Michael Fanone worked for the Metropolitan Police Department of the District of Columbia from 2001 until his retirement following the storming of the U.S. Capitol in 2021. What he says here I find interesting.

Two points:

MAGA congresspeople appear to be “triggered” by the word “insurrection,” but that’s an act.  These people all graduated from good colleges, and are anything but stupid.  What they are, however, is a collection of a) liars and b) actors. They have all seen the video footage of the wreckage, but they know how to appear outraged to their constituents who are desperate to believe that the incident was simply an unplanned tour of the building, and/or that it was set in motion by Antifa, BLM, the Deep State, the Hollywood elite, the woke mob of radical thugs, etc.

By the time the justice system finishes up with Trump and his top brass, Americans will have been exposed to dozens, perhaps hundreds of times more evidence on this subject than what we’re sitting on today.  When all this is over, only the world-is-flat QAnoners will reject the word “insurrection.”

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The Democracy Now! article begins:

This year, there are at least 2,456 lobbyists at COP28, the U.N. climate summit in Dubai — nearly four times as many as last year — from companies like Shell, Total and ExxonMobil. The lobbyists outnumber the delegations of every country other than Brazil and the United Arab Emirates, which is hosting the summit, presided over by the CEO of the UAE’s national oil company, Sultan Al Jaber. “It’s definitely impossible to ignore how front and center the fossil fuel influence is at this particular COP,” says Rachel Rose Jackson, director of climate research and policy at Corporate Accountability, who says the climate summit must kick out big polluters and “reset the system so that it can finally end fossil fuels and advance real solutions and save millions of lives that don’t need to be lost.”

What can be done to “reset the system” and prevent the fossil fuel industry from baking the planet?

I’m not sure, but the effort to shame these people as “morally bankrupt” seems to have limited effect, insofar as Big Oil completely understands that they are despised, but don’t appear the least bit chagrined–or even embarrassed.

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Here’s a reminder that we can have both a working Second Amendment and a ban on weapons of war.

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Obviously, there are reasons that we’re still talking about Marcus Aurelius 2000 years after his death–and here’s one of them.

He seems to have possessed an ability to think rationally and without prejudice.  He would have made a very bad acolyte of modern-day right-wing “news,” which depends so heavily on its viewers’ unflagging loyalty to certain tenets, e.g., that progressives are always bad or wrong.

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Here’s David Letterman’s suggestion to this effect.

I would simply add that the “home” needs to have bars on its windows and doors.

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One would think that the list of demographics that would refuse to vote for Trump is so large that the former president would be hard-put to get more than about 30% of the popular vote in the general election.

Think not only of the veterans and active-duty military personnel, but also of people of color, LGBTQ, the well-read and well-educated, women and the advocates of their rights, young voters concerned about planet-wrecking climate change, and everyone else who believes that Trump needs to face justice in the four jurisdictions in which he’s facing 91 felony counts.

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Where do you break the chain of single-use plastic?  The manufacturer? The distributor? The retailer?  The consumer?

There is no correct (or incorrect) answer, but, as shown in the photo, there is no good reason that it can’t be the retailer.

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But he’s sane, competent, and decent.

That’s quite a contrast.

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In addition to what Spinoza said here, we have Hegel’s clever remark that “the only thing we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history.”

Regardless, what we’re running into here and now in the United States is unprecedented in American history, which means that even a robust understanding of history would be of no help whatsoever. Since the country was established in 1776, there have been exactly zero attempts to overthrow the federal government–until now, of course.

Here we have a former president inventing lies about the validity of an election in an illegal attempt to remain in power.  We might think that effort failed, but it may be too early to make that claim.

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Reader Marv Werlinger writes: I like reliable power. Coal and nuclear. Hydro-electric, very good. Limit wind and solar because they are reliably unreliable when you need them most. Keep oil and gas. We can’t afford not to keep our energy cost’s (sic) down especially for transportation. I don’t want to hear from tree huggers and will not respond!

Well Marv, thanks for your input.  Fortunately for all life forms on Earth, all scientifically literate people on the planet recognize the need to transition towards renewables.  Sorry to know that you’re not one of us.

Perhaps studying up on the subject wouldn’t hurt.

 

 

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