Roger is a long time friend of mine.  We were colleagues at distant universities from 1992 on, and have remained in touch via email.  Roger was a prolific writer in the field of science education, and wrote a ground breaking book, Fallout! about an Australian scientist who spoke out against the British testing of nuclear weapons in Australia.  It was made into a film Silent Storm.

Last night I wrote in response to an email I received from him.  He had sent a photo showing him testing out a boat he had designed, with a llama looking on, and he also mentioned Trump in his note.

Here is my letter to him.

“Looks like a fun outing. How is the boat powered? Was this what you built for your son? It looks like the llama was your lookout (I assume it’s a llama). Many many years ago one of my PhD students & his wife raised llamas on a farm not far from here.

Last night President Obama gave his last speech in front of  a packed audience in his adopted city of Chicago. It was a wonderful speech as his usually are. Our country never deserved him. There will be no one close to him and his family. I consider him one of the best, if not greatest President in my lifetime, perhaps in our history.

And now we have Trump who I call The Authoritarian on my blog. He’s the worst we’ve ever had. But I’m concerned about his penchant for revenge, and his disdain for the press. He lies when he speaks.

Today he gave a news conference but it was a staged event keeping the press at bay. He usually calls out at least one member of the news at any of his event.  He did so at this event. It was a reporter from CNN. He refused to take a question from him, because Trump said that they give us “fake news.”  The fake news he was lashing out about was this.  Last night CNN broke a story that the Intelligence Service briefed Obama and Trump last week about the extent of the Russian interference in our election. In their report, they made it very clear (Very high confidence level) that Russia hacked the Clinton campaign, gave stolen emails to Wikileaks and had a slew of “reporters” who wrote fake and negative stories about Clinton. All of this was on Putin’s orders with the intent of helping Trump get elected.

But last night CNN revealed that there was an addendum to the Intelligence service briefing  that claimed that the Trump campaign had communications with the Kremlin and that the Russians had compromising information on Trump that could be used to blackmail him. Of course Trump denies this, and is furious with FBI & CIA because he thinks they leaked this part of the Intelligence briefing.

We are entering an age that will be marked by the ravaging of our democracy by a president who can’t be trusted, is a serial liar, unpredictable, perhaps mentally ill, and has done nothing for others but everything for himself. When he talks everything comes back to him telling us how great is, that no one else can do the job and don’t disagree with him.

There you have it, Roger. I hope none of this is true. That’s all fake news. But I don’t think it is. At least I’ll have the memory of President Obama.

Kind regards,
Jack