Category Archives: 21st Century Feudal

FTAC From On High: “Jews who vote Democratic . . . .”

16 Wednesday Sep 2020

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, 21st Century Modern, American Domestic Affairs, Canada, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, North America, Politics, United States of America

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I’ve tired quite of Punch the Democrat and Judy the Republican on Facebook. I’ve been at it long enough to abandon the aisle while the mud flies overhead.

This is a short personal take on the present state of affairs in the United State but inspired by a conversation hosted in Canada, I’ve add a small plea for remembering that our seeming adversaries online are also our neighbors, and we used to talk — or we used to be able to talk — with compassion, better than superficial knowledge, and reason with the intent of grappling with difficult cultural, environmental, political, and social issues. That near past seems to me much better than this descent into hurling frequently vicious memes and slogans in every direction.

From the Awesome Conversation

Jews who vote Democratic will do so because it has been Democrats who appear to most care about distressed ordinary Americans. The Dems have blundered terribly with COVID-19, but at least they are asking questions about our cultural and social pathologies and their victims. All that takes is a walk down an urban street.

The President’s leadership in vicious demonizations and of what appears to be a supine Republican Senate has, predictably, inspired some flight into the Biden camp.

The Dems, sadly, carry the burden of the Far Out Left and the Soviet Era Communist legacy in global perception, and that’s killing them here but for one thing: the better comportment of strident moderates like Biden and Schumer (I don’t really know the camp, but I’m tired of the Republican Senate, and that’s coming from an initially conservative position in all of this).

All of this has been complicated by the COVID-19 response (please note that my liberal state’s governor is a Republican, and we have been shut down as much as any) and the creation of conditions for the peonage (slavery by way of mounting personal debt) of millions of Americans of both parties. The political reaction on both sides of the aisle: throwing money (or borrowing and spending) into the air to encourage evidently set allegiances.

We should wake up in America and Canada to regard our conversational adversaries as Americans and Canadians rather than North American extremists who (somehow) aren’t like ourselves.

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FTAC: Trump — The Bad News President

28 Friday Aug 2020

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, 21st Century Modern, American Domestic Affairs, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation

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In Trump’s World, power has in part turned out the power to condemn and demean without substance: “Fake News!” “Crooked Hillary!” “A real nut job” (referring to James Comey while chatting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Ambassador Sergey Kislyak in 2017), and so on. Applying the most medieval, primitive, and tribal of techniques — name calling! 🙂 — it should come as no wonder that an admirer suggest he must have a second term with which to prosecute those whom he has capriciously accused of wrongdoing.

From the Awesome Conversation

Addressing he who had named names (like Hillary Clinton) that had been marked for investigation at Trump’s behest —

They’re not criminals.

Trump is this man: https://www.northjersey.com/story/news/columnists/mike-kelly/2020/01/24/donald-trump-still-owes-money-to-contractors-who-built-taj-mahal-atlantic-city/4547037002/

Trump is the man who inspired books like this one: https://www.amazon.com/Room-Where-Happened-White-Memoir/dp/1982148039 — and this one: https://www.amazon.com/House-Trump-Putin-Untold-Russian/dp/152474350X They are both extraordinary books, well documented, clearly told.

Trump has been the kind of man who fires people like this: https://conflict-backchannels.com/2019/11/17/marie-yovanovitch-the-kind-of-person-president-trump-fires-from-his-administration/

Trump is the kind of man who hires for a campaign manager someone like this one: https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/402125-manafort-guilty & https://gothamist.com/news/convicted-felon-paul-manafort-indicted-on-new-fraud-charges-in-new-york

Trump expected criminal behavior from this guy — and got it: https://www.cnn.com/2019/02/27/politics/michael-cohen-donald-trump-oversight-committee-russia/index.html

Trump, the working man’s President, couldn’t wait to brag the line reported here: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/12/you-all-just-got-a-lot-richer-trump-tells-friends-at-mar-a-lago-after-signing-tax-overhaul

Trump has inspired his opposition from within the Republican Party: https://www.youtube.com/c/RepublicanVotersAgainstTrump/videos — and every single video represents someone who has been for a long time conservative, Republican, and conscionable.

