U.S. Mainstream Media: “The Enemy of the People”
Shutting down the media is the first step that every authoritarian figure takes in securing his position of total and unassailable power.
Tagged with: Trump authoritarian
Biden and the Working Class
The meme here reminds us of the incredible challenge facing Democrats in their quest to win over working-class voters.
Where Trump looted the U.S. Treasury and gave trillions of dollars to billionaires and corporations, Biden is doing everything in his power to ensure that every American has a living wage.
Yet for some reason (ignorance and hate?) this doesn’t seem to be registering with the electorate.
Fossil Fuel Lobbyists
Most people in developed countries today disbelieve in the concept of hell, i.e., a place of everlasting punishment to which the souls of unrepentant evil-doers descend after death, even though Christ clearly believed in it, as inferred from his detailed description of the place in Mark 13.
Whether or not it’s real, it plays a role in our society’s archetypes.
The cartoon here made me smile, though we hope that people whose careers are built around destroying our planet for profit will have some sort of severe retribution visited upon them.
Tagged with: Fossil Fuel Lobbyists
Overturning “Citizens United”
When we look at everything we want from government: better education, universal healthcare, common sense gun laws, etc., we see immediately why all these items are out of our reach; Big Money is interfering with our lawmaking processes.
The most obvious remedy for this is a constitutional amendment that would overturn the 2010 Supreme Court decision “Citizens United,” which provides corporations the right to spend as much as they like influencing our elections. The high court found that the First Amendment’s protection of free speech applied to corporations, and now, here we are as plain U.S. citizens, disenfranchised from our democracy.
The words of the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg speak for the vast majority of American voters.
Tagged with: 2010 U.S. Supreme Court decision “Citizens United”
The Cruelty of American Politics Breaks Our Hearts
There is great deal to be said for free enterprise, but maybe there is even more to be said for putting limits on the exploitation of the desperately poor.
Ask yourself: what political philosophy put an end to child labor as depicted here, as well as the countless other atrocities? The conservatives/ libertarians or the progressives?
Tagged with: American Politics
The Origin of Religion
Twain was a humorist and not an anthropologist, and thus we can accept what he said here with a grin, even though it’s clearly untrue.
Religion was one of humankind’s first attempts to explain natural phenomena, before science came along and gave us another way forward.
The concept of a God in the sky, commanding us to worship and obey Him, in exchange for His love and protection–even after the death most of us fear–made perfect sense at the time, just as it does for many of us today.
Tagged with: The Origin of Religion
Saving the Planet from the Ravages of Climate Change Will Not Be Easy
At left is an ad whose copy reads: In addition to the damage to local communities, solar “farms” can cause deforestation, destruction of wildlife habitats and disruption of ecosystems.
Think for a moment of the places you’ve seen where utility-scale solar PV has been deployed. Do they look anything like a place that poor Bambi here might live?
As anyone with any sense at all would guess, the permitting process for solar farms is incredibly rigorous in terms of environmental consequences.
But don’t think for a minute that the fossil fuel industry isn’t going to trick you into preventing the fall of their enterprise.
Questioning the Value of College
This New York Times podcast on the changing perspective on the value of a college education examines the two most powerful forces at work:
1) Personal finances. Until quite recently, one of the broadest assumptions about parenting in the U.S. was that, almost without exception, children should go to college, primarily because of the “income delta.” I.e., their income stream over the course of their lifetimes has historically been significantly higher than that of their high school diploma-only counterparts. Now, the rising tuitions and other costs, exacerbated by the student loan debt burden that many graduates carry with them through the bulk of their lives, has largely destroyed this economic model.
2) Politics. Conservatives find their viewpoints underrepresented vis-à-vis liberals among students, and more importantly, professors. As a result, many modern-day Republican families find the entire college experience objectionable. This position is reinforced by right-wing media, an entity that hadn’t fully taken form and penetrated our society so deeply until the last decade or so.
One thing that never seems to be discussed in conversations like these are the intangibles, issues that are not directly related to finance or politics. It could be argued that college graduates enjoy richer lives, in a broad sense of that word, and that this should count for plenty. They are more likely to enjoy reading and museums, to travel outside the U.S., to learning foreign languages, and to take pleasure from intellectual pursuits like astrophysics and philosophy.
We need to consider the factors that affect enjoying their careers. It makes sense that teachers and doctors take a higher level of reward from their careers than auto workers or employees in the retail industries.
Of course, this is a truly subjective matter, and perhaps that’s why it’s avoided by podcasters. But it’s a shame that we have learned so little from Socrates (“the unexamined life”), and the words of Confucius, Gandhi, Marcus Aurelius, and the thousands of others who came before us, each of whom sought to teach us the value of learning, wisdom, and the pursuit of virtue.
If we have only one shot at life, shouldn’t it be our best one?
Tagged with: Questioning the Value of College
Trump: “I Killed Roe v. Wade”
My wife often asks me, “How can any woman vote for Trump?”
I have no good answer, other than some morons still believe that Trump alone can make America great again, that he can close the border, and stop the spread of the wokeism disease.
Tagged with: Roe-v-Wade
The Working Class and American Politics
One of the great mysteries in U.S. politics is how the Democrats lost their connection to the working class. Until very recently, there was a huge stasis in this country in which labor aligned with the Democratic party, and management aligned with the Republicans.
My theory, and I know I’m not alone here, is that:
• Almost all the new wealth that came into the United States over the last 40+ went to the upper 1%, which gutted the middle class, and left more than half the country with virtually no savings, living paycheck to paycheck, and deeply frustrated.
• Educational standards declined sharply over this period of time.
• Republicans, Trump in particular, exploited this combination of ignorance and frustration, blaming the Hollywood elite, the Deep State, Dr. Fauci and other “corrupt” scientists, immigrants, people of color, and liberal “wokeism” for the financial pain that is inflicted on white America’s workers.
Having said all this, it is quite possible that the great labor strikes of the day will be effective at alerting us to the plight of labor.
It’s also true that the GOP has gone too far for even the most poorly educated Americans. Its leader by a huge margin is Donald Trump, who, by virtue of his status as a traitor to his country, doesn’t stand a prayer in the 2024 election.
In many ways, we’re a pathetic country, the butt of jokes from peoples around the globe. But even many Trump supporters have a limit, one that was crossed when the former president came within a gnat’s a** of overthrowing the U.S. government.
Tagged with: Almost all the new wealth that came into the United States over the last 40+ went to the upper 1%, Donald Trump traitor, educational standards declined sharply. Trump exploited ignorance and frustration, gutted the middle class, how the Democrats lost their connection to the working class
