Mark, have heart. Things are better now, even if it often seems otherwise. I too have lived through all of that, but remember the Big Muddy? We actually went to war on the wrong side in another country's civil war, and the entire Pentagon was complicit in it. And remember the mess that France was in back then, and how their mess got …
Mark, have heart. Things are better now, even if it often seems otherwise. I too have lived through all of that, but remember the Big Muddy? We actually went to war on the wrong side in another country's civil war, and the entire Pentagon was complicit in it. And remember the mess that France was in back then, and how their mess got it all started? Egads - that even softens the current view of the mess in Ukraine. The US military's officer corps was significantly corrupt back then, and the CIA under the Dulles brothers was little different from the KGB, including a heavy dose of the kind of corruption we now see in the Putin regime. And that had a long tail - remember Contragate? Today, sure we still have our bad apples (e.g. Flynn), and we have gone through another scumbag presidency, but the self examination is happening this time with much less tension than we had back in 1967-72. As outrageous as jurists like Alito are, back then we had Julius Hoffman. Admittedly he wasn't on the high court, but today I think that if a judge were act as he did back then he would probably get himself arrested while sitting on the bench in his own courtroom.
Then there is Trump. Yes he was a thoroughly disgusting and awful president, but history will eventually judge him by the long term impacts of his misbehavior and malfeasance. How long will the tails be of his bad actions? They would have to be very long indeed to even come close to the impacts with which we are still struggling from the Andrew Jackson presidency (i.e. the Indian Exclusion Acts). I suspect that as awful as the Donald has been, his lasting impacts will be more along the lines of an embarrassing chapter in the history books, and not a source of constitutional issues that last for centuries.
So have heart and enjoy a read of Steven Pinker's "The Better Angels of our Nature." It will make you feel better in what are admittedly some troubling times. We'll get through this, albeit on a hotter planet that has radically modified coastlines and areas of human habitation, of which there will be fewer of us packed into the remaining areas where we live, as the die-off we are in accelerates and then peaks later in the century. As Slipping Jimmy would say: "It's all good man."
Mark, have heart. Things are better now, even if it often seems otherwise. I too have lived through all of that, but remember the Big Muddy? We actually went to war on the wrong side in another country's civil war, and the entire Pentagon was complicit in it. And remember the mess that France was in back then, and how their mess got it all started? Egads - that even softens the current view of the mess in Ukraine. The US military's officer corps was significantly corrupt back then, and the CIA under the Dulles brothers was little different from the KGB, including a heavy dose of the kind of corruption we now see in the Putin regime. And that had a long tail - remember Contragate? Today, sure we still have our bad apples (e.g. Flynn), and we have gone through another scumbag presidency, but the self examination is happening this time with much less tension than we had back in 1967-72. As outrageous as jurists like Alito are, back then we had Julius Hoffman. Admittedly he wasn't on the high court, but today I think that if a judge were act as he did back then he would probably get himself arrested while sitting on the bench in his own courtroom.
Then there is Trump. Yes he was a thoroughly disgusting and awful president, but history will eventually judge him by the long term impacts of his misbehavior and malfeasance. How long will the tails be of his bad actions? They would have to be very long indeed to even come close to the impacts with which we are still struggling from the Andrew Jackson presidency (i.e. the Indian Exclusion Acts). I suspect that as awful as the Donald has been, his lasting impacts will be more along the lines of an embarrassing chapter in the history books, and not a source of constitutional issues that last for centuries.
So have heart and enjoy a read of Steven Pinker's "The Better Angels of our Nature." It will make you feel better in what are admittedly some troubling times. We'll get through this, albeit on a hotter planet that has radically modified coastlines and areas of human habitation, of which there will be fewer of us packed into the remaining areas where we live, as the die-off we are in accelerates and then peaks later in the century. As Slipping Jimmy would say: "It's all good man."