Mastodawn

It was outside the United States that the dissonance struck most deeply.
I remember sitting on high-speed trains that glided so fast and silently they seemed to erase distance itself,
watching wind farms cross the horizon like silent fleets.
In country after country
— places far smaller and, on paper, far poorer than ours
— I kept asking the same question:
how could they manage to build what we could not?
Why did the richest nation on earth feel like it was living off the leftovers of its mid-twentieth century optimism?

Conversations in Europe added another layer.
People spoke casually of health care as a right, not a privilege;
of sending their children to university without dread or debt;
of a shared obligation to slow the warming planet.
It was not utopia
— just an older, steadier faith in the public good.
The idea that freedom and mutual responsibility might coexist had not yet been driven out of their political imagination.

Back home, the contrast was impossible to ignore.
We stumble on crumbling bridges and argue about the price of insulin
yet never question why nearly two-thirds of what Washington calls “discretionary spending” is locked inside the machinery of the National Security State.
In the 2026 budget,
-- 59.6 percent is marked for the Pentagon
(even more if Trump succeeds in getting an additional $600 billion),
-- another 6.4 percent for Homeland Security.

No other democracy has made such choices
— or lived so comfortably with their consequences.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/political-commentary/trump-america-military-industrial-iran-war-1235524970/

The Terrifying New Era of American Imperialism

Donald Trump's war against Iran is part of a terrifying new era of American imperialism, one in which the military budget never stops growing.

Rolling Stone

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Chuck Darwin Mar 5

Trump campaigned on the promise that the United States would stop policing the world,
that the era of regime change and open‑ended intervention was over.

Now we have invaded Venezuela, kidnapped their president, and Trump tells us we “are going to run the country for a long time,”
as if Venezuela were a failed subsidiary being placed into receivership.

Next up was Iran, with a New York Times banner headline proclaiming, “Trump Calls for Overthrow of Government.”

The idea that the United States will “run” or administer another sovereign nation,
even “temporarily,”
ought to trigger every alarm that still works in Washington.

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KevinOnEarth

@cdarwin
Alarms are ringing wildly but the only response from anyone in a position to respond is to throw a blanket over them.
Largely because there is no actual "opposition" in the corridors of power beyond the semantics & nuances.
Because they ALL get some personal benefit out of it, while the rest of America & the world pay the price.
The way it's going, at some point, We The People are going to need some street-level heroes.