Month: July 2019

From The Rogue Columnist:

Yes, I'll be writing about the needless election to save light rail.

But I was struck, forgive the pun, by last week's news that a "city killer" asteroid had passed our planet, coming so close it was only one-fifth of the distance between the Earth and the moon. The rock wasn't one that scientists had been tracking, and it had seemingly appeared from "out of nowhere," Michael Brown, a Melbourne-based observational astronomer, told The Washington Post.

I was strangely unsurprised. My black-dog mood since 2016, when Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by 3 million votes but our fate was sealed thanks to 78,000 votes in three Midwestern states, in a deeply tainted, nay, stolen, election, has yet to abate. One of the most qualified people ever to seek the presidency lost to an astonishingly unqualified quisling for a foreign prince, a mob boss, a man now normalized by the media and heading for reelection.

Since then, everything has been falling apart. And all this time, I have thought: If we were surprised by a deadly visitor from the cosmos…yes, of course. The haunting 2011 film Melancholia, starring Kirsten Dunst, come true. Life, or its end, foreshadowed by art. Bad things coming our way.

We would have it coming having squandered out space program for 50 years after the magnificent achievement of Apollo 11. The world spent $1.8 trillion its militaries in 2018, higher than in the Cold War. Yet nothing is being done to protect the planet from some 20,000 near-earth asteroids. That number is not a typo.

Meanwhile, we are doing little to address a planetary emergency of our own making: climate change. The "President" and his party deny that it even exists. This is part of a broader pattern of destruction by "conservatives" and the Republican Party, now wholly Trumpist. Trump and the shredding of the Constitution is our other genuine crisis.

The Democrats have cracked up, too. The left has gone so mad that I dare not even write about my disagreements for fear of driving away Rogue readers. They will think I have gone off the deep end like Westbrook Pegler or Jim Kunstler. For the left, everything seems to be a "crisis": homelessness, affordable housing, diversity, racism, missing and murdered female "Native Americans," police brutality, etc. etc. Many of these are problems. Many are weaponized words simplifying and even distorting complex social conditions that transcend comic-strip Manichaeism.

Watch the liberal firing squad, the purity demands that can carry Seattle and the Bay Area in a landslide, and see Donald Trump win big next year. Then our experiment in self-governance really will be over. And so will the planet we knew.

We have only two crises: climate and Constitution. The rest are challenges, problems, conditions to which constructive or destructive policies and individual responsibility can be applied.

RC's Front Page Editor, Richard Silc, and I have an ongoing debate. He argues that the United States is heading toward a USSR-style collapse and breakup. I say we're watching the death of the Roman Republic and the rise of the Roman Empire, digital-style. We're too rich to experience 1989 redux. Also, unlike the Soviet Union, we're not made up of many antagonistic one-time nations yearning to break apart (the Russia then was happy to see them go).

The Romans happily sold their rights for bread and circuses (smart phones, streaming entertainment and online shopping), for the stability of an emperor and army (most Americans know nothing about our form of self-government, our inspired Constitution and Bill of Rights). Rome lost plenty of battles and wars, but it endured for almost 400 years in the west and 1,400 years in the east. To be sure, this was before nuclear weapons.

Happy sky watching.