We haven’t yet finished counting all the votes, and many of us are having feelings that our country, our future, and our possibilities will soon start to vanish into thin air. It feels as if the oxygen is being sucked out of our homes and workplaces, and it is being replaced with an invisible gas that is shrinking our brains. What an inglorious transformation! Visionaries such as Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln are rarely invoked these days; thinkers and doers at all levels are disregarded; builders of scientific wonderments that now rest on other planets and beyond are scoffed; immigrants from the past like Thomas Paine, Rudyard Kipling, and Albert Einstein, all geniuses of words, deeds, and imagination are defiled; inventors, explorers, and moon walkers are laughed at; those who gave their lives on fields of battle are scorned; while the spirits of Katherine Bates and Emma Lazarus and others who dared record inspirational words are pushed aside. Miscreants have stained the good names of those who honor excellence by seeking fealty to our title duo. Others are replacing honor with lies and abandonment, with pretenders to the highest offices in the land—knowing they are mostly untried, untested, and incompetent. It’s as if the rest of us have become victims of another time and place overrun by marauders, hellbent on replacing our way of life, our thoughts, and our dreams with the worst that we can be. They are taking our institutions, our honor, and our most sacred right--freedom--and replacing them with lies, misinformation, and drivel...all without firing a shot.

This is not the land, the people, nor the inspiration that I grew up with. This is bending the arc of history backward in time to places where kings, and popes, and other ne’er-do-wells looked upon citizens as slaves, and beheadings and burnings-at-the-stake as quick solutions to pesky problems. To the commoner, it was an either/or choice: give in or die. History knows it as the Dark Ages.

The ballot box was once a symbol of fair play and a reflection of our national will. No more. It too has been high-jacked. It’s existence is now in peril, as the pages of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 (how to build a dictatorship) now contaminate everything they touch. [Yes, Mr. Dickens: These are the new times that also try men’s souls. And we had damned well better get about repairing and restoring the parts before it is too late].

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Others are busy analyzing how an aging real estate tycoon went about winning an election while also pulling a dozen or more legislative candidates into the win column with him via a bloodless coup de tat that gave him all three branches of our government: the Executive, the Legislative, and the Judicial. Personally, my walking around information gathering antenna tells me that the biggest chunk of their votes came from those who fit the closed-minded profile. That’s not a trait easily verifiable. It looks like stupid. We need to apply our best critical thinking skills to the task of identifying the brain-washed in our fix as opposed to just throwing out the Electoral College. We need to find a better way to tap into duty, honor, country, coupled with life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness a lot more effectively. There is more on this subject to come.

Let’s now turn our attention to the center of this narrative. It is a right-wing organization that has been around since 1973, inappropriately called the Heritage Foundation. Better: “Abandon hope all ye to enter here.”

The Heritage Foundation is at the core of all the political mischief masquerading as intellectualism. They call themselves a “think tank.” In reality, they are scarcely more than a group of physical and intellectual weaklings who want our money without earning it; who also want to take power and keep it flowing to them; and they want to choose our president and all the underlings who are loyal to him. They are funded to the tune of about $100 million annually mainly from 800 of the 835 US billionaires (Forbes, Inc.) who want the river of plenty steadily flowing from us to them. This scheme was fortified in 2010 (Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, 558 U.S. 310 (2010)) in which the US Supreme Court ruled that money was “free speech,” and individuals were free to give as much of it as they wanted to candidates of their choice. Anyone who cannot connect the dots in that scheme is in serious need of counseling.

Briefly, the ultra-wealthy in the US have $150 trillion of wealth. It grows at the rate of 7.2 percent annually, thus doubling in value every10 years. Nearly all of it is unearned and untaxed. And that is how they want to keep things—in perpetuity. In 50 years their total wealth will be 32 times higher.

The Heritage Foundation is but one link in that chain of dishonor. The ultra-wealthy and the entire right-wing of the Republican party make up the rest. There is no intellectual basis for their goals, their methods, or their pronouncements. It’s all greed and fear, capped by ignorance and arrogance.

