1919 - The Year of Hope and Fear ---- My new book on the tumultuous events of that year.
https://www.lulu.com/en/us/shop/eric-leif-davin/the-year-of-hope-and-fear/paperback/product-4gznz9.html?page=1&pageSize=4
Wednesday, January 12, 2022
Thursday, January 6, 2022
Monday, January 3, 2022
Soylent Green -- What It Got Right
SOYLENT GREEN:
A half century ago, the 1973 movie, "Soylent Green," looked at what life would be like in the far off future of the year 2022.
We have now arrived at that far off future. What did the movie get right about us today?
Most of all, it got the devastation of climate change right. Here's what was said about 2022 in the movie's press release book:
In the 1973 press book, the film’s technical consultant, Frank R. Bowerman, president of the American Academy of Environmental Engineers, said, “I am of the firm conviction that uncontrolled population expansion and its concomitant pollution of the air and the seas is the gravest problem facing mankind. A polluted, overpopulated world must result in a physical deterioration of life as we know it. I believe that our sources of food are waning, that our seas are dying, that our air is being poisoned, that our mineral resources are being exploited far beyond the natural replacement process. There is still time to reverse the trend. With action. The alternative is that ‘Soylent Green’ will be more than a warning. It could become the epitaph for mankind’s gravestone.”
Fifty years later........ more true than ever!
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THOUGHTS ON THE JANUARY 6TH INSURRECTION
What was the next stage following a successful Insurrection?
Imagine the Trumpists occupying the Capitol, with security forces stymied from removing them because they held the entire Congress hostage... including the three next in line to the presidential succession, Pence, Pelosi, and the President Pro Tem of the Senate. Threatening execution of all, and tossing their bodies out the windows one by one, should any attempt be made to remove them by force. What a scenario! Who would have accepted such a crazy fictional scenario before January 6th?
Meanwhile, Trump, sitting in the Oval Office, would go on TV and declare a State of Emergency, declaring (upon no legal authority) that he continued as Acting President (for life?), and ordering the armed forces, as the Commander in Chief, to stand down. More than a constitutional crisis..... the end of American democracy.
This was how Hitler and the Nazis came to power in Germany. In response to the Reichstag Fire (we still don't truly know the origins of that), the Reichstag declared a state of emergency, giving the Chancellor (Hitler) extraordinary powers until the end of the emergency. All other political parties were "temporarily" suppressed. Security forces rounded up Socialists, Commies, any other suspected terrorists, and sent them off to prison. Hitler ruled via these temporary emergency powers until his death in the bunker in 1945.
It could happen here....
The GOP is already rewriting the history of the Insurrection via the Big Lie that Trump won the 2020 election and that Biden is an illegitimate president. A New Lost Cause Myth is taking shape saying those who stormed the Capitol were true patriots protecting American democracy from an illegal takeover by Dems. False history works. The South lost the Civil War, but won the peace, by rewriting the history of what the South fought for (it was all about states' rights!) and the history of Reconstruction (a shameful period of misrule by ignorant former slaves!).
People should read my obscure book, "Radicals in Power," about how some of the New Left focused on taking power at the local level.... the origin of Bernie, among others. That's what the Radical Right is now in the process of doing....
.... while America sleep walks toward the death of democracy....
https://lnkd.in/dk-KjKas