Month: December 2016

It’s pretty weird blogging from NY but I read an article online today that I figured was worth posting. We talked a little bit about the Cuban Missile Crisis this semester and how that relates to the power of the executive and the decision making process inside the White House. With the revelation that our incoming president will not read the daily intel briefs because he has like such a really good fabulous brain, POLITICO thought it was a good idea to remind us of the time that a daily intel brief saved the country from a nuclear war.

After the Bay of Pigs embarrassment, Kennedy vowed to never be swayed again. “All my life I’ve known better than to depend on the experts,” Kennedy lamented. “How could I have been so stupid, to let them go ahead?” When October 1962 rolled around, he was prepared. He knew the maps, read the briefings, and took advice from people without stars and medals on their jacket. Trump is surrounding himself with generals and refusing to read these intel briefings. Not like you needed another reason to be terrified of a Trump presidency or anything.

Adding on to my last post, incoming president You-Know-Who launched a missive against Vanity Fair magazine and its editor Graydon Carter, shredding them on Twitter over poor subscription numbers.

What could have set the President-elect off, you ask?  Well, Carter’s magazine has recently published a delightfully harsh review of You-Know-Who’s restaurant, calling it the worst one in America.  As anyone knows at this point, saying anything associated with He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named is the worst are fighting words.

Again, this incredibly thin skinned man will be our next commander in chief.  Sad!

Here’s just a little window into the mind of our incoming president, He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named.  He recently held a meeting with Technology executives, including Amazon.com’s Jeff Bezos and Tesla’s Elon Musk.  One person missing here?  Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey.  Why was that?  He was apparently banned for not allowing an emoji version of #crookedhillary as part of a deal between Twitter and the Trump Campaign.

This is what we can expect for the next four years: temper tantrums over small stuff.  Sad!

After the fall of Aleppo, both sides agreed to allow for the safe passage of residents that have been trapped in the city. The Red Cross expects the evacuation to take several days with about 3,000 people leaving the city in ambulances and buses today. The residents are being taken to Idlib, a province Assad has vowed to target next, and Turkey has promised to take the most vulnerable. It’s hard to tell what’s next for Syria, but this war, and Syrian suffering, is far from over.

There seems to be a theme for Trump’s Cabinet picks: total disregard, apathy, or hostility for the department the person will head, old, and white. Just take a look at the picture on CNN. There is nothing at all diverse or representative of the body politic about this Cabinet, unless the diversity is based on the manufacturer of the nominee’s pacemakers.

Okay, maybe political ethics have been questionable for longer that the past year but we voted in scandal (and not the good ABC primetime variety). Then again did we really vote it in when Clinton won by almost 3-milion votes.

Bloomberg news talks, however, about how Trump’s plan for his businesses, while he is in office, would not hold muster ethically for a Federal employee. The good news, as we all know, for Trump is the rules don’t apply to him (in reality this time, not just in his head).

If we don’t all end up in prison for being vocal opposition to Trump the ethical scandals that we will see in the coming year should at least prove to be entertaining (that is if they don’t bring the republic down in the process).

While I was at AAF this semester I heard repeatedly about how these people felt as though the academy did not value right-leaning opinion. I took this at face value because as we all know reality has a liberal skew.

Hyperbole aside. If this is true, if the right believes in freedom of thought and expression then why do they allow this to happen. This being a liberal professor getting death threats for voicing an opinion. This goes to my belief that social media has perpetuated a society that can only tolerate listening to their bubble – and get violent when they hear things they don’t like.

Okay, while I get what the author here is saying asking Trump to rise above the fray is like asking a 5-year old to look at a marshmallow and not eat it.

But, in all seriousness, Trump won by using deceit and dog-whistles. Is asking him to rise above and promote international journalistic standards, standards that will allow the press to say “not nice” things about him (that likely are true).

Where did that marshmallow go again?

It has been hard for me to follow the news since the results of November 8th. When I have, it just made me more depressed and angry. In the days after the election, I lost it on Social Media. Lost it so bad that I had to delete my accounts. But everyone in this group already knows that. It’s why I have not been blogging. Engaging was hurting my overall wellbeing. I realize that the era of social progressivism that marked my teenage and young adult years is over as I move to the beginning of my middle ages (okay I have a few more years but they are coming fast, and I have the gray hairs to prove it).

It has taken a month for this reality sink in. Everything that I believe in like racial equality, gender equality, LGBT equality, environmental policy, prison reform, police reform, is in jeopardy. I know that this reality is not lost on this group of high-minded individuals.

I realize that action must be taken. But what measures can be taken in a world of all but useless 140 character missives. You cannot have nuance on Twitter. You cannot have civil discourse (it seems) on Facebook. Snapchat has degraded discourse to pictures (and if they are worth 1000 words, I want a refund).

It is with this disdain for what we call engaging in the modern world that I recommend (reservedly) that if you are not a part of the Injustice Boycott that you should be. There is a lot of Twitter activism, but I think that with the numbers who have joined that the Twitter activism coupled with the real activism might just work. They are targeting efforts on injustice with the Dakota pipeline and in NYC and San Fran. I am not sure about it but I can hope.

New research has come out from sociologists and economist at Standford and Harvard, revealing something that most people already have an intuitive sense of, and is still all the while depressing:

“The decline in economic  mobility between parents and kids over the past half century is astounding. About 90 percent of Americans born in the 1940s earned more than their parents by the time they turned 30. Only about half of those born in the 1980s can say the same. All figures are adjusted for inflation, household size, and the number of people working in each household.”

The research indicates that, among those hit the hardest were men in the rust belt, something that might go to explain their strong support during the past election for now President-elect He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named.

The kicker ultimately here:  The driving force behind this phenomenon, the force that should be tackled and dealt with to reverse this trend, is growing inequality.