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EU Parliamentarian Valérie Hayer
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Rain
One of our local landmarks, Table Rock park, has been on fire for over a week now. Over 10.000 acres have burned.
And today it finally rained.
No Time or Interest
Spending a good bit of the evening working on another, short-term writing project and then reading about Trump's latest shenanigans (if only that weren't an application of the literary device of understatement) leaves me with little time, energy, or interest to write about my day, to share any pictures, to do much of anything other than take a deep breath and spend the last few minutes before my 11:00 bedtime doing anything that doesn't involve thought...
Yet another cheat to keep a now-thoroughly-compromised streak going.
Shopping Center
Every morning, I drive up Mauldin rad until it intersects August. As I cross Augusta, I always catch sight of the strip mall on the corner of Potomic and Augusta and wonder how any of the stores there possibly stay in business.
Many of the shops are vacant, and the few that do have businesses seem so neglected that their demise seems imminent.
And then, out of the blue one morning, the whole thing is gone. A pile of rubble, with only a short a news report about it.
The comment at the end of the report about pushing people out of their homes without giving them any affordable options was likely not a comment about the shopping center but about the neighborhood next to it -- the neighborhood that houses my school. There has been noticeable gentrification taking place over the last decade or so. A quick look at Zillow estimated property values in the area tells the story:
Signs 2
During our trips to Florida this summer, I noticed several interesting billboards. Many of them were theological; one was political:
Stolen elections have catastrophic consequences
This notion is perhaps the most loaded statement I've read in recent memory. It's certainly the most terrifying.
From the perspective of those who financed the billboard it is a statement about the 2020 election and the ever-persistent myth that somehow the Democrats committed election fraud. The complete lack of evidence for this is no matter: those who hold this view simply acknowledge non-facts as evidence. Those of us firmly grounded in reality are simply and willfully ignorant.
But just what are those catastrophic consequences? Again, from their perspective, it's multifaceted. First, there's simply the idea that an unelected individual is currently holding the nation's highest office. Were that true, it would be catastrophic. But there's a second notion hiding in that statement: what are people who believe this -- in their own eyes, good and God-fearing patriots, one and all -- to do about it? A recent article in Newsweek points out that there are renewed calls from the far right for civil war:
[Trump's post on Truth Social] warning that 2024 will be the new 1776 is in line with other threats of looming civil wars in the U.S. made by Trump supporters following the New York jury verdict on Thursday which found the former president guilty on all 34 counts of falsifying business records in a criminal hush-money trial.
Newsweek
In Boston University's BU Today, staff members write,
A recent Washington Post headline says: “In America, talk turns to something not spoken of for 150 years: Civil war.” The story references, among others, Stanford University historian Victor Davis Hanson, who asked in a National Review essay last summer: “How, when, and why has the United States now arrived at the brink of a veritable civil war?” Another Washington Post story reports how Iowa Republican Congressman Steve King recently posted a meme warning that red states have “8 trillion bullets” in the event of a civil war. And a poll conducted last June by Rasmussen Reports found that 31 percent of probable US voters surveyed believe “it’s likely that the United States will experience a second civil war sometime in the next five years.”
BU Today
The billboard, then, suggests to informed drivers that a civil war might be the necessary outcome of such Democratic duplicity.
The attempted assassination of Trump will only add to this.
What politicians need to be doing now is talking us back from this brink. Biden and the Democrats seem to be doing this. What will Trump do? Will he try to quell this anger or will he stoke it? I don't think there's any doubt about how the man will react.
Those of us who warned friends and family around us who supported Trump in 2016 that he is a dangerous man continually feel more vindicated, but right now, I'd rather be proved wrong.
Indignation
Those on the far right are quite indignant about Trump's recent conviction.
This suggests that America is under attack, and by terrorists no less. We went to war as a result. Some of these people want war as well -- a second civil war. Perhaps talking about it could help, so I asked "Why?" when I saw this post. We're facing an attack from within, came the response.
Another friend, from college, pasted a suggested new American flag on his social media feed:
"Would you be reacting the same way if the ONLY difference was that it was Biden instead of Trump?" I asked.
"That would very much depend on the facts of the case. It's the whole point, frankly," he replied.
I clarified my question: "But I'm simply asking if EVERYTHING was EXACTLY the same, with the only difference being it was Biden and not Trump."
Silence.
The last post really hits at the underlying cultic qualities of Trump devotees.
Eclipse
I forgot to put pictures up from the eclipse yesterday. Our district had an e-learning day (?!?) and so only the teachers were at school.
Destruction
With Keri Lake taking Trump's example to heart and refusing to concede an obviously-lost election, I'm afraid we're seeing what will now be the typical Republican reaction to election loss: deny, deny, deny.
Trump did so much damage to our country, but this Republican denial of reality as a basic election operating principle is the most harmful. It tears at the very foundation of our democratic institutions, and it leads to previously-unthinkable insanities, like the ostensible leader of the party calling for the dissolution of the Constitution and the party saying nothing to condemn such dangerous rhetoric. Republicans have not rejected Trump even when he literally suggested destroying our country.
There is no hope for the Republican party. Just when I think it can't fall deeper, it does.
Forgiveness
It's a pretty impressive feat of short-sighted hypocrisy that most of the people most opposed to student debt forgiveness are practitioners of a religion that is built upon the idea of a debt being paid undeservedly...
Spark
Two images that came through my Twitter feed over the last few days. The first: a rather succinct overview of Trump supporters.
Then a graphic representation of the same idea.