You gotta love who he lets into his buildings: https://newrepublic.com/article/143586/trumps-russian-laundromat-trump-tower-luxury-high-rises-dirty-money-international-crime-syndicate

I’ve started to wonder what kind of people now insist on defending Trump.

Trump’s acumen as a businessman has been legendary — https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/donald-trumps-business-failures-were-very-real — and possibly nowhere more so than with New York’s attorney general whose legitimate investigations (acknowledged so by the Trump organization) have been so far stymied by lack of cooperation (https://ag.ny.gov/press-release/2020/attorney-general-james-takes-action-force-trump-organization-comply-ongoing) .

Perhaps some here will reconsider the purpose of having caged themselves in the reactionary echo chamber of conservative and once moderate politics.

Related Online

URLs, as above, conveyed without fanfare (life (‘s short — and for this editor speeding past 65, getting shorter).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nicknames_used_by_Donald_Trump

https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-trump-comey-insults-20180415-htmlstory.html (5/10/2017)

https://www.rollcall.com/2018/08/02/top-10-trump-nicknames-and-why-they-stick-to-his-foes/ (8/2/2018)

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Suggested Thoroughly Independent End-of-Summer Reading for Lovers of Freedom, Knowledge, and Western Civilization

20 Thursday Aug 2020

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, 21st Century Modern, Books, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology

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Summer Reading, Hunter Hill, Hagerstown, Maryland, August 20, 2020

This post has been on my mind for at least a month and rather held up by the sorry habit of reading “long form” in bits and pieces. Advancing age, declining energies, the web’s own “Electronic Attention Deficit Disordering”, and the plain fact that I’ve reached about the final less-than-third of life’s journey surrounded by a personal library (of about 2,250 volumes) offering me more choices for reading than may be read or re-read toward the looming end account here for my relaying more of what might be helpful to fellow travelers than I have taken in myself.

However, I have read each of these suggestions in part or whole — and if in part have bookmarked — and have been trying to transition from “Life Online” (how it has turned out thus far) to more of the aesthetic and literary manse beloved ever by romantics and old souls.

Dictatorships have powerful tools in capricious censorship, denunciations, frames (how the despotic present issues as well as rivals for power and targets for crushing), and, ultimately, force by threat and by violence. By comparison, democracies would seem soft with conscience, empathy, and sentiment — and not much else before the armed might of absolute state power. Nonetheless, how much abuse must democratic constituencies take before facing the choice of withering before despotic forces or standing up to them?

Were it not for the desperation, greed, ignorance, and laziness of our own — and perhaps ourselves — we may not have reached this point where the apparent most patriotic and pious of Americans may have put into power the most questionable and selfish representative of America’s reactionary wealthy. Well, we’re sure in it together now and might wish to clarify what it means to be Americans and what it may mean to govern ourselves with more adult comprehension, selfless wisdom, and a much, much greater magnanimous and shared American spirit.

Applebaum, Anne. Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism. New York: Doubleday, 2020.

Bolton, John. The Room Where It Happened. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2020.

Hitchens, Christopher. Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2006.

Paine, Thomas. Collected Writings: Common Sense, The Crisis, and Other Pamphlets, Articles, and Letters. Rights of Man; The Age of Reason. Eric Foner, Editor. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1995.

Soros, George. In Defense of Open Society. New York, Public Affairs, 2019.

Soros, Tivadar. Masquerade: Dancing around Death in Nazi-Occupied Hungary. New York: Arcade Publishing, 1965.

Stawrowski, Zbigniew. “Is Democracy Moral?” Church Life Journal, October 25, 2019.

Stewart, Katherine. The Power Worshippers. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020.

Posted to YouTube by KEXP, September 15, 2009.
Posted by Republican Voters Against Trump, August 18, 2020.

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America for Sale?

10 Monday Aug 2020

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, 21st Century Modern, American Domestic Affairs, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Philosophy

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How does one go about purchasing the United States of America?

First ruin it.

Give it a bad cold.

Shut it down.

Throw the lesser capitalists out of their own small businesses; throw their employees out of their jobs.

