Fingering Yet More Loathsome Bastards

 THE CRAZY BASTARD who exploded his RV and himself inside it indeed had a bone to pick, as had been strongly suspected. Why wouldn't he? If you'g gonna try to blow up a whole city, at least do it for a reason, right? The bone was deranged, also predictably, but had nothing to do with Islam or racism, to the probably disappointment of Christian zealots. What, the 5-G freaks believe that the government has only suddenly hit upon the idea of embedding propaganda, or Covid 19,cancer, or communism within the electromagnetic media?Hell, they've been doing that for decades.Its called corporate controlled media and/or christian broadcasting. Why, in a world awash with electromagnetic radiation, man made, coursing through our bodies, jiggling our every brain cell, any semi-sentient, coherently conscious being would be the least quanta concerned with 5-G, is quite beyond coherent comprehension. The cow, as we like to say, is long out of the proverbial barn, by about a century. The man must have been mentally ill, or mad, as in angry. Many of us seem to be nowadays. And that's the problem with all these idiotic alternative cosmic paradigm purveyors tidal waving into mainstream culture in ever greater abundance: they do real harm to real people in real space and real time. They form cults. They kill people, when sufficiently mad and motivated. Put them all in the same historical dustbin, the one labeled "nutcases", because they all belong there. The anti-vaxxers, the Q-Anon deep staters, the 5-G paranoids, the multidimensional extraterrestrial contactees, the alien abductees, the election fraud fanatics - have I left anyone out? Many, doubtless. It becomes easier to understand how religions emerged and evolved. An American, intelligent, ostensibly sane, from an affluent family, cruises through the first thirty years of life well educated, well connected, socially high ranking. Then, the stumbling block. That first great American novel is never finished, never published. A writer, a successful one, was all he ever wanted to be, or planned on being. Disillusioned, he rejects the real world and blasts off into the stratosphere, lugging his alternative cosmic paradigms along for the ride, and for the sublimation of social status. e has his status back; only he knows what he knows, and he is all too eager to share. What might he do next? Build a cult following? Encourage others to disown the world, or to harm it in an attempt to reform it? That's the problem.  We are all confronted daily with millions of ticking time bombs. On the bright side, if civilization can survive Essenes, St. Paul, and the Pentecostals, maybe, just maybe, it can survive our current hot mess, even if a few bombs go off every once in a while.

Loathing Bastards

 LOATHE though I nearly former president Trump, I promised on inauguration day to give him a fair chance, and I did. He blew it, early and often. Despicable though I have long found him, I MAGA agree with the two grand, though, like may, wonder why the publicity hound didn't speak up in June or July, thus pulling his petty stunt post pandemic package passage. Whatever, the stunt worked, at least on me. I am ready to rearrange the letter on my red ball cap to say, instead of "GRETA", "GREAT", like the rest of the reprobates, and to thus join the unruly mob, ad hoc, even as it heads for the dustbin of history. Leader McConnell's combining the two thousand dollar per person pay out with a bill to fully investigate the free and fair presidential election of 2020, and to pull the legal protection rug out from under major social media platforms in terms of their long standing immunity from lawsuits regarding their published content suits me just fine, although apparently not my fellow Democrats, for some weird reason. If it, in a nutshell, turns out to be the Demos who torpedo my chances of getting a nice fat two grand pay day instead of a measly six hundred, boy, are they ever gonna hear about it, the  bastards! So what if the election is investigated by Congress? It already has been ad nauseam, ad Biden is going to be president. And why should the Democrats be afraid that a mob of conservatives are going to file lawsuits  against Facebook for not having enough right wing bias? That, as Voltaire succinctly stated,, will come out even at the end of the day, and more even still at the end of all days. Its too funny, really, or would be, were it not so tragic, were the bastards not in such deadly earnest. Trump and the republicans spend two trillion dollars giving a huge tax cut to the corporate wealthy, but can't find a few hundred extra dollars, or their hearts and souls, for America's desperately poor, poor through no fault of their own. Chaotic to the bitter end, walks Trump, top hat, tails, and watch fob, demanding more money for the downtrodden, nay, insisting on it, throwing his G.O.P. Senatorial sycophants into a panic of contradictory values. The Repugnantins recoil in horror, while pretending not to. the Democrats jump on it. So Mitch the bitch, caught hard betwixt a rock and a hard place, contorts himself into a pretzel making it untenable for Democrats to vote yes, whipping up a nasty poison pill. If only the Democrats would swallow it, would go for the investigation into the election and removing protections for Facebook. But, for some reason, they won't, and Mitch will not separate the bill into three parts, under false pretenses. All is not lost. Georgia will give us two more Democrat senators, and Biden will give us the extra money we all so desperately need. you can bank on it.

Achieving, Enduring, Ennobling

 NEARLY TEN MONTHS IN, and the lord and vaccines willing, the end is in sight, but my life has scarcely if at all changed during the pandemic. I occasionally reach out to old friends, near and far, sometimes leaving my house. They rarely reach out to me, sometimes they don't respond to voice and email, and when they do, they seem somehow faint in appreciation. Perhaps they are depressed. I'm almost always alone from humans, but never lonely. I have my cats whom, in any case, I prefer. I have a good friend whose friend died a little over a year ago from an painkiller overdose. His pain is gone. My friend's restaurant chin is sagging beneath the weight of the collapsed economy, and he says that his severe diabetes is the least of his physical ailments.I will never know the joy or pain of having children, nor the pride and worries of owning a successful business, and my steady exercise over decades has seemingly kept me in good health. A high school girl on the radio opined that she has lost all her friends, not realizing that they are still her friends, but merely lazy, preferring immersion in video games, movies, and music while quarantined at home to the effort required at actually communicating.The ones she has lost, if any, she never needed. A lady on teh radio bemoaned her isolation, and the recent death of her unborn baby. So poignant was her voice,,,,, so profound her exuded grief, that I could but grieve with her, and I would have cried even had I not been alone with only my cats to curiously watch. I wanted to tell her what many others have already told her: that, as Voltaire said, all comes out even when the day is done, and more even still when all the days are done. That her grief will be appeased, and that she and her precious baby will be together forever, in heaven. I want to tell everyone what everyone already knows, that many if not most of our collective societal afflictions are self inflicted, avoidable, unnecessary. that among these are the pandemic, climate change, poverty, war, and so many more.That we have the means to eliminate them all, if only we have the will. And I want to remind everyone what everyone already knows, that this too shall pass, and that, as Goethe nobly said: "There is no situation which cannot be ennobled through achievement or endurance." The girl will get her friends back. the lady will have her baby, and another. And we all will have our fear, our anger, and our disappointments appeased, if only we endure and achieve, and have the faith in ourselves and our creator to only do what is necessary, and that is, to live.

Changing Plans

 WHEN NAPOLEON INVADED RUSSIA IN 1812 with half a million men, he wanted to travel light, to be able to move quickly and strike quickly. his army traveled therefore with a minimum of food, water, clothing, and shelter, and medical supplies. The plan was to live, like the two protagonists in "of Mice and Men" :off the fat of the land". It didn't work. the plan backfired. It failed miserably. The retreating Russians scorched the Earth. They burned their crops and forests, killed their livestock, destroyed all their material wealth, ransacked and burned their own cities before giving them up to the overwhelming French force. The French army got weak and hungry, drank from polluted rivers, and got dysentery and typhus. Of the four hundred and eighty thousand soldiers who died, most died not from combat but from disease.They retreated from Moscow, which had been burned and abandoned when they arrived, and staggered back to France during a harsh winter. Only twenty thousand of them made it back alive. The entire time Napoleon dismissed all the disease as imaginary, trivial, and easily surmountable problem. He abandoned his ragtag remnant of an army, fled back to France in a fancy sleigh, and was removed from office, so to speak. Ten scored and eight years later, the United States of Amnesia was invaded by a deadly microscopic army,, a deadly enemy which its leader first called a "hoax", then dismissed as trivial, then, an a pathetic, ignorant attempt to show concern and competence, prescribed a series of incredibly crazy cures, like bleach,  then blamed the whole thing on a foreign country. he too was later removed from office. The invading virus was far more intelligently and properly prepared than napoleon's ill fated army. It will be driven out, but only after inflicting horrible damage, and, in effect, winning the war. The Russians' defense against the invading French was brilliant, and although involved great sacrifice, brilliantly effective. The American defense against the virus, by contrasts, was chaotic, weak, underfunded, and even included the bizarre and traitorous phenomenon of the president and a substantial portion of his loyal followers denying its existence and actually assisting its spread. This time, it was the invading army which used smart tactics, and the invaded country which blundered badly in its own defense, killing many of its people needlessly. Legendary football coach Mike Ditka once said that it is all well and good to have a grand plan, but that you had better be prepared to change it, when necessary. Napoleon should have sent man en back to France to obtain the necessary supplies, even belatedly, even when halfway through Russia. Trump should have stopped calling the pandemic a "hoax", and should have led in organizing a massive federal response in the spring, including contact tracing and testing. He should have admonished us constantly to wear a face mask, and he never should have had those idiotic MAGA disease spreading rallies. His mindless supporters should have changed their minds about Covid 19, and begun taking it seriously, which, it seems, they have yet to do. For the believers in hell hell exists only within the limits of their own hatred and fear, and for the rest of us, for the non believers, may the dear lord bless and keep us. 

