TBB Best of Web: Culture War, Mass Shooting Survivors, Good Guy With Gun, Norwegian Commandos, Orbiting Earth

We bring you the Sunday TBB Best of Web links: We go deep into the reasons for the insane culture war atmosphere in the United States, we let mass shooting survivors talk to us and show us their scars, we finally meet a good guy with a gun who saved many lives, we learn about some Norwegian commandos doing a daring raid in World War II and finally we fly orbiting earth and the views are phucking amazing!

TBB Blog Mission: To Educate. Entertain. Inspire. In That Order!

Support TBB by applying for CREDIT CARDS & clicking our REFERRAL LINKS

 

Every Sunday I pick the best reads that blew my mind in the previous week. It can be…anything! I like to be eclectic and despise salesy/clickbait/sameold content you read…everywhere else!

As always, click on the headline to be taken to the original source. Sometimes I insert my incendiary comments on article excerpts between [brackets].

If you enjoy my blog, please pass it on to someone you care about so they can enjoy it too. And do some clicking on the colorful linkies above, thanks!

How Everything Became the Culture War

How have we come to this? To not stand each other? To try to talk to the other side…only to feel like you are talking to a wall…it’s like we are living in two separate universes…or galaxies…or whatever.

This is what the article is trying to answer. It is a MUST read. Of course the conservatives will dismiss it and not give it the light of day. Which is, well, exactly what I am talking about!

If you care to try our best to make this country work for all, for the future of the next generations, lets do our best to…get closer to each other. I always said we both want the same thing deep down…we just differ so vastly how to get there. Just a few excerpts to get you interested to read it.

A decade later, McCain is dead, bipartisanship is just about dead—his funeral felt like the rare exception that proved the rule—and the leader of the Republican Party is a world-class polarizer who mocked McCain’s service while cozying up to Putin on his way to the White House. President Donald Trump has pioneered a new politics of perpetual culture war, relentlessly rallying his supporters against kneeling black athletes, undocumented Latino immigrants and soft-on-crime, weak-on-the-border Democrats. He reverses the traditional relationship between politics and governance, weaponizing policy to mobilize his base rather than mobilizing his base to change policy. And in the Trump era, just about every policy issue is a wedge issue, not only traditional us-against-them social litmus tests like abortion, guns, feminism and affirmative action, or even just the president’s pet issues of immigration and trade, which he has wielded as cultural cudgels to portray Americans as victims of foreign exploiters. These days, even climate change, infrastructure policy and other domestic issues normally associated with wonky panels at Washington think tanks have been repackaged into cultural-resentment fodder.

As long as America keeps sorting itself into two factions divided by geography, ethnicity and ideology, pitting a multiracial team of progressives who live in cities and inner-ring suburbs against a white team of conservatives who live in exurbs and rural areas, this is what debates about public policy—or for that matter about the FBI, the dictator of North Korea and the credibility of various sexual assault allegations—will look like. We will twist the facts into our partisan narratives. The self-inflicted wounds will infect more and more of our lives. And if you want something else to worry about, consider where it might be spreading next.

It’s hard to have serious public debates about the massive changes in public policy that Trump is pursuing, because there’s no longer a clear path for facts and logic to break through the daily onslaught of demonization and obfuscation. We’re too busy fighting to think. It’s especially tough to have an evidence-based debate about an issue like trade when Trump proclaims at one rally that his tariffs have prompted U.S. Steel to open seven new plants, and after fact-checkers point out the actual number is zero, he ups the number to eight or nine at his next rally. He understands that modern political debates don’t depend on facts or logic. Where you stand—on questions of whether to believe Kavanaugh’s accusers and whether there was any collusion with Russia, as well as questions about corporate tax rates or lifetime insurance caps—depends almost entirely on where you sit. Deficits are bad when your team is in charge, benign when my team is in charge. I’m being denied due process by a witch hunt, but you belong in jail. I’m no puppet; you’re the puppet.

This is presumably how entire countries turn into Dumbfuckistan. The solutions to our political forever war are pretty obvious: Americans need to rebuild mutual trust and respect. We need to try to keep open minds, to seek information rather than partisan ammunition. We need to agree on a shared foundation of facts from authoritative sources. But those words looked ridiculous the moment I typed them. Americans are not on the verge of doing any of those things. Once the dogs of war have been unleashed, it’s hard to call them back. And we should at least consider the possibility that we’re fighting this forever war because we like it. [Yep, my first thought was how ridiculous as soon as I read these words, sad!]

Only in this country we would have several people die in a mass shooting (Thousand Oaks) after escaping death in another mass shooting (Las Vegas) a year earlier. How depressing is that!!!

I have always advocated for strict gun control. Just reduce the number of guns. DO SOMETHING to stop this shit! But, make no mistake, I am not going to bet that anything will happen. After Sandy Hook…I mean, even after that…

The Hero of the Sutherland Springs Shooting Is Still Reckoning with What Happened that Day

Hope my conservative readers did not give up yet. Because they will really like this one! Another great article in Texas Monthly. Portraying a good guy with the gun. Finally, we got one after so many shootings! The answer clearly must be to have even more guns so next time it happens a good guy with a gun is nearby to stop it…Yeah, how phucked up is that logic, smh!

Obviously, a really nice family man. Yes he has strong beliefs about guns and deep conservative values. But, in the core, he is a good guy. I think deep down we all are and I hope we can come together again.

How do you overcome being a part of a tragedy like that? I wish you all good luck and pray you are never involved in a tragedy like this!

And I really applaud the editors that they did not post a single photo of the killer! I wish all media did that going forward.

Heavy Water and the Norwegians

I had never heard of this World War II incident!

On 19 November 1942, a pair of Royal Air Force Halifax bombers shouldered their way through thick winter clouds over Norway with troop-carrying assault gliders in tow. Inside each glider a payload of professional saboteurs from the 1st British Airborne Division weathered a rough ride as the planes approached their intended landing site on frozen lake Møsvatn. Somewhere in the snow-encased hills below, a team of Norwegian commandos vigilantly awaited their arrival.

The ultimate objective of the joint mission was to penetrate and incapacitate the Vemork hydroelectric plant, a fortified Nazi facility nestled high in the mountains of Norway. Though the plant’s original purpose had been the production of electricity and fertilizer, the German occupiers were capitalizing on the facility’s ability to collect large amounts of heavy-water— a key ingredient in the Nazi effort to develop an atomic bomb.

What follows is a fascinating account of the commando raid.

Love reading stuff like this!

An Incredible Video of What It’s Like to Orbit the Earth for 90 Minutes

This will blow you away!

And I leave you with this…

TBB
travelbloggerbuzz@gmail.com

Follow TBB on Twitter @FlyerTalkerinA2.

You can subscribe to TBB below, winners only!

Leave this field empty if you're human:

Opinions expressed here are author’s alone, not those of any bank, credit card issuer, hotel, airline, or other entity. This content has not been reviewed, approved or otherwise endorsed by any of the entities included within the post.