The Sound of the Trump
Dec 01, 2016 11:18 Filed in: Politics
I haven’t written anything on this blog since the election, first, because I was speechless at the result, and second, it was impossible to predict what the election of Trump means for the future of the nation and even the World.
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Talking points for a new president
Oct 27, 2016 19:55 Filed in: Politics Subjects Environment
It looks now that Hillary Clinton will be our next president. Once she takes office, she will face a multitude of problems confronting both the nation and the world. The most formidable problems will not be immediately pressing. They are long-term problems that if not acted upon immediately will have calamitous consequences in as little as twenty years. Principal among these are global warming and nuclear energy.
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Trump
Jul 02, 2016 12:37 Filed in: Politics
It’s hard to avoid a sense of schadenfreude over the unexpected triumph of Donald Trump, who has become, for all practical purposes, the Republican candidate for the U. S. presidency. The discomfiture of the Republican bluebloods is palpable. They do not know what to do any more than their predecessors did in 1964, when Senator Barry Goldwater and his followers seized the Republican Party and made him the candidate.
Surely they must realize that they themselves created Trump’s natural constituency. They have been cynically preaching to the uninformed that all their troubles have been caused by liberals, that the government is the problem, not the answer, and that deficit spending takes away our children’s future, since the nation will have to pay the debt off someday. This has been accompanied by appeals to racism and demonization of immigrants as scabs, depriving true Americans (code word for white people) of employment. Trump has called them criminals who commit most of the crimes here in the US.
Read More...An Awful Solution to a Non-Existent Problem
The legislative session that recently ended is positive proof that otherwise moderately intelligent and presumably sane persons can assemble together to form a perfectly insane corporate body. What has this legislature accomplished worthwhile? If a reader of this blog (and alas there are not many of them) can think of any laws, any appropiations, any resolutions, or any other beneficial actions that the solons accomplished, the reader is invited to list them in the comments below.
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Clinton v Sanders - A Comparison
Both candidates have much in their favor.
Hillary Rodham Clinton
HRC certainly has the intelligence and experience to be president, No other candidate comes close by these measures.
But
(and it's a big BUT) (no pun intended),
1) She has revealed herself to be a tool of Wall Street and the financial sector (think Bankruptcy Bill). She has a stable of economists from which to choose her advisors. These will undoubtedly be the same very serious persons that brought us, or failed to predict, the crash of 2007.
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Hillary Rodham Clinton
HRC certainly has the intelligence and experience to be president, No other candidate comes close by these measures.
But
(and it's a big BUT) (no pun intended),
1) She has revealed herself to be a tool of Wall Street and the financial sector (think Bankruptcy Bill). She has a stable of economists from which to choose her advisors. These will undoubtedly be the same very serious persons that brought us, or failed to predict, the crash of 2007.
Read More...
The Difference Between France and the United States
Nov 18, 2015 21:24 Filed in: Politics
In the face of a vicious attack by guerrillas acting on behalf of ISIS, the French have responded, not with abject fear, but with resolve that their freedoms—indeed, their entire civilization—will not be undone by an enemy working to sow fear and uncertainty.
We Americans, on the other hand, are succumbing to fear and uncertainty—cowardice, in other words—over an enemy thousands of miles away.
Our Mississippi governor is in the front ranks of those who would turn away refugees from Syria. He panders to fear. He invokes the worst in us. He awakens the deep currents of racism in Mississippi whites—yes, dammit, whites—that has plagued this benighted state for centuries.
Our Mississippi culture holds fast to the belief that compassion—Christian compassion included—only applies to people like us: WHITE FUNDAMENTALISTS. I omit the word Christian because this rationing of compassion is utterly unchristian. How many passages from the gospels have you read that justify the turning away of refugees? Name just one. How many of the words of Our Lord would I have to read to you for you to understand that rationed compassion is no compassion at all. It only means “I got mine.” Like the parable of the rich fool.
Certain natives of India catch monkeys by cutting a small hole in a coconut which they fasten to the ground. The hole in the coconut is just large enough for a monkey to insert its hand through the hole. They place a nut or other attractive object in the coconut. The monkey approaches the coconut, thrusts his hand through the hole and grasps the nut. When it tries to withdraw his hand from the hole while holding the nut, he finds that he cannot. His fist is too large. When a human approaches, the monkey, instead of dropping the nut and running away, refuses to drop it and is easily captured.