Climbing the Mountain, Tolerantly

 "DO WHAT YOU CAN, with what you have, wherever you are". "Expect nothing, blame no one, do something". Words of wisdom. Now, on to other matters. Unto reprobates, reason requires reiteration. If you are a born again evangelical Christian, have accepted Christ as your lord and savior, and you believe that anyone who hasn't, anyone who is not a Christian, anyone Islamic, for example, is not "saved" and that his or her eternal soul is therefore at great peril, you are an evil monster, an enemy of decency, and the world would be better off without your attitude and beliefs, perhaps your religion, perhaps you. if, on the other hand, you are a born again evangelical Christian, saved by your acceptance of Christ as your lord and savior, and you believe that all humans and all religions are beautiful and true, that there are infinite ways to the mountain top, and that all believers of all faiths, agnostics, atheists included, are beautiful, eternal children of God, you are beautiful, and beneficial to humanity. I know a monster who considers himself superior and virtuous because he is saved by the blood of Christ, believes he has a "one way ticket to heaven",  is waiting for the lord to return, (presumably in a fiery chariot brandishing a sword not an olive branch), and says that all Democrats and liberals go to hell. He is a humorless, personality, grumbling growling old curmudgeon, dines alone every day because nobody can stand being around him, and contributes approximately one piece per week to the community jigsaw puzzled at the local senior center, only after staring at the puzzle for hours on end every day. He thinks Trump is/was a very good president, revealing himself thereby to be, like Trump himself, a traitor and a criminal, and despite Trump's pathological lying, traitorous behavior, and criminality, all of which he is either unaware of or chooses to conveniently ignore,because, after all, Trump protects the unborn. the hateful old fool is probably on his knees at this very moment, praying to Jesus to deliver us from Joe Biden, and to return the lord's servant, Donald J. Trump, to power. he is a typical right wing evangelical reprobate, and is too stupid to understand that the social security he lives on is, yes, socialism. The very same socialism espoused by render unto Caesar give unto the poor Jesus.He further believes that the "Word of God" is a collection of primitive, barbaric ancient manuscripts written by ignorant people, in which God behaves like a genocidal, pathological demon. It is he, rather than the billions of good people he would consign to hell, who should be so consigned. so consigned to the hideous hell of his twisted imagination and mind, which, much to our good fortune, exists only within the pathological minds of those who imagine its existence. Anyone who believes in hell believes in it because he or she chooses to, wants to. You have got to be either mentally ill or just plain evil to believe in hell. Aren't there already enough problems and nightmares in this world? There is a special place in hell for anyone who believes in hell.

Migrating

 NOW THAT WE KNOW that working from home does not kill the economy, although it might slow productivity a tad, the practice is likely to persist post pandemic. Fewer commutes, bathrobe accounting, better baby sitting. Able to work from home no matter where they live, people begin to realize that they are free to live where they choose, rather than where they must.for several decades, for most of the twentieth century, the great plains, especially the northern part thereof, the "great American desert",  has been emptying out, losing population as folks give up on it and disperse for greater opportunity to the coastal regions and the big cities of the Midwest. Kansas, Nebraska, eastern Colorado, southern Idaho and Montana, great areas of abandoned territory, are now ready to be resettled by twenty first century pioneers with computers and smart phones ready for some cheap land and expansive vistas. Half of everyone on Earth lives within a few miles of an ocean, as of now. Will we all crowd together there now, unconstrained by restrictions of employment? Its possible, though it would be disastrous, since we need to be moving away from rising waters. Beginning around 1840, Americans back East started dragging wagons by oxen across thousands of miles of pertile land, wilderness, headed for Oregon. Nobody has ever logically explained exactly why,no historian nor anthropologist. nobody knows why, nor ever has. they rolled right on through millions of acres of proven fertile opportunity in search of a dream, some fantasy they had heard advertised and held dear in their imaginations. Many never made it, their bones bleaching in the hot desert sun. Many who did were disappointed by the lack of any discernible garden of Eden, and fell into drink and ruin. People migrate for many reasons. Perhaps the most fundamental is our fundamental nature, our ancestry, our origins...Our ancestors spent millions of years as nomads, always on the move, hunting and gathering, never staying in one place long. then, they, we, invented agriculture, and began to build cities, and neolithic civilization. But having root,s permanent dwellings and cities are still new to us, a recent invention, and we are not yet accustomed to it. From force of habit we remain on the move, near where we live, if nothing else. Daniel Boone and David Crockett who tried to imitate his hero Boone, neither one could stay still for long, and were always building new log cabins, deeper in the wilderness. Boone claimed he felt too crowded in when too many white settlers arrived following his footsteps, and the Indians vanished. Crockett, who also loved Indians, always imagined, always incorrectly, that he could someday have two nickels to rub together if only he could make a new start, farther west. he never found riches, but only a heroes end, at the Alamo, still looking. And maybe that's the reality for us all, always moving, always looking...for something...because we must, because we are never satisfied with what we have and know, because there is always something beckoning to us, just over the horizon. Whatever it is we are looking for we never seem to find, but we continue looking, because we must.

Making Millionaires Matter

 AS OF THIS MOMENT, there are 657 billionaires in America. Thirty five years ago there were eighteen. There are four centi-billionaires, one hundred billionaires; Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg. We in America claim Musk although he is South African.During the pandemic the net worth of all the billionaires has increased by more than one trillion,  and the big four have nearly doubled their personal fortunes, despite Gates' ongoing never ending attempt to give his money away, despite Bezos' divorce, Zuckerberg's legal difficulties, and Musk's speculative behavior. Enter Chuck Collins, the great grand son of Oscar Meyer, the German immigrant meat packing mogul of wiener fame and fortune. When he was twenty one, he inherited a fortune. At twenty six, after five years of privilege and introspection, he decided to give his fortune away, and try to make it on his own. ..he made it on his own. He currently works for a progressive think tank, the Policy Institute, researching and writing about  wealth, economic inequality in America, and the forces which drive it. He also suggests and articulates public policies which might be helpful in mitigating its harmful effects on American society and economic health. He has written two books: "Born On Third Base", and "The wealth Hoarders" Both are concerned with the phenomenon of inherited wealth and the processes by which the extremely wealthy increase their wealth from generation to generation. As the titles imply, Collins is not a fan of of inherited inter-generational wealth, and strongly favors a wealth tax, raising income taxes on the very wealthy, and the reestablishment of an estate tax. Like Warren Buffet, Collins is strongly opposed to financial family dynasties. Like many political and social scholars, he disparages our system in which the wealthy purchase political power, then retain it and use it to enact policies which favor the further accumulation of personal wealth for the already wealthy. IN a society of extreme economic inequality, he points out, the wealthy also suffer negative consequences. The most glaring example of this is the recent revelation by the New York Times that Donald Trump, a self proclaimed proud billionaire, has paid almost no income tax during the past decade. The president takes pride in his ability to avoid the responsibility. Not all wealthy people are self absorbed narcissists, preoccupied with greed. Many contribute much to charity and society. The "Patriotic Millionaires" is an organization of several hundred,including media mogul heiress Abigail Disney, which seeks to reform legal and economic systems to provide greater systemic economic equality. Disney fondly recalss a more compassionate corporate culture of her childhood, when her uncle Walt would take her aorund Disneyland, reminding her to always respect all workers, and insisting that they be paid well. Now, many of them live on food stamps. Quite simply, the more widely throughout society wealth is distributed, the more people with purchasing power, the greater the aggregate demand for goods and services, the greater the incentive for production and distribution, and the more prosperous society becomes. As we all like to say but seem to seldom do: we are all in this together.

Having An Attitude

RELIGIONS, of which there are thousands, all share certain similarities. for one, since most of them are of ancient origin, most of them embrace a primitive, simplistic, false cosmic paradigm. They all provide inspiration and emotional support for their votaries, and they all purport to provide the truth, usually the unique and only truth. They all contain elements of beauty and wisdom, they all contain truth, and they all contain imperfections and falsehoods. They all evolve over time, as new generations of believers put their stamp on them, and as the exigencies and circumstances of society require. The christian religion, for example, centers around Jesus, who was, according to all theologians, born during the first week of April in the spring, probably around April 6, in the year 6 B.C.  The early church was perfectly willing to change the date to December 25, to accommodate the northern Germanic Europeans, who had always celebrated the winter solstice as their big holiday, when the sun reached its lowest point, the days became their shortest, but finally, began to lengthen, as the sun began to rise once again the the sky. So now we have the eternal evergreen tree and the winter holiday, as a compromise to bring the Germans into the church. If your attitude towards your religion is as follows: "I accept Jesus Christ as my lord and savior, my religion is the one true religion, and anyone who does not do this is not saved, and therefore his or her eternal soul in in great peril", you are an enemy  of civilization, a bad person, and the world would be better without you. If you consider people bad because their religion is different from yours, I despise you. If your attitude is as follows; "Everybody is beautiful, and every religion is beautiful and true, because whatever religious beliefs inspire and sustain people is good, and therefor, all religions have value", then you are a friend of the human species, an upholder of civilization, and your participation in society is beneficial to us all, may the dear lord bless you, and, above all, have a very merry Christmas!

Living On the Edge

 IT IS A TOSS UP which is the more reprehensible, Donald Trump, or we the American people. First, Trump. the Russians have invaded the United States, cyberly, and are still apparently in the process of stealing every bit of information from very computer in America, including all the cute pictures of your puppies, kittens, and baby brothers. That, plus all the proprietary information contained in government and corporate computer systems. The Russians will have walked off with everything in the house, and Trump, serving as Putin's errand boy as per usual, racist as always, blames the Chinese. The fact that the United States does the very same thing to Russian and every other country in the world, that every country does it to every other country, and that every human being on the planet steals whatever it can from every other human being notwithstanding.Perhaps the day will come when we discover what horrible blackmail material Putin hangs over Trump's head, like a sword of Damacles. Something to do with pissing on prostitutes in a Moscow hotel, perhaps. We the American people are less concerned about and with Russian perfidy, and much more concerned with satisfying our every hedonistic urge. A dear friend of mine recently lamented that the pandemic has prevented her from going shopping and taking her own sweet time while being about it. I nearly bit my tongue off refraining from reminding her that there will soon be nearly half a million Americans who are no longer able to worry about leisurely shopping, nor anything else. At any rate she already knew that. It seems that many if not most Americans can empathize with my shopping deprived friend. Roughly eighty five millions of us were expected to take to the skies and highways over the holidays, some with, and some without masks and social distancing. These people must either be oblivious to the carnage all around them, vaccinated, like living on the edge, or are irresistibly impelled to fly to the bosoms of far flung friends and family, like salmon swimming upstream to mate. We hop they all make it back healthy, but of course, they won't.

