WAFF-TV is a TV channel, an NBC affiliate, in Huntsville, Alabama, a fast-growing city that is one of the most sympathetic to science and technology in the South. This community led the way for the defeat of Roy Moore (R-AL) in his bid to take over the Senate seat that Jeff Sessions vacated to be Attorney General of the United States. If one controls for ethnicity, this is the most liberal community in Alabama except perhaps for college town Tuscaloosa.
...We are seeing the coarsening of political rhetoric, especially and almost exclusively on the Right. The Left is scared of the illiberal pronouncements of Donald Trump and his willingness to excuse emotional outbursts culminating in personal or potentially mass violence. We are beginning to see people use deadly weapons and unalloyed hatred as expressions of free speech.
Trump and his supporters do not deserve respect. Effective leaders show through their own behavior, including a refusal to take advantage of personal power and authority for their own gain. A military officer learns this early, and someone who understands history to the extent at the least that history is largely wars that the quality of leadership ultimately decides, knows this.
The sumptuous dinners? I'm guessing that anyone with adequate means can enjoy such repasts, but some of them restrain themselves out of a concern for what those repasts can do for their health. A wise person has better things to do in life than die of a heart attack resulting from obesity or from liver disease resulting from alcoholism. The alcoholics that I have known have mostly seemed to be people who avoided joining the world of mature adults, and most of the grotesquely-obese people that I see near where I live are on the brink of destitution if not already there.
