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Friday, June 30, 2017

News Factoids for Second Quarter 2017

The U.S. Census Bureau reported another low birth rate in the United States for 2016, for the tenth straight year.

It takes 270 Electoral College votes to pick a president; states representing 165 Electoral College votes have already joined the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact.

RUMOR? or TRUE?: A proposed 'COVFEFE Act' in Congress would preserve Emperor Trump’s tweets as presidential records. (June 2017)

The creators of the "South Park" TV show say that they'll no longer satirize Donald Trump because he is no longer funny. (Feb 2017)

Netflix now has more subscribers than all the other cable TV providers combined: Netflix has 50.9 million, the others have 48.0 million.

Beginning with Columbine in 1999, more than 135,000 students attending at least 164 primary or secondary schools in the U.S.A. have experienced a shooting on campus.
~~ per story in the Washington Post

People of color purchased 45% of movie tickets in USA in 2015.

The Japanese word for stress is 'stress'.


NEED A JOB? DEPT.
There are 30 openings for machinists at Zimmer Biomet in Warsaw, Indiana.
~~ per story in the Washington Post

There were 13 billionaires on the list when Forbes Magazine debuted their Forbes 400 Richest Americans issue in 1982; today, all 400 are billionaires.

U.S. hiring slowed in March as employers added only 98,000 jobs (while 250,000 jobs per month are needed to keep up with population growth).


HEALTH NEWS DEPT.
Mumps infections in the U.S. spiked from 229 in 2012 to over four thousand in 2016.

Obesity rates have doubled since 1980 in 73 countries, with major blame attributed to exportation of the Western fast food diet.

Nearly half of Americans between 18 and 59 years of age have one of 40 types of H.P.V. (human papilloma virus), with 25% of men and 20% of women having a high-risk (for cancer) strain.
~~ per C.D.C. (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention)


SENATE STUPIDITY DEPT.
On June 22, the Republican majority in the U.S. Senate revealed their written-in-secret 'Trump Doesn't Care' health bill.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren said:
"I’ll fight this mean, scary, reckless, shameful, heartless Senate G.O.P. health care bill every way I can."
Sen. Bernie Sanders said:
"Let us be clear and this is not trying to be overly dramatic: Thousands of people will die if the Republican health care bill becomes law."
Barack Obama said:
"Simply put, if there’s a chance [that] you might get sick, get old, or start a family – this bill will do you harm."

Copyright 2017 by G.E. Nordell, all rights reserved

Tuesday, June 27, 2017

June 2017 Quotations (53)

"More than forty years after the nightmare of Watergate, our national tragedy is being repeated as farce."
~~ Peter Rothberg, publisher at The Nation Magazine

"Laughter really is carbonated holiness."
~~ Anne Lamott

"When all is said and done, we're really just walking each other home."
~~ Ram Dass

"Our task is no longer to make political films, but to make films politically."
~~ French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard, in April 1970

"Let the wine of love flow through your veins."
~~ Persian poet & mystic Rumi [1207-73]

"Even as this administration joins a small handful of nations that reject the future, I'm confident that our states, cities, and businesses will step up and do even more to lead the way, and help protect for future generations the one planet [that] we've got."
~~ Barack Obama on 1 June 2017

"If there is a book you really want to read but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it."
~~ author Toni Morrison

"[Anne of Green Gables is] the dearest, most lovable child in fiction since the immortal Alice."
~~ Mark Twain [1835-1910]

“Certain things in life simply have to be experienced -and never explained. Love is such a thing.”
~~ Brasilian author Paulo Coelho

“I don't care what you say to me. I care what you share with me.”
~~ Nepalese poet Santosh Kalwar

“So it’s true, when all is said and done, grief is the price we pay for love.”
~~ author E.A. Bucchianeri lives in Portugal

“Instructions for living a life. / Pay attention. / Be astonished. / Tell about it.”
~~ Mary Oliver

“We seldom realize, for example that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society.”
~~ Allan W. Watts [1915-73]

“Instead of worrying about what you cannot control, shift your energy to what you can create.”
~~ Roy T. Bennett

“The trouble is if you don’t spend your life yourself, other people spend it for you.”
~~ British playwright Sir Peter Shaffer [1926-2016]

"If we don’t have a healthy land we won’t have a healthy people."
~~ Carleton Bowekaty, Tribal Councilman at Zuni Pueblo

“When your toil has been a pleasure, you have not earned money merely, but money, health, delight, and moral profit, all in one.”
~~ Robert Louis Stevenson [1850-94]

“Champions do not become champions when they win the event, but in the hours, weeks, months and years they spend preparing for it. The victorious performance itself is merely the demonstration of their championship character.”
~~ T. Alan Armstrong, band teacher in Georgia USA

