The Death of The GOP                   #209

by Hank Silverberg

"Legitimate political discourse" by "ordinary citizens." That's the way the Republican National Committee is describing the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.

But the attack on the Capitol led to the deaths of five Capitol Police officers, either from injuries or suicide directly related to the event. One rioter was  shot and killed by the police as she tried to climb through an internal window and into the House Chambers. Another died after being crushed by the crowd. More than 140 Capitol Police or D.C. Metropolitan Police officers were injured  

(Getty Images)  

More than two thousand people got inside the Capitol Building and caused more than $1.5 million worth of  damages.    

In Censure Statement, RNC Declares 1/6 'Legitimate Political Discourse' (newsweek.com)

Members of both the House and Senate and the Vice-President had to flee the building in fear for their lives.  

Under NO circumstances was this "legitimate political discourse."

So this declaration by the RNC is a lie. It's propaganda with no care for accuracy, and it is the final death throe for the Grand Old Party. 

Reagan, Ike or even Nixon, would not recognize what the current crop who claim to be Republicans, have done to their party.  

It's basically the same group of hypocrites which raked Hillary Clinton over the coals for 11 hours during a committee hearing on the attack on the U.S. Embassy in Benghazi in 2012. Egged on by a growing influx and influence of Trumpites, the RNC has now censured Republicans Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger for simply serving on a congressional committee investigating a deadly attack on our own Capitol Building. The committee investigating January 6th is predominantly  Democrats, but that's because Cheney and Kinzinger were the only Republicans who agreed participate in the investigation.  

So the bottom line is, the Grand Old Party is now dead. It's been replaced by a group of people, both in office and out, who now favor authoritarian one- party rule with racial overtones. They encourage book banning or burning along with wild conspiracy theories. If you don't agree with them, you are labeled a "radical left-wing extremist."   

With that in mind, the only thing that will protect this country from deterioration into authoritarianism is a solid victory by Democrats in the Congressional elections next November. Or there can be a series of rejections of the current crop of faux Republicans in congressional primaries by the average Republican voter.   

I firmly believe that an overwhelming majority of  Americans reject what the current crop of  right- wing Republicans are selling, and could get rid of them up and down the ballot, from Congress to the State House to local school boards. The question is, will those people show up at the polls and make it happen? Our country's future as a Republic is at stake. 

Big Brother Is Watching!

A good example of how wacky some GOP members are getting comes from America's heartland, Iowa. A Republican lawmaker there wants cameras installed in nearly every classroom in the state so that parents can watch a live stream of their children's classroom. Iowa State Representative, Norlin Mommsen, compared the proposal to police body cameras. He says it will hold teachers accountable for their work. The teachers union is obviously not happy. They called 

it an attack on educators, a waste of already limited funds, and a violation of students' privacy. The legislation would also punish teachers or administrators who fail to comply or who obstruct the cameras or stream in any way. 

Every parent does want to know what their child is learning in school, but this appears to go a bit further. Imagine if you will, a history lesson. Can a teacher freely discuss Jim Crow, the Holocaust or the Vietnam War knowing that some parent might be offended by the truth? Will books with a subliminal plot, like Arthur Miller's "The Crucible" be off limits?  Or perhaps students will no longer be able to read and discuss George Orwell's classic "1984" where "Big Brother" is watching everything people say and do in an effort to control thought and practice. After all, that's what this Iowa lawmaker wants to do. 

It's not just Iowa. Virginia's new Governor, Glenn Youngkin,  has set up a website where parents can report things they hear about from their children's school that they don't like. He told conservative radio host, John Fredericks, that it is an effort at "rooting out" teachers who are not teaching "objectively." But when pressed by reporters to make those emails available to the public so we all can see the complaints, Youngkin said "no."

Iowa Republican wants cameras in public school classrooms so parents can monitor teachers 'similar to a body camera on a policeman' (yahoo.com)

All of this of course puts a chill on a teacher's ability to present information to their students that might be controversial. And it also eliminates one of the major components of a good education--allowing students to learn "critical thinking" so they can come to their own conclusions. 

What are Republicans going to suggest next, re-education camps for teachers who don't fit their mold? 

 ISS Demolition And A New Space Race?