Truth by Assertion. One of the quickest ways to spot a weak thinker is in his/her use of assertions dipped in flowery language. Go to the Heritage Foundation’s website as a start. It is loaded with assertions. “Help rescue the American Dream” is followed by an appeal to send them money. Technically, they should know. They have been trying to steal it since 1973. Their motivations are”greed and fear.” They love money and all that it can purchase. They dislike fear because it shows in all they do when things are not going their way. But they are organized, and they are predictable—two characteristics that true intellectuals rarely display.

In Project 2025, each of the nominees to high offices in the new administration is greeted with lofty praise. But where are the facts? Where have all these “experienced” professionals been hiding?

I recall that Sarah Palin added extensive international experience to her resume by including travel to Ireland. In reality, she was aboard a plane that had merely landed there to refuel. And, of course, she could see Russia from her front porch in Alaska. Take that, all you beginners who need lots of foreign experiences to fatten your resume. She lost the election but carried home a hefty payday with 10 million copies of her book written by someone else.

The rest is money and votes, and how to get more of each. Put a tie and a jacket on a 40-year old, and suddenly he or she is a seasoned veteran, who has been everywhere and done everything. I think I just nailed VD Vance, Tulsi Gabbard, and Pete Hegseth. I can’t remember the names of the others.

The burning question isn’t about them, per say, rather it is about who, how, and why the American electorate voted for Donald Trump (again!), and why they cheer when his ragtag band of inexperienced boys and girls don’t pee their panties at the thought of each holding down positions that are way over their heads.

What is a Closed Mind?

When was the last time you heard Donald Trump discuss an issue by answering who, what, when, where, how, and why something occurred? Did he also use a lot of documented facts, examples, sources and methods in arriving at limited conclusions that were accurate, reliable, and useful? And did he state his conclusions carefully so that he would not be misunderstood?

If your answer is “never” you understand a lot about critical thinking. And you probably know more about Trump than he knows about himself.

I won’t turn this relaxed format into a scientific paper. I merely want to confirm what a large number of teachers know is true about the American education system. And that is that it seriously lacks critical thinking as one of its most urgent subjects. It’s about how to think, analyze, discuss, evaluate, and arrive at useful answers to life’s issues. Those with open minds do all those things every day. Those with closed minds do not. The important question is “why the differences?”

Closed-minded persons are underachievers, they are stuck at “belonging needs” on Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs; they are not self-actualizers, and they rarely think about the good that they can do for others. They are not stupid. They simply haven’t been taught how to use their brains for solving problems. They rely on authority figures to feed them answers. But authority figures rarely have ready answers other than “shut up,” or “do as I say.”

At a minimum everyone should know this much about open- and closed-mindedness. While I have not researched this subject recentIy, am compelled by experience to proclaim that not one open-minded person voted for Donald Trump in the last election. Not one. Open-minded people do not like liars.

Reboot Foundation

While there are no doubt many good websites available on the subject of Critical Thinking, I am going to recommend only one, It is here: https:\\reboot-foundation.org. It is physically located in Paris, France. And it explains the basics, the current issues, and who to contact when you are ready to change the world and leave it in better shape than the one you found. Or something like that.

Finding answers to issues is much faster today than at any time in the past. That is because of the wide variety of Artificial Intelligence models available today. A simple Google search of critical thinking produced 442,000 hits. That numbers is easily reduced by focusing on these topics:

Here are some websites related to critical thinking:

1. Critical Thinking Web: Offers OpenCourseWare on critical thinking, logic, and creativity.
2. The Critical Thinking Skills Cheat Sheet: Helps you become a better citizen through critical thinking.
3. Zeno’s Coffee House: Provides resources for critical thinking.
4. The Fallacy Files: Offers information on fallacies and critical thinking.
5. Argumentation and Critical Thinking Tutorial: Provides guidance on argumentation and critical thinking.
6. The Idea Emporium: Offers educational textbooks and activity books to develop critical thinking.
7. The Skeptics Dictionary: Provides information on critical thinking and skepticism.

In my way of thinking, the road to Enlightenment is paved by critical thinking. It is not the road to truth. But once you feel the joy of finding the essence of a subject, you will never go back to guesses, hunches, surmise or to anyone’s assertions about anything. You may even find that it is one subject that sets you apart from you own past, while it projects you into the realm of those who came, saw, and mastered something – and changed the world for the better.