Supporting Socialism, Like A Good Republican

 CAPITALISM is an economic system in which goods and services are produced and distributed to the public by privately owned (non government) business enterprises for profit in the free market. Socialism is an economic system in which goods and services are produced and distributed by government at tax payer expense. The system which provides social security, roads, highways, public schools, police and fire protection, and numerous other services in the United States, obviously, is socialism. Most material goods in America are produced and distributed capitalistically, but often with government assistance in the form of tax breaks and subsidies, such as the aircraft industry and agriculture, among others. Both capitalism and socialism can exist flourish in any political system, ranging from totalitarian dictatorship to direct democracy, to anarchy. When you hear someone say, usually a conservative, that social must at all costs be kept out of the United States and that socialism has never worked anywhere it has been tried, as you have heard a trillion times if you have heard it once, you are hearing a lie, and please beg to differ with it, then refute it. Use the U.S.A. as your example. Social Security works like a charm. So does all other socialism in America. The roads are drive-able, the schools teach, the police catch crooks, and so forth. Suppose you are a progressive, are running for high or low political office, and your opponent, a staunch conservative, repeatedly warns the electorate that you are a "closet" socialist, and that if elected, you will open the door to the dreadful specter of socialism in Amerikah.  You panic, deny every word of the malicious allegation, accuse your opponent of vicious slander, and, as we like to say these days, "push back". That, of course, is totally useless. Instead, try this. Proudly proclaim to the initially shocked public that yes, indeed, you are a socialist, out of the closet.  You are a democratic socialist of the enthusiastic kind, and that so is your opponent, although she doesn't seem to know it. She is either ignorant of what socialism is, in denial, or ashamed to come clean. Remind the public that they too are democratic socialist, every last one of them, because they do not want to pay a tool fee every time they get in their car and leave their driveway and head for the parkway.Nor do they wish to pay a fee to the local capitalistic police force, and the corporation which owns it, for every burglary or trespasser on their property. Unless some weirdo wants to live in a dictatorship, and wants to corporate community to own and control every street, school, library, fire department for private profit, everyone in Americah is a democratic socialist, at least partly, even if our right wing brethren and sistern refuse to acknowledge this simple fact.It is absolutely crazy the way right wingers claim that socialsm never works anywhere, and that we must keep it out of our country, when it works great her in America,  has been here for decades, and yes, we want to keep it. Either that, or refuse to accept social security and medicare when you turn sixty five, whcih, I promise you, as a new sixty five year old, you most certianly do not want to do.

Naturally Occurring Hope

 MOST INFORMATION concerning climate change is depressingly negative. Millions of idiots deny its existence, to preserve their self esteem and political viewpoint. The rate of increase atmospheric carbon is slowing, but the net content is increasing, not decreasing. Deforestation continues. The polar regions and the oceans are warming at much greater rates than previously thought, and climate scientists are alarmed by this. Every year is the hottest year on record. and so forth. All negative. A seemingly endless litany of negative realities. But juxtaposed against all this is one overarching reality: nature, by nature, seeks equilibrium. Nature is constantly, like humans, engaged in healing itself. Rivers over time tend to flush out their own pollution, if left alone. If left alone the atmosphere, over time, clean itself up. Likewise the land. problem is, there aint no way on Earth or under heaven that we the people are going to leave the Earth well enough alone. What remains to us, as we have long known but seldom practices, is to make our living as much in harmony with nature as possible, instead of with complete disregard for natural health of the environment, exclusively for our own convenience, pleasure and profit. We must take heart, and be optimistic. It is not too late to save the ecosystem. it can only be done,however, with sustained, fundamental change in human behavior. That too we have long known, but have tried to avoid acknowledging and acting upon. And since humans by nature are conservative and resistant to change, making the necessary changes will be tedious and strenuous, as we have already seen. but humans have survived and evolved because of resiliency. Although we only change when forced to, when forced to , we change. Future historians will likely regard climate change deniers of the twenty first century, and the "bring back coal" crowd, aka Trump supporters, as dinosaurs, throwbacks to an era long gone, hinderers of essential progress, much like people who refuse to accept modern science, advances in medicine, advances in our understanding of nature. Refusing to accept the reality of climate change caused by human activity is no more sensible than refusing to accept the fact of human evolution by natural selection, the fact of nuclear physics, relativity, or microbiology. the good news is that such people, like dinosaurs, are doomed to extinction.

Lovingly Dogging Juan

 MY NEIGHBOR is from Guatemala, and I have repeatedly told him that I speak only to white people, that hs should consider returning to his own country, and that brown and black people are second, third, or fourth class citizens in America, take your pick.  I tell him that I must make America great again, like it was before his arrival in this country, and that I must hurry, before the current president leaves office, assuming he does. I am joking, of course, and we both laugh hard, being easily entertained. I would rather make jokes about our nightmarish American racism than cry about it. For good people, ignoring it is not an option .Often one of us will suddenly shout: "Long live the president"! (Trump). and the other will respond: "Somewhere far away"! It cracks us both up, every time, no matter who says which line. I don't get to see Juan as often as I would like, because he has a family and a full time job owning his own home renovation business, and I am retired. He rebuilt my crumbling deck. Juan reminds me unintentionally, how fortunate we are, having people like him coming to our country and improving it. I often tell him that he needs to quit his job, because his boss is a slave driving asshole. Again, we laugh. We laugh at anything, at Trump, whom we both despise, and mostly at ourselves. it beats crying. He has often remarked that much of what Trump does and says reminds him of a Latin American dictator. "This is worse than Guatemala" he has said several times. The thought has occurred to me how wonderful it would be if Trump supporters and evangelical Christian Trump supporters and I could get along as well as Juan and I, if we could simply joke and tease each other about our differences, instead of taking ourselves of seriously. I have often said that I despise Trump supporters, particularly evangelical Christians, eighty percent of whom still support Trump even at the end of the most corrupt presidential administration in American history. To me, for any true Christian espousing the values and messages of Jesus Christ to support a person like Donald trump is simply inexcusable, deplorable, and all kinds of other bad things. I often remind Juan that he chose to emigrate to the mother of all racist countries, when he sadly tells me that often people seem to dislike him because of his Latino accent, his dark skin, assuming that he might be an illegal immigrant, which he is not. I remind him that the rest of us , like he, are forced to live among right wing evangelical Trump supporters. he himself is an evangelical Christian, which give him a unique insight into the bias against folks like him. I haven't asked him how well he gets along with the right wingers at his wife's Pentecostal church; I probably won't. I really don't need to know.

Taking Credit, Unduly

 LEAVE IT TO the two supreme beings of right wing American fanaticism, Mike "the fly" Pence, and Mitch "monotone" McConnell to seek to salve self esteem in the dying days of the Trump mis-administration by taking credit for doing good thins were no such credit is due. Now that vaccines for Covid 19 are manifesting, Pence, in a rare display of respect for science, got shot in arm on camera,and took full credit for the opportunity. Pence praised "Operation Warp Speed", of which he was nominally the head, for developing the vaccine. In fact he had nothing to do with it, and Operation Warp Speed was simply an infusion of government money into a corporate endeavor which was already underway. In truth, decades of accumulated scientific research and progress, combined with the resources of big pharma and good old fashioned profit motive capitalism did the trick.McConnell, referring to the endlessly debated Covid 19 relief bill which each day for months moved halfway to the finish line without ever getting there,  asserted that teh bill's coming to fruition is a tribute to bipartisan  bicameral compromise, but that also, if only the Democrats had been the least bit cooperative, help would have gotten to the struggling American people much sooner, a blatant lie. There was much failure to cooperate, much obstruction, on both sides of the isle.Every American who is not wealthy but votes for Republican candidate is voting against his or her best interests.Were it not for republican opposition, the Covid 19 bill would have been much more comprehensive, would have given much needed help to many more Americans, including struggling cities and states, whose financial woes are not of their own making. Because of Republicans, the first Covid 19 relief bill in March gave unnecessary help to the corporate wealthy. Because of Republicans, the new bill will leave small towns struggling to keep police and firefighters on the payroll.Mitch McConnell has openly expressed his contempt for giving away money to America's poor, who, he said, are likely to spend it on crack cocaine and other frivolous pleasures. This, of course, is completely false slander, but demonstrates the arrogance of the party of the wealthy, entirely out of touch with the realities of most American's lives.If mainstream American working class society truly understood the aims and means Republicans us to achieve them, they would permanently vote the elitists out of office.

