Our Trigger-Happy Child President

 Ted Folkert – January 8, 2018

It seems that our child president and the child leader of North Korea may be cut out of the same cloth. Now they are comparing the sizes of their nuclear buttons, like kids on the playground declaring “my daddy can whip your daddy.”

David Rothkopf addressed the situation (January 3^rd – Los Angeles Times) in a more meaningful and perceptive manner than many of us consider as Trump triggers our ire daily with his abusive twitter rants.

 Quotes from: “Trump keeps making bad American foreign policy worse”  – By David Rothkopf –  senior fellow at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns    Hopkins University and visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

“Although Trump is in a class by himself when it comes to incompetence, greed, mendacity, absence of values and unfitness for office, America’s “abdication” of its world leadership role has been a long time coming. We have gone from overreach to inertia to incompetence, and damaged our standing at every step along the way.”

“In part, this is because Americans seem to think we can elect presidents — five out of the last six — with very little foreign policy experience. We act as though U.S. world leadership is a God-given right rather than something that must be earned again and again. Most Americans mistakenly think the rest of the world matters little to them. Unlike the Greatest Generation, who through World War II and the Cold War came to see informed foreign policy leadership and the international system as essential to peace and our way of life, the baby boomers who took over a quarter-century ago have been complacent, distracted and then ineffectual.”

“Trump is without a doubt the worst foreign policy president in American history. But our international problems are not, contrary to what some might think, all about him. They are about us. The only hope for fixing things requires a national awakening; only then can we expect one in the White House.”

Which is a message to us baby boomers and our offspring to get more involved in who we elect to entrust with our peace and prosperity. After all, the guy we entrusted it to was elected due to our complacency in correcting campaign finance, the electoral process and the lack of public control of the press in this country, which perhaps resulted in the dilemma of choosing between two candidates that we found unsatisfactory for the challenge. Now we face a tenuous situation on a daily basis with no voice in the outcome. (My words, not David Rothkopf’s)

 

An Infinitesimal Existence – Cosmology for the Unscientific Mind

Ted Folkert – December 29, 2017

We often use the term mind-boggling as a casual comment to emphasize something complicated, hard to understand or that seems incomprehensible.

Fasten your seat belts. Here is a mind-boggle for those of us with an unscientific mind.

If there isn’t one, there should be a book entitled “Don’t Know Much About Cosmology.” Think about this information which is discussed by David Filkin and Stephen Hawking in “Stephen Hawking’s Universe:”

Summarizing: The rock we all inhabit, Planet Earth, evolved more than fifteen billion years ago from something smaller than a dot in the universe, which exploded in an event called the Big Bang, which created billions of stars and evolved through gravitation into billions of galaxies, each containing billions of stars, one of which is our home, Planet Earth.

That’s right, Earth is one of billions of stars in the Milky Way galaxy, which is one of billions of galaxies in the universe.

How is that for mind-boggling? Like my grandfather might have said, put that in your pipe and smoke it.

In other words, if there was a map on your computer screen containing all the stars in the universe, which would be a number with at least eighteen zeroes behind it, a quintillion, sextillion, septillion, octillion, maybe a centillion, with 300 zeroes. The map would be a solid sheet of black after all the stars were noted on the map. So, Planet Earth wouldn’t even be identifiable, it would be lost in a huge mass of billions and billions and billions of dots.

How big would the map have to be to identify our planet? How big to identify our state, our city, our home, each of us seven billion people on this planet. As Bernie Sanders might say, it would have to be HUGE.

How small does that make you feel? Tiny? Infinitesimal? It’s a real ego deflator if there ever was one.

Most of the cosmologists agree to all these facts – facts proven to a considerable degree of confidence in the scientific community through studies by radio-telescope technology and quantum mathematics, generally considered to be irrefutable. Furthermore, they believe that only about ten percent of the universe has been discovered, leaving ninety percent yet to be identified. And they believe that the universe is continuing to expand although at a slower rate which could mean that, at some point, the universe could reverse directions and begin to contract back into that original small dot from whence it came. A frightening thought to say the least.

I didn’t make this up. The information came from Ptolemy, Pythagoras, Erastosthenes, Einstein, Mendelson, Curie, Rutherford,, and many others who spent their lives looking through telescopes and doing mathematical equations.

