Those who follow professional golf know that the Saudi-backed LIV Tournament has recently merged with the Professional Golf Association (PGA), to the chagrin of many.
At issue is the concern that Saudi Arabia is a rogue state with gross disregard for human rights.
The meme here refers to the fact that Saudi journalist and dissident Jamal Khashoggi was assassinated and dismembered at the direction of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
Most of us crawling around this planet join Charles Dickens in his hope for the world.
In fact, many of us are living our lives in such a way so as to achieve this outcome.
The problem arises when evil people accumulate large amounts of money and power, and are thus enabled to cause enormous damage to our planet and the civilization that lives on it.
I support the right of labor to organize in most cases, but I urge caution to those who approve of the meme here: Be careful what you wish for.
I had just over 100 employees at a certain point in my career managing a marketing services agency. The subject of unionization never came up, as it was never implemented in our industry, and I paid my people well, with significant bonuses, even if that weren’t the case.
Trust me, these people didn’t want to send me up a tree in terror, desperately looking for a way to reduce head-count. They wanted me on my game, excited to travel the globe, bringing home huge projects that would be lucrative for the entire team to deliver.
As I’ve mentioned, progressives, unlike Trump supporters, generally don’t put on massive public displays of their political and religious beliefs. No Confederate flags, no “Let’s Go Brandon” decals.
As an example, I have a small “Amnesty International” bumper sticker on the back of my Prius, but there is nothing else by which I can be identified as “woke.”
As we can see in the photo shown here, this practice of discretion doesn’t hold universally.
Nicola Tesla was an enigmatic figure who, in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, played an important role in the development of the technology that made it possible for humankind to make use of electricity.
And he didn’t get the credit he deserved.
But we’re not doing his name any favors with idiotic stuff like this.
He invented electricity? First of all, electricity is a property of the universe that existed from its inception. Thus it’s no more proper to say that someone invented it than to say that someone invented the North Pole.
More to the point, hundreds of years before the birth of Christ, a Greek named Thales discovered that amber, when rubbed with silk, attracted feathers and other light objects. He named this phenomenon after the word for amber: ëelectron.
More than 2000 years later, European scientists Galvani, Volta, Ampere, Ohm, and many others worked out certain of the key principles of the subject. Note that many of the units in which we measure electricity are named for them.
In my estimation, it was England’s Michael Faraday who deserves top credit in this department for having nailed all this together in the 1830s with his discovery of the relationship between electricity and magnetism. But, if you’re a purist, you can argue in favor of James Clerk Maxwell, who expressed all this in the elegance of the mathematics that Faraday couldn’t.
In any case, Tesla was a great mind (though he had little or nothing to do with X-rays and radar). Let’s not dishonor him with our stupidity.
It may have been CNN’s Chris Licht’s decision to give Donald Trump the floor in a “Town Hall” to promote his “Big Lie” that cost him his job.
In any case, given the now-deposed CEO of CNN and his credentials as a complete asshole, maybe he can obtain a new job euthanizing dogs in animal shelters or separating families at the southern border and inflicting unspeakable cruelties on the world’s most unfortunate little children.
As we’ve proven over long periods of time, there’s always a path forward for our country’s most despicable people.
Mark Meadows, Trump’s chief of staff oversaw the goings-on in the White House in the period in which the former president tried desperately to retain power following his loss in the 2020 presidential election. Now, it appears that, because of his participation in Trump’s attempt to overthrow the U.S. federal government, Meadows has agreed to plead guilty to a lesser charge than seditious conspiracy so as to avert a life prison sentence.
Evidently, there is no honor among traitors.
If, in fact, Meadows had been sentenced to die in prison, that would have been completely acceptable to those of us who care about the continuation of American democracy.
If he gets a lesser sentence, and his boss goes down hard, that’s also totally fine, IMO.
At this point in his career, John Boehner has the luxury of being able to tell the truth, since he’s no longer a viable Republican political candidate.
Isn’t that, in and of itself, disgusting? As long as you have even an iota of potential in GOP politics, you either perpetuate Trump’s lies, or go back to ambulance chasing or lobbying for the planet-destroyers, or whatever other revolting professional you had before your “public service” aspirations.
It’s not like you or I never lie. Occasionally, even the most honest among us finds himself in a position where fibbing is the best way out of an awkward position. But decent people hate to find themselves in that situation.
It’s hard for most of us to even imagine fashioning our lives around nonstop lies. I’m not a billionaire king, but at least I wake up every morning in the comfort of knowing that I’m not Donald Trump.
Actually, you have a choice. You read the crap described at left in an effort to prove to yourself what you already believe.
Alternatively, you can travel to any of the other developed countries around the globe and see for yourself that the United States is the only wealthy nation on the planet that does not offer its citizens universal healthcare (see below).
Tour Europe and Scandinavia and discover that these people are better educated and happier than we are. Obviously, they’re healthier, and thus live longer lives.
This latter choice will push you outside of the comfort zone that Fox News offers you, but maybe you’ll actually learn something.
Countries with Universal Healthcare
My #1 thought about American education is that Ben Carson can only worsen it further.
We had four years of a full frontal attack on our schools during the Trump years when Betsy DeVos was the Secretary of Education; we don’t need any more obstruction from these saboteurs.