Ridding Ourselves of Reprobates

 THE SURVEY divided American society into several groups, including: white evangelicals, black protestants, Hispanic Catholics, and non religious, among several others. The purpose was to measure societal attitudes towards the Covid 19 pandemic, according to ethnic and religious affiliation. The results were striking, and, probably predictable. white conservative evangelicals were the only group which did not list the pandemic among its top three concerns. All other groups placed it as number one, understandably. White evangelicals also placed little or no importance on public health protocols such as mask wearing and social distancing. They trust Trump more than anyone to deal with the pandemic, evidently because they do not consider it worthy of being dealt with.Only the evangelicals considered government restrictions on the size of worship services during a deadly pandemic to be unwarranted government intrusion into personal liberty and a violation of the freedom of religion, and totally unacceptable. Incidentally, only evangelicals failed to list either climate change or  extreme economic inequality among its top three concerns. Of all the people on Earth, white conservative evangelical Christian republican Trump supporting Americans are by far my least favorite. The results of this survey partly explain why. i consider them uniquely evil, unworthy of inclusion in civilized society, worthy only of utter contempt, exclusion, and destruction. I never hesitate to tell people this. I consider them primarily responsible for electing a traitorous criminal reprobate to the American presidency, and for most other social ills, of which the list is long. It includes racism, homophobia, religious intolerance, and unrestrained corporate capitalism, environmental destruction, and poverty. Majority Christian America likes to call the nation a "Christian country", and to claim credit for its virtues. Let them take a little credit for its failings as well. Simply substituting the word "progressive" for "conservative", or "tolerant of all religions" instead of "Christian evangelical" changes my attitude completely.The good news is that all statistical compilations indicate that this demographic, white, conservative, evangelical Christian Republicans, is declining rapidly  and numerically as a percentage of the American population. They are heavily concentrated among the baby boomers, who are dying off, and the millennials are not inclined to be religious, and are inclined to be progressive politically. There is hope for the future.

Messing Up, Cleaning Up

 AS IT HAS DONE EVERYWHERE ELSE, the human species has massive polluted the outer fringes of the Earth's atmosphere, in orbit, where deep space begins. Tens of thousands of orbiting satellites of sundry sorts have been launched into orbit by many countries, have served their purpose, become obsolete, ceased functioning with age, and, like so much other material of human manufacture, have been conveniently discarded and ignored, there to remain forever as pollution. Its getting to the point where any astronaut who travels into upper Earth orbit is risking her life, because the possibility of collision with  rapidly moving space debris is becoming increasingly real. Scientists are well aware of this, although the public isn't, and are trying to design and facilitate the tricky problem of removing and cleaning up tons of space debris. It is apparent that it will be an expensive process, like all other massive clean up efforts, and, like most other problems, would have been far easier to contend with had it been addressed long ago, when there were far fewer junk piles in orbit. Maybe some sort of huge mesh net could be dragged around the world a few times. The list of human dung heaps is long, and lengthening. The lower atmosphere is full of carbon, the upper atmosphere is full of space junk, are full of plastic and other poisons. The ground itself is full of plastic and land fills, and discarded, toxic chemicals of a wide variety. Fresh water bodies are still polluted with chemicals and garbage, even after decades of clean up, the fruit of corporate freedom and profit. Our bodies are no less full of it. Each day we take in about a debit card's worth of plastic, and much of it remains within us. Where and how do we begin to clean up? By talking about it? The clean up is actually beginning, but not fast enough, nor near enough. With the human population approaching eight billion and no end in sight, and a global economy determined to proceed with the industrial process necessary to make a few million folks incredibly wealthy and the rest of us  pacified and docile, it seems as if the forces of wealth, greed, and filth still outweigh our increasing global awareness of the problem and our desire to clean up our act, for future generations, if not for ourselves. All around us the environment is crashing to its death, as millions of plants and animals become extinct because of human activity, climate change encroaches rapidly, and we continue to defecate where we eat. Time will tell, and it will tell soon, probably before we even know it.

Favoring Life, Like Everyone Else

 THE GREAT STATE of Arkansas has been named, questionably, dubiously, the most "pro-life" state in the United States by some anti-abortion rights group .As if there is any state or person who is not "pro life". Pro choice people are strongly opposed to government intervention in a woman's control of her reproductive choices, since pro choice people by and large tend to believe in God, and that pregnant women will be guided by their God, not their government. "Pro life" people believe in big government, government intervention in a woman's personal choices. Arkansas, the historical home of lynchings, lethal injections, and a veritable hunter's paradise, pro life? Thou shalt not kill?  The pro life group further cited the recent upsurge in the number of right wing judges in the federal judiciary, including the U.S. Supreme Court, as a positive indicator for future legislation limiting women's abortion freedom under Roe v. Wade. Indeed, conservative judges, like conservative people generally, tend to hate abortion rights, and tend to seek to reduce these rights granted by Roe v. Wade, whereas left leaning judges, like left leaning progressive people generally, tend to support abortion rights as guaranteed by the 1973 Supreme Court decision upholding them, based upon the constitutional  the right of privacy, a right which does not actually explicitly appear in the founding document, but is assumed to exist by extension of other enumerated constitutional guarantees. Arguably, Roe v. Wade was rendered under dubious logic, constitutionally, but the ruling still stands, and has for a half century. Everyone is pro life. Bu those opposed to abortion rights seem to believe that government is needed to prevent abortions, whereas progressive abortion right advocates, who themselves are not less pro life and who do not necessarly want people to ever have abortions, prefer to believe that a woman's own judgment, and the guidance of her God, will suffice. Liberal renderings from the Supreme Court, or any other court, are often described by conservatives as "legislating from the bench", or "judicial activism". But in the case of the abortion issue the exact opposite is true.A woman's right to an abortion is guaranteed, the settled law of the land, for nearly fifty years.Therefore, liberal judges who uphold Roe  v. wade and abortion rights are upholding constitutional law, and conservative judges and legislators who try to shrink abortion rights through legislation or court renderings are the judicial activists, legislating from the bench. This is another truth that conservative refuse to accept, that they too are often guilty to seeking to make law in court, rather than interpret it.

Killing For Fun

 EVIDENTLY NOT CONTENT to have murdered hundreds of thousands of Americans through neglect, negligence, and plain old idiocy,the Trump administration has decided to leave town with a bang and a whimper, one final killing spree. In recent days the Department of Justice has ordained the execution of ten death row inmates, the first federal prisoners to have been put to death in more than sixteen years. More are yet to come, as the executive branch executes its power to execute, outgoing A.G. Bill Barr pulling the plug on a couple dozen lives on his way out Trump's dog house door. Not since the wild west days of president and former sheriff Grover Cleveland has such a shocking multi state shooting spree been beheld. Trump seems inclined to associate with and to deal with criminals, birds of a feather. Those who criminal activity personally benefit him, he defends, praises, or pardons, more of which is soon to come. When his criminal cronies get into trouble, he denies knowing them, prior to pardoning them, Why not? Those whose criminal behavior does not benefit him personally, we now know, Trump merely disposes of, like so much human garbage. Normally federal judges and juries sentence people to death and determine execution dates for federal prisoners. But the federal Justice Dept. supervises the entire federal judicial system, and under Trump, the Attorney General, normally independent, must do the president's bidding or risk his job, if not more. The current occupant recently lost his, as have several previous. Donald Trump will never know the names of the people he kills. They may be innocent, as many on death row have been proven to have been. Exactly what business it is of Donald Trump and his justice department to intervene in the criminal justice process simply to hasten the execution of selected condemned? Except, perhaps and assuming to president's true purpose is to expedite as much death as possible n his continuing anger over his recent election loss. This is further evidenced by his staunch refusal to even acknowledge the existence of the two greatest threats to the United States in the past one hundred years; Covid 19 ans climate change. then too, when one considers the president's  summary and spartan treatment of refugees, including desperately hungry families and their children, separating them and locking them in cages, one can easily see that Donald Trump is not an advocate of compassionate conservatism. Quite the opposite, actually.

Disrespecting Democracy, Like Good Republicans

 NOW THAT THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE ha formalized and confirmed the will of the people in the election of Joe Biden as president, another very reluctant handful of republican lawmakers and Trump supporters are beginning to acknowledge reality.The vast majority remain in denial, just as they denied the illegal election of Trump four years ago with Russian assistance, and have denied the criminality, chaos, and harmful policies of the Trump presidency. Even now, days after the revelation of a massive Russian hack into U.S. government computers, Trump remains silent, evidently in denial of the perfidy of his Russian employers. Attempting to undermine and subvert  American democracy by stealing the election , as Trump and millions of his supporters have done, will not make America great, but rather, quite the opposite. I t will, and already has diminished our country in the eyes of the world, and, more importantly, in our own estimation. The white Christian republican party is an anachronism, a relic of an America long gone, never really existed, will never return, was never intended to be, and was never truly great. The way to make America great is to look forward, not backward, to make America great "once and for all", rather "again". Desperate. shrinking political movements resort to desperate tactics. Desperate activism is nothing new among America's extreme right wing, because the right wing, conservatism, is always being supplanted b y change and progress. Their desperate attempt to usurp Biden's legitimate election is merely the continuation of a long standing trend. Watergate, "birtherism", the ludicrous lie that Obama was born in Africa, and was therefore ineligible to be president, a lie widely spoken among Republicans. voter suppression and gerrymandering are among an old bag of tricks, oft employed. They use lies and vicious slander to facilitate their diabolical ends. On the day Barack Obama was inaugurated, January 20, 2009, Republican congressional leaders gathered together for a single purpose: to devise strategies for defeating every legislative initiative which might come from the Obama administration, even before knowing for sure what those initiative might be. Mitch McConnell vowed to make Obama a one term president as his sole objective. he failed, fortunately. All across America's fruited plan Christian Republicans lynched effigies of Obama, and many still do. So much for bipartisanship, and racial equality. So much for conciliation with the right wing. In all this the desperation of a dying political movement is evident. What remains is to put it out of its misery, soon, and mercifully.