We humans do the same thing. We grasp tightly to our “nut”—our version of what kind of world we want to live in—and we are caught. No matter how hard we try, we cannot escape the conditioning of our racist culture without letting go of the “nut” we are grasping, our “southern way of life,” that rests upon a deeply unjust class system based on race. We cannot open our hearts and minds and at the same time tightly grasp the very thing that is doing us in. We must first let go of the nut.
We Americans, on the other hand, are succumbing to fear and uncertainty—cowardice, in other words—over an enemy thousands of miles away.
Our Mississippi governor is in the front ranks of those who would turn away refugees from Syria. He panders to fear. He invokes the worst in us. He awakens the deep currents of racism in Mississippi whites—yes, dammit, whites—that has plagued this benighted state for centuries.
Our Mississippi culture holds fast to the belief that compassion—Christian compassion included—only applies to people like us: WHITE FUNDAMENTALISTS. I omit the word Christian because this rationing of compassion is utterly unchristian. How many passages from the gospels have you read that justify the turning away of refugees? Name just one. How many of the words of Our Lord would I have to read to you for you to understand that rationed compassion is no compassion at all. It only means “I got mine.” Like the parable of the rich fool.
Certain natives of India catch monkeys by cutting a small hole in a coconut which they fasten to the ground. The hole in the coconut is just large enough for a monkey to insert its hand through the hole. They place a nut or other attractive object in the coconut. The monkey approaches the coconut, thrusts his hand through the hole and grasps the nut. When it tries to withdraw his hand from the hole while holding the nut, he finds that he cannot. His fist is too large. When a human approaches, the monkey, instead of dropping the nut and running away, refuses to drop it and is easily captured.
We humans do the same thing. We grasp tightly to our “nut”—our version of what kind of world we want to live in—and we are caught. No matter how hard we try, we cannot escape the conditioning of our racist culture without letting go of the “nut” we are grasping, our “southern way of life,” that rests upon a deeply unjust class system based on race. We cannot open our hearts and minds and at the same time tightly grasp the very thing that is doing us in. We must first let go of the nut.
How Stupid Can Mississippi Republicans Get?
y not expanding Medicaid under Obamacare, the state is depriving its less fortunate of medical care and seeing its state Medicaid expenses increase at about twice the rate of states who have expanded Medicaid. Since when did the Mississippi Legislature and governor leave money on the table? It is irrational, vindictive and just plain stupid (for which there is unfortunately no cure). Read More...
The EFF Analyzes the Intellectual Property Provisions of the Completed TPP
The Electronic Freedom Foundation published the following article yesterday on its website. It is republished here with permission under a Creative Commons license. Read and heed.
Electronic Frontier Foundation
October 9, 2015 | By Jeremy Malcolm
Today's release by Wikileaks of what is believed to be the current and essentially final version of the intellectual property (IP) chapter of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) confirms our worst fears about the agreement, and dashes the few hopes that we held out that its most onerous provisions wouldn't survive to the end of the negotiations.
Since we now have the agreed text, we'll be including some paragraph references that you can cross-reference for yourself—but be aware that some of them contain placeholders like “x” that may change in the cleaned-up text. Also, our analysis here is limited to the copyright and Internet-related provisions of the chapter, but analyses of the impacts of other parts of the chapter have been published by Wikileaks and others.
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Electronic Frontier Foundation
October 9, 2015 | By Jeremy Malcolm
The Final Leaked TPP Text is All That We Feared
Today's release by Wikileaks of what is believed to be the current and essentially final version of the intellectual property (IP) chapter of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) confirms our worst fears about the agreement, and dashes the few hopes that we held out that its most onerous provisions wouldn't survive to the end of the negotiations.
Since we now have the agreed text, we'll be including some paragraph references that you can cross-reference for yourself—but be aware that some of them contain placeholders like “x” that may change in the cleaned-up text. Also, our analysis here is limited to the copyright and Internet-related provisions of the chapter, but analyses of the impacts of other parts of the chapter have been published by Wikileaks and others.
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Is The Christian Coalition Christian?