But don’t go shoot yourself in fear of the planet disappearing. This contraction would happen billions of years from now, so we won’t have to be concerned. After all, we may end up destroying humankind much sooner if we keep going the way we are. Maybe the fact that our existence began with an explosion causes us to be so attracted to explosions that we will make our planet uninhabitable anyway. We seem to be moving in that direction at a rapid pace.

Think about it!

 

 

Democrats Are the New Republicans

Frank Bruni  – DEC. 19, 2017

Family values. How long have we been subjected to that subjective phrase, championed by Republicans who equated it with heterosexuality, fecundity and Christian piety — and who appointed themselves the custodians of those?

Well, they lost any remaining claim to that mantle by embracing Donald Trump and then Roy Moore. Neither won the support of all Republicans, but both won the backing or complicity of enough of them to confirm just how hollow and hypocritical the party’s attachment to conservative morality always was. Quote the Bible. Denounce abortion. Congratulations: You’re upholding family values! No questions asked about the number of your marriages, the extent of your infidelities or the scope of your sexual predation.

Fiscal responsibility. How loudly have Republicans harangued us about that? It’s a worthy harangue — or at least it would be if there were an iota of integrity and consistency behind it.

But Republicans are poised to enact a sweeping overhaul of the tax code that will add nearly $1.5 trillion to federal deficits over the next decade. In all the news coverage of their need to finesse the math so that they don’t exceed that amount, the fact that they’re plunging the country so much deeper into the red in the first place almost gets lost.

This, mind you, is the same political party that fetishized balanced budgets and browbeat Democrats about being the foolishly, fatally profligate ones. Republicans’ actions routinely contradicted their words, and their tax reform is a contradiction on steroids. Where’s the fiscal responsibility in legislation with such budgetary hocus-pocus as the expiration of individual rate cuts that the bill’s authors fully expect other lawmakers to preserve down the road?

What pretty lies Republicans tell, most of all about themselves. And what a gorgeous opportunity they have given Democrats to steal that bogus rhetoric right out from under them.

Try this on for size: Democrats are the party of family values because they promote the creation of more families. They did precisely that with their advocacy of marriage equality, which didn’t tug the country away from convention but toward it, by encouraging gay and lesbian Americans to live in the sorts of arrangements that conservatives in fact extol.

Democrats also want to give families the flexibility and security that help keep them afloat and maybe intact. That’s what making the work force more hospitable to women and increasing the number of Americans with health insurance do. And Republicans lag behind Democrats on both fronts.

Democrats are the party of fiscal responsibility because they don’t pretend that they can afford grand government commitments — whether distant wars or domestic programs — without collecting the revenue for them.

Democrats are the party of patriotism, because they’re doing something infinitely more urgent and substantive than berating football players who kneel during the national anthem. They’re recognizing that a hostile foreign power tried to change the course of an American presidential election. They’re pressing for a full accounting of that. They’re looking for fixes, so that we can know with confidence that we control our own destiny going forward. The president, meanwhile, plays down the threat, and Republicans prop him up.

Democrats are the party of national security. They don’t taunt and get into Twitter wars with the rulers of countries that just might send nuclear warheads our way. They don’t alienate longtime allies by flashing contradictory signals about their commitment to NATO. The leader of the Republican Party does all of that and more, denying the G.O.P. any pretense to stewardship of a stable world order.

Democrats are the law-and-order party. While many Republicans and their media mouthpiece, Fox News, labor to delegitimize the F.B.I. and thus inoculate Trump, Democrats put faith in prosecutors, agents and the system.

Democrats are the party of decency and modesty. None of their highest leaders uses the public arena to bully private citizens in the way that the Republican president does. None advances his or her financial interests as brazenly or brags as extravagantly.

Democrats are the party of tradition, if it’s interpreted — and it should be — to mean a news media that operates without fear of government interference, an internet to which access isn’t tiered, judicial appointees who have a modicum of fluency in trial law.

Under Trump’s thumb and spell, the Republican Party is watching the pillars of its brand crumble. Democrats should grab hold of and appropriate them. And they’re starting to, fitfully and imperfectly. Jettisoning Al Franken as the Republican National Committee reteamed with Moore was part of that effort.