Misbehaving For Jesus

 AT MY LOCAL SENIOR CENTER many if not most of the elderly evangelical Christians are devout Trumpists who voted for Jesus and who consider Trump and Him two peas in a pod, in that they are beloved by god's chosen and rejected by sinners, to wit, liberal Democrats. Their younger, more energetic first cousins are the sort who carry assault weapons and bibles into the streets and, wearing white hoods, MAGA caps, knife and bludgeon bystanders suspected of voting for Biden in honor of their mistreated savior, Donald J. Trump. These people are dangerous, old and young alike, for their ideology is malignnant. I try to avoid wondering how many seniors, locally and nationally, all people who should know how to behave by now, joined Trump's doomed, desperate, desperate, demented, delusional attempt to steal the election from Joe Biden. One is too many.In all fifty state capitols Trumpist thugs harassed electors  as they completed their constitutional duties in electing Joe Biden.They are dangerous, thuggish demagogues, who worship a monstrous president and a monstrous deity and threaten anyone who does not with eternal damnation in hell. Hell, to our great fortune, is as imaginary as the virtue, self proclaimed goodness, superiority, and good citizenship of the evangelical community which supported Donald Trump. The evangelicals at the senior center are willing participants in a extremist, ultra right wing, ultra religious, thoroughly radicalized mob of thuggish and gangsters, and they number, alarmingly, about a third of the American population..They adore Trump and Jesus, reject democracy, advocate theocracy, carry guns, and they think secular progressives are the enemy.They believe that their God will descend from the sky in a flaming chariot any day now, and that Covid 19 is a liberal hoax, a sign of the end of days, or both. While they spread the disease by ignoring public safety protocols the pray for either the pandemic to end, or for the human race to end.They would be fine with either outcome. They would be less dangerous were they not so numerous, angry, well armed with fire arms, and totally  deluded.We must resist them and either reform them or defeat them before they succeed in forcing the rest of us, those who remain sane, to join them in their fantasy world by force.

Hating Truth

 IT IS WELL KNOWN that Donald Trump is a racist and white supremacist, although of course he denies it, as most racists do. it is also acknowledged among honest people who do not make excuses forTrump that he likes racists and white supremacists. he has called them "good people". On December 12 the mutual love affair culminated with a visit to the White House by the grand high dragon of the "Proud Boys", one of America's most violent white supremacists organizations, whose name sounds like a gay rights group, but, unfortunately , is not. Trump's spokespeople denied, predictably, that the hate monger leader had been issued an invitation by the president, or that he met with Trump. The Proud boy was just another tourist, we are told. If so, he was touring alone.Meanwhile, outside in the streets, an angry mob, looking for ways to vent their anger, afflicted with a common delusion,  chanted the same old tired lies and slogans about the election having been stolen. some pf Trump's precious Proud boys knifed an African-American man, whom they called a "nigger", and beat up a couple more, just for kicks, while hanging racist signs in front of black churches. Donald Trump, in a helicopter overhear, tweeted his approval of a mob he loved but could not hear. The millions member nation wide mob which pretends to believe that the election was stolen cannot hear Trump either, ore pretends not to, or chooses not to. The seventy four million mobster who voted for his reelection either did not care that he spent his entire first term lying to the American, or they did notice. During the past four years this website has published hundreds of articles about Trump, telling the truth about him, sharp;y criticizing him and his followers, but will publish few if any more. Its time to move on. Its time for Trump and his followers to move on, and to become better people if they can, even though it seems possible that Trump and his minions will return in 2024 for another run at the presidency. It is also possible that by then the republican party will have washed its hands of him, and that other presidential candidates will demonstrate their superiority to Trump as potential presidents.The silver lining is that we now know that about one third of the American people are mentally ill, and we know exactly who they are.

Remembering Our Remarkable Sister

 ELVIS PRESLEY sat through school with her songs in his head, then said he would run home from school to listen to her records. Chuck Berry, whom many consider to have invented rock n roll, said that his entire career was one long impression of her. Johnny Cash called her his favorite singer, and once reportedly said that she invented music .She played with Duke and Count, THE Duke and THE count. She was raised ln gospel, which remained her favorite throughout her life, but she combined it with jazz, the blues, and rock n roll, which she actually invented but did not give it its name, to create her memorable style. Among her contemporary music lovers she was beloved and admired, as she toured the world and became a world famous top hit icon.And yet today she is largely forgotten. If you've never heard of sis Rosetta Tharp, its either because you don't like modern American music, are quite young, you live on Mars, or, most likely its not your fault at all. Its because she was black and sexually queer, and a woman, and because of the hatred American society has for people like her. She died when I was a senior in high school. two weeks after harry Truman died, and at about the same time Pablo Picasso died. A friend and I drove three hour sin teh middle of a freezing December, 1972 night to stand in line for three hours and spend two minutes walking past the casket of president Truman as it lay in state.Th day Picasso dies, I went to class and tole the girl sitting behind me, may girlfriend who was a good art student, about Picasso's death. She refused to believe me. But I do not remember Tharp's passing, and I had never heard of her until I was well past fifty, despite my lifelong love of rock n roll. Shame on me. Shame on American society. I have friends who are musicians who have either never heard of her or know little about her.Had she been a man, or a gorgeous heterosexual white woman, she would now be a cherished as Chuck Berry or Marilyn Monroe or Elvis Presley.  Instead, she is largely forgotten. We Americans like to forget about the non conformers. She was a perfect storm for post life anonymity.She is also a perfect illustration that the United States of Amnesia is a racist, misogynist, homophobic culture. Not bashful, she often remarked that she could play guitar better than any man, and she was right.Anyone who listens to her gospel recordings knows that she was perhaps the greatest gospel singer of all time. Among our contemporary conservative evangelical Christian community she should be an icon, but they won't touch her with a ten foot pole, for obvious reasons. Like so many other narrow minded hateful attitudes of modern American Christiandom, its really too bad. But, its their loss, not hers.

Getting Some Fresh Air

 SOMEHOW OR OTHER, when the three waves of the misnamed "Spanish flu" had swept across freedom's land, killing upwards of three quarters of a million Americans, percipient people had begun to notice that being inside buildings seemed to make it worse, and being outside of them seemed to mitigate the viral spread. They were, of course, quite correct. Thus was born the great fresh air fad of 1920. Everyone rushed outside, and architects began designing buildings which could be steam heated in the middle of winter will all the windows wide open. When we Americans fad, we go whole hog, we do not mess around. The fad, like all other fads, didn't last, as we Americans are notorious for having less attention span than a goldfish, about sixteen seconds. On to other fads, like the Charleston and short skirted short haired women chain smoking cigarettes. But for a time, the big windows were wide open, and folks were outside at all hours of day or night, rain or shine. When they drank liquor, they did so illegally. In this they were wise. Staying outside, that is. The great flu epidemic faded after killing maybe one hundred million people world wide; the first flu vaccine wasn't developed until 1940. I love fresh air, and am willing to go to great lengths to get some. I am willing to stand up, walk away from the couch and comforter, and walk outside, but only during timeouts and commercials. In fact, I am somewhat paranoid about not getting enough fresh air, seeing as how I have huge lungs, and during the winter if the temperature rises above sixty, as it does with increasing frequency in our age of global warming, I open all the windows in my house, and let the air surge in. Most Americans do not seem to share my fresh air obsession, Most Americans in fact seem to avoid fresh air at all costs. I notice houses with the windows perpetually closed, the blinds perpetually drawn, and either the air conditioning or the furnace on, depending on whether it is above or below seventy two degrees outside. they make their houses cold as an arctic cap used to be in summer, and hotter than Hades in winter, directly defying nature. I do the opposite. I let my house get chilly in the winter, and warm in the summer, thus keeping my energy use to a minimum, and working with nature, rather than against it. The only drawback to that is that people tend to stop coming over to visit me, especially girlfriends.Or maybe that is a bonus..

Culturally Collectively Fantasizing

 THE ANSWER IS: The several if not many distinctly extraordinary occasions upon which a large percentage of the American people strongly embraced a common blatantly false belief. The question could be articulated thus: What do the William Miller double rapture, the War of the Worlds, America's supposed, alleged founding upon freedom, the anti-vaxxing movement, and the stolen election of 2020 have in common? And these, bear in mind, art but the tip of the proverbial hackneyed iceberg. In this our great American cultural fun house, where everything is a scam, and nothing is what it seems, bizarre mass delusion run rampant. There is always at least one afoot at any given time. We are never without them.We are accomplished as self deception, through hard practice. WE Americans have deceived ourselves for generations that our country was born in freedom rather than violence, slavery, and genocide. We once deceived ourselves that slavery was beneficial to the enslaved, because it gave them civilization and the christian faith. When the reverend William Miller's national rapture failed to manifest in 1843, he tried again in 1844, with the same results, only with fewer victims, fewer bankrupt, scammed votaries. In 1938, Orson Welles couldn't back up his radio broadcast with actual Martians, the national relief was offset somewhat by a vague sense of disappointment, almost as if the country wanted some distraction, any distraction, from the great depression. Two facts stand out. The United States of America is conceived in fantasy and dedicated to the proposition that all realities are created equal. The self delusion started early and often, in the land of the sucker. Noticeable is that over the years we seem to have improved if not perfected our technique. Future generations might marvel that in the computerized security state year of twenty twenty there could have been as serious debate over who won the presidential election, when the results were so transparent for all to see. they might even more that tens of millions of ostensibly intelligent people bought into the fantasy that it was stolen, through some means which nobody was ever able to make apparent. Even after the lack of evidence was obvious to all, the fantasy persisted that Donald Trump's presidency was stolen from him, and, of all the great delusions which have marked the American experience, this may well be the most inexplicable, the most amazing of all.

