Someone needs to inform Justice Scalia that the University of Texas is NOT a hot bed of intellectual stimulation. It’s your basic common, ordinary, run of the mill American university with a disproportionately large number of guys called Bubba and co-eds who aspire to be a Stepford wife for a Bubba with a daddy in the oil business.
Suggesting that the University of Texas it is a place where anyone, even “Black folk” would feel intellectually intimidated is well… To display a serious lack of intellectual capacity.
How do I know this? I’ve had the pleasure (or misfortune) to cope with UT grads in the work-a-day world. I was never once given cause to think that I should recommend the U of T to anyone.
Fear not Kosite readers, I have gone to the Official Web pages of Sens. Bennet & Gardner and that paragon of Congressional mediocrity, Mike Coffman, and sent them e-mails urging them to “Do The Correct Thing” and censure the S-O-B Scalia. Then I rewarded myself for engaging in this exercise in futility and had an undeserved and un-needed cup of ice cream.
TrumpThe Donald continues to inspire all those aging caucasian drop-outs from the U-of-T and their friends who didn’t even try ‘cause they couldn’t get accepted to the U-of-T or Ol’ Miss or Bama or LSU – you know those paragon of academic challenge that is beyond the pale of folks who suffer from piss poor primary and secondary education due to an excess of melanin in their epidermis.
I admit that I’m a bit puzzled as to why so many self-proclaimed “progressives” have their knickers in a knot about The Donald and his splendid showmanship. The Donald has been pandering to my fellow aging, white citizens from the get go. He polished his skills as a showman way back when he was firing aspiring young protégés during the dawn of REALITY TV.
Give The Donald his due. He’s a good showman. A good showman knows his audience and how to manipulate the audience. It’s my understanding that The Donald is a graduate of the Wharton School of Business, where I suspect he excelled in salesmanship and how to exploit the fears and insecurities of a potential customer.
Why so many progressives are demanding that the GOP denounce The Donald is a mystery to me. Shouldn’t they be doing some political rope-a-dope in order for the mainstream GOP to exhaust its resources defending The Donald as he blabs and blathers his paranoid rhetoric of fear, hate and despair? The Donald is good at blabbing and blathering trite slogans that inspire (or perhaps incite) good people to behave very badly.
My favorite Republican, who may well be one of the last true, honest and honorable Republicans, Dave Brooks, continues to use his PBS NewsHour pundit pulpit to proclaim that someday The Donald will implode.
But as I discover more about those frightened and forlorn fans of The Donald, I’m beginning to think it is possible that he could in fact become the GOP nominee. I don’t see that as bad for The Bern, nor for those of us committed to a Progressive agenda. I’ve seen no evidence that The Donald’s Fascism will spread beyond those former Middle-Class White-Anglo-Saxon-Protestants who are scared silly because:
They see their fellow WASP neighbors dying at a younger age than ever before. Why? I read that it is caused by the stress of knowing that their social and economic power is waning . Their incomes are stagnate or declining because they’ve been betrayed by to plutocrats and oligarchs of Wall Street. Wall Street has been busy busting the unions that once gave these blue-collar laborers the power to negotiate with white-collar management. A negotiating power that provided them with good salaries, good benefits and the good life. They consider their future, now denied good pensions and the security of a “good” job with good pay and good benefits and they’re scared. Who is to blame for their loss of status and security? Change. America is changing, and they don’t like the change they see and the change they feel and the changes that they’re told are coming. Their old order is crumbling and the new order looks and feels and thinks differently. And of course The Donald and the Cruz and Marko and yes, even the Jeb!ster are telling them they need to WORRY more because the BAD people really are out to get them.The GOP establishment has been priming the pump of fear and hate since Poppa Bush began recruiting Klansmen to defect from the Democratic Party LBJ and the Great Society. It should come as no surprise that if you recruit people because of whom and what they’re afraid of, someday they’re going to demand their leaders say and maybe even do something to protect them from the boogiemen.
The Paris FolliesFellow Progressives are all in a twitter and have been a tweeting about what may, or may not come out of Paris. As if anything that may or may not come out of Paris will make a particle of difference in the lives of anyone other than those who will find a way to profit from IT.
To listen to my Progressive colleagues, global warming is a threat to the health and well being of the entire planet. REALLY? And we must all be counting on the Paris Follies to save the planet. Really.
Recently, when I pointed out that not so long ago (at least in geological time) there were huge sheets of ice that covered all of Canada and much of what is now the northern latitudes of the contiguous US all the way down to what we call Ohio (not to mention Siberia and northern Europe) and that all that ice had melted away and raised sea levels by as much as 400, yep, that’s correct, as much as 400 feet, all before human being were doing more than burning dead wood at a rate that could easily be sustained for millennium , I got dull stares.
I am willing to concede that since human beings have been able to consistently and with a degree of reliability measure global temperatures, that our human influence on atmospheric conditions is very likely accelerating a rise in overall global temperatures. Reliable thermometers that can be calibrated for consistent data collection have only been in use since the mid-1700s.
These good folks seem to take as gospel that the temporary stasis in global temperatures over the last 12,000 years, since the so-called end of the most current Ice Age is something that can be restored and preserved.
Given that there is creditable evidence that the entire planet was at least once and possibly twice completely covered with ice – the global snowball – or maybe there was a band of open water with some open land (but hardly a land-mass) during the great Cryogenian Ice Ages, I find it difficult to believe that even if the planet went Cold Turkey and stopped burning all fossil fuels next week that our grandchildren and great grandchildren and great-great grandchildren would witness a return to a cooler and more stable climate.
Granted, they might not return to the world wide tropical climate we equate with the T-Rex and Jurassic Park, but I believe it is fair to say they will be forced to find ways to live in a warmer climate with more volatile weather patterns. That, I believe is what should have been the primary topic of the current Paris Follies – Adapting to Inevitable climate change. Instead I think we have engaged in some form of GOP fear mongering about the weather and who is to blame for the changes that are a coming.
Thanks to the good folks at The National Memo for such good grist for my ruminations.