Fiscally conservative Economist magazine put together a succinct video explaining the word Liberal.
The first truly Liberal government was the USA. In 2018 Canada and France are good examples.
USA under Trump in 2018 is run by a few billionaires and rich corporations funding the GOP.
Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.
I don’t particularly like Bill Maher.
But when he nails it, he nails it. 😀
Click PLAY or watch it on Twitter.
With a rating of 4.36 / 5.00 on GoodReads, this book is popular. And depressing.
My takeaways:
The U.S. political system is a fail, I’d say.
40% think Trump is doing a good job. A majority of those, I’m guessing, believe what they hear on FOX News and right wing radio.
Americans so easily misled deserve worse education, worse health care, medical bankruptcy, etc. … There’s no helping people like that.
I keep thinking American voters will figure out the richest of the rich are taking too much money. They don’t
Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right (2016) is a non-fiction book written by the American investigative journalist Jane Mayer, about a network of extremely wealthy conservative republicans, foremost among them Charles and David Koch, who have together funded an array of organizations that work in tandem to influence academic institutions, think tanks, the courts, statehouses, Congress, and the American presidency for their own benefit.
Mayer particularly discusses the Koch family and their political activities, along with Richard Mellon Scaife and John M. Olin and the DeVos and Coors families.
Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.
Jane Meredith Mayer is an American investigative journalist who has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1995. …
In 2016, Doubleday published Mayer’s fourth book, Dark Money, which became an instant national best-seller, and the New York Times named it one of the ten best books of the year. …
Mayer revealed that approximately six investigators, led by former New York Police Chief Howard Safir, had been hired by the industrialist Koch brothers in an effort to try to dig up dirt in order to smear her reputation, and that accusations of plagiarism had been leveled at her. She responded by publicly airing those tactics of intimidation, effectively debunking the smear campaign.
The third book (2014) in the Century Trilogy, after Fall of Giants and Winter of the World.
For me it’s the 6th book in his historical fiction series starting chronologically in the 12th century with the Kingsbridge series.
Each of the 6 books got better, I’d say.
I learned a lot. Kennedy and King were critically important for human rights in the USA, yet both were flawed men.
Edge of Eternity tells the story of the third generation of families developed in the first two novels and located in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany and Russia during the height of the Cold War.
The novel’s characters become involved in a number of the most important global events during the period, including the Cuban Missile Crisis, the British Invasion, the J.F.K. Administration, Watergate, and the Civil Rights Movement. …
Superb. I’m very sorry to have finished them all.
I MIGHT start over one day.
Click PLAY or watch Ken Follett explaining the book on YouTube.
Donald Trump:
“This is all very well, but I’d just like to know who is at home taking care of the babies?”
It might not have been Trump. But some other dinosaur trying to protect his white, male privilege.
In 1919, the Missouri Legislature approved letting women vote in presidential elections — an act made moot by ratification Aug. 18, 1920, of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, prohibiting the denial of voting rights “on account of sex.”
“I Have a Dream” is a public speech delivered by American civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr. during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 28, 1963, in which he calls for an end to racism in the United States …
I still have a dream, a dream deeply rooted in the American dream – one day this nation will rise up and live up to its creed, “We hold these truths to be self evident: that all men are created equal.” I have a dream…
Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.
I’m reading a book about those days. President Kennedy playing a balancing act between King and his supporters and the segregationists, mostly whites in the southern States.
Amazing days. King was far from perfect. Nor was Kennedy perfect. (Both were womanizers, for example.) But I admire both in different ways.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 had been proposed by President John F. Kennedy in June 1963, but opposed by filibuster in the Senate.
Thereafter, President Lyndon B. Johnson pushed the bill forward, which in its final form was passed in the U.S. Congress by a Senate vote of 73-27 and House vote of 289-126 (70%-30%). The Act was signed into law by President Johnson …
Warm-up acts at the 1963 March on Washington:
Gospel legend Mahalia Jackson sang “How I Got Over“, and Marian Andersonsang “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands“. …
Joan Baez led the crowds in several verses of “We Shall Overcome” and “Oh Freedom“. Bob Dylan performed “When the Ship Comes In“, for which he was joined by Baez. Dylan also performed “Only a Pawn in Their Game“, a provocative and not completely popular choice because it asserted that Byron de la Beckwith, as a poor white man, was not personally or primarily to blame for the murder of Medgar Evers.Peter, Paul and Mary sang “If I Had a Hammer” and Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind“. Odetta sang “I’m On My Way“.
Charlton Heston, James Baldwin, Marlon Brando, and Harry Belafonte were there.
Charlton Heston supported civil rights?
Yep. He was a big booster of Democrats before switching to the dark side with Reagan and then the NRA.
Aktion T4 was a postwar name for mass murder through involuntary euthanasia in Nazi Germany. …
In October 1939 Adolf Hitler signed a “euthanasia note” backdated to 1 September 1939, that authorized his physician Karl Brandt and Reichsleiter Philipp Bouhler to implement the programme.
The killings took place from September 1939 until the end of the war in 1945 …
In the towns where the killing centres were located, many people saw the inmates arrive in buses, saw the smoke from the crematoria chimneys and noticed that the buses were returning empty. In Hadamar, ashes containing human hair rained down on the town. …
Memorial in Berlin to the disabled killed by Nazis in Germany.
Actually, I’ve only recently looked at the issue. So this is a weak endorsement.
Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.
We have some decades left using Petrotoxins. If you use them, you need to weigh all the alternatives for transport. Is this pipeline actually more dangerous than the alternatives?
I don’t think so.
Opponents, especially First Nations, were not sufficiently consulted. Perhaps not sufficiently compensated.
I’m hoping — in the end — some compromise can be decided. Otherwise we’ll be stuck with worse options.
St. Louis MO April 19, 2018.
Rule of law is critical to society. I like the police. But I like them better when video is rolling.
Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.
The only other person on the scene when police called over a gentleman, I propped up my camera.
This gentleman did exactly what I would have done. Came directly to the first officer. Sat down immediately as requested.
Police were not aggressive in body language or any other way. Eventually they noticed my camera. Did not seem to care. I suspect most encounters go exactly like this. But are not reported
Have you heard of this guy?
Oswald Mosley was leader of the British Union of Fascists(BUF). …
Mosley was imprisoned in May 1940 and the BUF was banned. He was released in 1943, and, politically disgraced by his association with fascism, he moved abroad in 1951, spending most of the remainder of his life in Paris …
The BUF was protectionist, strongly anti-communist, strongly anti-zionist and nationalistic to the point of advocating authoritarianism. …
I couldn’t recall hearing of any Brits who supported Hitler and Mussolini.
But they did exist.
Rick McCharles 