https://youtu.be/QzanwGzbS7I
Festivus for the rest of us
Good morning, and Happy Festivus for those of you who celebrate that particular holiday. Today is the day you get to make your annual complaint. Just don’t make it in my direction because I’m not listening. We have rain moving into the Midwest this afternoon while to our North a major winter storm is developing that could interrupt holiday travel for a lot of people. Wherever you are, please be safe when you’re on the road.
There is a lot to discuss this morning. Uber has moved its driverless car fleet to Arizona after the California Department of Transportation revoked the registration of its 16 vehicles. JetBlue removed some rowdy passengers from a flight carrying Ivanka Trump. And A Lybian plane presumed to be hijacked has landed in Malta. That situation is ongoing and at this point we don’t have enough details to elaborate. Let’s get into our 5 things you should know.
The Tunisian driver in the German market incident is dead
Early this morning, police in Milan, Italy reported that they had shot and killed the man believed responsible for driving a truck into a crowded holiday market in Berlin earlier this week, killing 121. Â Anis Amri had been the subject of a European-wide manhunt, though as of last night Berlin officials said they believed him to still be in that city. Amri pulled a gun when stopped at a routine traffic stop in Milan and was killed in the subsequent shootout.
While attempts to actually connect Amri with the terrorist organization are questionable, the Islamic State has taken credit for the attack in Berlin, which may be part of a broader plan to boost its visibility. Early yesterday, Australian authorities said they foiled a plot to attack multiple locations there on Sunday2. The five ISIS-inspired terrorists had planned the attack using explosives, knives, and guns for high profile locations in Canberra, Australia’s second-largest city.
At the same time, there are reports of a list of churches in the United States that have been targeted for attack by the group as well3. National Security Administration officials question whether the list has any authority to it or if it is just rhetoric in an attempt to disrupt holiday celebrations. Security across the US is already heightened after the attack in Berlin, but no credible threats have been identified.
The nuclear arms race may be back on
After decades of deliberate attempts at reducing nuclear proliferation, both Russia and the United States now seem poised to start up the nuclear arms race once again4. First, it was Russian President Vladimir Putin stating that strengthening his country’s nuclear capabilities should be a chief military objective in the coming year. President-elect Donald Trump quickly fired back with a tweet saying the United States needs to “greatly strengthen and expand its nuclear capability” until the rest of the world “comes to its senses” regarding nuclear weapons.
Sounds a bit scary, doesn’t it? There are a couple of things on this topic we need to keep in mind. First, the nuclear arsenals of both countries is getting old. Strategic Arms Limitation Treaties of the 1970s pretty much put a halt to any new nuclear weapons development. As our nuclear stockpile begins to age, there is some danger in radioactive material leaking from corroded containers. Plans have been under discussion for some time as to how the US might upgrade its stockpile without violating existing treaties.
At the same time, however, one has to consider the possibility that Putin was merely baiting the president-elect. If so, it would appear that the trap worked. Mr. Trump’s proclivity toward tweeting before thinking was an issue all through the campaign and this may well be another occasion where someone on his staff shows up today attempting to walk back the gaffe. Either way, there is plenty of reason to be concerned. Talk about nuclear weapons is not a joking matter and taken very seriously by leaders around the world. Any attempt at a new buildup would likely face UN restrictions as well as a Congress not terribly excited about funding such a project.
Worst year in history
If you’re thinking that 2016 has been the worst year ever, you may be correct, at least for the murder rate in Indianapolis. The murder of a man who opened his door and was immediately shot was the city’s 145th homicide. Murder number 146 came late yesterday as police found a man in the 4500 block of East 37th Street who had not only been shot but then set on fire. These murders make 2016 the deadliest year in Indianapolis history5.
All this comes on the same day that police chief Troy Riggs announced his resignation and at the end of the first year of Mayor Joe Hogsett’s administration. Hogsett ran in 2015 on a campaign of reducing violence in the city. However, despite aggressive efforts to bring the rate of violence under control, homicides have continued to rise. Officials are blaming everything from poverty to substance abuse and mental illness. Chief Riggs said in a statement on Thursday that the fundamental cause remains the fact that too many people are settling arguments with gunfire.
Nationwide, FBI statistics have shown violent crime to be decreasing across the nation. However, in the Midwest both Chicago and Indianapolis have defied that trend with homicides in both cities setting new records each year. Officials in both cities have struggled across multiple administrations without finding an answer to the problem, leaving certain parts of the cities as dangerous as war zones.
