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Have we moved from a shining city on a hill to a stinking swamp?

It’s ironic that nearly at the beginning of the United States of America and the possible end of the Divided States of America empire we may have had two presidents consumed with sex. More than 200 years ago we had Thomas Jefferson, president from March 4, 1801, to March 4, 1809, who evidently led a sex-fulfilled married life with a wife and later with a 14-year-old slave who was 27 years younger.

On January 20, 2017, Donald Trump took the oath of office with the reputation of grabbing, harassing and using private parts of dozens of women before, during and after his term ended January 20, 2021. Our third president and 46th are meeting for the first time in Manhattan, one in a courtroom and the other in Sally and Tom in a Broadway theater.

In the play Sally & Tom, written by Black writer Susan Lori-Parks, we are learning more about the sex life of Tom, a 41-year-old widower, and Sally, his 14-year-old slave (who just had her slave quarters moved into Tom’s Monticello home in 2013) and the “consensual” sex between porn star Stormy and her “Fat Orange Turd” named Donald. What a coincidence! How prophetic? How American!

Jefferson had six children with his wife Martha but only two survived infancy. She died, probably from childbirth, in 1772 after 10 years of marriage. Sally Hemings was born enslaved at Monticello in 1773, went to Paris with Jefferson when he was appointed senior minister from 1787 to 1789, ostensibly as a nursemaid to two of Jefferson’s young daughters, Maria and Martha.

No one knows when the sex between Tom and Sally started, but it probably was when he was 41 and she was 14 (notice the reversed numbers!). In her years at Monticello, she bore Tom six children with four surviving. No paintings exist, but neighbors reported the surviving children looked like Jefferson. Tom freed all of the children before he died in 1826, but he did not free her. She was allowed to leave Monticello by Maria and Martha when Tom died, and she went to Charlottesville and lived with two of her freed sons. Their children were so light they lived as Whites in their lifetime.

Sally evidently was not literate and left no records. Little was known of Tom and Sally’s “relationship.” Perhaps she possessed other talents. Sally left no record of her inner thoughts, or how it felt to be a 14-year-old girl raped by a 41-year-old White man who had been president of the United States. Sally lived to be 62 and has been a figure of endless fascination in the history of the country.

So, it has come to pass 200 years after Tom and Sally, we have two people who probably know more about sex than more than 99.9% of the population. The DSA porn industry that Stormy cavorts and orgies around in is worth at least $100 billion a year, providing 1.5 million hours of film content to all ages in more than 13,000 movies. Sex sells everything from TaterTots to Tesla EVs, and the two stars of the present 24/7 news service are staring and glaring at each other in court.

In the witness chair is Stormy, an award-winning porno star and director of a porno film company named Wicked Pictures, telling all about the sex apprentice she labeled the “Fat Orange Turd” nodding off at the defense table next to his unpaid lawyers.

Well, the way the world and its predators have been acting, we deserve the two at our final curtain as a civilization. The Turd has already lost a sex defamation case and has 26 women at last count accusing or suing him for sexual harassment or assault. Perhaps he suffers from Testy, a Kennedy brain worm that doubles the hormone testosterone in Orange Geniuses. Stormy, interning as a stripper, is an experienced porn worker in several aspects of the sex industry.

She is now 45 and preparing for her future. She was 27 at the time she had a quickie at a Lake Tahoe golf tournament with the then 60-year-old Donald, who used his only knowledge of the Bible, the missionary position, in his penthouse bed. She spanked him because he wasn’t wearing a condom. Evidently, he scored 62nd in bed as he did on that golf course. If you would like more details, read her book and testimony.

I tend to have three points of view when making judgments about the effect of events on empires: pessimist, possibilist and optimist. Whether we will survive both Tom and Sally and Stormy and Fat Orange Turd may be a closed question because of global warning or World War III. I was bending toward possibilist from pessimist – until I read the results of a TikTok survey of women this morning. The question was: “If you’re alone in the forest, who would you rather run across, a man you don’t know or a bear?” O

ne might think a country would learn how to understand and treat females in more than 200 years. The results for the Divided States of America: “Women online are nearly unanimous in favor of the stocky, shaggy, sleepy-through-the-winter one.” In case some woman makes a mistake about her worser half, Fat Orange Turd is not the animal in the Kenai River catching salmon in the rapids. Seven out of eight women said a bear is more appealing because “men are scary.”

