Having recently written a long piece about the origin of what was termed neoliberal economics and how it inevitably led to a disgraceful, vacuous, malignant narcissist like Trump being elected to the US presidency1, I decided to have a crack at looking at the effects it has had on the UK and the US populace. This is Part 1 and deals with income inequality, wage stagnation, job insecurity and declining union influence.
There are many Americans who have noticed Trump’s swollen ankles, the large bruises on his hands, and his increasingly incoherent speech, and speculate that he is in rapid terminal decline, and will soon die. The White House itself has announced that Trump is suffering from chronic venous insufficiency1.
Again and again the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) refers to what is being perpetrated by Israel on the people of Gaza as a ‘war’1-3. Everybody who has any understanding of what is going on knows this is a genocide.
I wrote a piece about the religious bastardry afoot in the US about 18 months ago which argued the Christian nationalism was a misnomer, and that christofascism was a much more accurate term1.
As a concept, the sovereign citizen movement, individuals identifying as sovereign citizens or something similar have existed in Australia for decades. These beliefs have been manifest in the various ways these people attempt to dissociate themselves from societal structures1.
While so many modern christians are despicable bigots whose main aim in life seems to be to make life miserable for people who are not like them, perhaps one of the worst was a bloke called James Dobson who founded the ultraconservative Christian organisation Focus on the Family in 1977. He died a day or so ago at the age of 89. Born in 1936 in Shreveport, Louisiana, Dobson was initially a child psychologist who launched a radio show to counsel Christians on parenting1.
I was forced to work with a workplace psychopath for a decade or so. Most of the time, it had little effect, because my day-to-day work was something he knew little about and I was largely left to my own devices. However, there were a few times when we interacted. We edited a book some years ago, and as I was an experienced editor, I did most of the work compiling the volume. He wrote the two page foreword.
In 2009, NASA launched the Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO), a satellite designed to take precise measurements of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to help guide the response to climate change. Unfortunately, the satellite did not make it into its planned orbit. So, in 2014, NASA launched the replacement OCO-2, which has been collecting a huge number of high-resolution measurements, which provides greater spatial distribution of carbon dioxide over the entire planet.