The end of 2018 marks the demise of Donald Trump’s “rubber stamp” Congress. To the surprise of many, the Democratic Party managed to regain control of the House of Representatives during the midterm elections. With the Democrats controlling the House, Trump might decide that the Presidency is no longer any fun – with too many obligations and duties, demanding such loathsome tasks as reading and listening to other people.
Meanwhile, the Democrats are scrambling to present a united front behind whomever might be their 2020 presidential nominee. The party’s establishment seems terrified that a new generation of progressives – exemplified by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez – might scare away the deep pockets of K Street lobbyists. On the other hand, progressive-minded voters have been conditioned to view Centrists as corporatists in the tradition of Hillary Clinton. Will a unifying candidate, with the backbone to advance a forward-looking agenda, gain enough traction to rise above a large pack of ambitious contenders?
January 2019 brings us the long-awaited release of American Cosmic, a book by Professor Diana Walsh Pasulka from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. I discussed American Cosmic in my last posting. Although the book was originally scheduled for release in April of 2018, the publisher (Oxford University Press) found it necessary to “dumb-down” the book so that it would be accessible to a mainstream audience. (Oxford University Press is primarily involved in the production of academic textbooks.)
American Cosmic will offer information about the involvement of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs in the reverse-engineering of UFO technology and the assimilation of that technology into products manufactured by aerospace industry giants. This book could have a significant impact on the acceptability of the taboo subject of UFOs. (They are now referred to as unidentified aerial phenomena or UAPs to avoid the stigma of lunacy associated with UFOs.) A significant amount of rumbling from the rumor mill suggests that the Pentagon is poised to release some “dramatic” UAP videos in January or February.
Beyond the damage inflicted upon the environment by Donald Trump’s deliberate efforts to sabotage the measures and mechanisms of environmental protection, 2018 brought us more bad news about the outlook for climate change. A rather bleak National Climate Assessment (NCA) report was released on Black Friday (the day after Thanksgiving). The NCA is a United States government interagency effort focused on climate change science. At the website for the Union of Concerned Scientists, senior climate scientist Rachel Licker discussed the sleazy handling of the report by the Trump Administration:
The Trump Administration tried to bury the report, which they were legally mandated to issue, over a holiday weekend. When that failed and the report drew wide coverage, President Trump, his press secretary, and two cabinet secretaries tried to discredit the assessment and disparage the work of more than 300 scientists and experts from federal, state, and local governments, tribes and Indigenous communities, national laboratories, universities, and the private sector who contributed to the report, many on a purely voluntary basis.
Hopes run high that 2019 might be the year when decisive action is taken by special counsel Robert Mueller and Congress to end the destructive, scandal-plagued Trump presidency.