Next: take their your own profits in trade and purchase what the little people couldn’t hold.

It’s a free world, financially speaking, after all.

And funny thing — more and more (of everything – businesses in bankruptcy, related debt, foreclosures, even people) will may be coming up for sale as debt rises and capacity to return both interest and principle diminishes.

Related on BackChannels: “FTAC: COVID-19: The West’s Big Blunder”, May 10, 2020.

Related Online: “China: A loan shark or the good Samaritan?” DW, May 9, 2019; “How much U.S. Debt Does China Own?” Investopedia, Updated January 15, 2020; “The U.S. is About to Vastly Increase Its Debt. That’s a Good Thing” by Neil Irwin for The New York Times, March 27, 2020 —

“One of the primary reasons to be fiscally responsible during periods of economic expansion is to have the capacity to fight downturns or emergencies,” said Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. “This is precisely the kind of moment, where borrowing is warranted and necessary, that we should have been preparing for over the past years.”

Even if the Big Picture looks good, the financial suffering attending the country’s COVID-19 response and related response to that on the street may nonetheless continue degrading productivity and the sustaining of wealth in short order. One may wonder with what might be coming whether the complacent “we shall see” really hacks it for the public.

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FTAC: A Short Note on the Demonizing of George Soros

08 Saturday Aug 2020

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, 21st Century Modern, American Domestic Affairs, Anti-Semitism, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Epistemology

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That a certain portion of conservative and reactionary Republicans have chosen to develop and spread lies about George Soros — it’s practically an industry — comes as no surprise. Push-back, however, seems to me comparatively rare. The Political Correctness of the Far White Right immediately demonizes those who would defend the billionaire’s spacious philanthropy on behalf of authentic democracy, freedom, and progress.

The post that follows came about through involvement in one such conversation.

From the Awesome Conversation

Soros’s funding engages and liberates. Some of the people you hate so much appear to be fashionably “Marxist” but in fact hustling capitalist and modern Americans themselves, but they are leveraging substantial American challenges (involving bigotry) into careers.

The Anti-Defamation League has commented twice in the past two years on the demonizing of George Soros: https://www.adl.org/blog/the-antisemitism-lurking-behind-george-soros-conspiracy-theories & https://www.adl.org/blog/soros-conspiracy-theories-and-the-protests-a-gateway-to-antisemitism.

Sometimes, some features of the “New Nationalism” and its Christian focus may remind many of the mission taken up by Gerald L. K. Smith (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_L.K._Smith) and his own (failed) “America First Party” — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/America_First_Party(1943).

BackChannels has come to regard the co-founds of Black Lives Matter as fashionably “Marxist” — the term has been overplayed as a dog whistle for the nation’s reactionaries — but in fact deeply “capitalist” — i.e., making their way — as modern moral entrepreneurs, each uniquely engaged in the address of the more stubborn aspects of America’s issues with class and race.

https://www.ted.com/speakers/alicia_garza

https://www.ted.com/speakers/opal_tometi

https://www.ted.com/speakers/patrisse_cullors

With the Trump Administration playing up the term “Antifa”, some easily seduced may come out to play, as it were, and by doing so actually create an organized and visible Antifa movement, but for the most part, such claims have been Big Lies and undeniably fake news, e.g., “FBI did not say teacher is the most common occupation of antifa activists” (Ali Swenson for AP, July 9, 2020).

The Trump Administration lies to Americans — not as yet a still conscionable FBI (please do look up “FBI, Antifa” up to this day (August 8, 2020) and let BackChannels know of any substantiation of claims about either “Antifa” and “Black Lives Matter” as the direct drivers of protester violence.

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Dr. Fauci Is Not . . . .

01 Saturday Aug 2020

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, 21st Century Modern, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology

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Perhaps by overreacting to the Man Above It All — or HE who believes he is — we have been following Dr. Fauci.

Dr. Fauci is not a businessman.

Dr. Fauci is not an economist.

Dr. Fauci is not (yet) among the line level workers in entertainment and retail services damaged or shuttered by compelled COVID-19 mask-wearing and social distancing “requirements” driven by generally unconstitutional administrative and Draconian edicts.

Dr. Fauci is not a politician.