"I'm always sorry when pleasant things end. Something still pleasanter may come after, but you can never be sure."
~~ L.M. {Lucy Maud} Montgomery [1874-1942]

"Logic will get you from A to B, imagination will get you everywhere."
~~ recent popular quote, NOT by Albert Einstein [1879-1955]

"You can't cross the sea merely by standing and staring at the water."
~~ Nobel-laureate poet Rabindranath Tagore [1861-1941]

"I have already settled it for myself so flattery and criticism go down the same drain and I am quite free."
~~ painter Georgia O'Keeffe [1887-1986]

"When the sun shines, it shines for everyone."
~~ Jamaican musician Ziggy Marley

"The most affectionate creature in the world is a wet dog."
~~ Ambrose Bierce [1842-1914]

"Procrastination is the art of keeping up with yesterday."
~~ Don Marquis [1878-1937]

"If I ever go looking for my heart's desire again, I won't look any further than my own back yard because if it isn't there, I never lost it to begin with."
~~ author L. Frank Baum [1856-1919]

"Our culture is about choosing an identity and sticking with it so [that] people can market [crap] to you. Anything that switches that around is completely the antithesis of what our culture implores us to do."
~~ entertainer RuPaul Charles

"Nostalgia ain't what it used to be."
~~ NOT said by Yogi Berra, but by Peter De Vries [1910-93], in his 1959 novel "The Tent of Wickedness"

“Life is like a beautiful melody, only the lyrics are messed up.”
~~ Hans Christian Anderson [1805-75]

“I hate it that Americans are taught to fear some books and some ideas as though they were diseases.”
~~ Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. [1922-2007]

“Something will be offensive to someone in every book, so you've got to fight it.”
~~ Judy Blume

“In all my life, I have never been free. I have never been able to do anything with freedom, except in the field of my writing.”
~~ Langston Hughes [1902-67]

"Loving people live in a loving world. Hostile people live in a hostile world. Same world."
~~ Dr. Wayne W. Dyer [1940-2015]

"Safety is all well and good: I prefer freedom."
~~ writer E.B. White [1899-1985] in "The Trumpet of The Swan" [1970]

“Fiction is like a spider’s web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.”
~~ British author Virginia Woolf [1882-1941], in her seminal 1929 essay “A Room of One’s Own”

"I am not a good man, and I'm not a bad man. I am not a hero. And I'm definitely not a president. And, no, I'm not an officer. Do you know what I am? I am an idiot with a box and a screwdriver."
~~ 12th Doctor Who

"The Pacific Northwest has its year-long 'Rain Festival' and Washington, DC continues celebrating its year-long 'Festival of Stupid'."
~~ G.E. Nordell

"Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water; after enlightenment, chop wood, carry water."
~~ Zen proverb

"I have nothing to lose by standing up for my beliefs. So I'll go to jail, so what? We've been in jail for 400 years."
~~ boxing great Muhammad Ali [1942-2016]

"In the old battle between the public interest and private greed . . . private greed is winning, personified by President Donald Trump."
~~ Ruth Conniff, editor-in-chief at The Progressive Magazine [est. 1909]

"Rick Perry puts the 'goober' back in gubernatorial."
~~ progressive activist Jim Hightower

"At times like these in which we live, it will not do to be overscrupulous."
~~ Alexander Hamilton [1757-1804], in 1800

"What if the fourth time's the charm and we've just been settling thus far?"
~~ "Frazz" syndicated comic strip [est. 2001] by Jef Mallett

"The good society is one in which virtue pays. "
~~ Abraham Maslow [1908-70]

"Leaks are illegal and hated by those in power (and their followers) precisely because political officials want to be able to lie to the public with impunity and without detection."
~~ journalist Glenn Greenwald

"Lying is the message. It's not just that Putin and Trump lie, it is that they lie in the same way and for the same purpose: blatantly to assert power over truth itself."
~~ Russian-American journalist Masha Gessen

"Ni Pravda b Tass, ni Tass b Pravda (No truth in The News, no news in The Truth)"
~~ longtime Russian saying . . . the humor here is that Pravda (truth) is the Communist Party newspaper and Tass (news) is the official government news agency

"Hillary Clinton carried only 472 counties in America out of more than 3,000, but those 472 were predominately urban and accounted for nearly two-thirds of the country's economic output."
~~ political theorist Yascha Mounk

"Donald Trump and the Republicans are creating a tribe of 'Me and Mine' while no longer even recognizing a democratic society of 'Us and Ours'."
~~ John Kircher of Washington, DC (letter in May 2017 The Atlantic Magazine [est. 1857])

