2021 Archives

Trump has so far avoided the final fate of Abimelech, who was taken out by a woman...or has he? Back in November when it was clear that Trump had lost the election in an historic landslide of 7 million votes, a fascinating CNN piece noted how he and his top officials were working to create absolute chaos during the presidential transition specifically and intentionally to sabotage the incoming Biden Administration. “Some observers,” the authors noted, “pointing to Trump's rush to pull troops [out of Afghanistan] over unanimous objections from the military's most senior leaders as well as NATO commanders, question whether the President and his officials are trying to salt the earth for Biden.”

The best of the rest of the news. — Thomas Paine once pointed out: “The only ground upon which exclusion from the right of voting is consistent with justice would be to inflict it as a punishment for a certain time upon those who should propose to take away that right from others. The right of voting for representatives is the primary right by which other rights are protected. To take away this right is to reduce a man to slavery, for slavery consists in being subject to the will of another, and he that has not a vote in the election of representatives is in this case. The proposal therefore to disfranchise any class of men is as criminal as the proposal to take away property.” Republicans, however, think that restricting the right to vote is simply good politics. Many Americans disagree with them and are planning protests today across the US for voting rights.

We must abandon our simplistic worldview and stop thinking that somebody or something (or as-yet-undeveloped technology) will save us. There are two thought poisons embedded deeply in western culture, and together they threaten to kill us all, or at least turn the world into a hellscape we’d never wish on our grandchildren or anybody else, even Republicans. They’re the collision of salvationist christianity and Cartesian thinking. In a way, these philosophical contemporaries brought us our modern conception of hell, as characterized in the third triptych by Hironymous Bosch on which Leonardo DiCaprio based a documentary about global warming.

What red blooded, Nazi-arm-band-wearing, Confederate-flag-waving, Capitol-invading, gun-toting, Trump-humping American patriot could possibly object? Now that the Pfizer vaccine has received full approval and is widely available across the US, it’s time to back it up with a vaccine passport. Those of us who did the right thing and got vaccinated are sick and tired of living a half-life because of all the covidiots out there who refuse to get vaccinated. Let them “stand on the outside” of American business and society “looking in” for a change. No shoes, no shirt, no vaccine passport, no service.