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.

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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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