Trump's (Latest) Unwise Words

Today, Donald Trump, in a speech before the United Nations, referred to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un as "Rocket Man."

According to the protocols of international diplomacy, one national leader does not publicly disrespect another national leader in that way. It just is not done.

Plus, make him angry enough and Kim might just send one of his nuclear missiles our way.

Trump's handlers need to keep him under better control.

I am not a Twitter user so please, anyone who reads this and agrees with me, please send a tweet to @realDonaldTrump.

Meanwhile, keep your eyes peeled and scan the sky for a North Korean ICBM.

Copyright © 2017.

Christians and Muslims, Historically

At one time there were Islamic societies which led the world in their arts and sciences: notably mathematics and astronomy but also medicine, architecture, philosophy, and poetry. We owe to Muslims (and the Christian Byzantines) the preservation of much of the literature and knowledge of the ancient Greeks. By comparison, the Christian West was generally backward, and I am sure that the Muslims regarded it as even barbarian.

So how and why did the Islamic civilizations decline? I am not a historian but from what I do know, I think I can say this with hopefully only slight inaccuracy: wars with the Christians were a big factor.

In Spain, where there was quite a glorious Islamic civilization, with advanced medicine as well as philosophy and other arts and sciences--and, incidentally, generally remarkable tolerance of non-Muslims (Christians and Jews)--centuries of war (the so-called Reconquista or reconquest by Christian Spanish kingdoms) culminated in 1492 with the fall of Granada and thus the ending of the last Islamic kingdom in Spain. (In 1492, not coincidentally, Spain's Jews were expelled; the Muslims were granted tolerance but that promise lasted only some 30 years.)

In the Middle East, where notable Islamic civilizations centered on Baghdad and Persia, there similarly were several centuries of wars between Christians and Muslims, centering on the Crusades, which supposedly had the aim of recapturing Jerusalem for Christians but which caused enormous killing and destruction over a larger area. Wars between Christian states and Muslim powers lasted at least until the eighteenth century.

The last of the Muslim temporal kingdoms--and this is starting to get off the subject--was the Ottoman Empire, which had absorbed the Byzantine Empire (culminating in 1453 with the fall of Constantinople) but weakened over centuries until its final collapse with World War I.

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Donald Trump, Ronald Reagan, and Their Attitudes toward Their Predecessors

I have to believe that Donald Trump has multiple staffers in the White House whose main or perhaps only job is to look over everything that former President Barack Obama did while he was in office, and especially his "executive orders" --so that Trump could reverse every one.

"Obama did this? Okay, now it's reversed." "Obama did that? I'll reverse it!"

I am not the first one to point out that Trump seems hell-bent on reversing every single thing that Obama did. "We don't like you, never did, and we're going to wipe out every last little bit of your legacy." Yes, Trump is that childish.

But this thumbing your nose at your predecessor reminds me of at least one thing that President Ronald Reagan did, some 30 years ago. His predecessor, Jimmy Carter, had installed solar panels on the White House roof. Reagan ordered the solar panels removed and dismantled.

Why on earth would he do this? Were there any bad or harmful results of having those solar panels there? Possibly Mr. Reagan thought that the hot water for his bath was not hot enough and so the entire water-heating system, as it was, needed to be substantially modified.

But I doubt that the reason was anything like that. I think Reagan just wanted to thumb his nose (or give the finger, or flip the bird. . .) to Carter. Jimmy Carter had told the American public that fossil fuels were a finite resource that needed to be conserved. He advocated for a more serious attitude toward energy use, perhaps even a bit of belt-tightening.

Reagan, on the other hand, comes along and, while campaigning for President, says, basically, We don't need to tighten the belt. Screw conservation. We are America and austerity is not for us. There is plenty of oil.

Incidentally, and at risk of straying from my subject: Reagan did not believe in government support of research into alternative energy sources. The day he took office he froze Department of Energy funding of alternative-energy research projects, thereby setting American alternative energy programs back by 30 years.

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U. S President Tronald Dump Speaking on the Flooding in Texas

Note: This is fake news. This did not happen. Any resemblance to persons living or dead if purely intentional.

Mr. Dump speaking:

I want to tell the people of Texas, and America, and the world: we will fix Texas. We will fix Texas. We are going to make Texas better than it ever was before. We have a plan. We have a great plan, a greater plan than there's ever been before. And we will fix Texas.