Think of Epstein, Gates, Prince Andrew, Weinstein, Gaetz and thousands of other predators. The World Health Organization reports that “one-third of women worldwide have been subjected to physical, mental or sexual violence.” Often, it’s the woman’s intimate partner, married or not, who ends up being more dangerous than a Mama bear in the woods.

Actually, bear attacks often fall under “BREAKING NEWS!” There are many stories of women teaming up, even romantically, with beasts, frogs, swans and other animals they can be happy with. Orangutans, chimps, bonobos and silver back gorillas have the same problems Homo sapiens men have, who often end up being Homo stupiditis or Boobus Trumpicanus.  

Does a 50-year-old book have the answer to life on planet Earth?

Every day the world’s population suffers from heat, floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, drought, fires, rains and other disasters. In 1972, scientists at the Massachusetts institute of Technology published The Limits of Growth that reviewed the results of computer simulations of the world economy from 1900 to 2100. In short, they were looking for scenarios that outlined the earth’s ecological limits and “so avoid economic or even civilizational collapse.”

When will we need a no-growth scenario was a question that needed answering. The answer is in this old book. We need it now, according to an article “Echo-Collapse Hasn’t Happened Yet, But You Can See It Coming” by Stan Cox. The MIT analysis forecast the following: “With business-as-usual, production would grow for five decades before hitting its peak in the last half of the 2020s (here we come!). Then decline would set in. And sure enough, we now have scientists across a range of disciplines issuing warnings that we’re perilously close to that turnaround point.”

We are now spending hundreds of billions of dollars recovering from climate change disasters instead of developing new markets for new “things.” Remember the Paris accords where countries decided in order to avoid the disasters associated with climate change that the world would have to limit the increase in temperature to 1.5C? Because of the inaction of governments in imposing limits on the use of fossil fuels and the failure to switch to renewables soon enough, hundreds of the world’s leading scientists (80% of them!) expect global temperatures to rise to at least 2.5C by the end of this century.  Only 6% say the limit of 1.5C will be met.

An interesting sidelight by female climate scientists who are still in the child-bearing ages. A fifth of them say they will not have any or fewer children because the limits will not be met.  

How about a few short stories emphasizing dangers of global warming?

Sometimes it takes an unusual incident to capture the world’s attention to a common problem. Caramelo, the little Brazilian horse marooned on a roof for 24 hours because of a huge flood that killed 100 people, may not, in the end, reduce the temperature by 1.5C. But a few billion people hearing about a horse stranded for days in a city may think a minute about the dangers of global warning and fossil fuels. The horse, now recovering in a veterinary hospital from dehydration, was saved by a large crew of firefighters viewed on national television which was then shown worldwide. They used inflatable rafts and boats to bring him to safety, making him a subject of all social media. Caramelo got many offers of adoption while recovering from his long stay on the roof.

BREAKING NEWS!  At 8:46 a.m. on May 16, 2024, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed legislation eliminating the words “climate change” from all state laws. The law promotes the expansion of natural gas, reduces regulations on gas pipelines and increases protections against bans on gas appliances. This should be terrifically good news for Floridians, who are facing rising seas, extreme heat, flooding and increasingly severe storms. The state just had its hottest year since 1895.

This new law also bans power-generating wind turbines offshore or near the 8,436 miles of extended shoreline. There’s only one question left. Is DeSantis’s brain infected by the same brain worms that have attacked Robert Kennedy Jr, destroying all reason in exploding synapses and frozen blood vessels? One might think that the world’s 2,713 billionaires with 813 at last count in the Divided States of America would expend at least half of their fortunes to keep the world temperature increase to 1.5C Don’t bother.

Many of them are on their superyachts burning tons of fossil fuels going to tax havens and shelters on the warming oceans with the dead coral reefs and the Category 5 hurricanes reaching 200 miles an hour. One large superyacht, a few up to 600 feet long, will burn as much fuel as the entire population of many small countries.

Bill Gates has not gotten into the race for the largest yacht like many other billionaires, but he did rent one for a week for a cool $2 million. Just to keep one tied to a dock in a major city will run the owner $30 million a month. Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and Meta fame just bought two yachts, one superyacht 387-footer with a 200 ft. service yacht. The big one has a crew of 48 with 24 guest rooms. Jeff Bezos of Amazon always travels with a similar pair of yachts because his new wife needs a helipad on one to land her helicopter.

Roman Abramovich of Russia, once a Putin buddy, has the $800 million Eclipse superyacht which has a swimming pool, a submarine, armored plating and a couple of helipads so he can fly to his $475 million Solaris. He is the current superyacht champion. I wonder if he feels he can buy a ticket to any place in the universe.