Kitchen Sink Omelet

  Why we NEED to study History Historian Mary Beard contends that  Rome became a de facto empire due to territorial expansion too vast to be effectively governed by a democratic republic So the territorial empire created the first emperors to fill a political void IMO This is frightening  the USA is rapidly expanding its holdings  (military installations) satellite nations We cannot decide how to effectively administer them Could this be why we are facing the threat of Emperor Donald Trump I? IMO This upcoming election is not whether the USA will become an empire or a republic But rather what direction the Empire of the United States will take. Or to put it more bluntly: The 1% want their empire and will stop at nothing to get it. Prediction: Tyrant Trump will fail He insists on doing everything himself Nothing happens without Trump's approval. He will drown in the details.

 For Conservatives, the question, What is a woman?  is a "gotcha" question. To conservatives, the correct answer is, "A woman  is a person born without a penis. I'm seeing strange arguments about slavery being practiced by non-whites, so this (somehow) hand-waves whites off the hook for importing (and then later smuggling) boatload after boatload of slaves to the Americas for the benefit of white slave-owners: "Oh, everyone was practicing slavery." Rule #1: Slavery  is evil. Rule #2: When in doubt, refer to Rule #1. The fact slavery is near-universal is one of the major failings of our civilization. The prevalence of slavery does not excuse the practice of slavery. How bizarre that conservatives emphasize individual responsibility;  unless it comes to issues of race,  whereupon it's all collective responsibility.

 Still catching up on old notes: This happens all the time in local politics: We need to pay town employees more to better retain experienced people. GOP: No. We need to pay LEO's more to retain them. GOP: Yes.

Woke  is so easy to define: Giving the same respect and courtesy to non-white people that we give to white people. Let's explain this another way: You know the respect and courtesy we're supposed to show to wealthy, middle-age, cis-white males? Woke  is to extend the same courtesy and respect to all other human beings.

 

 Why does living in the past always seem to involve guns firing, uniforms sparkling, foxholes manned, tanks rumbling past, military jets screaming overhead, huge factories churning, gigantic dams rushing water, limousine cars pulling up, and vast steam railroads chugging-chugging-chugging? All of this built/made by white people, with not a single non-white in sight, except to passively enjoy the benefits of being with white people? The history of our past—everyone's past—is always rewritten. So the justifications for this historical revisionism are also in a constant state of rewrite to shore up and prop up the vast overarching conspiracy, the mythology, the Adam Smith collection of fairy tales, that all of our nation's greatness, our social progress, our cultural wealth was made by lily-white hands—only these hands, mouths, feet and brains belonging to white males with wives and children. Children raised to carry on this delusion, maintain and violently defend the lie. For wit...

 It may not seem like a Blue Tsunami.  Perhaps without the GOP sabotage of the electoral process,  combined with conservatives coordinating their sabotage with foreign state agents, the votes would have been tallied much faster to create a huge wave of voter response. Yet we have so much to be thankful for: The use of paper ballots thwarted efforts both internal and external to hijack the electoral process. The forces of white patriarchy in all their violence have been exposed; the warnings of Liberalism have been validated. Everyone now sees what we are really fighting for: freedom and equality. Rivers of dark money did not win the election. The 1% coup has failed. Marijuana legalization is trending across the country. For-profit prisons will lose much of their revenue. More senate seats will come into play in two years. The benefits of liberalism will help elect more Democrats. Mitch McConnell will face his reckoning. Biden and Harris can still do much to improve the US...

We've been through this before. It's the 1960's all over again. The corrupt President Richard Nixon was in power. The GOP fomented endless wars everywhere, using Russia as their excuse; rattling sabers to loot small nations. Crony capitalism exploited the American people. Vicious racism concealed beneath a veneer of "law and order." But we know what to do this time. Educate. Resist. Expose. Envision a better world. Just like then, facing the juggernaut of a crushing economy, practice patience, one step at a time, small victories here and there.

 I am slowly coming to realize a minor but crucial distinction in the struggle for human rights,  especially for civil rights in the United States.  There are those who believe that all races are equal and  must be free to live their lives where they will  contribute to our nation how they will choose  without obstacles or constraints.  Then there those who believe it is immoral to subjugate other races for social, economic, or legal gain, and so the white race must do a better job of governing our nation. This (for me) explains so many of the weird discrepancies we find in the struggle for human rights, where thousands and thousands of people take to the streets in support of Black Lives Matter, and yet conservative politicians continue to be re-elected time after time (and outside interference can't fully explain the disparity). The sad conclusion to this chain of premises is well-intentioned people will march side-by-side with fellow activists in pu...

The consequence of a stratified hierarchy--beloved by conservatives--is we, the people, all die, be it a military death, a religious death, a medical death, or an economic death; we die slowly and painfully, and our deaths are usually meaningless.

We somehow seem to expect our children in school to be smart and stupid at the same time. Smart enough to pass all the merit-based testing, yet stupid enough not to notice our dead-end economy. What are our students learning?  They are learning that for every problem, there is an ineffective solution. These ineffective solutions are based on the (ancient) idea that less money will solve everything. How do you motivate students to learn?  Give them a future. Our students are not stupid. They can look ahead and see what our economic injustice--all of our money flowing upwards and never coming back down--will do to them. And yet the solution seems to be learning cursive writing? Seriously?