Roe v Wade was overturned today by the Supreme Court.  This was not surprising given that the ruling was leaked several weeks ago.  Still it is a day of infamy in  American democracy.  Look, I am not for abortion but this is about the right of women.  Let's been frank.  If men are the ones who get pregnant, there will be no laws restriction abortion.  Birth controls would have been invented long ago and we would not only have plan B but also plans C, D, and E today.

This overturn of Roe v Wade demonstrate that elections have big consequences.  Trump appointed three of the justices that voted for the overturn.  He will be a hero to the conservatives just for this alone.  Majority of the country want to keep abortion legal.  Yet a guy who got less popular votes than his opponent single handily change the law of the land.  Well, he did have help from Mitch McConnell who helped the GOP steal two of those three justice seats.  So it is imperative that we get out the vote to keep the slim Senate control in November and keep the White House in 2024.  

Even if are able to accomplish that, it maybe years before we can overturn this decision.  On another note, there is gun legislation that looks to be passed.  Still, it will not go as far as the majority of the country want.  So this begs the question:  If majority of the people cannot get what we want by voting, how free are we really?

 It has been fifty years since Watergate which was the first time in my lifetime that there was a constitutional crisis in the U.S.  We were lucky that disaster was avoided fifty years ago.  But can we avoid disaster this time?

Richard Nixon, unlike what he proclaimed, was a crook.  He tried to cheat on an election and then tried to cover it up.  Donald Trump is worse.   He asked the Russians openly to help him win an election.  And when the CIA said that Russia was trying to interfere, he agreed with Putin rather than our own intelligence service.  Nixon at first refused to turn over the tapes but eventually did although with 18 minutes missing.  Trump refused to turn over records and has some records missing.  We still have not seen his taxes yet.  Some of Nixon's cronies went to jail.  Some of Trump's cronies may go to jail.  It is obvious that the scandal went all the way to the presidency in both cases.

Nixon actually won reelection and probably would have won anyway without cheating.  Trump lost fair and square and then promoted conspiracy theories about fraud in the election.  This led to the insurrection which Trump encouraged.  Nixon resigned peacefully and let Gerald Ford become president and healed the nation.  Trump did not care if the mob killed his vice president.  Trump is still at it now, trying to divide the nation.  

Back in 1972, I was glued to the tv after school for the hearings.  I didn't understand what was going on a lot of the time.  But I, like many people in the country, wanted to see the truth come out and make judgment based on facts.  Today, most people don't care to watch because they have their minds made up depending which party they are affiliated with.  Back then we have Walter Cronkite, whom everybody trusted.  Today we have the conservatives and liberal media with their own distinct audiences.

Back then, many Republicans see that Nixon's actions were bad for democracy and the country.  Today. the Republicans, with the exception of a few like Liz Cheney, only want to get power back and could careless about the state of democracy in the country.  Nixon knew that he would be impeached if he did not resign and there was a good chance he would have been convicted and kicked out of office.  Today, regardless what criminal acts Trump did, there was never enough vote to convict him in the Senate.

So that is why I believe that Trump and his followers are much worse for the democracy of this country than Nixon and his supporters were fifty years ago.  And that is also why I am much more worried about the future of our country than I did fifty years ago.

 I thought that the Jan. 6 Committee did a good job of presenting the case last week in the first of the televised hearings.  To have Ivanka Trump agreeing with Bill Barr that the election results were correct and that it was not stolen was big.  But did it change any minds?

The people who believe Donald Trump's lies would not have tuned in.  After all, they would be watching Fox and other conservative news outlets.  If they had believed all those outrageous lies up to now, I don't think anything presented would change their minds.  All the people who believe Trump caused the insurrection obviously would not change their mind.  So it is like preaching to the choir.  Maybe I am being pessimistic, but it seems like we are too divided to even agree when somebody is trying to kill our democracy.  I will continue to pay attention to the hearings but I doubt the opinions of the country will change significantly.

 Peter Zeihan is a China hater who has claimed that due to low birth rates and other factors. China will have half of its current population by 2050!  He also claimed that China will collapse soon and it knows that so it will invade Taiwan soon while it still can.  He also claimed that Taiwan will have nuclear weapons at a moment's notice and will use it to turn back China.  Despite these outrageous claims, he has a lot of followers who believe he is an expert in foreign relations.  Of course, lots of people make outrageous predictions and have followers.  Gordon Chang comes to mind.  But I was shocked that with such unintelligent babble, Zeihan was deemed credible enough for our defense community to be invited to speak at the Eisenhower School of National Security.

The Eisenhower School is part of the Armed Forces education system and is highly regarded in turning out leaders in the military.  Eisenhower himself graduated from this school which had another name in the past.  So I would think the school would be careful in inviting speakers who should be credible.  It is not credible that China will lose 700 million people in population by 2050 unless there will be a war the magnitude of which we have never seen before.  There is no way that demographic extrapolations will come up with this conclusion.  I have never heard anyone else make that prediction.  

Even if China is on a downward spiral, it does not mean it will invade Taiwan.  And while Taiwan has the talent to produce a nuclear weapon, it would be unlikely that it would make even one on a moments notice, let alone multiple warheads.  Zeihan said that Taiwan can destroy Beijing and Shanghai.  Even if that is the case, China still has dozens of cities of over a million people.  

Zeihan's claims become even more ridiculous.  He said that China then will send millions across the strait in fishing boats with the hope of landing enough to overwhelm Taiwan forces.  But he believes that Taiwan and U.S. navies will destroy these boats before they land, killing millions of Chinese and thus the invasion will fail.

It is laughable what he said.  If Taiwan uses nuclear weapons on China, wouldn't China respond in kind with even more nuclear weapons?  Maybe half a dozen would destroy the whole island, so why would they bother sending people across the strait?  In fishing boats, when they have a powerful navy?  Maybe Zeihan doesn't know that China has a navy and hundreds of nuclear weapons.  If that is the case, what makes him an expert?

What bothers me is that our young officers who are learning geopolitics and military strategies are exposed to such clowns.  It is like Trump listening to his cronies instead of real experts and make idiotic decisions that cause a million American lives.  I think we can understand why Fox News keep inviting Gordon Chang and others like him to blast China.  But who in our defense department invited this fool to speak at one of our prestigious military institutions?