 

The International Space Station which has housed over 200 astronauts from 19 different countries in 22 years, has just eight years to live. 

It has orbited 227 nautical miles above the |Earth  since launch in 2000, but NASA now has plans to retire the aging space craft at the end of 2030. NASA says private companies will take over the station's primary mission---scientific research. That comes even as our space rivals in Russia and China move ahead with their own space stations.  

The plan is to crash the International Space Station into a sparsely populated area of the South Pacific, about 3,000 miles off New Zealand's eastern coast when the time comes. (Learn more about the space shuttle in this video) 

   

Several countries have dumped more than 263 pieces of space debris in that area since 1971.   

But the station still has a significant role to play before its demise. It's going help with the planned NASA mission to Mars. 

The Russians, who have played a big role in the ISS mission, will leave it in 2025 and will launch their own station, possibly by 2030. 

China, which was excluded from the ISS since the beginning, launched the first module of its own space station last year, and it could be operational by the end of this year.   

The ISS does have an impressive resume over its short lifespan, including some major medical and technological advances.  

Including:

2014: The first item to be 3-D printed. 

2016: Sequencing DNA for the first time in space.

New water purification systems. 

Growing food in microgravity. 

Medical research on Alzheimer's disease, Cancer, Asthma and heart disease. 

Aide in the response to natural disasters on Earth; everything from wildfires to floods using high- tech photography. 

The International Space Station to be retired and crashed into the Pacific Ocean - CNN

20 Breakthroughs from 20 Years of Science aboard the ISS | NASA

Does it bother you that our future in space may soon be more controlled by people like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk or Richard Branson rather than by our government, especially as Russia and China make significant progress in space exploration?  I don't think that's what JFK and LBJ had in mind when they created NASA. 

Doomsday Glacier  

It's called the "Doomsday Glacier" because it is melting rapidly and has become a firm indicator of the impact climate change is having on our planet. The Thwaites Glacier (the real name) in Antarctica  is huge, and it's coming apart. And now the big pieces are blocking efforts by scientists to study how fast the crucial ice shelf is deteriorating. 

(Thwaites Glacier, courtesy of NASA)

Scientists from around the world have been conducting a $50 million multi-year study, but it needs to be done during the Antarctic summer. But the break off of several large chucks have made it almost impossible for researchers to get to the right spot, called the Dotson Ice Shelf, to test water warmth beneath it.   

Why is this important? If all of the Thwaites collapses it could eventually raise the sea level around the world by more than 2.1 feet and redesign the coastline on a global scale.     

Doomsday glacier iceberg blocks scientific study (9news.com.au)

Dumbest Quote of the Week!

This week's dumbest quote comes from actress and talk show pundit Whoopi Goldberg. Appearing on The View during a discussion about racism, Goldberg declared that the Holocaust was not about race:

"but rather a symptom of man's inhumanity to man. That's what it was about."  

She's wrong, of course. The cold blooded, systematic round-up and murder of six million Jews and four million Slavs, Poles and Roma in Germany's death camps, was totally the result of Nazism's racial theories and their perception of a Master Aryan Race. 

Goldberg was immediately labeled "anti-Semitic," and after a half-hearted apology on The View and elsewhere, she was suspended from the program for two weeks.

I don't think she is anti-Semitic, but she needs more education. Goldberg talked about race as if it were just a Black and White issue. She used a poor example to explain it. She said if she was walking down the street with a White person and was confronted by a group of White Supremacists coming in the other direction, she would be scared and would probably run. But a Jew as a "white person" would not have this worry. 

Guess what Whoopi? My skin my be pale, but as 

soon as the group learned my last name, I would be in as much danger from their hate as you would.   

Jews are not considered a race in today's social construct. But anti-Semitism is racism in another form and it's thousands of years old.  

Goldberg has been socially active in many causes, including Civil Rights. But it's time she took a history course that includes Europe from 1930 thought 1945. And then maybe another one on the Inquisition in Spain in the 15th Century. Also, I suggest she read some Shakespeare, starting with Merchant of Venice. Certainly all she has to do is go back and look at the videotape from Charlottesville in 2017.  

In today's world, Jews come in every skin color. But anti-Semitism is still largely based on the racial hatred of Hitler's social construct.  

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