There is no question that the world needs a bumper crop of peace-makers, rather than a few more billionaires demanding tax cuts at the expense of the common man.  But how could this possibly come about?

In particular, who are the world’s great peace-makers, and how did they come into being?  How did people like the Buddha or Jesus or Gandhi mysteriously appear?

And why does it seem so unlikely that anyone like them could come along today? In a world in which Donald Trump is the most powerful person on the planet, how probable is it that the next incarnation of Gandhi will come along and lead us to world peace?

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It’s funny, my wife and I were just talking about this.

It’s only a matter of time before a DOGE guy wants to enter a private business or residence and it is met with an armed fellow who explains, “If you don’t have a warrant, and if you take one more step forward, I’m going to put a hole in your chest the size of a grapefruit.”

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What has happened to the economy over the past half century?  Well, here are a number of things that are provable:

Almost all new wealth has wound up in the hands of the top 1%, which has driven the demand for all good things like real estate and quality higher education. This means higher prices, given that the supply is relatively fixed.

The wealthiest Americans now have an ironclad grasp on Congress; our laws are made and passed entirely at the behest of rich donors.

Anyone who believes that wealthy people would use their riches to hire more employees or pay them more than necessary is a fool.

Jobs have been lost to automation and offshoring.

In addition, there several damaging aspects of corporate greed that has grown exponentially.  In particular, it’s:

Put pressure on employees’ salaries and bonuses.

Translated into dishonesty, making harder to behave honorably in the workplace.

Crushed millions of of small, “mom and pop” operations.

At the same we have the dumbing down of the population, making us increasingly incapable of competing on world stage, and understanding that we’ve elected a sociopathic conman to lead us.

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The weird thing about Trump is that about half of voters agree with Robert DeNiro (though we might not express ourselves quite like he does), while the other half believe the president was sent by God to make America great again.

One either sees this or one doesn’t; there is no middle ground.

 

 

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Yes, that’s true.  But that would a be a lot easier to achieve if we had fewer hateful, uneducated people who vote for Trump.

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An old friend sent me this article that deals with an instability that Team Trump is sewing into human civilization.

The real problem of course, is that people like Elon Musk and Donald Trump don’t rely on 401(k)s to provide the funds to keep them comfortable through their golden years, and thus they don’t really care if the stock market takes a dive due to the insane and self-defeating imposition of tariffs.

They don’t have kids with some rare form of cancer for which a cure was right around the corner, until the NIH got its funding cut.

Etc.

Tesla sales were sliding long before Musk was appointed to be the lead executioner for essentially everything that the federal government does to serve the American people.

Bumper stickers like the one below began to show up as soon as we realized the world’s richest person was a terrible human being.

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I trust Bernie Sanders, and I’d like to believe he’s right here, but I actually don’t.

In 2024, a plurality of voters elected Trump, consisting of perhaps 20% amoral rich people and 80% uneducated morons.  These people absolutely adore what they’re getting out of Trump, and extremely unlikely to switch parties, regardless of what they’re hearing from the Democrats.

At this point, we either educate our young people, or look forward to an endless stream of candidates who appeal to hateful idiots.

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Let’s be honest.  The American people elected this SOB just a few months ago, and he was hardly an unknown quantity.

We need to deal with the fact that almost half of U.S. voters approve of ignorance of basic economics, white nationalism, the systemic cruelty of asylum seekers, the abolition of minority rights, the rejection of science, and the demolition of public education.

I understand the impulse to apologize, but at the same time, we need to face the truth about who we are.

 

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As shown at left, the people who want to muddy the waters on climate change (Big Oil?) are at it again.

In truth, there were occasional articles in the early 20th Century that (correctly) asserted that the emissions from burning coal were increasing the temperature of the Earth’s atmosphere, though climate science had no rigor behind it until the 1970s, when precise readings of temperature and CO2 concentrations around the globe began to become available.

At this point, there is virtually no disagreement on the theory of anthropogenic global warming among those who study the subject seriously.

Now, are the people who write the news for Fox News, or the PR departments of the largest oil companies in line with this?  Of course not.

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