Former FBI director James Comey had been characterized as a “showboat” and “grandstander” after having been fired by Donald Trump and so were now three CEOs who rather voluntarily resigned from his “manufacturing council” after Trumps infamous response to the deadly incident in Charlottesville, VA, last week.
POTUS’ fallacious characterization of upright individuals, most of the media (“fake news”), alt-rights and white supremacists (“many nice people”), and his false claim, #MAGA; an American nightmare.
An ever changing appearance of POTUS’ Twitter account. A seemingly hard working president is surrounded by his loyal generals. Facial expressions of American presidents change over time. Even Barack Obama turned grey in 8 years. Mr. Trump now sports a grim face, but does it convince his supporters that he becomes finally even more determined? You know, #MAGA?
With the departure of demonic Stephen Bannon, has firing his staff on a weekly basis solved any of his numerous problems? Who’s next?
Finkelstein is not just a public intellectual, however: there is something too explosive about the subjects he writes about for that category to completely contain him. He acts out a role that is Grecian in its cosmopolitanism, Abrahamic in its prophetic intensity. It is a role all Christians, Jews and Muslims instinctively – if subliminally – recognize. He is the archetypical Prophet who warns the people in his tribe to stop dancing around the Golden Calf, and tells of their impending doom if they do not. He is Cassandra, who foresees the downfall of her nation; he is the Abrahamic prophets Isaiah, Daniel, and Jeremiah, as well as the heroic figure of Joseph, who astounds the Pharaoh by telling him what his dreams are really about. He is a figure Americans recognize, although they do not want to. He is the Puritan preacher, hurling bolts of rhetorical fury in modern Jeremiads; he is Daniel in the lion’s den; he is tormented and selfish and at times uncouth, but he is also unexpectedly Christ-like, refusing to Abandon his message despite scourging by critics.
What Lawrence Swaim writes on page 174 of his collection of eulogies on several individuals’ “traumatic memory and the struggle against systemic evil” [1] is a culmination of a very subjective narrative about the American political scientist Norman Finkelstein who has paid a high price for challenging Israel and members of the so-called Israel Lobby in the U.S when painstakingly exposing, in his numerous books, Israel’s not-so-favorable conduct in the decades-long war with the Palestinians.
When Chelsea Manning gave her first interview, to ABC, after her release last month, we saw a young pretty woman and, for the first time, heard her self-confident and determined voice. What she has done for us still can’t be judged in full. Her ordeal may in fact have been worth it. Her leaked 700,000 or so classified documents made it/may make it possible to get a better picture in times of permanent war and alternative facts, which is not a new phenomenon.
Showing his complete lack of information on global climate change, Donald Trump claimed being an environmentalist (“As someone who cares deeply about the environment, which I do …;” possibly of his golf course of the Mar-a-Lago Club in Florida) in his America First address in the Rose Garden of the White House yesterday. He has apparently a 2015 MIT study in mind when claiming,
Even if the Paris Agreement were implemented in full, with total compliance from all nations, it is estimated it would only produce a two-tenths of one degree — think of that; this much — Celsius reduction in global temperature by the year 2100. Tiny, tiny amount.
A correct quotation of one of the numerous alerting conclusions by MIT in its 2015 Energy & Climate Outlook would have been,
Assuming the proposed cuts are extended through 2100 but not deepened further, they result in about 0.2°C less warming by the end of the century compared with our estimates, under similar assumptions, for Copenhagen– Cancun. Other adjustments in our economic projections resulted in another 0.2°C reduction in warming (see Box 2). (Emphasis added.)
As usual, Trump is misleading (by ignoring the expected dramatic increase in surface temperatures). He quotes the Wall Street Journal that “withdrawing [of the Paris Agreement] is in America’s economic interest and won’t matter much to the climate.” Well, maybe that’s true. Maybe that’s why the Doomsday Clock has moved its hand to 2 1/2 minutes to midnight.
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