What I think is helpful is not to conflate these two things or not to suggest they are the same, but to put them in conversation with one another so that we can learn about them, so that I can think about what it means that Angola prison in Louisiana – the largest maximum security prison in the country where 75% of the people held there are Black men and 70% of them are serving life sentences – what does it mean that that is built on top of a former plantation?
I’ll always remember my trip to Dachau and standing in Dachau and seeing this sort of vast expanse of gray land. Look to your left – you see the remnants of the crematorium. You look to your right – you see the remnants of the barracks. And I close my eyes and I imagine what it would be like if; on that land, they built a prison. And in that prison, the vast majority of the people held there were Jewish.
I couldn’t even finish the thought exercise because it was so viscerally upsetting. It was so absurd. It would be such a horrific, inexcusable manifestation of antisemitism.
…And yet here in the United States, the largest maximum security prison in the country in which the vast majority of people are Black men serving life sentences, many of whom work in fields, picking crops for pennies on the hour – what does it mean that that place is built on top of a former plantation? The failure of American memory around chattel slavery allows a place like Angola to exist in a way that a more direct confrontation with memory in Germany would never allow a similar space in Germany to exist in the same way.
The Jacobson v. Massachusetts decision made clear that the government could mandate vaccination, arguing that collective good sometimes outweighs individual rights. But the line between the two is blurry. More than two decades after Jacobson’s case, the Court used the same logic in another decision, one the historian Michael Willrich says is among the “scariest U.S. Supreme Court decisions of all time.”
The episode of The Experiment that is embedded above illustrates how easily we can be manipulated into thinking something that is good for us is bad, and it illustrates that the converse is also true. It is illegal to refuse vaccination when that vaccination is mandated by government, that is a basic public health criteria. This isn’t about you and your vaccine fears anymore than it is about me and mine. this is about keeping everyone in the population as healthy as we can, and the way to do that is to make sure that we achieve and maintain herd immunity through vaccination for easily communicable diseases.
This is why you should get your influenza vaccination as well as all the other vaccinations on the list of required vaccinations. Get them because you care about the people around you more than you care for yourself. If you can’t find it in yourself to do it for other people, do it so that you don’t get sick from an easily preventable disease. Wish for a vaccination for every communicable disease that you might casually be exposed to so that you don’t die from that disease, either (I see you hiding over there, Malaria) I do, and I hate needles more than anything else I encounter in day to day life.
I have little doubt that Stonekettle is right in the article embedded above. There is too much bullshit out there circulating for this to not be something that Russia is trying to seed throughout the United States in order to weaken us. That other shoe will drop eventually (if we can’t just take past actions as proof in and of itself) and then we’ll know for sure who is spreading the anti-vaccination bullshit this time around aside from the anti-vax idiots in our midst.
There should be a mandate to get the COVID vaccine just as there is for all the other vaccinations we undergo. The influenza vaccination should be mandated as well. What form that mandate takes is the only real question left to answer. Do we just pass a law making refusing a vaccination a crime again, or do we try to nudge people in the direction of doing the right thing without holding guns to their head to get them to do it? Americans can’t seem to get away from doing everything that they can at the point of a gun. Maybe we should try something different for once.
Each person’s existence carries its own meaning, this much is clear to me at age 56. I’m not likely to get anywhere near 97 years of age. The genetic and social burdens I carry will probably kill me long before I make it that far. But who knows? I certainly don’t. I plan to live for as long as life brings me joy, and not for one minute longer if I can arrange that.
Like the veteran philosopher, this amatuer philosopher has pondered the meaning of existence many times. I cannot come up with a reason for life beyond the one I gave in the first sentence. Either you find your meaning for continuing for yourself, or you don’t. If you don’t, your existence is liable to be shorter than the person who can find that reason for themselves.
People without purpose tend to wither away. When I was stricken with illness that wouldn’t kill me, but rendered me incapable of continuing to indulge my passion for architecture, for designing and building, I came dangerously close to doing just that. It was the interference of family and friends that kept me here, allowed me time to find new purpose. Otherwise I would have been gone years ago.
