Post-impeachment

It's been only a week since Trump was acquitted by the cowardly Republicans in the Senate. Meanwhile, Biden has continued to advance good policies and a much-needed relief bill. Another seam has opened up which demonstrates, once again, the moral bankruptcies of Republican governance. The independent Texas electrical grid has failed in spectacular fashion bringing much misery and death to the state. In pursuit of profits and low prices, power suppliers failed to make the recommended upgrades after a near miss in 2011 with bad weather. I can only hope that more people will learn the lesson that when it comes to public infrastructure that supports basic human existence, a market solution fails miserably. The good solutions are cooperative rather than competitive. Market forces are, in the end, destructive to human welfare. When will they ever learn?

Second Impeachment - Day 1

The second impeachment trial began yesterday. I can only hope that this is another step towards purging our country of the cult supporters. Sadly, it won't be a final step. It seems that the only way to evaporate them from our political world is to have a strong press regime about telling the truth. Reporters who publish lies should lose their platforms. The lies themselves should not be repeated. These lies need to be figuratively starved of media oxygen. And this can't be legislated or forced by the engines of formal power. It must be enforced by a common mind and consensus that lies have no place in our social deliberations. This is hard because, at the least as social animals, it is often that we have tendencies to stretch the truth, to exaggerate, to punch up the story to increase the impact of our narratives. As a society, we need to start our truth policing right there. We need to encourage reporters and spokespersons to rein in their tendencies. We need for them to acknowledge and confess that the tendency for "enhancement" is there and that every public statement needs to be evaluated in that light before it is distributed for consumption. At the next level, editors and content gatekeepers must exercise a critical ethos of truth-telling. And finally, it is the role of third parties and repeaters to limit the spread of falsehoods. Some will always repeat the garbage. But the desired consequences would be for others to call out the falsehood by repeating the truth and naming and shaming the liars.