Of America’s population of 328 million souls, more than 2.813 million Americans die annually of all causes.

Morbidity associated with COVID-19 remains associated with ageing and preexisting conditions.

Note that in the post-WWII “Baby Boom” generation, America has the certain challenge of retiring and burying within the next ten to twenty years an entire generation of notable Americans and the more general “population bubble” that has been theirs through life. The oldest of that generation is today 75 years old.

Dr. Fauci has been a myopic public health policy analyst whose mission has been restricted to preventing the spread of disease and thereby saving or extending lives. That has been a laudable crusade, but as thrown “candy” (Trumpian stimulus checks) fall short of needs and state unemployment support or related systems also fall short or fall away, lives may be lost to increasing crime and suicide as desperation and inevitable displacement become American realities.

Worse: COVID-19-related peonage — mass indebtedness — may lead to a new unconscionable enslavement of formerly independent Americans. Keep in mind this failure, so far, from the Trump Era — Foxconn, Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin. Related: “Foxconn Suicides”, Shenzhen, China.

Whatever the nominal economic doctrine in force, all depends on the taxing or taking of tribute from the various sources of economic productivity. As productivity, however defined, diminishes, the value in tax or tribute diminishes. In the integrated social capitalism of the west, contraction within the tax base first pressures and then diminishes also necessary and responsive public service. Entire systems of civil order and the orderly and prudent distribution of a responsible government’s portion of wealth and the obligations built around its abilities risk collapse while inviting even more disastrous “disequilibrium” and “revolution” — and criminal activity in the name of it.

Had America a leader in which The People had invested both confidence and love, we might well have faced our fears, built our capacity to treat COVID-19 cases (without wrecking other hospital services in the process) and, alas, to briefly store and bury the related dead, albeit at a pace not much higher than normal and expected. With a President who has outraged the nation, alienated a growing population of conservative Republicans, and made enemies — even when he tells the truth! — with every other tweet, that leadership appears doubtful.

Perhaps by overreacting to the Man Above It All — or HE who believes he is — we have been following Dr. Fauci.

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Greed is Good! Hmm. Just Kidding

01 Saturday Aug 2020

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, 21st Century Modern, A Little Wisdom, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation

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From the Awesome Conversation, a comment on greed in America and American domestic and foreign policy —

Greed can and will kill the credibility and promise of the USA if the constituency abandons its Constitutional, ethical, and moral obligations and principles. The state will either evolve forward toward greater achievement and enlightenment or it will simply fall backward to the repeated of lost eras more delightful, if that, in memory then tenable in reality.

Bonbons or bon mots, what do with a nice ring than put it up on the web for a few to contemplate momentarily.

Gecko’s “Greed is good!” speech from the Wall Street film provided the prompt for the response (“FTAC” on this blog) — and the response is true: the three “superpowers”, lumbering sumo that each may be, have each autocrats for chiefs. One appears to seek the renewal of dynasty and empire; another appreciates the glory and grandeur of more vicious imperial days; and the last appears to believe that money is existence and existence money, and that is all we know and all we need to know.

😦

Compared to futurists, science fiction writers, and the advanced of 21st Century political and religious philosophers (well, maybe Thomas Berry), they’re kind of dumb and looking that way even cushioned by muscle and planted in luxury.

More —

How much is enough?
Enough to make us feel secure and happy.
How much is too much?
So much that the more we have of it, the less it fills our own wells made empty by the sense of our own shortcomings and related psychological and spiritual bankruptcy and exhaustion. More than enough becomes never enough.

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Russian Active Measures, Donald Trump, and Either Evil or Gullible Americans (Or Both)

22 Wednesday Jul 2020

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, 21st Century Modern, American Domestic Affairs, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Epistemology, Political Psychology, Political Spychology, United States of America

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Active Measures — The collection of Russian Agitation, Disinformation, and Propaganda Methods made evident through covert or subtle Influence Campaigns applied to wrecking the political coherence and cohesion of EU/NATO for the purpose of reestablishing Political Absolutism in the same and then using the most thuggish of feudal and medieval methods to leverage loyalty and wealth from them for contribution to the Greater Imperial Glory of Moscow, the Russian “mafia state” it has come to represent, and the immense enrichment of its oligarchy.

