It’s true: the last 40 years have made us much safer in many ways that are quite important.
Sadly, this is counteracted by growing levels of ignorance.
Had COVID come along in the 1980s, we wouldn’t have had millions of people falsely claiming that vaccines were often lethal and part of a government plot to weaken the nation and enslave the population.
I was recently asked to join the board of Human Trafficking Solutions, a group committed to eliminating modern-day slavery. Though this scourge on human civilization often goes unnoticed, it’s estimated that there are somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 million people globally who are illegally held against their will and forced to work in some capacity.
As a marketing guy, my job is helping the organization formulate and disseminate its message. Though I have no experience in this space whatsoever, marketing, in its essence, means the same thing in every application: Articulating how we address the unmet needs of the public.
Among people who are aware of it, slavery/sex trafficking is probably the single most repugnant feature of our world today. I’m quite certain that we can fashion a description of ourselves that awakens this outrage and translates it into positive action.
Conservatives like this metaphor, because they don’t have a problem ignoring U.S. history and the unprecedentedly high standard of living that Americans had after World War II, when the tax rates for corporations and wealthy individuals were 90%.
Until Reagan changed all this in 1980, we had great schools, and a powerfully affluent middle class that enjoyed pleasant vacations. Now, three out of five Americans live paycheck to paycheck.
Conservative forces in the United States have always sought to separate Americans as a people from those living in the rest of the world.
As we entered the nuclear age, many of our brightest minds pointed out that this was a terribly dangerous and stupid position to take.
Here we are, 75 years later, coming to terms with the fact that nuclear annihilation is no longer the only mass tragedy that can beset humankind; we are faced with a climate emergency that will, if left untreated, render vast regions of the planet uninhabitable.
Dealing with both these challenges require recognizing our common humanity, not “making America great again,” whatever that means.
My mom, a life-long Republican, asked me what I thought of the midterm election results, to which I replied, “My take is that the GOP is in an awkward transition period as it expels Trump and tries to re-establish itself as a sane and honest voice for traditional conservative values.”
That’s about the very nicest and most optimistic thing that can be said on the subject. It’s not untrue, but it’s wishful thinking in that it doesn’t take into account that:
• GOP leadership, though it is clearly turning against Trump, is insanely far to the right, and shows no signs of relenting. Anything that is remotely good for the common American gets 0.0% backing from congressional Republicans.
• Trump is having a tough time, but he’s far from gone. He enjoys immense levels of support in deeply red states, which means that the cowards these morons elect continue to be forced to back the traitor and pretend to believe the Big Lie. The cartoon above makes this like a fait accompli, but there are others that depict this in a different light altogether. My favorite: Siamese twins, Trump and an elephant, with a surgeon delivering the bad news, “It’s too late for separation. You’re going down together.” I expect the truth is somewhere in the middle.
• Of course it’s speculation, but is seems that Trump’s legal woes aren’t going to simply evaporate. The utter chaos that is going to accompany a bushel basket of criminal indictments is a wildcard the size of Alaska.
We’ll have to wait and see.
The meme here expresses exactly what more and more Republicans are realizing to their horror.
It was never about “America first”; it was about the well-being of one man, who’s now walking through a land of disgrace, on his way to what lies on the other side: criminal prosecution and incarceration.
FWIW, I was hoping that all this would happen over a very short period of time, in a brilliant epiphany, like the luminous explosion of a star. As it turns out, it’s happening over a period of years.
But better late than never. This disgusting phase of American history will soon be behind us.
Lots of gratifying and actually amusing things in the news, none the least of which is the utter mess Elon Musk is making of Twitter.
I have to say that essentially everything I’ve predicted about Musk has been wrong. Make a commercial success out of carrying cargo into space? Can’t happen.
In fact, it was the success of SpaceX that led me to say I’d never bet against the man again.
So paying $44 billion for Twitter didn’t seem like something that would set the news cycle on fire–until it did.
I’ve been wondering why discussion about politics have gotten so toxic, so unapproachable. Doesn’t it seem that, even while Trump was president, civil people could have some sort of peaceful conversation about him? Why is everyone so tense about this now?
My current theory:
Until very recently, most Americans were in one of two polar opposite places: progressive or pro-Trump. Now, in a period of just a few months, the “pro-Trump” crowd has fractured into dozens of different pieces: (more…)
These people claim to have a workable solution in small wind, on the basis that its unique design gets around the problems that the industry has traditionally encountered.
The main challenge in small wind, and the reason that the entire enterprise has all but completely disappeared over the last 5 – 10 years, is that, because it generates very little electricity, the devices themselves have to be cheap, and cheap stuff breaks down rapidly in real-world conditions.
As a message on Veterans’ Day, Yusuf / Cat Stevens, apparently standing by his Peace Train, writes: I always stood for the elimination of conflict and wars, and any of those causes that ignite them.
This is perhaps the most compelling reason to address climate change, i.e., because the growing scarcities of resources, including food, potable water, and inhabitable land, will make conflicts fiercer and more numerous.