"The consequences of our not thinking are great . . . People who aren't thinking are capable of anything."
~~ George E. Minnich, CFO & multiple board member

"There is no partial commitment to justice. You are either in or you're out."
~~ 1968 Olympic athlete Dr. John Carlos

"The supreme issue [is] the encroachment of the powerful few on the rights of the many."
~~ Robert M. La Follette [1855-1925]

"The next few years are going to be hell."
~~ feminist Gloria Steinem, in November 2016

{each set of posted quotations are then posted at the Working Minds website, alphabetical by author}

Saturday, June 24, 2017

U.S. Fascists Attack Healthcare

On June 22nd, the Republican majority in the U.S. Senate revealed their written-in-secret 'Trump Doesn't Care' health bill.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren said:
"I’ll fight this mean, scary, reckless, shameful, heartless Senate G.O.P. health care bill every way [that] I can."

Sen. Bernie Sanders said:
"Let us be clear and this is not trying to be overly dramatic: Thousands of people will die if the Republican health care bill becomes law."

Barack Obama said:
"Simply put, if there’s a chance [that] you might get sick, get old, or start a family – this bill will do you harm."

Sunday, June 11, 2017

Working Minds Essay #113: No More July Fourth For Me

I am an American and I love the country that I was born in. But that country no longer exists.

All three branches of the U.S. federal government are now controlled by fascists. Congress is controlled by Republicans who sold out to the Koch Brothers and A.L.E.C., to Wall Street banks, to Southern (and Northern) racists and hatemongers, to Rupert Murdoch's Fox Channel and its fake news propaganda, to religious fanatics, and to climate change-denying polluters. The U.S. Supreme Court is controlled by fascists (5 to 4): all five are members of the Federalist Society and signatories of P.N.A.C. (the latter being a violation of their oath of office, if not both). Loose cannon billionaire sex offender Emperor Donald Trump violated his oath of office as President the moment that he spoke it and is still in violation of the Constitution's Emolument Clauses. His entire administration believes that lying alters reality. And there is now enough evidence of the crime of obstruction of justice to impeach Emperor Trump – whenever the U.S. Constitution gets revived.

The U.S. Constitution is a hollow shell; it was placed on life support (metaphorically) in January 2010 when Justice John Roberts issued the ludicrous Citizens United v. F.E.C. decision declaring the United States to be a fascist government. The U.S. Constitution was finally killed when Emperor Trump took over the White House and the Executive Branch with the help of (per evidence since revealed) dictator Vladimir Putin of Russia.

Fascism was defined by Benito Mussolini in 1926 as when "the corporations and the military take the government away from the people". He later said that he should have called it corporatism, because that is what it is. Everyone in Emperor Trump's cabinet is either a general officer in the military (active or retired) or a right wing billionaire. Other officials in the Trump White House include failed TV reporters, incompetent members of the Trump family, and lobbyists and politicians sworn to dismantle the very department or bureau that they now head.

* *          * *          * *          * *

I long ago gave up celebrating 'pagan holidays' – Hallowe'en is the obvious one, but so are New Years Day, Christmas, Easter, and Thanksgiving. That leaves Memorial Day and Veterans Day and Labor Day, which no longer have cultural meaning and are basically excuses for three-day weekends. M.L.K. Day, Gay Pride Day, Mothers Day, and Fathers Day are irrelevant to my situation, so that left only Independence Day on July Fourth as a holiday that mattered to me.

A group of wealthy white males signed the Declaration of Independence on July Fourth in 1776, and their defiance of the British monarchy and business interests put each of them at great risk. The last phrase of that immortal document states that they "mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our Sacred Honor."

Today's United States government has no honor. None.

Emperor Trump decreed withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement so that our corporations can freely pollute and thus increase profits. Congress is slashing Head Start and Medicare and Medicaid and cutting $5B from public education and cutting further billions from the budgets of the E.P.A. and the I.R.S. and the C.D.C and the S.E.C., and from the Departments of Health & Human Services and Housing & Urban Development so that corporations can wreak havoc without regulation. The Department of the Interior will be selling federal land and mineral rights to the LOWEST-bidding polluter. And there will be no job creation programs through infra-structure repair or renewable energy or economic stimulous – better to keep the peasants living in fear.

Here is a clue for the clueless: Privatization is fascism. Every time. Period.

So there is really nothing to celebrate on July Fourth this year. We The People are displaced, no longer free and independent individuals basking in a world of choice and prosperity. We are peasants living under the control of the same divine right aristocracy that we broke with in 1776.

And at least half of the people in America (and in New Mexico and in my Valencia County) have been brainwashed into believing that that is a good thing.

Copyright 2017 by G.E. Nordell, all rights reserved