Who among us doesn’t care about family values, defined justly and embraced honestly? Who doesn’t see the good in patriotism, tradition and decency? They’re neither hokey words nor musty concepts, and that’s why Republicans have been using (and misusing) them. But in the age of Trump, they constitute a language that Democrats can more credibly speak.

 

Republicans Despise the Working Class

Paul Krugman DEC. 14, 2017

President Trump looking at guests identified as “middle class families.” Credit Doug Mills/The New York Times

You can always count on Republicans to do two things: try to cut taxes for the rich and try to weaken the safety net for the poor and the middle class. That was true under George W. Bush, who sharply cut tax rates on the top 1 percent and tried to privatize Social Security. It has been equally true under President Trump; G.O.P. legislative proposals show not a hint of the populism Trump espoused on the campaign trail.

But as a terrible, no good, very bad tax bill heads for a final vote, something has been added to the mix. As usual, Republicans seek to afflict the afflicted and comfort the comfortable, but they don’t treat all Americans with a given income the same. Instead, their bill — on which we don’t have full details, but whose shape is clear — hugely privileges owners, whether of businesses or of financial assets, over those who simply work for a living.

And this privileging of nonwage income isn’t an accident. Modern Republicans exalt “job creators,” that is, people who own businesses directly or indirectly via their stockholdings. Meanwhile, they show implicit contempt for mere employees.

More about that contempt in a moment. First, about that tax bill: The biggest-ticket item is a sharp cut in corporate taxes. While some of this tax cut might trickle down in the form of higher wages, the consensus among tax economists is that most of the break will accrue to shareholders as opposed to workers. So it’s mainly a tax cut for investors, not people who work for a living.

And the second most important element in the bill is a tax break for people whose income comes from owning a business rather than in the form of wages. The nonpartisan Tax Policy Center has evaluated the Senate bill, which the final bill is expected to resemble. It finds that the bill would reduce taxes on business owners, on average, about three times as much as it would reduce taxes on those whose primary source of income is wages or salaries. For highly paid workers, the gap would be even wider, as much as 10 to one.

As the Center’s Howard Gleckman notes, this might mean, for example, that “a partner in a real estate development firm might get a far bigger tax cut than a surgeon employed by a hospital, even though their income is the same.” (Yes, a lot of the bill looks as if it were specifically designed to benefit the Trump family.)

Bottom of Form

If this sounds like bad policy, that’s because it is. More than that, it opens the doors to an orgy of tax avoidance. Suppose that I could get The Times to stop paying me a salary, and instead to pay the same amount to Krugmanomics LLC, a consulting firm consisting of one person — me — that sells opinion pieces. I would probably get a big tax break as a result.

Now, the bill will contain complicated rules intended to limit such gaming of the system, and they’ll probably prevent me personally from taking advantage of the new loophole. But as Gleckman says of these rules, “some may fail and some may work too well” — that is, deny the tax break to some business owners who really should qualify. On average, however, they’re likely to fail: a lot of revenue will be lost to those who game the system. Think about it: We’re pitting hastily devised legislation, drafted without hearings over the course of just a few days, against the cleverest lawyers and accountants money can buy. Which side do you think will win?

As a result, it’s a good guess that the bill will increase the budget deficit far more than currently projected. And meanwhile, after all those promises Republicans made about simplifying our tax system, they’ve actually made it far more complicated.

So why are they doing this?

After all, the tax bill appears to be terrible politics as well as terrible policy. Cutting corporate taxes is hugely unpopular; even Republicans are almost as likely to say they should be raised as to say they should be lowered. The Bush tax cuts, at least initially, had wide (though unjustified) popular support; but the public overwhelmingly disapproves of the current Republican plan.

But Republicans don’t seem able to help themselves: Their disdain for ordinary working Americans as opposed to investors, heirs, and business owners runs so deep that they can’t contain it.

When I realized the extent to which G.O.P. tax plans were going to favor business owners over ordinary workers, I found myself remembering what happened in 2012, when Eric Cantor — then the House majority leader — tried to celebrate Labor Day. He put out a tweet for the occasion that somehow failed to mention workers at all, instead praising those who have “built a business and earned their own success.”