Forcing women to work
The president-elect’s transition team is having some difficulty finding artists and entertainers willing to perform at inaugural events next month. Just yesterday, Canadian singer Celine Dion released a statement adding her name to the list of people who have told the president-elect “No, thank you.6” This puts her on the same list as Elton John, Andrea Bocelli, and Garth Brooks, among others.
After all the many declines, inauguration planners were happy to announce yesterday that the Mormon Tabernacle Choice and the Radio City Music Hall Rockettes would be performing7. Neither addition is surprising as both have performed for inaugurations before. To some extent, their presence is pretty much old-hat.
Wait just one minute, though. It would seem there is some dissension among the ranks of the Rockettes. Pheobe Pearl, one of the Rockettes, wrote on her private Instagram account yesterday that, “Finding out that it has been decided for us that Rockettes will be performing at the Presidential inauguration makes me feel embarrassed and disappointed.”
It’s no secret that an overwhelming number of New Yorkers voted against the president-elect so the dissent isn’t surprising. However, the Rockettes are owned by the Madison Square Garden Company and a union boss responded to Ms. Pearl’s statement saying that any dancer who didn’t participate in the inauguration event would find themselves unemployed. Needless to say, that stance has not set well with the Broadway community nor social media. Something tells me this situation isn’t quite over.
And finally …
We end this week saying goodbye to Franca Sozzani, the editor-in-chief of Vogue Italia who passed away at her home yesterday with her son by her side8. Franca had been editor of the magazine for 28 years, taking on that position the same year Anna Wintour took the lead position at US Vogue. Immediately, memorials began pouring in from fashion’s most notable names expressing their condolences. Ms. Wintour described her as, “warm, clever, funny, and someone who could give the Sphinx a run for its money when it comes to keeping a confidence.9”  Jonathan Newhouse, Chairman and CEO of Conde Nast, the parent company of all the Vogue editions, said in a statement: “France was one of the greatest Editors who ever make a magazine. She was by far the most talented, influential, and important person within the Conde Nast International organization.”
More than just an editor of a fashion magazine, however, Franca Sozzani was a photographer. She was the daughter of a photographer and had an unquestionable passion for photography that was evident in how she put together her magazine. She championed hundreds of photographers over the years, most notably Steven Meisel. She was constantly on the look for emerging photographers and established and supported multiple programs to give those photographers a chance to show their work.
Make no mistake, she was demanding and set a very high standard for the photography that graced the pages of her magazine and even in its more expanded online galleries. Having that small Vogue Italia logo in the bottom left-hand corner of a photo was an incredible achievement, a statement to the world that the toughest of photo editors approved of your work. I am fortunate enough to have that logo on 18 photographs. We normally don’t include those images with our other portfolios, but for the next few days at least we’ve put them all online in memory of a fantastic person who pushed us all to take better pictures. You can see our Vogue Italia portfolio here.
We are once again out of time and space. We hope you will enjoy your Festivus activities and that you will join us again tomorrow as we try to find 5 special things you need to know for Christmas Eve. Don’t forget to subscribe, please. We hope you stay warm and dry. Have a great Friday.
Death Of Liberty
In the defiance of checks and balances, we lose every freedom we once claimed
A drastic situation
What we take for granted is easily taken away.
We have long assumed that the freedoms for which men and women have fought and died, once secured, would remain our forever. We would fight any invading force. We would stand in the face of tyranny, rise up together as a mighty throng, and turn back the forces of oppression, bigotry, and injustice. We would not let anyone invade out shores, occupy our hallowed halls, or threaten the precious democracy we hold dear.
And we’ve done that. There have been no invaders. No one has sent their troops to our shores. No one snuck into our country in the dead of night. No bullets were fired. No bombs exploded. They didn’t need to.
Instead, we elected tyranny for ourselves. In thinking that we needed to fight against the status quo we opened the door to an unholy regime of panderers, white supremacists, elitists, and power mongers whose ideals and philosophies are worse than any external foe we could ever face. By choosing a billionaire whose inherited fortunes are buoyed through deception and unethical practices, we did not choose one who would “drain the swamp,” but rather a swamp rat who delights in the mud and the muck and the filth.
In two very short but eventful weeks, we have moved from being a flawed democracy to one that it on the brink of utter collapse and, interestingly enough, there remain millions of people standing by and cheering. They somehow think that by giving up all pretense of freedom that they, themselves, will obtain more power. The foolhardy believe that in the destruction of liberty for all that they will somehow retain liberty for the few. There is no such hope, however, for when liberty is erased for some, it is destroyed for all. There is no such thing as a partial implementation of liberty.
