Author: Carma Henry

Nunnie on the Sideline

 The U.S. Supreme Court has handed down a significant 5-4 decision that preserves the ability of states to count mail-in ballots that are postmarked by Election Day but arrive within a legally established grace period. The ruling rejects an effort backed by President Donald Trump and the Republican National Committee to invalidate such ballots, reinforcing the authority of states to administer their own elections.

    A cult evolves as a group whose members become intensely devoted to a leader, ideology, or belief system, often surrendering independent judgment in favor of unquestioning loyalty. Cults typically flourish during periods of fear, uncertainty, social change, or perceived threats to a group’s identity and status. Individuals who feel displaced, marginalized, or anxious about the future may become especially vulnerable to messages that offer simple explanations, clear enemies, and promises of restored greatness.

    War has been an integral part of human history for some 11,000 years or so, depending on the definition of war. Iconic anthropologist Margaret Mead wrote an essay in 1940 that declared that, like so many other human practices, war is an invention—we are not doomed to wage war simply because of human nature. She proved her hypothesis simply by describing peoples that not only didn’t ever wage war, but often didn’t even have a concept of what war is.

     I liken my roller coaster rides to what is happening in American politics today. There are ups and downs, detours and roadblocks. One day you are up and the next day you are down.

    The ineffectiveness of such bombing, despite its destructive power, has been known for many years. At the end of WW II, the economist John Kenneth Galbraith led a large staff in a government report on the effectiveness of the Allies strategic bombing. In 2004, he summarized his conclusions from nearly 60 years before. Attacks on German arms factories “were sadly useless” as “fighter aircraft production actually increased in early 1944 after major bombing” due to factory and machinery relocation and determined management. The resulting death and destruction in German cities “had no appreciable effect on war production and the war.” This lesson, he opined, was ignored when the United States initiated wars in Vietnam and Iraq.

    The first actual nuclear treaty was the Partial Test Ban Treaty of 1963, between the Soviet Union (SU) and the US. It ended open-air bomb testing. There were many more testing treaties, some signed and ratified, some not. Trump posted on his social media that he was ordering the War Department to resume nuclear testing “immediately.”

    Not long after the second Trump administration took office, a new power center emerged in Washington under the banner of “government efficiency.” Through the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, Elon Musk was handed extraordinary influence over federal agencies, and USAID became an early target, as legal challenges and reporting on DOGE’s efforts to control USAID’s funding streams make clear.

       Most of the critical commentary on the Trump administration’s memorandum of understanding (MOU) with Iran centers on the specific commitments each side is supposed to have made and intends to carry out. But the MOU is not a peace agreement; it is a framework for a potential agreement. 

Living, and creating, my own life