I receive newsletters from the Christian Coalition of America on a regular basis. Recently, the newsletter referred to the agreement with Iran on nuclear weapons as “the president’s surrender to the Islamic State of Iran deal.” This is in the face of public announcements by numerous general grade military officers, nuclear scientists, and leaders of the other nations involved in negotiating the agreement, expressing a contrary opinion.
The newsletter exulted in the fact that every Republican in Congress voted against the agreement. It also made clear that the lemming-like support of Republicans for Israel played a great part in their decision to vote against it.
I seem to recall that Our Lord made His position on the issue of war and peace very clear: “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God.” Matthew 5:9. In light of the fact that Iran hasn’t attacked anybody in hundreds of years and has now submitted to an inspection regime that our own government would reject in a second, one is compelled to ask “exactly what is this “Christian” Coalition all about, anyway? It’s hard to discover anything Christian about it. It supports a policy vey likely to lead to war, not a policy that would enhance our national security.
Sadly, The Christian Coalition has acted as merely another propaganda wing of the Republican Party, intended to pander to fundamentalist Christians by supporting unthinkingly whatever the Israeli government does, no matter how evil. And all for the purpose of inveigling ignorant and gullible Mississippians to vote into office the very representatives that have held back the state for more than a hundred years.
We elected lemmings. Let us congratulate ourselves for electing these moral idiots.
The newsletter exulted in the fact that every Republican in Congress voted against the agreement. It also made clear that the lemming-like support of Republicans for Israel played a great part in their decision to vote against it.
I seem to recall that Our Lord made His position on the issue of war and peace very clear: “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God.” Matthew 5:9. In light of the fact that Iran hasn’t attacked anybody in hundreds of years and has now submitted to an inspection regime that our own government would reject in a second, one is compelled to ask “exactly what is this “Christian” Coalition all about, anyway? It’s hard to discover anything Christian about it. It supports a policy vey likely to lead to war, not a policy that would enhance our national security.
Sadly, The Christian Coalition has acted as merely another propaganda wing of the Republican Party, intended to pander to fundamentalist Christians by supporting unthinkingly whatever the Israeli government does, no matter how evil. And all for the purpose of inveigling ignorant and gullible Mississippians to vote into office the very representatives that have held back the state for more than a hundred years.
We elected lemmings. Let us congratulate ourselves for electing these moral idiots.
A Short Note to Bernie Sanders
Bernie,
I just read an article in Counterpunch magazine that is highly critical of your policy position regarding the Middle East. You are venturing into areas in which you clearly have no expertise.
Suggestion: before you make any more statements about what our mid-eastern policy should be, get a real expert on board. This is a very serious business, and your opponents will take you apart if you continue with the same policy recommendations you are putting forth now. You would be wise to consult Dr. Juan Cole at the University of Michigan on the middle east in general. For Syria, specifically, Josh Landis at the University of Oklahoma would be a good choice.
The administration’s middle east policy is a mess, chiefly because neither the Obama or Bush administrations really knows or knew very much about the middle east and didn’t seem to want to know. Obama has enough sense to resist the pressure to become deeply involved in the Syrian and Iraqi conflicts, and a knowledgeable candidate who can speak with authority on this issue will, if nothing else, reinforce the president’s spine and help him keep the neo-cons, who are dying to put other people’s boots on the ground, at bay.
A president is only as good as his advisors. The same goes for a presidential candidate. Having good and forthright advisors is the key to wise governance.
I just read an article in Counterpunch magazine that is highly critical of your policy position regarding the Middle East. You are venturing into areas in which you clearly have no expertise.
Suggestion: before you make any more statements about what our mid-eastern policy should be, get a real expert on board. This is a very serious business, and your opponents will take you apart if you continue with the same policy recommendations you are putting forth now. You would be wise to consult Dr. Juan Cole at the University of Michigan on the middle east in general. For Syria, specifically, Josh Landis at the University of Oklahoma would be a good choice.
The administration’s middle east policy is a mess, chiefly because neither the Obama or Bush administrations really knows or knew very much about the middle east and didn’t seem to want to know. Obama has enough sense to resist the pressure to become deeply involved in the Syrian and Iraqi conflicts, and a knowledgeable candidate who can speak with authority on this issue will, if nothing else, reinforce the president’s spine and help him keep the neo-cons, who are dying to put other people’s boots on the ground, at bay.
A president is only as good as his advisors. The same goes for a presidential candidate. Having good and forthright advisors is the key to wise governance.