Systemic points of failure.

So, this has been popping up on Facebook:
https://trofire.com/2017/02/16/congressional-republicans-willing-accomplices-trumps-criminal-empire/

And I agree. It's important to remember, especially during the next election, that trump is not the problem.

He's the most blatantly corrupt, the one committing the most visible crimes, the one with the most obvious conflicts of interest, but he's a symptom, not the cause.

Trump did not create Fox News and Breitbart and antiwar and countercurrent and infowars and all the other conservative fake news sites.

He did not create the massive propaganda against science, fact checking, and legitimate news.

Trump did not invent the "Southern Strategy" to make the Republican Party so welcoming to the worst of the racists.

Trump did not introduce extreme gerrymandering in every state that got a Republican controlled executive and legislative branch.

Trump did not create Crosscheck and the various other voter suppression schemes in every Republican controlled state.

Trump did not do away with laws requiring reporting of sources of campaign financing or limits on lobbyists.

Trump did not even create the anti-Muslim bigotry that was a hallmark of his campaign.

Without any one of those things, of course, he would not be president today. He definitely and undeniably benefited from all. But he didn't invent any of it.

All these things were created intentionally to benefit the plutocrats who have completely taken over the Republican Party.

Getting rid of one tired elderly narcissist who's too stupid to hide his own conflicts of interest won't solve the problem. Not that we shouldn't. Treating symptoms is valid medicine, too, after all. But to solve the problem, the whole system has to change.

I don't believe it's too late to change it yet.

But it's getting there.

Apropos of something.

A friend of mine once made the point that part of what made medieval history so fucked up was that all the kings were like 16 years old.

Basically, you've got a bunch of emotionally immature adolescent males making decisions involving deploying armies, with little regard to the consequences because they'd never had to face them themselves.

There's no particular reason I am thinking of this now...

Lessons from the French Resistance

944: "We set it up that way on purpose."

Progress!

Tonight, finished typing in notebook #20 (of 24).
Total word count: 117,805
Which Scrivener tells me is equivalent to a 337 page paperback book.