Giving The Sane A Good Laugh

 DONALD TRUMP is arguably a two hundred and fifty pound virus which, having infected American society, has metastasized and caused widespread mental illness among us, the american people. Einstein said it best: "the world is a madhouse". More than one half of the Republican members of the U.S. House of Reps have signed on to the lawsuit soon to go before the supreme court, the one which originated in Texas and to which trump signed on. their brief asks that the election be nullified in four states, then lists a bunch of nonsense, lies, and conspiracy theories to back it up. Trump vows revenge against those GOP lawmakers not participating. The high court will toss it out within moments, since its full of the same insane nonsensical wishful thinking with which all Trump supporters seem infected. Mitt Romney said it best: "madness". The republicans and evangelical conservative america had better think twice about how closely it hitches its wagon to Trump in his waning political days. When the last lawsuit is laughed ou into the streets and Biden is sworn in, Trump will slink back towards Florida with as much fanfare as he can muster, as only he can. The ghost of Senator Joseph P. McCarty shimmers translucently in the corner, warning of the fleeting nature of American political celebrity predicated upon outrageous behavior directed towards a radical but limited audience. nearby stand David Due and Jerry Falwell Junior, who failed to heed the warning.  Donald Trump, congressional Republicans, and assorted little trumpets are having a proverbial blast. Trump is raking in gullible money, while the gullible donors are enjoying their little game of righteous indignation, crying foul, claiming election fraud, stop the steal. Conservative evangelical America has long mastered the psychotic psychological artful act of turning itself into a victim, a pure and innocent victim of a dread conspiracy of liberals radicals, the mainstream media, some imaginary deep state of anti-Trump rebellion, and heavens only knows who else, what other godless factions pitch in. I hope that they continue reaping the emotional balm of their little charade of outrage for decades. I sincerely hope that those who supported Trump never let go of their anger and resentment of an imaginary enemy from within which stole seven million votes from their iconic demagogue. They deserve nothing more or less than to dwell eternally in the pathology of their ow making. And, after all they have put the rest of us through, and after all the high melodrama they have bestowed upon us, the rest of us, America's remaining sane, well deserve the good laugh to which they unwittingly have treated us and reduced themselves.

Battling To The Bitter End

 DONALD TRUMP and his political allies, consisting of nearly all congressional Republicans, most republican governors, state secretaries of state, and attorneys general, and millions of morally bereft bad American citizens, have embarked on their version of the Battle of the Bulge. a last ditch attack,not a diet, despite the soon to be former president's corpulence. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton et al are leading the lunacy, a publicity stunt disguised as a lawsuit, and the chief con artist himself, Don the con, is joining forces with the gang, getting on board the badly out of tune bandwagon continuing his money making protest of the election results.  What a pathetic legacy is being left by the Trump movement. Even our current most conservative supreme Court will laugh the phony lawsuit right out onto the streets, just like all the others have. Will Donald Trump attend Joe Biden's inauguration, as is customary for outgoing presidents? If so, will he do so still claiming to be the duly elected president? He will not attend, but he will spend the rest of his life claiming to be the true president in exile, and millions of his sycophantic cultish reprobates will buy the scam, or pretend to. When Biden moves into the white House, will Trump move out willingly, or be evicted forcefully as a trespasser? The potential for unprecedented high melodrama is apparent.  This has the making of good, or bad reality TV, or made for prime time episodes of the Kardashians, The Bachelor, The Bachelorette, twenty twenty culture written all over it. Equally apparent is the appalling lack of honesty, decency, and patriotism of Trump and his cult following, for whom personal political power trumps basic morality and love of country. Rush Limbaugh, in a rare moment of lucidity, suggested that there is no hope of reconciliation between left and right in America, and that, as he put it, secession might be the only remaining alternative. He omitted mentioning exactly which side would secede, and where thy might go; perhaps he envisions two distinct countries superimposed upon a single continental land mass. but if Trump and his supporters are today's version of conservatism, and most of the rest of us represent the left, Limbaugh may have a point. Biden's plea that the virus is the enemy, and that we are not each other's enemy seems sadly mistaken. I for one cannot imagine ever breaking bread with anyone who supported Trump. Four long years made a believer out of me, a believer in the inherent evil of American religious conservatism. And this business of their trying to steal the election by claiming that it was stolen from them, well, that is the straw which broke my reconciliationary back.

We, Warming Up Fast

 ON A WARM SUMMER DAY in the middle of December in the midwestern United States, I was out in my yard, picking up sticks. I do that a lot. I planted twenty saplings fifteen years ago, they grew up, and they shed. So go the unintended consequences  of my meager albeit sincere effort at mitigating climate change. I wonder how much carbon they have sequestered?... Enough to grow a lot and shed a lot of sticks, obviously. My neighbor, also out, piped up: "Nice day, aint it"? Standard,mundane, harmless banter. Indeed it was a nice day, being seventy five degrees in December and all, but, sometimes i want more than friendly innocuous banter. Sometimes I simply cannot be content to say "yeah, nice day", and leave well enough alone. Instead I said: "Yes, but should it really be seventy five degrees this often in the middle of December?" He allowed as how it shouldn't, as people always do, when I say something like that, which is often. Emboldened, I trudged on.I remarked that every October for the past several years half of the days have been in the mid eighties, and that in November, temperatures in the upper seventies are no longer uncommon, and that it didn't used to be that way, not when I was a kid, back in the sixties and seventies.My climate change lecture is always brief, inviting, evocative. I further remarked that October has become a summer month in our part of the country, and that November and December are apparently following suit.When I say all that, which is often, people over the age of fifty always agree with me, because they can all remember when October was a cold month, as were November and December, and spring began in late March, not late February like it odes now. Everyone also agrees with me when I mention that it is only going to get weirder, and that by the time we are dead and our grand children are our age, the world will likely be one...hot...mother. Most alarming of all is the obvious fast rate with which the world is warming, the climate changing. Climate scientists are all alarmed, as each year is hotter than the previous.For climate scientists, for me, and for anyone paying attention the facts are obvious, as are the causes. The current rate of warming and change greatly exceeds all previous extrapolations, which is doubly alarming. Climate change is upon us now, is getting worse fast, and what we once considered to be a threat to future generations is a threat to we here now the living.its impacting us more every day. And, all things considered, maybe this is for the best, maybe this is the way it should be.Future generations did not create this problem. maybe we can do something to fix the mess we have made, before its too late. Probably not, but...maybe.

Confusing Causes

THERE HAVE EXISTED civilizations in which the citizenry believed, with credulous fervor, that by ceremoniously dumping a virgin into the volcano, the volcano will be appeased, and, satiated, will refrain from further eruptions of hot magma, thus sparing the city below further harm.  Among pre scientific societies, all kinds of sacrifices, often often human, often virgin, were made to all kinds of imaginary gods, to appease the forces of nature, in anthropomorphic form. Flash forward to the year two thousand and twenty, the scientific revolution has manifested and modern technology has emerged, knowledge has multiplied, human understanding of the universe swells in abundance. We find that nearly two billion people, many of them with knowledge of science and nature, are firmly convinced that a virgin was slowly tortured to death on a wooden cross two thousand years ago, and that therefore the two billion people are spared the consequences of their personal bad behavior on the condition that they worship the murdered virgin as their one and only God.Question; have we learned anything about causation in the world, or haven't we? Every human action, every mistake has consequences, direct, indirect, immediate, delayed. Its very simple, basically. Its provable, demonstrable, verifiable.. So why, in an age in which your average fourth grader can program a computer, do two billion intelligent people persist in believing that sacrificing a virgin into volcano appeases the volcano god, cools the magma, makes everything all right? Why do so many human beings refuses to accept modern, factual causation, and cling to primitive, barbaric, false beliefs? Why for that matter does any intelligent twenty first century person pretend to believe that some anthropomorphic deity exists, and speaks to people in ancient manuscripts, in books and stories? Two hundred years ago Thomas Paine and Johann Von Goethe gave the world a perfectly modern, verifiable method of developing an attitude towards religion. So we have had a better blueprint for a long time.Only a handful of intellectuals, deemed radicals, paid attention. More people pay attention to natural causation now, and fewer subscribe to primitive religions, but the number is still relatively small.And thus, in the middle of a terrible pandemic to w hundred years after Paine and Goethe, in which modern science has given us the means to understand the virus and to effectively combat it, thousands upon thousands of people still crowd into poorly ventilated rooms, yelling and breathing heavily on each other,and praying to an imaginary god for relief, even while their unmasked breath spreads the disease and death from which they pray so fervently for relief.

Relying On Lies

 RUSH 'LUNGS" LIMBAUGH began his program recently by proclaiming himself the popular radio talk show host in all the four corners of the Earth. his notion that the world is flat must come from what somebody told him about the bible, but not from science or education. Rush never went to college. Rush calls Joe Biden "plugs", for some obscure insulting need for self esteem and superiority. Calling Limbaugh "lungs" seems appropriate, a reference to his big mouth, and his use of it to spread hatred and lies. I first listened to Limbaugh in 1994, when he was still something of a novelty, not quite yet the pied piper of American right wing fanaticism. Over the years, I have only been able to stomach him sporadically. His distortions of fact and blatant dishonesty have always stood out. Can it be that he has become even more vicious and hateful as he has aged? A Limbaugh lover might assert that many essays on this website are vicious and hateful. Calling Donald Trump a racist and a traitor, describing millions of conservatives as delusional and unpatriotic for denying, for instance, climate change and for insisting that Trump actually won the election that was stolen from him has one redeeming quality: a basis in truth. When Limbaugh and his flock call Joe Biden and other moderate Democrats "radical left wing socialist extremists",, when they claim that the election was stolen when in fact they are trying to steal it, when they claimed that after the election, after November 4th we would hear nothing further about Covid 19, there is no basis in fact, no honesty, nothing but blatant lies. That's the difference between Rush Limbaugh types and this website; integrity, which he lacks, and we have. I was actually surprised, but shouldn't have been, at how strongly Limbaugh pushed the stolen election lie. Limbaugh,like all the other sore loser liars for trump, will, as time proceeds into the future,be forced to choose between confessing to perpetrating a vicious lies, of having behaved stupidly and grossly dishonestly, and harmfully to America, or to clinging to false scenario of the stolen election until they die,  or denying that they were ever engaged in the nonsense at all. Many will doubtless choose the second option, and many the third, but you can bet your bottom dollar that few if any will muster enough honor and integrity to take the correct, decent one, the first. such is the nature of Trump and his supporters.

