Not With A Bang But A Titter

The leader of the most powerful country in the world stands up in the United Nations assembly and makes a speech about how wonderful his administration is and the delegates laugh at him. Has such a thing ever happened before?

Power rests on intangibles like respect and fear. When those are gone...

Magnificat

I skim the news for markers of change. The news is mostly frightful- and mostly skewed that way, deliberately so. Frightfulness sells- and, by stirring up fear and anger- serves the interests of the powerful (including the people who own the news media.) But embedded in the overall frightfulness are little nuggets of something else. 

I mostly skip over what politicians are saying and doing because they're invested in keeping the world in lock-down- and rarely mean what they say. What I'm looking for are new things, things of a kind that haven't happened before, new inventions, new thought, creativity- evidence that the world is becoming kinder, more peaceable, more just- something I believe to be the case in spite of all propaganda to the contrary.

Four nuggets from this morning's news: (1) Trump getting laughed at in the UN, (2) Bill Cosby being sent to jail, (3) Monsanto getting told by a court that one of its filthy herbicides causes cancer and it needs to pay reparations, (4) the publication of a report that reveals the extent of clerical child abuse in the Catholic Church in Germany- all instances of entrenched power being challenged and defeated.