A few years ago this week, I held my dying mother in my arms, and wept at the cruelty of the world that would kill this noble woman this way. Kill her with a cancer that she refused to treat. She felt it was the end of her time. And so it was the end of her time. And so it is for all of us, if we allow it to be. Or not.
Or not.
Accept that you know next to nothing about life and living. Savor each new thing, each new day, as if it is your last. Never miss a sunset if you can help it. Catch the first sun’s rays when you can. Breathe in life and then exhale it to enrich the world around you. Each and every day is a new day with new things to learn. Existence is its own purpose. I wouldn’t have it any other way, myself.
The drug deal started before Volodymyr Zelensky was elected president of Ukraine. It was his election that caused the Trump administration to panic. Rudy had been working with prosecutors under the previous president of Ukraine, trying to get those prosecutors to open investigations into the Putin-created conspiracy fantasy that Ukraine had somehow worked to undermine the Trump election campaign.
The fact that Ukraine favored the election of Hillary Clinton, as did every single one of our allies (except possibly Saudi Arabia) is irrelevant. Or would be irrelevant if any other person was president other than someone like the Orange Hate-Monkey (OHM) Any other president would have understood that US allies were his allies, no matter their opinions on US political competitions. For the OHM, not wanting him to win the election was tantamount to betrayal on the part of every single one of our allies. But it was especially a betrayal by Ukraine. Why? Because Vladimir Putin wants Ukraine back in the Russian sphere of influence, and not part of the EU or part of NATO.
Donald Trump loves Vladimir Putin. He loves all the vicious dictators who currently hold power in the world. He wants to be one of them and has been working to make the US into a banana republic that he can rule over just like all his heroes do. But there is something special about Putin and Trump. One really has to wonder what kind of dirt Putin has on Trump that makes him so terrified of the Russian President. Because the OHM’s terror is palpable.
So Trump appears to be working for Vladimir Putin and against the interests of our allies in the region, whether he is conscious of this fact or not. It was because of the Putin fabricated conspiracy fantasy that Donald Trump, through Rudy, Lev and Igor, sought to remove ambassador Yovanovitch from her post in Ukraine. You can’t have a corruption fighter in the ambassadorial residence if what you want done involves engaging in activities that are essentially corrupt.
Before Trump, oligarchs felt relatively defenseless in the face of American efforts to strip corruption from the Ukrainian judicial system. Because the Ukrainian nation depended on American support, a figure like Yovanovitch had the leverage to demand cleaner government. But the new U.S. president presented the possibility of salvation for the corrupt. Here was an American leader who operated in the style of an oligarch, who wanted to use the legal system to wound his political rivals. Trump seemed like he could be enlisted, with a properly calibrated message, to act on an oligarch’s behalf.
This is probably why Bolton instructed his subordinates not to even talk to Rudy. Instructed them to take no part in his drug deal and to inform the lawyers that he wasn’t involved. It was his unwillingness to do the presidents bidding in this matter that probably lead to his leaving/being fired. We won’t know unless and until he takes the stand and testifies. The trial continues after dinner.
Meanwhile, the publicity stuntmen working for Donald Trump just can’t seem to keep quiet.
This is why I quit listening to him and to them. Because they lie constantly. Paying attention to what they say is a complete waste of time. Donald Trump will always be the guy who stole from all his contractors on his building contracts. Caveat Emptor, America. Just ask them the question.
Both action and inaction by the chief magistrate, if sufficiently dangerous to the republic, must be impeachable if impeachment is to serve its intended purpose. Even conduct motivated by a sincere and deeply held principle can be a constitutional “high Crime.”
The bar is lower for impeachment than it is for bringing charges against an average human being. That is because the behavior required for holders of high governmental office is more restricted than it is for average human beings. What we charge the officeholder with doesn’t have to be a crime at all. It just has to be behavior that is unbecoming of the officeholder.