Yes, it was just a gaffe, but a revealing one; Cantor, a creature of the G.O.P. establishment if ever there was one, had so little respect for working Americans that he forgot to include them in a Labor Day message.

And now that disdain has been translated into legislation, in the form of a bill that treats anyone who works for someone else — that is, the vast majority of Americans — as a second-class citizen.

Harry Pregerson, one of the most liberal federal appeals court judges in the nation, dies at 94

U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Harry Pregerson, a Los Angeles-based jurist who embraced the underdog and let his conscience inform his rulings, has died. He was 94.

Pregerson, who was suffering from respiratory ailments, died Saturday night at his Woodland Hills home surrounded by family, said Sharon Pregerson, his daughter-in-law.

A few nights earlier, with his health seriously failing, he turned to his wife, Bernardine, and expressed a regret.

“’The hard thing is that I don’t have strength anymore to help people,’” recounted U.S. District Judge Dean Pregerson, Harry’s son.

“He was full of love,” Sharon Pregerson said. “He helped so many people. That was his mission. That’s why he got up every morning.”

Pregerson, born in Los Angeles on Oct. 13, 1923, was one of the most liberal federal appeals court judges in the nation.

He grew up in East Los Angeles, served as a Marine in World War II and suffered severe wounds in the Battle of Okinawa. He later graduated from UCLA and obtained his law degree from UC Berkeley.

Dubbed a “thug for the Lord” by one attorney, Pregerson was relentless in his efforts away from the bench to help the poor in Los Angeles.

He worked to establish several homeless shelters and volunteered at one each Thanksgiving.

Dr. Katie Rodan, Pregerson’s daughter, said that she nicknamed her dad “the rescue machine” when she was a teenager.

“He wants to save everyone,” she said in a 2015 interview. “He wants to save the world.”

On the bench, Pregerson was often controversial. He stirred criticism when he refused to follow a 2003 U.S. Supreme Court ruling upholding California’s tough three-strikes sentencing law. Not long after the court’s decision, Pregerson dissented in rulings that upheld life sentences, some for relatively minor crimes.

His dissents were seen by some critics as insubordination, but Pregerson was frank about putting his conscience first.

“My conscience is a product of the Ten Commandments, the Bill of Rights, the Boy Scout Oath and the Marine Corps Hymn,” the Carter appointee said during his Senate confirmation hearing. “If I had to follow my conscience or the law, I would follow my conscience.”

Pregerson also angered some when he issued an order in 1992 to put a hold on the execution of Robert Alton Harris, who was already strapped inside the gas chamber. The Supreme Court later overturned Pregerson’s decision, and Harris was executed as planned.

Conservatives railed at him for overturning death sentences and accused him of activism. Some prosecutors said they dreaded appearing before him. Pregerson said he simply believed that many death row inmates had not been given fair trials.

“You read the record in these cases, and you see what happened and how defendants’ rights are not observed,” he said.

Pregerson also was viewed by some as a federalist, a label most often worn by conservatives and libertarians.

He favored restraints on the power of the federal government and wrote a decision saying federal authorities lacked authority to interfere with state medical marijuana laws. The U.S. Supreme Court later overturned the decision.

“His was a jurisprudence that was really based on the recognition of the dignity of every person,” said UC Berkeley Law School Dean Erwin Chemerinsky.

“For him the law was much less about abstractions and much more about what it would mean in people’s lives,” Chemerinsky said.

Pregerson took senior status in 2015 at the age of 92 after 36 years on the 9th Circuit. The move reduced his workload, but he made it reluctantly, at his wife’s urging. “You know, at 92 you are not 82,” the judge said in an interview at the time. “You slow down a bit and need a little more rest.”

The injuries he suffered in the war also were hobbling him. He needed two ski poles to help him walk.

He told The Times he viewed the bench as a way to improve the lives of others.

“I looked upon being a judge as a chance to help as many people as I could through the law,” he said. “And it has given me that opportunity, no doubt about that.”

A public square, a freeway interchange and a child-care center in L.A. bear Pregerson’s name.

In response to a lawsuit when he was a lower court judge, Pregerson prevented construction of the 105 Freeway until construction jobs were set aside for women and minorities and a training program was in place to give them the needed skills.

