Pat Shiplett Writes About People.
His lies are more dangerous than what he’s lying about.Donald Trump uses his lies as jokes and his jokes as threats.
He scrambles facts and walks back his statements as a raw exercise of power. He tries to destroy anyone who confronts him with the truth.
LIE: On June 16 the president blamed Democrats for a law that separates migrant parents from their children — there is not such law. The policy is his. Republicans have controlled the House for eight years, the Senate for four.
Even though some of them were married and had children, there was still a touch of adolescence running through the group.
They worked on the thirty second floor of the very art-deco skyscraper that inspired the Empire State Building. It was constructed just before air conditioning came on the scene and was equipped with vertical-sliding windows.
The six of them worked on assignments with little supervision, at their own pace.
When projects dried up in the summer the co-workers would sneak out to a newsstand to kill time. They often stopped at a gag shop that sold hand-buzzers, sneezing powder and whoopee cushions. That’s where they happened upon the balloons
A little physics enters into the story.
Water weighs .036127 pounds per cubic inch. A balloon filled to the size of the grapefruit (100 cubic inches) weighs around three pounds. The vertical drop from their office windows to the street was 380 feet. The acceleration of gravity near the earth is expressed as g = 32.2 feet/sec^2.
Most of the water balloons smashed harmlessly on the lower concrete portion of the skyscraper. But every once in a while, with proper thrust and just the right trajectory, one would hit a bus as it was taking on passengers directly below.
A violent shockwave would radiate out from the center of the roof of the bus and then bounce back to the middle again. The hollow interior of a full-sized municipal bus is essentially a metal drum. The impact inside must have been deafening.
We are all allotted a certain number of do-overs in life. Those bored people working up on thirty two were young enough to have a supply mulligans and get-out-of-jail cards left to draw on. Sirens never sounded on the streets below and the police never showed up in their reception area. They were lucky.
Some years later one of the culprits woke up in a cold sweat. It wasn’t until then that he realized he may have missed committing involuntary manslaughter by only a few feet or a few seconds one way or another.
Nothing good ever comes from objects that fall out of the sky.
Joseph (Jose) wasn’t a carpenter, he was a bookkeeper.
And Mary (María) wasn’t a virgin, she conceived and gave birth in the normal way.
Their son Jesus (Jesús) is not the Son of God. Their family was sacred, but only in the way all families are sacred.
Their lives were put at risk when Joseph discovered rigged bids and money laundering at the Honduran branch of a Japanese construction firm where he worked.
After going missing for three days, he was found dead.
Mary decided she and her child had to flee. They made their way north through Mexico to the southern U.S. border.
“A shining city on a hill” is how Ronald Reagan described America. “If there had to be city walls,” he said during his farewell speech, “the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here.”
But Jesus and Mary came to the America of Donald Trump. He had decided to repel legal asylum seekers by following through on his threats to take away their children. Mary and baby Jesus were caught in his crosshairs.
Asylum seekers don’t sneak unseen across the border. They risk dangerous journeys in order to petition U.S. immigration authorities under a rigorous judicial process defined by Congress. Their fates can go either way.
What Ronald Reagan understood — and the Donald Trumps don’t — is that our neighbors don’t come to harm us.
They pick our vegetables, clean our buildings, bathe our kids and pay taxes. Later they start businesses, run for office and serve in the military just as generations of refugees fleeing violence and persecution have done before them.
The two friends were your basic three-egg omelet and hash-brown kind of guys.
They wore their hair short and weren’t much concerned about how they dressed. From time to time waitresses would mistake them for cops. They weren’t.
The two met for lunch once a week for more than thirty years, after vacations it might be several days in a row. They ended up in the same booth in the same Midwestern Greek diner almost every time. They agreed their Friday lunches were the perfect way to kick off a weekend.
Eventually the two friends would cut back on their billable hours — semi-retirement came to both of them. Now they could share coffee and current events long after their booth was cleared.
Although neither had members or financial interests at risk, they took the U.S. invasion of Iraq to heart. It was a war waged by their elected officials paid for by their tax dollars. Lives were being spent in their names.
A difference of opinion over the war developed between the two. The more they tried to ignore it, the more it festered. It was as if they were speeding toward an IED, hidden on the side of the road, that would destroy their friendship. One they wouldn’t see until it was too late.
Before the war Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld wrote a series of short memos he called ‘snowflakes.’ His snowflake of October 15, 2002 warned “…there could be higher than expected collateral damage.”
The friends of more than thirty years walked out of their coffee shop one Friday afternoon, six and a half years after the war began, and never saw each other again.
DALLAS May 4, 2018 — The National Rifle Association has banned firearms from its annual convention.
That’s very good news.
The NRA insists that the way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. But even it realizes that 70,000 good guys crowded into the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center might end up killing each other while trying to protect Donald Trump and Mike Pence. (Speaker Ryan, are you ready to take the oath?)
Finally NRA members can stop worrying that the big, bad government is coming to limit their Second Amendment rights. The NRA just beat them to it.
