Now playing: The “Apprentice – the Cabinet Series”

By Dvitale300, a Trail Mix Contributor

In this new series watch as President-elect Trump marches a never-ending series of Republican, conservative politicians and talking heads into the famous Trump Tower set of the “Apprentice” to vie and compete for a small number of White House and U.S. Cabinet positions to run our government.  Starting Sunday November 27th, watch as camera’s go live in the Trump boardroom where potential nominees can be seen arguing policy and pulling out all of the stops to castrate their opponents and destroy the opposition.

Emceed by the soon-to-be former governor of Indiana, watch our prospective leaders be grilled by none other than Ivanka and Eric, of the Trump family.  Sparks will fly, feelings will be hurt – but the viewing public will be tantalized by this “show of shows”.  We’ll also see continuous coverage by the major network and cable media – posting a never-ending “candidate-watch” outside the front doors of the majestic “Big Apple White House”.

Details:

Where to watch:  All of your favorite TV and cable networks, online news sources and bogs.

When to watch:  Coverage will be continuous with never-ending post-interview coverage on all of the major entertainment news networks.

Series length:    November 9th, 2016 through January 19th, 2017

Don’t forget to check your phone for ongoing show “teaser tweets” from none-other than the President-elect”

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The Milky Way Is Moving!

Not that politics is off limits but this holiday week seems a good time to focus elsewhere.

What’s your favorite non-politics story?

I found it interesting to learn that the Milky Way is moving, revealing a dense supercluster of galaxies never seen before. And we’re moving toward it at 50 kilometers per second. But there is no cause for alarm: At that speed it will take us 5 trillion years to get there.

milky-wayScience Magazine: “Our Milky Way and its neighboring galaxies are on the move. The whole Local Group of more than 50 galaxies is being tugged in one direction by, astronomers presume, the gravity of some enormous unseen object. Now, an international team believes they’ve found the culprit: a nearby supercluster—a collection of many hundreds of galaxies—that has never before been noticed.”

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Secretary of Stateless

My hunch is that Mitt Romney or anyone else considering becoming Secretary of State under Trump will be screwed like so many who took that job only to find that foreign policy is actually being run by the West Wing. Trump’s national security appointments so far indicate that, as is usually the case, the State Department will not be the center of foreign policy making. I am thinking about Bill Rogers — Nixon and Kissinger didn’t even tell him about the opening to China. Cyrus Vance — who resigned after Carter’s failed hostage rescue. Poor pitiful Alexander Haig left in the cold by Reagan’s White House. Colin Powell fed lies by Dick Cheney.

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A Recommendation and Another Take On The 2016 Election

By GrannyMumantoog, a Trail Mix Contributor

soskinI’ve been a fan/follower of Betty Reid Soskin and her blog for quite a while. She’s an amazing writer and, at 95, she is the oldest full-time park ranger in the U.S. She’s led quite a life! She was in the music biz, was/is a political activist, civil rights champion and was part of the planning & development of Rosie the Riveter/World War II Home Front National Historical Park, where she now serves as a ranger/historical interpreter.

She is also into genealogy and her family history is amazing. She’s been blogging “CBreaux Speaks” since 2003. It’s very no-frills site but it makes for some terrific reading. On the left side there are links to some of her other pages and family sites. There are a couple of dead links, but the ones that work are worth a look. Also on the left side is the blog archives, it’s a long list, she writes a lot.

If you like oral histories and genealogy this is a fascinating read:
“Rosie the Riveter World War II American Homefront Oral History
Project: An Oral History with Betty Reid Soskin conducted by Nadine
Wilmot, 2002, Regional Oral History Office, The Bancroft Library,
University of California, Berkeley, 2007.” It’s a pdf transcript of a series of audio recordings that were made by UC Berkeley in 2002

betty_reid_soskin-e1467349699951She often writes about political subjects and, needless to say, was not a fan of Trump. I’ve been waiting to see what she thought about the way the election turned out and she finally wrote her feelings about it yesterday (11/16/2016). She didn’t disappoint and I wanted to share what she had to say. Scroll down to the second posting on the blog page to read it there if you have time, but I’ve copied it here too for simplicity (bold text emphases are mine):

How on earth does one respond to the state of the Union?

As are we all, I’ve been in a state of shock for a week, and grateful for whatever was built into the human anatomy that allows us to retreat into ourselves for whatever time it takes to recover.  That, I suppose, is what we call “shock.”  How else can this state of numbness be described?

I’m guessing that I’d secretly kept a corner of my mind in enough doubt to retain the capacity to see the possibility that my country might well slip into a period of regression.  The hints have always been lurking in there somewhere.  We all must have known this, but chose to ignore it.

The fact that the electorate had been persistently dumbed down over past decades by a failing system of public education colored by the introduction of reality television being pumped into every home at the sacrifice of the nation’s values and eating away at our cultural base until little is left with which to fight off cynicism and hate of “other-ness” and the empathy needed to support community.

Over coming months we may learn the painful lesson that Democracy cannot be sustained without an educated electorate.

My fear that the cause of the rise of hate — gradually going dormant in our society but now being given one last chance at dominance — may have been the growing apathy and disconnections within the democratic process. The 39% turnout in the last general election did not bode well for our ability to sustain our system of  governance, and the 50% participation in 2016 simply may not have been  enough to turn us back to the painfully slow progress being made over recent years

I suppose I’m less concerned with how the incoming administration will effect our fate as a nation as I am of the ascendance of hatred and bigotry into an electorate that has been inching its way toward forming that “… more perfect Union” over recent decades, and now will be slowed in that progress as we try to figure out where the Ship of State hit this reef!

I am fairly convinced that we may be seeing the final frantic defense in the attempt to reinvigorate white supremacy in a fast-changing world.  These may be the last gasps as the nation begins to realize and accept that our strengths are in our diversity, and that the inexorable creep toward that realization and acceptance might well be our final chance at eventual salvation.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAUniversal mobility and an irresistible system of communication has made of us one world; a world that might well begin to achieve a relatively peaceful existence, but only if we can come to terms with the urgent needs to save Planet Earth.

Just how we will manage to do that when the Evangelicals are now holding the reins of power — good folks who sincerely erroneously believe that the “… scientific warnings of global warming, rising sea levels, climate change, are a hoax created by China”,  — and that this global concern is irrelevant since they are hoping to hasten the Rapture when Jesus will return to the world to carry them up to Heaven!  How do we deal with the deniers when everything in which they believe has convinced them that scientific evidence is simply humankind’s wasted effort in the face of what they know is profoundly real and biblically verified by myth?

How could I have ever guessed that there would come a day when I would view Christianity as a detriment to any hope of sustaining life as we know it?

How can this be?

And how can one dare to utter such blasphemy yet feel the ring of truth in the utterance.

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I recommend reading Ms Soskin’s blog anytime you’re bored. You can pretty much just click on any year in the archive on the left and you’ll find something interesting to read about.

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