I can't release all the details of this plan, but we have a weapon. We are going to soak up all that water. We are going to make all that flood water go away, so fast you wouldn't believe.

We are going to bring in a sponge. A really, really big sponge.  A sponge like nobody's ever seen before. And we are going to soak up all that water. And then we will dump that water. We are going to dump that water, maybe on some country we don't like. Maybe on North Korea, or on Iran.

Meanwhile, I've got people looking for the drain. And we are going to open that drain, and let all the water drain out. Drain away. We've got divers, right now, looking for that drain, that will let all that water drain away. And with God's help, we are going to find that drain. We are going to drain all that water away. We are going to drain Texas to where It’s drier than it's ever been before. Believe me. We are going to fix Texas. And we're working on it right now. And we've got really, really great ideas on how to fix Texas. And we are going to fix Texas, I can tell you.

Copyright (c) 2017.

One Little Observation, and a Joke

The coming (next Monday) total solar eclipse which is to be visible in the US has gotten so much publicity and hype in the news that I suspect that the Sun must have some of the best press agents in the world.

What's the best month for joining the military? Answer: March.

Copyright (c) 2017

Does Religion Do Any Good?

This country is virtually carpeted in churches and awash in preachers of various stripes. But, despite volumes, mountains, torrents of preaching and reading and writing about religion, God, morality--proper human conduct--it's not clear that we have even the tiniest bit less lying, cheating, corruption, and even killing.

Human greed and lust impel men to lie, cheat, and murder for the sake of obtaining money, power, position, and sex.

Most people have a conscience--I say "most people" because it is clear that some criminals simply have no conscience whatsoever--but a person can do another person wrong and then confess, and then he is told, "Say twenty Hail Marys," and this institution of the confessional lets him or her shed all feelings of guilt whatsoever. It is said that some Mafiosi would murder other people six days a week and then go to church on Sunday and confess (and receive absolution).

Not only does religion, it seems to me, not lessen the net sum of human evil in the world; but religion sometimes even adds to it. There is evil committed in the name of religion. It is not only Islam (let me hasten to add, "as some people interpret it") that gives us terror attacks, with people being killed, almost daily, these days; but Christianity (if we look at the record) is far from blameless. The Crusades, for example, were very brutal: the aim, as incited by the Pope, to recapture the Holy Land from the Muslims not only resulted in many Muslims being brutally killed, but the Crusaders, on their way to the Holy Land, would pass through many towns in Europe and massacre any Jews they happened to find there.

And let us not forget about the Hundred Years War, when Catholics and Protestants were brutally slaughtering one another.

So I am saying, if you care to take a cold and detached look: The good that religion does is, at best over-rated. Yeah, churches sometimes feed the hungry, shelter the homeless, etc. But I feel strongly that these things could and maybe would be done in the absence of religion. And to look at the large picture, as I have tried to do in the opening paragraphs, of whether religion has had success in ameliorating some of the kinds of evil that are prevalent in the world, I don't think it really does much good.

Copyright © 2017

Donald Trump, Climate Change, and the Paris Accords

Donald Trump has announced he is pulling the United States out of the Paris agreement or accord on climate change. This puts the United States in the company of the only two nations in the entire world who are not party to that agreement: Syria and Nicaragua. Nearly 200 countries are signatories to the accord, in which they pledge to reduce their emissions of greenhouse gases.

 

Mr Trump says his first duty is to the US and US jobs. Presumably he means jobs in the fossil fuel industries. Statistics, interestingly, show there are three times as many jobs in renewable energy fields--wind and solar--as there are in coal mining. It looks like Mr Trump's real effort is to aid, not coal miners, but the Koch Brothers, whose wealth depends on fossil fuels, and who are prominent conservatives and big financial supporters of Mr Trump.

 

If Trump really wanted to help Kentucky coal miners, he would not be taking away health insurance coverage for pre-existing conditions, which will leave miners suffering from black-lung disease with no health insurance.

 

By this latest action, Trump may have done a lot to secure his legacy--as the single human being who did the most to help destroy the planet.

 
Here is an AP (Associated Press) article, available online, that shows the fallacies of Mr Trump's arguments for his decision:
climate change fact-check

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