Kristi Noem channels Hitler

If you saw or heard the statement by Kristi Noem about the murder of the woman in Minneapolis, you heard a speech that could have been delivered by Hitler.  Whenever she talks about illegal immigrants and defines them as evil and criminals and terrorists, you are hearing the echo of Hitler.  Only the target of the hatred differs. 

Supply and demand and cocaine

Suppose no one in the U.S. used cocaine.  Suppose the market wasn’t there.  Would anyone be shipping cocaine from Venezuela to the U.S.  Of course not.  

Are we perhaps punishing the wrong people?  I’m certainly not an expert on this, but  I have never heard of someone holding a gun to the head of a person and demanding that he sniff cocaine up his nose.  This whole thing needs to be reevaluated.

And please please don’t give me that song about it being a sickness.  Is there anyone left in this country that doesn’t know that cocaine is a habit-forming drug?  Really? 

Speaking of Denmark

Last Tuesday Denmark stopped delivering letters.  Denmark has had a postal service for 400 years, but, like here, almost no one sends letters any more.  They phone.  They email.  They text.  

You can still get a letter in Denmark, but a private company will now deliver it.  

Some Danes, however , have noticed that younger people are writing more letters because it is vintage, and because when you do get a letter, it is really special, as opposed to a text.

It gets worse

The theory of Mutually Assured Destruction has worked well in preventing nuclear war, but there were always issues with it.  For example, a flock of geese on the radar could be mistaken for incoming missiles.  Other issues, sometimes mentioned, were that a country with nuclear weapons might be ruled by a madman who didn’t care about the future of the globe, or a stupid ruler who didn’t understand the consequences of nuclear war.

Never did I think the madman or the stupid ruler would be the President of the U.S.  I couldn’t even comprehend that a President would somehow manage to be a stupid madman.  Yet here we are.

A lesson for today from 1974

In the weeks before President Nixon resigned from the Presidency, Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger called in the Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Joint Chiefs.  He told them he wanted to know about any orders that came from the President outside the normal chain of command.  He and the Joint Chief were prepared to countermand such orders. 

What was he worried about?  He was concerned that President Nixon might fake a foreign crisis.  Nixon could then go on TV with a speech something like this:

“My fellow Americans.  We are facing what may be the greatest crisis in our country’s history.  We have information that –––––– is ready to launch an attack on American cities, and I have ordered a preemptive strike.  In this hour of peril we have no time to be distracted by Watergate and its partisan intentions.  As a result I have dismissed the Congress and declared a state of emergency and martial law for the next three months.”

This is what Schlesinger and the Generals were prepared to prevent.  

Today we don’t have a Department of Defense.  We have a Department of War.  We don’t have a Secretary who obeys the Constitution.  We have a Secretary who violates both the Constitution and the rules of warfare.  We don’t have Generals who disobey illegal orders.  They’ve been dismissed.  We don’t have independent sources of news.  We have “Truth Social” and Fox News and X.  

And we have China and Russia taking notes.

Willpower is overrated

Have you broken your New Year’s resolutions yet?  You will.  

Many people no longer make a New Year’s resolution, having learned from experience it won’t be kept anyway.  

Today I read a great essay by Angela Duckworth, a professor of psychology.  She says you should exercise “situational agency.”  Say you drink too much pinot grigio.  Say you have a tall glass every night from that economy-sized bottle you keep in the refrigerator, and then you resolve not to drink.  But you remember it is there, calling, calling...and you say, ok, just one more night.  And another, and another.  [Not that I would know about any of this, of course.]  

What “situational agency” says is that you don’t buy another bottle of pinot grigio.  If it isn’t in the house, you can’t drink it.  Nothing to do with will power.  

Dr. Duckworth gives the example of experiments with teens and their study habits.  Students who kept their phones in another room while they were studying had better grades.  She notes, “physical distance creates psychological distance:  Draw close what you want more of; push away what you want less.”

The essay was printed in todays Times.  It is entitled “Willpower Doesn’t Work.  This Does.”  

Where do you get your news?

In November Harper’s Magazine ran a graph showing the percentage of U.S. adults using four sources of news on a weekly basis from 2013 to 2025.   The sources were TV, print, online news sites and apps, and social and video networks.  

Here are the trends:

    2013 2025

TV     72% 50% down 22 points

Print     47% 14% down 33 points

Online news

sites and apps     69% 48% down 21 points

Social and 

video networks    27% 54% up 27 points

While we are on the topic, ten owners control 60% of the local daily newspapers in America.  Gannett Corp. alone controls 215 dailies.  

This explains a lot about the present state of affairs in our country.