The settlement he helped write also ensured that affordable housing was built for residents displaced by the project.

Civil rights lawyer Paul L. Hoffman, who teaches international human rights law at UC Irvine and Harvard University, called Pregerson “one of a kind.”

“He was so committed to social justice,” Hoffman said.

Christopher David Ruiz Cameron, a law professor at Southwestern Law School and a trustee of the Mexican American Bar Foundation, said Pregerson lived most of his life on the Westside and in the West Valley, “but his soul remained in the working-class Mexican American community of East L.A. where he grew up.”

“Harry never forgot his roots,” Cameron said. “He identified with the struggles of Chicanos and practically considered himself one of us.”

The son of Ukrainian Jewish immigrants, Pregerson made his home in Woodland Hills, where he and Bernardine raised their two children, Katie and Dean.

Two years before taking a reduced workload, the elder Pregerson lost his grandson, David, Dean’s son, in a hit-and-run. The elder Pregerson said the family would never get over it. He recalled that his father, a postal worker who fought in the trenches in World War I, told him life was a battlefield.

“You never know when you will get hit,” the judge said.

Pregerson remained close to his adult children and grandchildren throughout his life.

When Rodan was 12, her mother decided she was bored at home and wanted to go back to school full time to receive a graduate degree in microbiology. She expected the judge to assume the domestic duties, Rodan recalled.

“He was a typical 1960s man,” she said. “He came home late from work and expected to have the dinner on the table.”

Suddenly, he was taking her to ballet and running errands. But he couldn’t cook, and she said they ate dinner at restaurants. She called those years “a gift.”

“He told me, ‘When you grow up, be your own boss and make your own money. Don’t rely on a man to support you. You don’t know what life is going to deal you.’”

Rodan, a dermatologist, took his advice and started highly successful skin care companies.

Besides his wife and two children, Pregerson is survived by son-in-law Amnon Rodan, daughter-in-law Sharon, four grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

maura.dolan@latimes.com

 

Letter to the President

November 14, 2017

Updated & Reposted from February 10, 2017

The Honorable Donald J. Trump
President of the United States
Leader of the Free World
Master of the Universe
Self-made Billionaire

Dear Mr. President:

Please excuse my boldness in addressing you directly, but I wanted to take this opportunity to express my extreme displeasure with the disrespect shown you by some of the comedians of the world as they misinterpret your efforts to make the world a better place. It seems some of these comedians are struggling for attention and choose to create audiences at your expense. It is obvious that your modesty is ignored as they chastise you for reminding us that you are smart, brilliant, handsome, rich, the greatest negotiator, the greatest business man, the greatest entertainer and the obvious choice to lead, not only this great country, but the entire free world (as well as any other part of the world that you feel is worth leading). And as an example of your modesty, you have consistently chosen not to use the word that best describes you, “Fantastic.” And I apologize for using the term “great country” so carelessly. We all know that we elected you because of your promise to “make America great again.” And the fact that after you declared the United States to be first in all respects, spokespeople for these unimportant countries like Great Britain and Switzerland have asked to be considered for second place, which indicates that they have accepted their plight as runner ups.

It seems like mere jealousy on the part of the people in this country, the very  people that you are trying so desperately to help, to criticize you for prioritizing the fact that you had the biggest crowd ever at your inauguration, and that you pointed out the incompetence of our judiciary, our “so-called” judges, for interfering with your effort to make America safe again, and the malicious act on the part of some clothing retailers in discontinuing Ivanka’s clothing line, and that you walk around the Whitehouse at night in your robe, when you don’t even have a robe, or that by “draining the swamp”, as you promised to do, that you brought the swamp residents into your cabinet, or that you are using the office of the presidency to promote personal gain, or that you had your spokesperson shout out a plug for Ivanka’s clothing line and that such action is in violation of federal law, and that you are sidling up with the murderous leader of Russia because you owe them billions, or that you contend that if we help the rich become richer then the wealth will “trickle down” to we plebeians, a trickling which Reagan started trickling in the 1980s that we are still waiting for, or that you are in violation of the “emolument” clause of US Constitution by continuing to own businesses that will profit from your presidency, or that SNL stated that they are having their best audiences in 22 years since Alec Baldwin started mocking you on Saturday nights and that he said that all they were doing is repeating what you said the week before (which may be plagiary, which you could pursue with our so-called judges). And they don’t seem to have any remorse for accusing you of obtaining wealth on the backs of the banks you stiffed and the contractors you stiffed and the minorities you denied access to your properties.

