Friday, March 21, 2025

MEASLES FROM RFK JR., THE MEDIEVAL WITCH! ESPECIALLY FOR YOU!

By the way, 

Are the American people too stupid to understand reality?  We'll have to wait and see!  But maybe the resurgence of measles and its needless deaths, which RFK is enabling right now, will light up a brain or two.  

God knows, it's not only Republicans who are stupid.  Democrats and Progressives and the various factions have all been too stupid for decades to go back and understand just who the American people really were!  And what is commonly called stupidity - human limitations - remains a truly universal fact, although we all judge it from personal and distinct poles, based on whatever viewpoint (or fashion) we hold dear.    

To return to measles:  

"This miserable and dangerous disease has already claimed the lives of two people – the first American measles deaths in nearly a decade. But despite the existence of a vaccine so effective that measles was once eliminated in the US, Kennedy has thrown his most enthusiastic support behind vitamins and cod liver oil – while also canceling scientific meetings of vaccine advisers."

- Jessica Glenza, Health reporter, Guardian US

A longer article is here:  

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cedlwxlp01zo

There may be some salutary things that will in the end emerge from Trump's Bizarro-world federal regime.  Perhaps the culling of some of the existing federal government's many unproductive or ill-conceived money-sinks will ultimately open space for a rebuilding of federal spending, a balanced budget, and perhaps better agreement about just what the nation needs.  But at this point that's only the vaguest of hopes, and one posed against a de facto government of thugs, bullies, and flat-earthers.  

Saturday, March 1, 2025

Can the Four Freedoms co-exist with Human Nature?

Famously, Franklin Delano Roosevelt (and his speechwriters) set out a powerful agenda for civilized and democratic nations in his State of the Union Address on January 6, 1941.  This was nearly a year before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.  He had in mind the American notions of both Democratic government and material progress, as opposed to the nationalist and militarist notions of the intolerant regimes popular in Germany, Italy and Japan.  His speech outlined Four Freedoms, a comprehensive outline not only of what people need and wish for, but also of what just governments would be concerned with.  

To wit, that section of his speech:  

In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.

(i)  The first is freedom of speech, and expression—everywhere in the world.

(ii)  The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way—everywhere in the world.

(iii)  The third is freedom from want—which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants—everywhere in the world.

(iv)  The fourth is freedom from fear—which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor—anywhere in the world.

That is no vision of a distant millennium.

It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation.

That kind of world is the very antithesis of the so-called new order of tyranny which the dictators seek to create with the crash of a bomb.

His words sound strangely optimistic in this part of the 21st century.  The people of our time have universally decided that they prefer war and enmity in place of peace and freedom.  Certainly, so long as the common mixture of grudges, gossip, resentment, and bitterness guide  modern electorates, barbarism will be the modern way of life.    

Nonetheless, while these points should obviously be the focus of political activity in the United States and, indeed, in all civilized nations, they are universally ignored and despised in favor of acquisition and revenge.  Everywhere, throughout the world, they are ignored in favor of egotism and identities based on violence.  

Thursday, February 20, 2025

TRUMPIAN PERFIDY

Well said by Francis Fukuyama:

"What Trump has said over the past few days about Ukraine and Russia defies belief. He has accused Ukraine of having started the war by not preemptively surrendering to Russian territorial demands; he has said that Ukraine is not a democracy; and he has said that Ukrainians were wrong to resist Russian aggression. 

"These ideas are likely not ones he thought up himself, but come straight from the mouth of Vladimir Putin, a man Trump has shown great admiration for. Mee/ting in Saudi Arabia on Tuesday, the United States started a direct negotiation with Moscow that excludes both Ukraine and the Europeans, and has surrendered in advance two critical bargaining chips: acceptance of Russian territorial gains to date, and a commitment not to let Ukraine enter NATO. In return, Putin has not made a single concession."

Trump, still a villain and an opportunist to the utmost, has made American concessions that were not ours to make.  He has, in the manner of Munich, 1939, betrayed a vulnerable people to a dictator's ambition.  The differences are that while a desperate Chamberlain was fooled by Hitler's lies, here Trump is the liar, blaming the victims and Zelensky for Russia's quite naked aggession, while knowingly playing footsy with the KGB criminal-in-chief, Putin.