The scary reality is that the future of the Republic may very much ride on the Republican Presidential Primaries in 2024. The Republican party enabled Trump to become President thus only it, or better said only it’s corporate and wealthy backers, can prevent him from being their nominee in 2024. In short, most of the anti-Trump, anti-fascist rhetoric is coming from Democrats, but they don’t have the real power to prevent it from happening again, particularly when the country is split 50/50 between the two parties.
Still, unless GOP voters are polarized against the extreme right, and turnout for Republican primary contests increases dramatically, the party could continue to be a vehicle for building this hard-right base at the state level and in congressional races. The poll numbers certainly suggest that these forces have plenty of room to organize and recruit. source
Another lesson of COVID is the reality that while scientists and doctors know a lot about the human body, there is much, particularly when it comes to diseases, that they just don’t know. Anyone who has had cancer can tell you this first hand. You want certainties and the doctors can only talk in terms of probabilities and percentages.
The Athletic is being acquired by the New York Times and I don’t know how I feel about it. I subscribe to The Athletic because I find it provides the best sports reporting, written by people who left big media for one reason or another. So, now that they find themselves once again caught up in Big Media, will the reporters stay? The corporate consolidation of media has not been good for the United States.
I think the only real way to address the root cause of the attempted Insurrection on January 6, 2020 is a constitutional amendment that removes the Electoral College. The system enabled what happened on that day, and the system is blocking any real consequences and thus stop any measures to be put in place to prevent it from happening again.
My guess is that many of us view this day differently, and yet others think it overwrought. To me the heart of the matter is the elevation of individualism to a religion. You might call it American Christianity. Individualism by default creates dualism, winners and losers, true Americans and not true Americans, and it does not see the value of the “public” (we) except only to the extent that it benefits me. Surely this is the lesson of COVID, and I think it is the true lesson of January 6, 2020.
In my opinion too many U.S. citizens do not have an understanding of the country’s foundational documents, particularly the Declaration of Independence. For most the Declaration and Constitution boil down to one word, liberty. Indeed, the Declaration layed out the case for why the colonies were declaring their freedom (independence) from England. However, to me the most important part of the Declaration is the statement of why we had the right to declare our freedom and create our own government: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal…” We can do this, we said, because we are created the same as you, King George. Citizens of the United States consider liberty precious, but true liberty is built upon our equality, and true equality is something not yet fully attained in the United States. The extent of which we fight equality, we put the liberty of one group of citizens over the liberty of other citizens. Liberty does not co-exist within supremacy.
Liberty Needs Equality
In my opinion too many U.S. citizens do not have an understanding of the country’s foundational documents, particularly the Declaration of Independence. For most the Declaration and Constitution boil down to one word, liberty. Indeed, the Declaration layed out the case for why the colonies were declaring their freedom (independence) from England. However, to me the most important part of the Declaration is the statement of why we had the right to declare our freedom and create our own government: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal…”
We can do this, we said, because we are created the same as you, King George. Citizens of the United States consider liberty precious, but true liberty is built upon our equality, and true equality is something not yet fully attained in the United States. The extent of which we fight equality, we put the liberty of one group of citizens over the liberty of other citizens. Liberty does not co-exist within supremacy.
We used to have a manager in my company who wrote a monthly email to the “troops” that he titled “Random Thoughts From A Random Mind.” If you want to, you can now read a random post from a random writer.
So I think that it’s better to ask people: “Based on your own self-interest as you yourself define your self-interest, how do you expect this to work out? How do you expect the world to look in 2060 or 2070 or 2080? And how do you expect to shield yourself and your family from the world?”
Unfortunately, I think a lot of people’s answer to the above is, I don’t care, I’ll be dead. We have been conditioned for short term thinking over the last five decades.
I have been using Omnibear with Chrome to post posts to my micro.blog site, but I’ve recently started using Firefox on my Macbook Air and Omnibear is not available for it. Are there any Firefox extensions that people use with micro.blog?
I’ve changed the theme to this site, again, but this time to one that supports On This Day. I like the fonts used with this one.
Thought I would move books that I Finished Reading last year to a “Books Read In 2021” bookshelf and discovered that I cannot move books out of of Finished Reading to another shelf. I have an aversion to continuously scrolling web pages like the Archive page on this site, I want to see a hierarchy to simplify navigation. I have created a separate page of the books I read in 2021 using Drummer.
I’ve been thinking about changing the theme for this site and today I learned about Micro Alto that I’ve decided to try, which is why this site looks different but reverted because On This Day does not work and I didn’t link the hyperlink format on the main page.
We got our first substantial snow fall of the season over night. Nearly three inches.
Finished reading: The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho 📚 I started 2022 reading a new book that I finished in a day. Need to sit with what I’ve read.
I finished my last walk outdoors in 2021. Construction is progressing nicely on the new bridge on a typical Michigan gray winter day.
I learned something from every one of the books that I read last year and I really wish everyone would read See No Stranger by Valarie Kaur, but given the current times I really wish every U.S. citizen would read One Nation Under God by Kevin Kruse. I’ve long been aware that there is a unique, and frankly not Christ-like, brand of Christianity in the United States that is mostly a tool of the powers and principalities of the world. For me Kruse’s book really explains how Americanized Christianity came into being.
I finish reading my last book of 2021, The Gifts of Imperfection by Brene Brown. As I did last year, I tracked the list of what I read in an OPML file that I have published. To make it easier for me to retrieve that published version I created a forwarding URL: 2021books.frankm.info. Last year I created and published the final outline using Little Outliner but this year I used Drummer.
Little did I know then, two years ago that I might be watching the last GLi. I am really disappointed with Little Caesars.
On The Death Of Desmond Tutu
I am only aware of one country in the world that took conscious steps to address the cancer of supremacy, that country is South Africa. It’s path toward the task of overcoming supremacy was long and likely incomplete but would probably not have been taken up at all if not for Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu.
News of Tutu’s death makes me wonder how he saw the United States. Tutu had the wisdom to know that the antidote to supremacy is oneness, ubuntu. Supremacy cannot be shunned as it will simply continue lurking in the shadows. The only way to eliminate contempt is to see everyone as a part of me I do not yet know.
I feel as though the entire United States needs to be in a 12 step program. We cannot begin to overcome that which we don’t even acknowledge. We hide our addiction with our liberties. The amount of death that we have grown to accept, the amount of senseless loss of life we tolerate are not signs of a great nation or society.
The United States is leading the world into a third year of a pandemic that will continue to take more lives unnecessarily, and United States continues to lead the world in gun violence. All we are doing is managing to get by for just one more day. Apparently we have not yet hit bottom even after children are gun down in schools.
South Africa did not start to overcome the addiction of supremacy known as apartheid until it consciously did something about it. Any expert on addiction will tell you that no person can be made to overcome their addiction, the addict must decide for themselves they want to live. We, the citizens of the United States of America need to decide whether this republic handed down to us is something we want to keep, and that takes all of us to take a long look at ourselves and see us as we are rather than as how we keep telling ourselves.