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2020/02/13/active-measures/

Kaplan, Alex. “Trump has repeatedly amplified QAnon Twitter accounts. The FBI has linked the conspiracy theory to domestic terror.” Media Matters, August 1, 2019.

Iyengar, Rishi. “Twitter takes down 7,000 accounts linked to QAnon.” CNN Business, July 22, 2020.

From the above references, one might suggest that in or with President Donald J. Trump, Washington, like Moscow, has had some kind of energized disinformation factory. It may not be the President’s factory, but he has encouraged and endorsed baseless conspiracy theories and the most disingenuous innuendo involving his political enemies.

Among the more stunning of this morning’s headlines: “The White House is pushing a conspiracy theorist fired from the NSC for a top Pentagon position” (CNN Politics, July 20, 2020).

Related: Winter, Jana and Elias Groll. “Here’s the Memo That Blew Up the NSC.” Foreign Policy, August 10, 2017. Here’s a key excerpt —

Trump is being attacked, the memo says, because he represents “an existential threat to cultural Marxist memes that dominate the prevailing cultural narrative.” Those threatened by Trump include “‘deep state’ actors, globalists, bankers, Islamists, and establishment Republicans.”

The memo is part of a broader political struggle inside the White House between current National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster and alt-right operatives with a nationalist worldview who believe the Army general and his crew are subverting the president’s agenda.

https://foreignpolicy.com/2017/08/10/heres-the-memo-that-blew-up-the-nsc/

Foreign Policy has the full memo embedded in its account.

Said Rich Higgins back in February: “Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman wasn’t the first staffer to be fired from President Trump’s National Security Council and escorted from the premises by security. I went through the same ritual on July 21, 2017. But in contrast to Col. Vindman, I lost my job because I was loyal to the president” (by Rich Higgins for WSJ Opinion, February 12, 2020).

Well, here in an NYT lead (by Julie Hirschfeld Davis, August 11, 2017) is evidence of what Higgins thought was necessary for pleasing President Trump —

WASHINGTON — A cabal of leftist “deep state” government workers, “globalists,” bankers, adherents to Islamic fundamentalism and establishment Republicans are conspiring to remove President Trump and impose cultural Marxism in the United States, according to a former White House aide whose darkly worded memo detailing the alleged conspiracy got him removed last month from the National Security Council.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/11/us/politics/rich-higgins-memo-national-security-council.html

Who has placed themselves behind the QAnon distribution?

Who has been reading and ingesting the garbage?

Who among Americans believes everything an American president might care to tell them (especially this American president)?

Bigoted, fake, weak, willful and enamored, apparently, of the kind of powerful others known to the west as dictators, who, aware of the pain he has caused others through multiple bankruptcies and countless and apparently limitless lies can respect him out of love rather than fear?

Have some Americans been so duped and convinced of “HIS” nobility in character that they cannot admit to themselves that they may have been fooled?

Americans will now have to educate themselves in relation to the collected legacies of the nation without regard for immediate resources and public or private channeling. To have become this ignorant, this vulnerable, to such an ignoramus: politically and socially obscene and tragic.

Related Online

Alba, Davey. “Debunking 4 Viral Rumors About the Bidens and Ukraine.” The New York Times, October 29, 2019.

Oppenheim, James S. “FBI, ANTIFA, and Swamp Gas.” BackChannels, July 1, 2020.

Oppenheim, James S. “The Confidence Man — He’ll Tell You Anything.” BackChannels, November 23, 2019.

Stanton, Zack. “You’re Living in the Golden Age of Conspiracy Theories.” Politico, June 17, 2020.

Venook Jeremy. “20 Conspiracy Theories Trump Has Pushed Before and During His Presidency.” Center for American Progress Action Fund, May 19, 2020.

Regarding President Trumps big dumb “Crowdstrike” attempt at misdirecting the attention of the American public —

Gramer, Robbie and Amy Mackinnon. “Impeachment Trials and Conspiracy Theories: A Match Made in Hell.” Foreign Policy, January 24, 2020.

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