And now, after resisting the demands of all the American people, you have finally lamented and offered us, in such a generous and self-sacrificing show of concern for those less fortunate, a tax reduction for the rich which will be so beneficial for us plebeians as it stimulates the economy in a bigly way, even though such measures historically have failed to bring such relief about after we swallowed that same explanation.

And you have proved to all of the other countries of the world how great you are by blessing them with your presence, although those who reside in your country are reluctant to acknowledge and admit your greatness.

It would be no surprise if the American people, after finally realizing you greatness and bigly-ness, will unanimously decide to make you our emperor so that you can enforce your will on us without interference with those of opposing opinions while making America great again.

These are just a few of the things that I am upset about and I am sure there will be more as we ride along on our way to opulence for all as you so earnestly pursue.

So, Mr. President, don’t be deterred in your quest for a better world for all. You have started in, as you say, a bigly way.

And sir, please don’t be deterred from your quest for a better life for all – just because some or our ungrateful citizens refer to you as our “Groper in Chief,” when you were just doing what you were entitled to do as a famous person.

You are Fantastic!

Yours truly,
A concerned and grateful citizen of America
The country which will soon be great again.

 

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Los Angeles Times Editorial: “Harvey’s lessons for Trump”

This Times editorial summed up the dilemma of the serious disaster in Houston versus the head-in-the-sand situation of our executive branch of government.

Trump’s Twitter acknowledgement: “Wow – Now experts are calling #Harvey a once in 500 year flood! We have an all out effort going, and going well!” Kind of like one of his usual comments like “this is the best and most wonderful job ever done by any president since the beginning of mankind”, even though he hadn’t even been to Texas yet and had no way of knowing how well anything was going.

Of course, he writes all this global warming stuff off, stating that these massive storms, hurricanes, earthquakes, and floods are just weather, they have nothing to with global warming. Obviously, the scientific community are all mistaken. There is no need to change the way we are destroying the Earth, this stuff happens all the time according to Trump and his experts, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt and Energy Secretary Rick Perry.

These experts refute the fact that global warming is real and that it makes storms like Harvey much stronger, more unpredictable and quicker to intensify. The experts say that warmer temperatures mean more evaporation from the seas and thus more rainfall from storms.

“Rising seas threaten shipping ports, coastal areas and freshwater estuaries as saline ocean water seeps into the Everglades and threatens the water supply of millions of people in Florida.”

Trump’s appointees are proponents of increasing fossil fuel production. Their beliefs imperil the health and safety of the people they swore to protect.

As the Los Angeles Times editorial board stated in their article: “Trump has subscribed to fake science ….… this would be a far more winnable battle if the world wasn’t also forced to fight ignorance in the White House, and a president content to whistle past the flooded graveyard.”

Then he has the audacity and stupidity to broadcast the “huge” crowd he drew later instead of encouraging everyone to help in the recovery effort, to donate money, food, clothing, and shelter. He didn’t have enough sense even to mobilize the National Guard which has troops in Texas and all of the other states who are trained in recovery techniques and assisting in treating injured people.

What an idiot. What a waste. What a disgrace for our country. The guy is heartless and hopeless.

Exploding our planet out of existence

Ted Folkert

August 14, 2017

Messages to North Korea from our fearless leader, President Trump, the same guy who had five draft deferments when he declined the opportunity to fulfill his duty to serve his country militarily:

“… the world will see fire and fury like it has never seen before” …. “if they don’t get their act together they are going to be in trouble like countries have never been in trouble before” … “military solutions are now fully in place, locked and loaded.”

We are talking about explosions here. North Korea exploding the United States. The U.S. exploding North Korea. Infrastructure destroyed, buildings destroyed, transportation destroyed, massive killings – all unnecessary, all a no-win situation, all with nothing to gain – just disaster and unnecessary loss of lives of innocent and helpless people.

