isn’t the same place without Hitchens.
Tagged with: love and hate
The Presidential Pardon
No one expected Trump to leave office before pardoning all his allies and mega-donor felons, so what he’s doing right now is anything but a surprise.
Clearly, we need a constitutional amendment to prevent this massive level of corruption from recurring, but what should it state? That pardons must be approved by a majority of members of the Senate? No, that wouldn’t have helped here, since the spineless, chickensh** Republicans would have been scared to death to override the president.
A suggestion: Whenever the president recommends a pardon for someone, it needs to be approved by the majority of the entire electorate in the following general election. How many Americans would vote to confirm the pardon of the fellow, now a free man, who was sentenced to 20 years for orchestrating the largest fraud in human history, bilking $1.3 billion from Medicare? 15? How about the four mass murders who massacred 14 in Iraq, under the aegis of Blackwater, one of whom was doing a life sentence? 11?
Tagged with: constitutional amendment
Climate Science Presented Brilliantly
Those looking for a wonderful presentation from several top climate scientists will enjoy the video below. There is so much here about ozone depletion, ultra-violet light and the electromagnetic spectrum, water vapor in the stratosphere, changing ocean currents, ice formation, water density, sea-level rise and dozens of other issues that it’s hard to name them all. (more…)
Is Politically Motivated Violence Inevitable?
It’s hard to know what will happen in the coming month or so. Trump will never admit that he lost the election, and tens of millions of Americans, egged on by Fox News and extremist social media, believe him. It hardly seems possible that these heavily armed people are going to sit back and let the “radical left” steal the election from their leader and bring socialism to this great nation. An uprising of some sort seems highly probable. (more…)
C.S. Lewis Brought Us Great Thoughts, Reading Pleasures
C. S. Lewis is now a subject of discussion primarily by virtue of his adopting Christianity, given his former position as an avowed atheist. But doesn’t this fixation on his religion seem like something of a shame, given that he was arguably the greatest writer of young people’s fiction in the entire history of the English language?
I was lucky enough to have had a 10-year-old daughter who had been assigned to read Lewis’s The Narnia Tales, which brought me the pleasure of sharing the reading duties as follows: “I’ll read a paragraph, and then you read a paragraph, and at the end of the chapter, let’s explain to each other what we’ve gotten out of it.”
We finished out on the front porch, my daughter deeply moved as the tale came to its close, me crying like a baby.
I wish every one of you the same type of fortune.
Tagged with: atheist
