President Trump has continued to lash out with bizarre and outrageous public pronouncements. He has threatened to destroy North Korea. He says athletes who protest police brutality should be fired. And he has no sympathy for the people of Puerto Rico, which has been devastated by a pair of hurricanes. In any other country, people would take to the streets to demand that the president be removed. But we’re chill…too chill.
Most scientists agree: it’s too late to reverse, or even slow down, global warming/climate change. Too much energy has already been pumped into the atmosphere by greenhouse gases. Yet Al Gore and other environmentalists continue to argue that there’s still something we could do, just maybe. Of course we should stop polluting; pollution kills us and other living things. But climate change? Better to accept that it’s happening and that we ought to have done something about it decades ago.
The Trump Administration and the mainstream media call North Korea a rogue state. But who’s the real rogue state? The United States issues wild threats of total destruction of a civilian population, yet the North Korean government is expected to stay calm, carry on and not attack the U.S. Meanwhile, the U.S. acts like a crazy scaredy-cat, attacking countries like Iraq on the flimsiest of pretexts, arguing that there’s the slimmest possibility of a threat that justifies it waging a war of aggression.
The shooting death of a Georgia Tech student by a campus policeman became just another example of trigger-happy policemen killing emotionally disturbed people. What often goes unasked and thus unanswered by police is the question: why do cops think they need to use guns against people armed with knives, especially when there is a considerable distance between them and the victims? In this case the situation was aggravated by the facts that the “knife” was a utility tool that merely had a knife among other tools, and that the blade was not extended.
Apple marked the 10th anniversary of the iPhone with the release of a new operating system including AR that could once again revolutionize the way we interact with our devices. Lost in the hype, however, is a reflection upon the millions of jobs and entire industries lost because the iPhone, like the Borg in Star Trek, destroyed and assimilated them. You don’t even need to buy a flashlight anymore! The other issue is, most of the iPhone app versions of the original products that they replaced are inferior to the originals.
One of the major problems with capitalism is inheritance. If this is a meritocracy, how come the children of rich people get to start out life with millions of dollars? One of the other questions, one that doesn’t get discussed very often, is the simple fact that the system relies on unemployment. People have to be unemployed for the system to work. If unemployment ever drops to zero, analysts and markets freak out.
After hackers bypassed the company’s lame security, the credit reporting agency Equifax charged consumers to freeze/protect their credit. Why can’t we make money from our screw-ups?
Once again, a major disaster affects tens of thousands of Americans in the form of Hurricane Harvey in Houston. Once again, Americans generously respond with donations…at first. But the survivors will need help, big help, for years to come. Unfortunately, history suggests that there probably won’t be the sustained attention to Harvey required to make a difference. Just look at Katrina; 12 years later, parts of New Orleans still look like a war zone.
A key advisor to Trump suggests that children brought to the U.S. illegally by their parents should return to their home countries and apply for citizenship at their local U.S. embassy. For many of these children, however, the United States is the only country they’ve ever known.