It seems that our life is dominated by explosions and/or the fear of explosions. Is there a day that goes by without a huge explosion somewhere? One day it is in Mosul. The next day it is in Baghdad and another day in Kabul. Every day in Syria and often in Yemen, frequently in Israel and Palestine. In Africa, it seems rampant. The newspapers display massive destruction of buildings, automobiles, streets, bridges, homes and, of course, people. Lots of people. These occurrences are so common now that they hardly illicit any obvious concern among those of us not directly affected. If the devastation continues in Iraq and Syria, fueled by opposing involvement by the U.S. and Russia, the Middle East may all go up in flames and become destroyed with widespread, completely crumbled, infrastructure. Much of it already is.

Most all of our entertainment now requires explosions. Our movies, TV shows, news programs, children’s toys, and adult’s toys. The mining industry, tunnel building industry and obviously our wars, are all dominated by explosions. We explode tall buildings when we want them demolished. Our development of weaponry and the testing thereof is dominated by explosions. We can’t be adequately entertained without explosions. Not small isolated explosions, but massively destructive explosions. In warfare and in entertainment, we need explosions that annihilate entire buildings, entire neighborhoods, entire cities, with thousands killed with a single explosion, bodies flying everywhere. This provides the same thrill that the Lone Ranger used to do with one “speeding bullet.” A speeding bullet doesn’t get it anymore. Now we need massive explosions. Onesies and twosies don’t provide the necessary thrill anymore. Now we need lots of blood and flying body parts. Otherwise it doesn’t move our excitement needle.

It is hard to find a movie to watch that doesn’t include murder by knife, hatchet, baseball bat, strangulation, suffocation, poisoning, bullet, or explosion – preferably by explosion. Explosions for the film industry must have created a whole new industry. It must have created a whole new degree in film industry education – like maybe: explosives technologist, or master of explosion, or explode-ologist, or mass-killing specialist.

Imagine your lifetime legacy to be the best creator of explosion clips for the film industry. It seems that there should be such a category in the awards ceremonies. You know – the shows where all of the famous entertainers congratulate each other with wonderful awards.

We don’t seem to be getting any scientific predictions concerning the impact of the daily explosions the world over on the sustainability of our little planet to support additional explosions while still supporting human life. This would seem to be a worthwhile subject to address. I mean, where does all of the smoke go? Does it go into our atmosphere from whence we get the air we breathe, the atmosphere that enabled life? And what is the impact of all these explosions on this thin crust that we live on which has been supported by a molten core for millions of years now, this crust that enabled life and sustains life?

The extended use of explosives in warfare, and a friendlier name used more frequently, “police action,” has created, the somewhat softer term, “collateral damage.“ The term apparently justifies, or at least shirks responsibility for, deaths and destruction caused by explosions which were badly aimed or for which it was not possible to destroy the target without killing innocent people or destroying unintended property. So that makes it forgivable for the perpetrator or initiator of the action. Kind of like saying: “sorry I killed you, or sorry I destroyed your city, or sorry I killed your parents, but it had to be done because the message or our intent was more important than you or your parents or your city.”

Explosive devices are becoming so common now, even the most dreaded atomic weapons, that it is only a matter of time until virtually every country on the planet will possess enough of them to destroy other countries entire populations and entire commercial areas. So, then who controls the use of such weapons? Are all the countries on Earth going to, all-of-a-sudden, just get along with each other? Will all the countries reach an agreement to resolve disputes through negotiation and to adhere with the decision of some governing body? Like the United Nations?

In considering the impact of such controversies and festering disputes one can imagine looking at the horizon every night and viewing distant explosions like firecrackers on the Fourth of July.

It’s kind of like what happened to the tough guys when guns became so easy to come by. All-of-a-sudden the little guys were just as tough as the big guys. Like they say, “the bigger they come the harder fall.”

This should be taken literally by the big powerful countries. All-of-a-sudden a little country like North Korea can be feared just like a big powerful country like the U.S. The bigger they come the harder fall. And what happens when Isis and other incessant trouble makers on the planet get access to them? Are we to assume that we can prevent such a disaster forever? Don’t believe it. At some point in time they will fall into the wrong hands. Then what?