Our country is in grave peril. The lives of many might actually be at stake. We not only need to remove the cancer infecting us, but as with any oncology surgery, we must remove the supporting tissue around it as well. We currently exist in a precarious state of hospice where our very next breath could be our last.
Everyone Sees It But Us
Edel Rodriguez, a Cuban immigrant who came to the US in 1980 to escape the tyranny of his home country, created an interesting cover for the German magazine, Der Spiegel. The image depicts a faceless image of the 45th US president holding a knife in one hand and the bloodied decapitated head of Lady Liberty in the other. Toward the bottom of the image are the words, “America First.”
The cover is alarming and, for many, disconcerting. Alexander Graf Lambsdorff, vice president of the European Parliament, described the cover as “tasteless.”
Cover of Der Speigel for 4 February 2017
The artist told the Washington Post: “It’s a beheading of democracy, a heading of a sacred symbol.”
Like it or not, this is how most people see the United States now. The president has been widely mocked, often with no small amount of hilarity. Leaders of other countries, including our closest allies, have rebuked his actions.
Yet, it is the Der Spiegel cover that may resonate the most. Germans, and Cubans, understand from experience what it is like to voluntarily put their freedoms into the hands of a tyrant. Both countries have had the sad experience of having done so. Both countries understand what it is like to suffer from their actions. Now, they see the United States heading down the exact same path. They are yelling and screaming at us in an attempt to warn us away from the inevitable outcome of our intentionally ignorant actions.
We are not listening.
Instead, the president and his team of autocrats push all the harder toward absolute authoritarian control and bluster loudly at any attempt to reign them in. Just yesterday, in response to a federal judge blocking the illegal travel ban created by presidential order, the president took to the lowest form of communication possible, Twitter, in an attempt to vilify the judge:
While the tactic the president is using is not a new one, his attitude shows tremendous disdain and a lack of respect for the balance of powers, the checks and balances that make a democracy possible. Remove those checks and balances, remove the judiciary that enforces the letter of the law, and we do not have a democracy. Our liberty is dead. Our freedoms are gone. In their place, we have a totalitarian regime where personal rights and freedoms are non-existent.
A Litany of Wounds
Without considering anything that occurred prior to the president’s January 20 inauguration, the new administration has attacked Lady Liberty repeatedly with actions, orders, and embarrassments that each act like another stab wound to our freedoms. We don’t even have to add the aforementioned immigration ban to the list to be concerned. Here are a few misdeeds, in no particular order.
Reasonable use of time and space prevent me from continuing the list. Over half of the executive orders signed in the past two weeks infringe in some way on the individual freedoms of some or all Americans.
Accessories to murder
To the point we stand by and allow this systematic rape of Liberty while we do not take every conceivable action to stop it, we become accessories to the murder of our freedoms. Some go their willingly. The silence of members of Congress on both sides of the aisle make them complicit in the activities of the president and his administration. The cheering of those who voted the administration into power dooms them for eternity.
But what about those who oppose what is happening to our freedoms? How do we fare in this endless nightmare?
Compare your actions to the person who is sitting in the room as another injects themselves with a lethal dose of heroin. What do you do? Do you call 911? Do you attempt to wrangle the needle from your friend? Or do you just sit there uncomfortably and watch?
My fear is that far too many are willing to sit there and watch. They make no noise that matters. They might say in far too calm a voice, “Hey, don’t do that,” but no one hears them. No one pays any attention because there are no actions behind the words.
If Liberty is going to be saved, if our freedoms are going to be preserved, we have to, at the very least, make sure our voice is heard. Repeatedly. Calling your members of Congress, as we have advocated so frequently the past two weeks, is like making that 911 call. While there’s no guarantee that call will be sufficient to stop the death that seems inevitable, at last you will have made some attempt at preventing the disaster.
More importantly, though, Liberty needs people who are willing to physically take part in the fight, to make deliberate moves to wrestle away the syringe that threatens our very existence. Marches and protests are a start, but we may need to go even further, filing lawsuits and engaging in whatever means of resistance necessary in order to stop the actions of a regime that cares only about their own power and profit.
We have the power. It doesn’t matter that 63 million people voted for this travesty. More than 75 million specifically voted against this president and his administration. The majority of Americans did not ask for this. Yet, the will of that majority is being blatantly and intentionally ignored with malice.
Americans find themselves on the precipice of a decision whether to act against this government more strongly than has ever been necessary or to sit by and let Liberty slip into death. One could get very messy and may ultimately involve uncertain days of turmoil. The other destroys us all and crushes the very foundation upon which the United States of America was founded.
Only you can decide what you’re going to do. You need to make that decision now.
Share this:
Like this: