Back to work

[rdonnay]

I have been out of touch with my eXpress++ community for a while due to a full month of excessive hot weather and smoke from wild fires.

Been trying to escape this climate change madness.

About 2 weeks ago my Gmail account was hacked and I had to change my password.
I just now realized that notifications from this board are probably not working.
I will will work on setting up the forum to enable notifications again.

Fortunately, weather is back to a nice autumn temperatures and the air is clear again.
For a person who has asthma, that was a difficult time for me.
I couldn't even talk to people because of sore throat and horseness.

I'm so much looking forward to getting back to work.
There is much work to do and also a great democracy that needs saving.

About 2 weeks ago my Gmail account was hacked and I had to change my password.
I just now realized that notifications from this board are probably not working.
I will will work on setting up the forum to enable notifications again.

[Tom]

There is much work to do and also a great democracy that needs saving.

It is sheer horror to have to realize this as a German, but unfortunately we have almost the same problems here.

Democracies are not as stable as we all thought, and people are much dumber than you can believe. In addition, our electoral systems (especially in the USA) have some weaknesses.

[rdonnay]

I can't seem to get email working any more on this forum.

I did a search to find out how to debug this problem but it's not an easy task.

[rdonnay]

It is sheer horror to have to realize this as a German, but unfortunately we have almost the same problems here.

Democracies are not as stable as we all thought, and people are much dumber than you can believe.
In addition, our electoral systems (especially in the USA) have some weaknesses.

People tend to think that whenever there are great problems to be solved, their country must resort to authoritarian rule. History tells us that there is some truth to this theory and Germany probably still remembers how well it worked in the 1930’s to recover from the depression and failures of World War 1.

I hope that they also remember that absolute power corrupts absolutely, and this never ends well for the people. America also had a movement that appealed to authoritarianism too in the 1930’s but it took another World War to convince the world that only democracies can live together in peace. Democracies do not go to war with each other. How soon we forget how important this is to world peace.

In America, the authoritarian movement today is driven by a political party that wants religious nationalism and wants to repeal the first amendment to our constitution, which protects us from that. The irony, however, is that their leader knows nothing about their religion at all, yet that does not seem to matter to them.