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Two sources close to Trump revealed past Saturday that Rex Tillerson, Chief Executive of the oil-giant Exxon Mobil and longtime associate of Putin, is expected to receive the Secretary of State nomination this weekend.

This means two things: one, that Big Oil will has a newfound opportunity to tighten it’s decades-long chokehold on American politics. Two, that Vladimir Putin will be confirmed as one of the most strategic victors of Trump’s election win.

Rex’s expected nomination comes as unsurprising. Trump has been slowly betraying the populist, anti-corporate message he touted proudly throughout his yearlong campaign, during which he threatened to penalize companies for sending America jobs overseas, and has instead been appointing to his Cabinet an unsurprising series of corporate leaders (just last week he appointed Gary Cohn, the second-in-command of Goldman Sachs, one of the worlds largest financial groups, as the Director of the National Economic Council).

But the appointment of Tillerson has a deeper significance. Tillerson has personal ties to Vladimir Putin, the despotic Russian leader who has loomed over global politics the past fifteen years. He is an advocate of the same neoliberal policies that have screwed countless American workers, and is against political sanctions (especially in the case of Russia). Now that he could be Secretary of State, he has the perfect platform to expand the reach of his shady corporation. Everything about the man suggests conflicts of interest.

Continue reading “What the Secretary of State Nomination Really Means”

 

I do not write about politics because I want to.

I write about politics because it is my responsibility as a human being.

You will notice, if you’ve embark on the adventure of following my blog, that an increasing frequency of the writings published here (for a while, at least) will be politically oriented: largely polemical opinion pieces concerning the domestic and foreign affairs of the United States.

This can seem contrarian to my generally free-spirited, adventurous personality. I’ve never aspired to achieve the label of “political writer,” and whenever I think of such a person, my mind conjures up a paltry image of a lonely CNN nerd, so brainwashed by the robotic propaganda of his party (whether Left or Right) that he is utterly out of touch with reality, incapable of understanding anyone who so much as raises a finger against his worldview.

If we were in a different world, or in a different situation, I would much rather get to my writings about fishing, adventuring, and philosophy first (I will get to them, eventually).

Continue reading “Why I Write about Politics”

Our parents always taught us that actions speak louder than words.

Now that Trump has secured his position to the most powerful seat in the world, and has finally begun to act, we’re beginning to see the true color of his character come through.

Throughout his yearlong, poisonous campaign, he promised a retaliation against the neoliberal billionaires that traditionally corrupt Washington’s politics, and opened the floodgate to a wave of racism that’s been seething beneath America’s surface since time immemorial. Under his campaign, and now his future Presidency, instances of hate crimes, Islamophobia, and xenophobia have risen astronomically.

Trump has busied himself the past few weeks appointing his Cabinet Officials. From his appointees, who will assist him in making his most important decisions, we can deduce the following: that he has turned his back on cleaning up corporate corruption, but is driving forward full-speed with his promised policies of racism and ignorance.

Despite the alarming developments, an astonishing number of intelligent people, with regards to Trump, tell me to “not worry about it.”

Continue reading “Underestimating Trump caught us once. It will screw us again if we aren’t careful.”

On Tuesday, November 7th, 2016, the Empire of Illusion succeeded in taking over America.

For the past fifty years, two versions of America have been jockeying for control of the destiny of the nation.

The first America, now a minority, is a dying tribe of literate folk who function in a print-based world, people who regularly question themselves and can soberly address the complexities of the world.

The second America- which I will call the “Empire of Illusion” (and I borrow the coinage from Chris Hedges, who wrote a brilliant book of the same name)- has retreated into a fantasyland of blind patriotism and false certainties. This tribe, which has steadily grown in numbers over the past half century, sees the world as black and white and is incapable of discerning truth from illusion.

Continue reading “The Two Americas”

So, then. If you’re reading this right now, I suspect you came here for one of a variety of reasons:  perhaps you saw a link on social media; maybe I recommended the site to you. Hopefully you’re a stranger, drawn here out of genuine curiosity.

Nonetheless, you’ve come to my blog, and I thank you for that. This marks the beginning of a journey, for both myself and those of you who love the same things as I.

I won’t keep you long: no one likes vapid writing devoid of substance. So I’ll get to the point.

I decided to start a blog because I was tired of seeing the world burn while feeling powerless to extinguish the flames.

In my short life, I’ve been blessed to experience a large chunk of this planet. I’ve come to love the world.

But since my earliest memories, I’ve seen horrible things slowly sucking the life from the world, devouring it, destroying it in the name of stupidity and blindness and arrogance. Recent developments over the past few years (of which I won’t bother to discuss right now) have only inflamed this pattern of self-destruction.

For the longest time I falsely believed that you could make substantial changes in the world by ranting to sympathetic friends, or through unleashing your furies on long-winded social media posts.

I was wrong.

You have to put in the extra effort. You have to go the extra mile.

That said: this blog will be a compendium of journalism, essays, and stories documenting my opinions about the world and my experiences in it. The philosophy that anchors this whole project simple: to awaken ourselves to the wonder of the world, and to do as much possible to stop its self-destruction.

Haters (as us millennials would say) will be quick to tell me that this blog won’t make a difference, that no one is going to read it, and that it is so small it will be swallowed into the infinite white noise of the internet. I laugh at the nihilism of haters: they criticize others because they lack the drive (or the balls) to accomplish anything meaningful for themselves.

I would tell the haters this: how everything great that ever changed the world started out infinitesimally small. Every accomplishment that ever meant something, every work of art or literature, every movement or revolution, started in silent anonymity.

Great things attain their aura of grandeur only retrospectively, when we look back into the past, as we forget how small they were to begin with.

The whole universe, after all, began as just a lump of molecules.

I’m starting this blog because I want to make my dent on the universe: to try to change things in the world, to uplift people, to show history that, no matter how many people sat out complacently on the sidelines, there was at least one good man who fought to extinguish the flames.

Thank you for coming to my blog. I’m looking forward to this journey.