Browsing: Opinions

We need to know eggxactly what’s going on

       Later, I realized that extreme cruelty is not uniquely German. The potential lurks in all races, a latent trait in human nature. It is plain in American history with slavery and the genocide of native Americans; in French history during the bloody Revolution of 1789, in English history during the Crusades; in Ottoman history with the massacre of the Armenians and in Russia with Stalin’s carnage of his own people.

    President Trump, leading up to his swearing-in as America’s 47th President, assertively voiced his reformation plans to MAGA. Reform refers to the improvement or amendment of what’s wrong, corrupt, and immoral. Highlighting only specific reformation plans shouldn’t be considered cherry-picking. Political reform isn’t new! Remember, the Political Reform Act of 1974, targeted campaign disclosures.

Put thousands of hardworking Americans out of work, including 1000 people at the US Department of Veterans Affairs, 4,400 public lands workers, forest service workers, firefighters, and park rangers; 388 EPA workers with 1,100 more receiving termination warnings; 1,300 Center For Disease Control workers; 1,500 National Institutes of Health workers; and half the NNSA workers who do safety work on nuclear radioactive waste.

If we can make it a Blackout can we at least do Charcoal Gray?

       We are in a collective grief process. The old normal passed away. We are not getting it back, at least not anytime soon. And so, the destabilization we are feeling right now is two-fold. First, the destabilization that we feel from the flooding of the zone, which is by design, and part of a playbook we knew was coming. They told us. But what we did not expect was another destabilization—that is, the destabilization that comes with grief.

   Before Trump’s top officials descended on Europe this past week, Donald Trump seemed to have three ideas for ending the Ukraine war: abandon ship, meaning depriving Ukraine of US aid and thereby forcing it to agree to a settlement with Russia; deploy European troops in Ukraine to deter Russia after a peace agreement; and give Ukraine aid in return for “guaranteed” access to its rare earth mineral deposits. Michael Waltz, Trump’s national security adviser, confirmed all these points and reiterated what he said was the Trump administration’s “underlying principle”: that the Europeans “have to own this conflict going forward.”

     The lessons to be learned from the events in Munich in 1938, in which Prime Minister Chamberlain signed off on the Nazi seizure of Czechoslovakia, are of course relevant, but they have also been used to justify all manner of wars and violence that have had little justification. Perhaps even worse, the Munich analogy has been used to justify the refusal to negotiate with adversaries. 

     Earlier this week, President Trump was anointed chairman of the Kennedy Center’s board of trustees—but only after firing all of the Democratic appointees on the board and handpicking their replacements to join the remaining half of the board (all Republican appointees), bucking the decades-long norm of a bipartisan Kennedy Center board. After this new, entirely Republican-appointed slate of trustees voted him in, he posted, “It is a Great Honor to be Chairman of The Kennedy Center, especially with this amazing Board of Trustees.” Then he fired the Kennedy Center’s president and installed someone loyal to him to run the Center.

     His plan is to expand the infamous Guantanamo Bay Detention Center, part of the U.S. naval base in Cuba, which George W, Bush began using as he waged his horrific “war on terror” in the Middle East. He began imprisoning alleged terrorists, often arbitrarily arrested, in a hellhole where they had zero rights. Some are still there, several decades later. Trump’s plan is to expand the detention center to hold 30,000 people, which would be, oh, more than double the size of two unforgettable Nazi concentration camps combined: Dachau and Treblinka.