Cultural Killing

FREAKING AMAZINGLY, African-Americans and Hispanics die of Covid 19 at a far great rate, die giving birth, die in infancy, and die in all sorts of other ways at a far higher rate than Europeanic-Americans.  Sure, everyone has to die, but...why? Why the worse outcomes for minorities in a wealthy, high tech country with great medical care? No less amazing is that sustained systematic research yields the answer, because many many researchers have asked the same question, and have done the necessary homework. the answer is systemic racism within the medical profession, within the public health system, as well as throughout the rest of American society. We already know that racism is baked into our criminal justice system and legal systems, hard wired into American culture by our enslaved origins. There is no arguing this. That the American medical system does not escape racism really shouldn't seem surprising in the most racist culture in human history, but, somehow, it is. For those among you who are inclined to dismiss, ridicule, take umbrage with, or scream disagreement and denial at all this, by which I mean redneck conservatives, please bear in mind that you are not arguing with me, you are arguing with Harvard, with the experts, with thousands of researchers and scholars who know a great deal more about the subject than you or I ever will. conservatives tend to reject expertise, and think they know more than the experts, but of course, that is nonsense, the experts, in all fields, have most of the answers. In the United States of Avoidance we prefer escape entertainment to openly confronting the most important issues, such as this one. A high percentage of the caucasian community, of which I am a member, incredibly seems to believe that racism became extinct the very moment that the white demographic acknowledged that the murder of Martin Luther King was unfortunate, a bad idea. I refer to the redneck conservative community, by which I mean all American right wingers, the same folks who deny climate change, deny that Covid 19 is a problem or that wearing a mask is a good idea, deny racism, deny that capitalism has flaws, and deny that Donald Trump is a pathological liar, and lost the election. Perhaps you begin to get the point. Denial of reality in American, of which we currently have a epidemic, does not span the political spectrum. It is the exclusive domain of right wing America, and every day that right wing America denies the reality of systemic racism, climate change, Trump's election defeat, or a host of other realities, it bears this fact out. In essence,it is not racism within the medical profession which kills minorities at a high rate, it is the persistence of extreme conservatism.

Post Presidential Posturing

 DONALD TRUMP, like all petty tyrants and gangster bosses addicted to adulation and blind obedience, now commences post presidential preening, prancing, and posturing, like a peacock on meth. The surreal spectacle to be unveiled over the next four years will include yet more MAGA rallies, reality TV, aTrump news network, and arun for the presidency in twenty twenty four, just for kicks, scheduled around an occasional sexual molestation or two. The MAGA rallies will become increasingly pathetic, laughable spectacles, a ranting elderly hand wringing lunatic with an orange toupee, spewing screeching, nonsensical garbage. his cult of followers will lose faith by gradual degrees, as they dimly begin to perceive their own pointless futility of protesting an election long over. people hide their true selves from others to gain social acceptance, and from themselves to gain self esteem. A recently published monograph entitled "Inner Truth, Outer Lies" written by a native of Turkey who teaches at Duke describes the psychology of "preference falsification" in which we hide and disguise our opinions from others and often from ourselves. People living in oppressive cultures like Iraq under Saddam, or East Germany under communism mostly pretended to support the oppressive regime, but the minute it was overthrown their true hatred of their vanquished oppressors was revealed. One might extrapolate that a person who has discarded this behavior in favor of unrelenting honesty has escaped the wheel of society, has become enlightened, and has become a sort of bodisatva among Americans. The purity of the self aware, unencumbered mind. Those who support Trump, the tens of millions of them, possibly are supporting Trump to justify their true inner selves, to allow for a release of their racist hatred, xenophobia, and fear of societal change. It might be easier simply to support a popular politician than to comes to terms with the more unpleasant aspects of one's true inner self. Eighty eight percent of republicans believe, or claim to believe, that the election was stolen. The thoughtful educated among them know better, but go along to get along, as a tactical ploy. Only the majority of reflexively responding thoughtless Trump followers could possibly brainwash themselves into actually believing the stolen election nonsense. they are deceiving themselves, but, much to our good fortunate, not the saner majority of good citizens.

Fading Fad

 THE RESEARCH IS IN.Surveys indicate that when the virus hit  home in March, most Americans briefly bit the bullet, masked up, social distanced, played by the rules. But the fad didn't last. In the United States of Advertising, everything is a fad, and fads never last long, with the notable exception of the slinky. The anti virus fad wore off. Concern for public health lost its allure, as the real space and time implications in the real world of personal sacrifice and inconvenience hit home, and we the American people resolutely refused to compromise our beloved bars and restaurants and parties and social life. Oh, the horror of being imprisoned in one's own home with a mere five hundred cable television channels and the internet in pocket. Whether we the hedonistic American people or our hoax mongering reality denying president was more culpable in killing nearly three hundred thousand Americans, and counting, needlessly is a toss up. There are no immutable laws of nature which require the teeming masses to listen to or follow the lead of a lunatic leader. the number of dead is likely to nearly double before spring, the result of our inexplicable but observable urgent need to become peripatetic during the thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Years holidays, taking the virus and sharing it with others wherever we may go. The proof, as they say, is in the puddin'. Survey says! women, after nine months of epidemic, are far more willing to behave properly than men in observing public health protocols, and older folks are more self disciplined tan the impetuous, invincible young, unsurprisingly. Minorities do better than white guys. African-Americans and Latinos and Asian-Americans adhere to sensible behavior much more readily than caucasians, ironically, since discrimination against minorities is evident in their lower access to heath care, lower living standards, and enhanced levels of disease and death by Covid 19. Atheists almost certainly care more about the health and well being and wear their masks in public at a higher rate than devout Christians, because of their superior intelligence, but there are no officials records for reference. But now for the coup de grace. Liberal Democrats wear masks in public, social distance, and assiduously avoid large gatherings, while conservative republicans, the Trump support evangelical Christian types either do none of the above, or do so as a much lower rate.They show a marked preference for proclaiming their constitutional rights, for gathering together to worship God and chant "stop the steal!" at MAGA rallies as mask-less and in as close proximity to each other and as loudly as they please, they prefer, and would defend unto death, their inalienable right to be stupid. Clearly observable is the undeniable fact that not only do they have this right, but that they practice it fervently, under all circumstances.

Contesting Election Results

 WHEN I WAS a mere lad of thirty seven, in 1992, I ran for city council. My opponent, a very nice teacher lady, got about 8,800 votes, and I, poor I, but five thousand five hundred and seventy nine, roughly. I narrowly lost, sixty one percent to thirty nine percent. She was a liberal, and I even more so, I campaigned, and she even harder so.I musta put about a thousand pamphlets on car windshields before I found out it was not legal to do so in our town. Oh, well. I had a public access TV talk show at the time, of a political nature, radical left, and I kept talking her up, telling my large and loyal audience that they couldn't lose, that no matter which of us they voted for, they were sure to get a good council member. that might have been my biggest mistake, nobility. Several of my fellow local election losers suspected massive electoral fraud, and collectively filed a lawsuit with the election board. without my knowledge or permission, they included my name on the suit. I acceded, but refused to help pay the lawyer, which I thought was fair. The one irregularity I noticed was that if you added up the total number of votes for me and my opponent, and then added up the total number of votes for everybody who ran for mayor, the vote total in our council race was somewhat greater, which I thought strange. Why would anyone vote in our council contest, but not bother to even vote for a mayoral candidate? Long story short, we lost the lawsuit, which was summarily dismissed by the judge for, you guessed it, lack of evidence. I thought the lawyer was incompetent. I still think the election was fishy. On that basis it could be argued that I have no reason to complain about Donald Trump or his millions of supporters complaining about the presidential election.Trump and his Trumpettes, trumpeting fraud. I beg to differ. In fact I demand to differ. In our election, there were truly man reasons for suspicion. For one, the irregular vote count in my council race. there were others, but I forget now. All the radical candidates lost, and all the Chamber of Commerce establishment types won, under strange circumstances. but in Trump's case there aint a damned bit of evidence to support the outrageous claims.In court, in forty lawsuits, Trump's lawyers keep getting throw out of court and ridiculed by judges that were appointed by Trump. They are like, oh and forty. That alone should tell you something. If there was massive nationwide fraud, wouldn't there be some evidence of it that Trump's lawyers would have presented in court by now? Trumpers, just give it up, and try again in 2024. Enough is enough, already.

