Response to today's news

"We have recently learned that President-elect Trump has ethical and business conflicts that seem to violate the Constitution; is skipping his national security briefings while dangerously departing from longstanding bipartisan foreign policy; has criticized union workers and protesters on his Twitter feed; and plans to staff much of his cabinet and high-level leadership with billionaires dedicated to eradicating the very programs they are tasked with overseeing. In the meantime, the most recent reports from the C.I.A. are that Russia interfered with the election."

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/14/opinion/buck-up-democrats-and-fight-like-republicans.html?smid=fb-nytimes&smtyp=cur

Why does Google believe that in an era of planetary death, totalitarian leadership, the corporate takeover of democracy, mass migration and genocide, what the world needs more than anything is self-driving cars?

Why aren’t we more concerned about a medieval voting population who would believe that comets cause smallpox, witchcraft causes disease and Democrats are possessed by Satan if they read it on the Internet?

The most dangerous ‘bubble’ Americans live in is not the one between progressives and conservatives but the ‘can’t happen here’ mentality that refuses to see the connection between hard right turns across the globe, internal coups of formerly Democratic governments like Turkey and Brazil, and the identical process here wherein national security (military) and energy extraction (industrial) are conflated (complex) and actually encouraged by a billionaire reality television star as commander-in-chief-corporation-takeover-facilitator.

The things we all have in common, right and left, is a sense of helplessness about the corruption of democracy. The difference is what we believe the source of that corruption is. Liberals recognize the threat as commercial interests corrupting democratic institutions (runaway capitalism) and conservatives have been convinced that the problem is government regulation of commerce and individual rights. The issue (from my obvious perspective) is that the latter is a rather transparent propaganda campaign (the tea-party movement, basically invented by the Koch brothers and others) to distract the population from the former, the perfect tool of the corporate coup taking place at all levels of our economic, social, and political systems.