{"id":17521,"date":"2016-06-28T22:26:35","date_gmt":"2016-06-29T03:26:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/?p=17521"},"modified":"2016-06-29T11:06:57","modified_gmt":"2016-06-29T16:06:57","slug":"down-the-rabbit-hole","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/?p=17521","title":{"rendered":"Down the rabbit hole"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>After a few days reflection, I find myself changing my mind about the larger implications of Brexit.  At first I had thought it boded ill for our own nation.  After all, if Great Britain can manage to vote itself down from a major world power to a shrunken frightened little child, then the same could happen here.<\/p>\n<p>But now that the charlatans behind that bizarre maneuver have had a chance to show their true colors, I am heartened.  The mythical three hundred and fifty million pounds paid weekly to the E.U. has vanished in a puff of rhetorical smoke, just as the promised greater investment in British healthcare was revealed to be nothing but empty talk.<\/p>\n<p>After the sad spectacle of Brexit, I had worried that people in the U.S. might also be taken in by a narcissistic no-nothing opportunist who doesn&#8217;t know the first thing about how government actually works.  But now I realize that we have the example of Brexit to show just how embarrassing it is for a country to be taken in by nonsense talk from fools and knaves.<\/p>\n<p>The U.S. now has a clear working example of what happens when racist isolationist opportunists steal the microphone.  At the end of the day, we Americans tend to be a fairly pragmatic people, with a strong instinct for self-preservation.<\/p>\n<p>Which is why I&#8217;m newly hopeful that we on this side of the Atlantic will not follow Great Britain down the rabbit hole of small minded and racist fear mongering.  Because that&#8217;s how a great nation destroys itself.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>After a few days reflection, I find myself changing my mind about the larger implications of Brexit. At first I had thought it boded ill for our own nation. After all, if Great Britain can manage to vote itself down from a major world power to a shrunken frightened little child, then the same could &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/?p=17521\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Down the rabbit hole&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17521"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17521"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17521\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17523,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17521\/revisions\/17523"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17521"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17521"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17521"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}