The young people of the world need to join hands. They need to communicate across borders and oceans. They need to converge on common ground in moving forward with the necessary goals for saving the planet for human life. The older folks aren’t going to do it. Too many of us don’t understand or don’t believe it when it comes to saving mankind. Look at who we elected to lead our country into the depths of disaster. This is how the older folks think. We have had it too good. We haven’t experienced the planetary challenges that are not only on the horizon but are already in the process of destroying the planet’s ability to sustain human life for the ten billion of us who will soon inhabit this molten rock we live on. That is ten billion mouths to feed daily, 10 billion who require fresh drinking water, a comfortable shelter, 10 billion who need clean air to breath.

The young people must find a way to eliminate explosive warfare from the equation. The planet simply cannot survive unless we take extensive measures to prevent global warming, which cannot be accomplished without ceasing to pollute our air with carbon emissions. This includes explosions. Every time one of the pistons in your car’s engine reaches the top of the cylinder the compressed gas creates an explosion. The elimination of explosions must be accomplished without imposing considerable hardship on the populace. We don’t need explosions to provide food, shelter and clothing, the essentials for survival, except those explosions generated by internal combustion engines in our cars, trucks, trains, airplanes, and tractors. The process of eliminating those is progressing but not fast enough. The future of the planet is all about the young. The young must pursue this challenge aggressively, not the way it is being pursued by those in power. For those in power it doesn’t matter much. For the young it means everything.

Think about it!

Helplessness, Hopelessness, and Despair – “The Big Three” – Revisited

Ted Folkert

July 25, 2017

The examples of helplessness, hopelessness, and despair seem to never cease. We see it by the thousands in Los Angeles each day as we drive by the outdoor encampments, which continuously multiply. They tell us that there are 50,000 or more people who have nowhere indoors to sleep now. It seems that we could count that many just around the downtown area as we drive by nearly every side street all over the downtown area and most all the underpasses.

These are the visible and invisible people, we see them but we don’t see them. We just drive on by. What else can we do? So, it seems.

But, as we know, “the big three” are not isolated in Los Angeles. No, they are visible and invisible everywhere we choose to go, worldwide.

Another new episode appears today about those seeking escape from the big three. Quoting from the article by Jenny Jarvie and Kate Lithicum in the Los Angeles Times:

“A group of people had waited for about a week at a hotel on the U.S./Mexico border before smugglers helped them cross the Rio Grande. ‘These human smugglers crammed more than 100 people into a tractor trailer in the stifling Texas summer heat,’ Thomas Homan, acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said in a statement. ‘Human smugglers have repeatedly demonstrated that they have absolutely no regard for human life.”’

“By the time they climbed up into the pitch-black truck, they had already crossed the Rio Grande on rafts and walked all night through wild brush land.”

“The air was hot inside the 18-wheeler, and there was no food or water. A few hours later, the truck driver told a federal agent, he opened the door to find ‘bodies just lying on the floor like meat.”’

“Thirty-nine people were discovered in and around the truck early Sunday after a disoriented man approached an employee for water in a Wal-Mart parking lot just off Interstate 35, about 150 miles from the U.S.-Mexico border.”

“Eight men were pronounced dead at the scene Sunday morning and are believed to have suffered from heat exposure and asphyxiation.”

“Seventeen of the vehicle’s occupants were rushed to hospitals with serious or critical injuries. An additional 13 had non-life-threatening injuries. Two men have since died at hospitals, according to the U.S. attorney’s office.”

Just another sad story of a case of smuggling struggling people gone bad.

This is not an implication that we should not have immigration laws or rules about sleeping on sidewalks. But it is an implication that we should revisit our attitude toward those in need of assistance.

And it is an implication that we should acknowledge the fact that our planet is becoming crowded and that the resources for sustaining life must be shared amongst all the population of the planet regardless of where they reside and what their needs are. And it is an implication that we are attracting immigrants because we have figured out how to capture and enjoy these limited resources better than most.

And it is an implication that we should reeducate ourselves about discrimination based on religion and national origin, and that wealth should be added to that list. Of course, this is in direct opposition to the desire and direction of our much-maligned president, the president who has been called more derogatory names than perhaps all our other presidents combined, and only in six months. Stay tuned, more to come.

Think about it!