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politics

John McCain: The End of Civil Politics?

It has been a rough year. From the fashion community, we lost Kate Spade; from television and culinary, we lost Anthony Bourdain. And now recently with the loss of the superstar Aretha Franklin, some people were shocked to learn that just a few days later John McCain had passed away.  Before I go any further, let me say that this is completely an opinion piece so you do not have to agree with me, all I ask is that you read and try to understand my perspective as a young person and maybe try to think about him from another perspective. Now as a Millenial, many of the older generations are confused as to why this affected me the way it did. Though I never met him, didn’t always agree with his policies, and at times thought he wasn’t being as pragmatic as necessary, there was one thing that kept him at the top of my list of politicians I would like to sit down and have a conversation with. Because that is what it would be: a conversation. A civil discussion with a back and forth that even…
Score: 1.27

Why Do We Force-Feed Dystopian Literature To Students?

      If you can read this, you're not living in a dystopia!  You know how teenagers end up so negative, depressed, and pessimistic?  Maybe it's because we shove gloom and doom down their throats as part of their required reading. In the United States, George Orwell's mid-20th-century dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four is heavily picked by teachers as required reading for students, and the blues don't end there.        Here is a list of required reading titles for American high schools, let's see how negative these works are…   The Catcher in the Rye - Young boy rants about "phony" society, rages at the world.    Lord of the Flies - Group of stranded boys descends into homicidal savagery.    Animal Farm - Political revolution on a farm turns into dystopia for the animals.    Fahrenheit 451 - Dystopian society burns books because they're for smart people.    1984 - World has taken over by totalitarian regime just for the evil LULZ.    Brave New World - See the previous novel, filtered through Elon…
Score: 1.98

Star Trek Is For Liberals, Star Wars Is For Conservatives

    How I Came To This Crazy Conclusion...  The freelance writing business takes you on some unexpected adventures. Over the holidays I was doing research work for this one client regarding the political leanings of corporations, which included punching the names of lots of companies into the site Open Secrets.        It's a strange world there. In the first place, there's some debate as to whether corporations should be meddling in politics on the financial level at all.  But beyond that, the logic behind corporate political donations is baffling. Many of them donate near equally to both Democrat and Republican parties, basically saying "We don't care who wins, we just want to make sure we have a friend when they get in."   Wal-Mart - Lately donates to both parties with a pronounced Republican lean, but during the Bush, Jr. administration went all in for Rs.    Target - Went all in for Republicans during the Bush years and well into Obama's first term, now leans slightly Democrat since Trump took…
Score: 1.66

Incident of Korean Navy Radar Lock-On, Japan's Future, Implication to the USA

 
    At the end of 2018, the South Korean Navy destroyer Gwanggaeto the Great  (KDX-I) irradiated the Japanese maritime SDF patrol aircraft (P-1) with a fire control radar (FC radar) within the Japanese EEZ of the Sea of Japan.  South Korean government has denied the radar irradiation, and never proposed any preventive measure even though the Japanese government has asked for from the beginning of this incident.  Why there is no productive cooperation between Japan and South Korean governments?    I think there are two reasons.   Strong anti-Japanese sentiment in South Korea prevents the South Korean government from admitting the wrongdoing and apologizing to Japan South Korea signals China that it is strengthening the confrontational attitude against Japan.   Most Americans seem to think that it is only "Japan-Korea issue." However, a functional alliance between Japan and South Korea is also very important for the US.  A similar incident happened before. Chinese People's Liberation Army’s frigate ship…
Score: 1.25

The Impeachment of Donald J. Trump, 45th President of the United States

  I don't volunteer to write about politics, you know. They make me here. I am of course glad to rave about the circus clowns as much as the next guy, I have my tweets and stand by them.  But in the big picture, I know it doesn't do any good. The United States has transcended politics now. Elections, primaries, democracy, laws, impeachment, parties, these things mean nothing in the United States. They mean nothing because that's what the people want them to do.  It doesn't matter at this point whether Donald Trump is removed from office or not.  Pretending that removing Trump would fix everything at this point is like pretending assassinating Hitler would have stopped World War II. A new despot would have simply risen to take Hitler's place. Hitler was nothing without the country that brought him to power. The same case is true of Kim Jong-Un, Rodrigo Duterte, Xi Jinping, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and of course Vlad Putin.  The United States has even proven this to itself before. We went into…
Score: 1.57

Russia and Propaganda: What Does Putin Want?

  There is an old saying that goes: "The greatest lie the devil ever told was convincing the world he didn't exist." The Present Author will paraphrase that to fit our topic:  The Greatest Lie Russia Ever Told Was That The Cold War Is Over.  Oh, we thought so! We had our Reagan / Gorbachev moment, with all that mushy perestroika and glasnost and goodwill getting gooey all over each other.    Anybody remember the feel-good wave we all had as the Berlin Wall came down? Jesus Jones launched us into the '90s with "Right Here, Right Now" bursting with naive Generation X optimism, and David Hasselhoff showed up in a glowing piano jacket and sang a song about how we were all free from our problems forever. You expected them to conjure John Lennon back from the dead to declare this the Lord's Millennium of peace.  Yeah, that was all bullshit. Despite the fact that Russia signed a new constitution in 1993, including some remarkably western-like ideas like article 29, which guaranteed freedom of ideas…
Score: 1.33

US Capitol Insurrection 1/6/2021 : Why the South Will Fall Again

  The United States is still in shock after the January 6th attempt to storm the US capitol and overthrow the government. Indeed, the whole world has the jitters about the incident. Remember, the United States is still the world's leading military power, a cornerstone of the global economy, and one of the most manifested current democracies in the world. What happens in America affects every nation on Earth, at least through our foreign policy if nothing else.         Your humble author has kept his big yawp shut about this whole affair for awhile. For one, I have been waiting to see how events shakedown in the days directly before and after the inauguration of president Joe Biden and vice-president Kamala Harris. For another thing, I have to take some time to absorb the news and get a handle on this mess just like the rest of you. And I've got some insight for that handle which, as usual, I see the rest of you are overlooking.  Let's take a deep breath and relax because things are not as bad…
Score: 1.31

America's Two-Party Left-Right System Can't Last

    Where do you start talking about American politics?Where do you end?  You can enter and exit at any point in the vacuum of the space-time continuum like a neutrino, heard by nobody and affecting nothing.  The great wasteland of American politics in the 21st century is that way because of the polarized division of everything into two opposite parties. It is an extreme polarization because both parties and all of the politicians in them keep discovering that they can say and do anything and still get elected by their party. Given this off-the-rails behavior, the two parties have arbitrarily occupied the two most vapid niches that any political party in history has ever occupied. They are:   Anti-society (Republicans) Pro-society (Democrats)   Furthermore, nothing much changes no matter which party has the majority, since they hold everything in deadlock. Other countries stand in amazement at the state of the US, but they have to understand one crucial thing: it's all talk.  We just…
Score: 1.55