Inciting Violence

 GOOD HARD WORKING election workers are receiving death threats and being harassed by Trump supporters and Trump, further proof of what has long been evident; that Donald Trump and his supporters are, by and large, a vicious gang of fascist thugs and criminals, trying to steal an election which was won honorably by Joe Biden. The attorney general of Georgia, who has been repeatedly harassed by Trump and the two Republican Senatorial candidates, is a  rime victim of this abuse. A caravan of Trumpers in pick up trucks cruised his house, shouting insults, threats, and obscenities, including sexual harassment directed at his wife. Confederate flags were flying, doubtless swastikas were at the ready. he is speaking out, imploring them to stop, even as a vast majority of America's conservatives, evangelicals, and Republicans, and Trump supporters, including the two G.O.P. Senate candidates in Georgia, say and do nothing to try to stop the violent behavior. By their silence they make themselves complicit in crime. U.S. Attorney General Barr can find no evidence of electoral fraud. if he can't, who can? If there were any, Barr would be more than willing to find it, and to report it. Trump's laweyrs can find no evidence either, and their more than forty lawsuits have been thrown out of court by judges appointed by Trump, conservative judges who have often ridiculed the baseless lame suits brought into their courts by Trump's lawyers. Tellingly, in none of these lawsuits do Trump's lawyers actually allege election fraud; minor violations of procedure are their only ammunition. Amid all the noise made by millions of deeply wounded Trump supporters, by Trump, and by his large legal team, not a shred of actual evidence or proof has been produced to substantiate the many fantastic, outrageous claims of massive election fraud. The only possible conclusion is that Trump and his supporters are traitorous usurpers, using false claims to steal the election from Joe Biden and stage a coup. it is also noteworthy that none of their fabricated accusations of fraud extend to any  other election than the presidential;  no congressional, gubernatorial, or local election result has been challenged. Donald Trump spent his entire term in office inciting violence from the extreme conservative community, which hardly needs external stimuli to behave violently. They should be more careful what they wish for. 

Becoming Inolerant

 ABOUT TWO THIRDS or the American people consider climate change a serious threat, surveys say. The remaining one third either don't believe in climate change, believe in it but don't think it matters, don't care, or think the lord is coming soon, or have never heard of it, your pick. Of this misguided third almost all of them are conservative Republicans, unsurprisingly, as a slowly decreasing but still significant percentage or Republicans are climate change deniers.For more than twenty years the United States Department of Defense has identified man made climate change as the single greatest threat to american national security.You'd think that alone would bring conservatives around to reality, but evidently it doesn't. Any American who denies climate change is therefore by definition, and in actuality, a traitor. Donald Trump, by pursuing policies which contribute to the enemy, climate change, is therefore a traitor and belongs in prison, or in front of a firing squad for aiding and abetting the enemy. A mental health facility would do. I can hear conservatives climate change deniers sneering derisively at this idea. I can assure them that my contempt for them is far greater than theirs for me and my fellow despisers of Donald Trump and of climate change deniers generally. As we age, we become, as we often say, "set in our ways". Much of what we once tolerated becomes intolerable. Once upon a long time ago, for instance, I could tolerate conservative republicans, if only barely, and I could tolerate fundamentalist Christians, to a very limited point. That time is no more. Refusing to accept the existence of and to contribute to to defeat of a dire threat to your own country is the behavior of a traitor, and should not be tolerated. There was a time, long ago, when I tolerated racists, right wing extremists, homophobes, and climate change deniers. That time has gone. Any talk of reconciliation between progressives, at least this progressive, and such reprehensible people as white supremacists and hell fire Christians who consider homosexuality as a sin is a wasted effort. These barbaric people are reprehensible, and to find common ground with them is pointless. They must be defeated in the arena of ideals and relegated to the intellectual garbage heap, where they properly belong. The same is true of the Trump movement and their current traitorous activity of trying to steal the election by claiming falsely that the Democrats stole it, without a shred of evidence to support their fantasy. the sooner these reprobates are discredited by decent people, the better.

Celebrating Personal Holidays

 DECEMBER THIRD is a big day for me, a sort of personal holiday. and this is the fiftieth anniversary. It has nothing to do with the monthly arrival of my social security check on the third of each month. On December 3rd, 1970, I went to first hour Geometry class, as usual, as a sophomore in high school. We had fifteen kids in the class, twelve girls, and three boys. We usually divided into groups of three and competed on the blackboard to see which group could complete a geometric proof the fastest. We took it seriously. We three guys had our own group. ON this particular day, the other two dudes were absent from school, so there I was, a group of one, in competition against four groups of three ladies, all smart students.All fifteen students were smart; this was what they called in those days a n "STS" class, which stood for, believe it or not, "Superior Talented Students". Political correctness had not yet fully arrived in America. I believe that nowadays they call these classes "Gifted and Talented", or "GT", which really is not much less arrogant sounding. The gun went off, blowing yet another hole in the ceiling of the classroom, and the great daily proof challenge began.It was a long fifteen step affair. The step by step equations proliferated on the chalkboard, all over the room. If angle AB = angle BC, and angle BC = angle DE, then angle AB must = angle DE, that sort of thing. About halfway through I began to like my chances. I rushed to the finish line, raised my hand, and the teacher, a rotund man in his thirties, who by now must be long dead, verified that I had indeed finished first, working alone. Ever since, I have thought od December 3 as "Proof Day", proving that it meant a great deal to me, to beat all those high IQ girl groups by my lonesome. Of such memories is a happy life made.  Ah, I recall the time in sixth grade when I was the only kid in class who received an "A" in Math, which in those days was called an "E" for excellent. boy, was my dad ever happy! My other great academic memory was in my Ph.D European history program, when I received the highest grade in the World War One seminar, despite the presence in the seminar of eleven other academic hot shots. I had gotten of f to a horrible start in that class, by delivering an incoherent report on a  n abstruse book about the Austro-Hungarian Empire pre World War One, which made me mad, because I allowed all the other students to line,up at the table laden with books and make their choice first, and the boring tome was ll that was left by the time I got my pick. The professor had upbraided me in front of the entire class, which had angered but motivated me. So, I buckled down, and spent the rest of the semester catching up, and it so happened that the final, a take home essay assignment, was right up my historical alley. I nailed it, and the professor stopped me in the hall one day, and told me I had come in first on semester grades. I felt vindicated. That might be the most noteworthy example of my life of the benefits of being motivated by scorn, and of never giving up. But, still and all, I cherish "Proof Day" above all else, even perhaps Christmas.

Explaining Declining Liberalism

 I BECAME A KENNEDY FAN when I was in third grade and JFK was president. The very idea that the president could be killed had never entered my mind before the assassination, which permanently scarred my eight year old psyche, and everyone else in my age group. He was a sort of father figure to me. I finally abandoned conspiracy theories when I applied critical thinking to Oliver Stone's movie. Maybe I shouldn't have. When I was thirteen, RFK was my hero, and once again I was shell shocked. I latched on to EMK, and when he drowned that girl in 1969 in his are I, at fourteen,m knew his presidential chances were probably gone. Like everyone else, after RFK's murder in 1968 I worried and halfway assumed that some maniac would kill the surviving brother for some twisted notion of consistency. Thank God we were all wrong. I rooted for him against the insufficiently liberal Carter in seventy six, but was never optimistic about his chances against a safe bet incumbent. There is a new two volume biography of Ted, the second volume to be published in twenty twenty one, the two books titled "Catching the Wind", and "Against the Wind". In it Kennedy's personal scandalous misbehavior is given much of the blame for liberalism's decline beginning in the late nineteen seventies, dubiously, methinks. I became a young liberal in the nineteen sixties, It seemed the thing to do. I believe that liberalism was seriously damaged by LBJ's involvement in Viet Nam in contrast to his "Great Society" domestic agenda, and by the rise Ronald Reagan, the womanizing former New Dealer who transformed himself into the pied piper of conservative evangelical Christians and their resurgent movement into politics in the late seventies. Conservatism is tradition. Liberalism is change. The arc of human history is change. History moves from right to left. The best that conservatives can hope for, the worst liberals can expect, is that change will occur at a snail's pace. Because change is inevitable. The best examples of this in American culture and history are racism, homophobia, and unrestrained neo-liberal capitalism, all of whose periodic resurgences are ultimately eroded, if only gradually, by progress and cultural evolution. There will inevitably come a day when the very first hand wringing, alarm ringing conservative anti-socialist crusader for corporate hegemony will fell the uppers wearing off, take a  deep breath, take a furtive glance through split fingered mini blinds, and notice that democratic socialism has long since come to and conquered America, and that it has so deeply insinuated into American society as to be beyond surgical removal.Then, at the usual snail's pace with which conservatives accept present reality, the rest will slowly, if reluctantly follow.

Faking Nuclear News

 HAD YOU LIVED in Russia in 1811, and chosen to believe that the French army didn't exist, not only would you have been verifiably wrong, you might well have been in dire danger, or dead. Denial of reality can be temporarily comforting and therapeutic, but it can also be deadly dangerous. Denial of climate change, denial the atmospheric carbon pollution by people is a clear and present danger, threatens to result in ecological collapse, with disastrous consequences for human civilization. The climate, long term weather patterns, have conspicuously changed almost everywhere on Earth, and yet climate change deniers, undaunted by reality, and probably thinking themselves quite clever, have devised a new strategy to deal dishonestly with observable reality; they now insist that although the climate is indeed changing, it would be doing so without human interference, humans, in essence, are innocent of wrong doing. Clever indeed, but harmful to our chances of long term survival, assuming we will need everyone's full cooperation to make the drastic changes necessary to heal our environment. Denial of proven, verifiable science in preference of personal fabricated fantasy is no less dangerous, as evidenced by the disastrous consequences to the American public of refusing to accept the absolute necessity of personal health related behaviors crucial to mitigating the spread of Covid 19. Its all based on simple biological fact. Health care workers tell stories about people gasping that the virus is a hoax, with their dying breath. Proven of proven scientific fact is denial of the real world.For religious reasons many people still refuse to accept the obvious reality of human evolution by natural selection, despite our being surrounded by and inundated in living proof of it.  Continuing denial of the efficacy of vaccines may soon contribute to the spread of untold suffering, disease, and death. Understanding the truth of climate change, vaccines, and evolution, jsut to name three huge examples, requires the most rudimentary understanding of chemistry, the same chemistry upon which nuclear physics is predicated. So far, there is no mass movement claiming that nuclear energy, nuclear power plants, and nuclear powered aircraft carriers are hoaxes. Let us hope that denial of reality, so common today, never becomes sufficiently extreme to spawn such nonsense.