We lost the great cosmologist and science educator Carl Sagan in the month of December...way back in 1996. His words resonate and inspire as much as ever.
…America will need to give up trying to restore its past glory through a go-it-alone, America First approach. It was the same impulse that pushed the Roman Empire into the military adventurism that brought about its eventual destruction. The world economy has changed, and the United States will never again be able to dominate the planet as it once did. But the possibility of building a new world out of a coalition of the like-minded is a luxury Rome never had. America, whatever it calls itself, should seize the opportunity...
Republican strategy shifted so quickly that by the time the party gathered in 1964 to nominate Barry Goldwater for president, for the first time in 50 years there were no Black delegates in any southern delegation. One of the few Black delegates who did attend "had his suit set on fire". The Black baseball star Jackie Robinson, a longtime Republican, declared that he knew "how it felt to be a Jew in Hitler's Germany"...
"Streeter observes that it's not the poorer members of the conservative coalition who are pessimistic; it's the affluent white Republicans who watch Tucker Carlson and believe the nation is on the verge of total destruction. Many of them believe that radical action, even violence, may be necessary to save it..."
… U.S. allies see our democracy as a shattered, washed-up has-been. We used to provide a democratic model for the world, but no longer. The chaos, dysfunction and insanity of the past several years have taken a predictable toll...
America: the greatest, richest, freest country in the world – or is it? David Cross, of Mr. Show, Arrested Development, and The Dark Divide, joins us to discuss why Americans, despite living in the wealthiest country in the history of the world, have a much worse standard of living than people who live in poorer countries. The "American Dream" isn't just dying: it's dead and buried. Cross tells us why. https://youtu.be/aNghg1Y-WIc
...The handover of power and the Capitol riot, "dealt a blow to the reputation of America as the moral leader in the world, particularly in the eyes of the Russian public," Mikhail Khodorkovsky told NBC News in an exclusive interview in London...
... Four years ago, before Trump became president, 43 percent of Germans had a positive impression of the United States as a leader in the world. Today just 6 percent approve. In the United Kingdom, 15 percent say they approve. More Russians — 18 percent — approve of American leadership internationally than Brits or Germans...
Since a boat of religious fanatics with buckles on their hats hit the shores near Plymouth Rock and claimed that this was their utopia, America has always been a little bit crazy. It's this kind of wide-eyed "anything can happen if you believe" mentality that, at its best, can produce incredible art. But at its worst, it can be cruel and conspiratorial. We live in a country where people refuse to believe vaccination can help you and where a White House is spinning "alternative — but Kurt Andersen is here to say that this is nothing now. At the time of the Civil War, society had become split by two sides that refused to listen to each other. Back then, the political and social divide is stoked by a hyperbolic partisan media where anyone could publish whatever they wanted in a pamphlet without fact-checking. Sound familiar? It definitely should. Kurt's latest book is appropriately titled Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire.... https://youtu.be/XirnEfkdQJM
...In an article titled, 'I Feel Sorry for Americans': A Baffled World Watches the U.S., U Aung Thu Nyein, a political analyst in Myanmar, told the newspaper: "The U.S.A. is a first-world country but it is acting like a third-world country."...