Browsing: Opinions

        As millions of retirees, persons with disabilities, and other beneficiaries try to cope with DOGE cuts to Social Security (website outages, inordinate wait times on the phone or in person, complete non-service for many), one group stands particularly vulnerable.

       Both these types have emerged with Donald Trump’s 90-day pause in his tariff war, after the stock market had lost several trillion dollars in value. They belong to the same fantasy world in which election defeats are fraudulent, legitimate lawsuits are witch hunts, judges who rule against them are crazy Marxists, and foreign students who protest are terrorists and must be deported.

   But sometimes the news of the day simply feels too absurd, too strange, to seriously address, like Trump’s comment the other day as he sat next to Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House: “You know how I feel about the Gaza Strip. I think it’s an incredible piece of important real estate.”

       President Carter’s words, upon signing the bill to create the U.S. Department of Education in 1979, ring louder today than ever before.

   The metaphor, ‘Pain reveals Reality,’ suggests that suffering acts as a catalyst, bringing to light hidden truths about us, our nation, and the world. It can also help us discern what is important and what is not. This often leads to a deeper understanding of ourselves, others, and the situations we find ourselves in. Pain compels people, including voters, to introspect and identify the causes of their suffering and pain.

       After he won the Nevada Republican caucuses in 2016, the current President crowed his victory. “We won with young. We won with old. We won with highly educated. We won with poorly educated. I love the poorly educated.” 

I got a feeling we ain’t seen nothing yet!

“ONLY THE WEAK WILL FAIL!” – Donald J. Trump

     Interestingly, the tariff announcement did not apply to Russia, North Korea, Cuba, and Belarus, supposedly because they don’t run a trade surplus with the US. Except that Russia does.

     Thomas L. Friedman of the New York Times came away from a China trip convinced that cooperation to regulate and contain artificial general intelligence (AGI) is the single most urgent, and most neglected, issue in US-China relations. While “fully aware of how absurd it can sound calling on the two of them to trust each other to collaborate,” collaboration is essential “to create a global architecture of trust and governance over these emerging superintelligent computers.” Otherwise, they and the robots they create will surpass us, with unpredictable consequences in trade, warfare, labor, and much else.