Hawking Monday’s Post October 24, 2018October 24, 2018 While Trump cages children separated from their parents, calls women “horse face,” promises to send Congress a tax cut this week (Congress is not in session) despite the already-irresponsible tax cuts that have the ice-veined Senate majority leader targeting Social Security and Medicare . . . here are some of the challenges the late Stephen Hawking says mankind faces. His posthumous piece is so worth reading. We are, after all, privileged to be alive in the make-or-break century for our species. (In the previous 2,000 or so centuries, nothing humans did could much affect the species at all, let alone wipe it out.) And: we may have only a very short few years to avoid passing the point of no return — if we haven’t passed it already. Do we really think today’s Republican leadership has the vision and wisdom to meet those challenges? Was the Obama Administration not more thoughtful, as it brought the world together for the Paris Climate Accords and six nations together to denuclearize Iran and seeded so much tech progress with ARPA-E? Facebook occasionally tries to get me to boost my posts. It’s how they make money, I guess. So when they offered me a promotional $5 to boost a post, I added a further $55 of my own (or tried to) to boost Monday’s post — Trump Is Right — to young Republican women in six swing states. This campaign — at $10 per state — was modest, I’ll admit. But even so, it was “disapproved” without explanation. I’m guessing the algorithms we hope will block Russian bots and FSB agents posing as Americans . . . and perhaps totally unsubstantiated conspiracy theories of the Alex Jones variety . . . will be blocking more than that as well. Yes, the post was harsh. But is Trump not all those things I listed? Did Republicans not say about him all those things I quoted? Is the definition of sociopath I linked to out of the mainstream of psychiatric discourse? Know anyone at Facebook we could ask? Vote! Volunteer! Give!