Browsing: Finally

       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.

     Bearing the offensive title “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports,” the executive order misinterprets a U.S. law called Title IX to suggest falsely that trans-inclusive policies in collegiate and elite-level sports are somehow harmful to cisgender women. The force of this claim is backed by a threat: ban trans women, or face having your funding rescinded. The order came following a flurry of political moves entrenching transphobia in U.S. law and society.

   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.”

     “It’s important for us in this season to hold a perspective, and our perspective, as Black people, is we’ve had bad leaders before. This is a time in which we have to grab a hold of the tenacity of our foreparents and know that we have what it takes to make it through this time as well,” said the Rev. Tony Lee, addressing concerns about the future of Black America in a Jan. 9 segment of “Let’s Talk WIN-TV.”

     National and state laws set some guardrails for our elections, but elections are managed locally. That means that elections are run by our friends and neighbors. Thousands of veterans and members of military families are working at polling stations, as are nurses, retirees, small business owners and others. “We the People” indeed.

     On Saturday, September 28, the Kinship Family Conference and the Children’s Service Council held a community event at the Mt. Hermon AME Church Life Center in Fort Lauderdale. You knew it was a community-driven event because it was structured to accommodate the clients and community served with benefits available from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m.

   Toynbee contended that in the atomic age, humanity would have to choose between political unification and mass-suicide. He believed the chief obstacle to political unification was a long-standing destructive habit of the West which he referred to as the habit of “divisive feeling” to which we tended to easily succumb as opposed to reaching for our more recently adopted habit of “world-mindedness.”  The good news, he said, was that just as new habits could be adopted, old ones could also be modified or abandoned. He stressed that as a general rule we humans would opt to abandon even our most deeply rooted habits once it became clear that clinging to them would spell disaster. 

     Enbridge’s 71-year-old Line 5 oil and gas pipeline, which trespasses through sovereign tribal lands, is an environmental disaster waiting to happen. And not just for the tribes.

2024 is likely to be filled with more than the usual challenges to planetary safety and survival. Here’s a look at 10 issues and a wild card that suggest what’s ahead internationally that is worth our attention.

   Revelation in the Bible talks about mankind’s apocalyptic fate for their transgressions and the faltering ways of churches. Now our Nation’s democracy faces its own Revelation of a perilous fate. Such a fate, results when voters knowingly elect an unfit and criminal minded president.