Gongol.com Archives: January 2021

January 3, 2021

President calls Georgia state officials to berate them for saying he lost the election

An abuse of the office such as this ought to be universally decried. The states are not to be bullied by a greedy, selfish, and manipulative executive in the Oval Office. As it was put in Federalist 46: "[T]he existence of subordinate governments, to which the people are attached, and by which the militia officers are appointed, forms a barrier against the enterprises of ambition, more insurmountable than any which a simple government of any form can admit of." President Trump's behavior is utterly outrageous.

The military has to cooperate with the political transition

All 10 of the living former Secretaries of Defense co-signed an opinion piece in the Washington Post saying not only that the military needs to stay right out of any disputes over the Presidential election, but also that "Acting defense secretary Christopher C. Miller and his subordinates [...] are each bound by oath, law and precedent to facilitate the entry into office of the incoming administration, and to do so wholeheartedly." The letter was Dick Cheney's idea. And, in a sense, it seems karmically appropriate that Donald Rumsfeld, author of countless "snowflakes", has signed on to a letter sure to trigger Trumpian snowflakes.

Science in service to humanity

Maura Quint: "Have we checked all food to see if exploding them makes them into something better or did we just stop with corn?"