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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
Attorney General Barr’s Address on China’s Abuses and Global Ambitions, July 16, 2020 at 11 a.m. Posted to YouTube by PBS NewsHour.
BackChannels folders related to China’s theft of America’s defense, industrial, scientific, and state secrets. Screen capture July 16, 2020 at 11:31 a.m.
China has indeed produced an astounding track record in the regions of human rights abuses, growth through the theft of proprietary processes and technologies developed elsewhere, biological and space weapons development (to knock out western satellites), etc. China’s quiet assault on the west and against dependent states (state predatory lending) has been as broad and complete as can be.
Doing business with Beijing — from anywhere in the world — has turned into bad business worldwide.
Imagine a society in which you are rated by the government on your trustworthiness. Your “citizen score” follows you wherever you go. A high score allows you access to faster internet service or a fast-tracked visa to Europe. If you make political posts online without a permit, or question or contradict the government’s official narrative on current events, however, your score decreases. To calculate the score, private companies working with your government constantly trawl through vast amounts of your social media and online shopping data.
When you step outside your door, your actions in the physical world are also swept into the dragnet: The government gathers an enormous collection of information through the video cameras placed on your street and all over your city. If you commit a crime—or simply jaywalk—facial recognition algorithms will match video footage of your face to your photo in a national ID database. It won’t be long before the police show up at your door.
Most generally speaking, about 99.5 percent of C19 cases do not result in death. Those that do remain associated with age-related vitality and latent and preexisting conditions. Life’s not fair, especially around 55/65-85. The oldest of America’s “Baby Boom” generation has reached a healthy but nervous 75 years. The average age of death in the United States is 78.5 according to the CDC.
On China as an Aggressive, Criminal, and Totalitarian Threat to Liberal Democracy
The United States, at least, loses billions annually in relation to China’s industrial and scientific espionage and the adaptation of proprietary processes and technologies (and not infrequently knock-offs) to grow its markets. It has been also a key and major supplier of precursor chemicals for the manufacturing of narcotics throughout the western hemisphere. Debacles involving computer, radio, and telephony technologies, much underscored by the Huawei’s global issues (e.g., https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/15/tech/huawei-fallout-5g-hnk-intl/index.html – 7/15/2020) involving consumer and defense issues (spying and incursions involving defense-related wavelengths) are real and now part of the western challenge involving the nominally “communist” regime (another issue for another post).
Biological weapons and space weapons (intended to kill western satellites, if and when necessary) appear no longer on the far horizon in defense matters.
Altogether, Sino-American cooperation in place of war would seem to require both a steadfast defense and law enforcement effort as well as some new discussion about political absolutism and totalitarian philosophy. At the moment, as China may be seeking revenge for the humiliations of the Opium Wars — so it doesn’t apply too much manpower to policing the narcotics precursor trade — and for what it may perceive as the intimidation of civilizational ambitions. “Sino-American Relations” are not looking very good.
On Sanctions Involving Select Moscow and Tehran Elites
Let’s not forget how Ali Khamenei made his first big bucks: https://www.reuters.com/investigates/iran/#article/part1 (“Khamenei controls massive financial empire built on property seizures,” Reuters, November 11, 2013. These days, the post-Communist and post-Soviet alliances support Big Rocket Man (trying to reach Israel) and Little Rocket Man (the one making Japan nervous) and Trump has been on it but with perhaps amateur enthusiasm (reference John Bolton’s book, The Room Where It Happened. For post-Soviet Moscow and Tehran, both apparently longing for more barbaric days, sanctions and “maximum pressure” campaigns may not work in a decisive manner, but that doesn’t mean we should drop them (and if Trump should move to ease Putin’s pain, then this blog shift away from any such a fawning, pandering, and placating a move.
Trumps character and character in diplomacy may undermine America’s efforts to defend its own liberal democracy and promote the same worldwide. As much has been America’s mission from its earliest days, days in which the Founding Fathers wrote far out ahead of their own age and its circumstances, and remains its mission in this day when it finds itself sorely tested by dogma, Far Out Left and (predominantly) Far White Right. To have in the President a personality that tends to go its own way — or have its own way — regardless of the advice of the experienced as well as the memory of national lessons learned — seems to represent an unwitting self-sabotage.
Perhaps all that separates Presidents Putin and Trump are America’s still-intact Constitutional checks and balances and related authentic cultural precepts, tenets, and values having to do with equality, freedom, and justice bound to a modern and spacious appreciation of universal human character and potential.
"I came here to support the people of Khabarovsk and their demand for Putin to resign… a person who hasn't fulfilled a single one of his promises," this man says in Pushkin Square, Moscow. "I think he's a typical windbag," he adds. pic.twitter.com/CqH4PYcgrb
The tapped popular perception of both of these heavy handed and extraordinarily wealthy politicians is that each exists to protect his image, his power, and his cronies and may be otherwise concerned with the needs of their respective nations overall to only a minimal extent.
The democracy of the United States of America requires — as do others — a soundly educated population on one hand and (it is this one on the other that’s tough) highly experienced and well educated statesmen on the other. The Republican vote coming for Biden, an “old school” politician with a manner familiar from far better days, will represent a mass of voting against the incumbent Donald Trump, but that will not hack it for American democracy except to forestall its dissolving into another shitty pseudo-democratic dictatorship.
Whoever wins 2020, it will be America’s 2024 election that will spell whether Americans will be governed by a fully responsive and responsible leadership or one bent by measures of dogma, excessive narcissism, and greed.
Donald Trump falsely accused Democrats of trying to “steal” Tuesday’s special election in California amid the Covid-19 pandemic by adding a polling place in one of the most diverse sections of a district.
But the county actually added the polling location at the request of the area’s Republican mayor.
The announcement that Russian President Vladimir Putin won last week’s national vote to rewrite the country’s constitution and allow himself to run twice more for president was not exactly a surprise. Putin has a long track record of winning elections through a mix of genuine popularity, electoral skullduggery, and—most important of all—ensuring that no real alternatives are allowed on the ballot. This most recent plebiscite took Putin-era elections to new depths of meaningless.
Posted to YouTube by Guardian News, July 16, 2018.
If HE hadn’t stepped off blasting away at America’s mainstream media and stable Federal agencies involved with all matters from environment to national security, HE and we might be fine, for BC believes he’s telling some truth these days. However, he has also had his indelible “Helsinki Moment” (above) and his regime (is that too strong a word?) may mirror known authoritarian governments integrated with their own state financial and political elites. The spectacle made by black clad troops herding nonviolent protesters from Lafayette Park (adjacent to the White House) may become a part of the memory of a liberal American generation for whom that kind of White House implemented thuggery — and show and tell with the Bible and Church photo-op — would seem to have been out of step with modern American political norms and values.
Posted to YouTube by The Independent, June 1, 2020.
For the United States with an Administration somewhat mirroring the authoritarianism and white nationalism associated with Moscow, one may wonder if collusion may not be found in aspects of convergence: how different does Trump’s Washington look from Putin’s Moscow?
Posted to YouTube by Guardian News, July 27, 2019.
By any sociological or financial measure, it’s good to be us. It’s even better to be our kids. In our health, family life, friendship networks, and level of education, not to mention money, we are crushing the competition below. But we do have a blind spot, and it is located right in the center of the mirror: We seem to be the last to notice just how rapidly we’ve morphed, or what we’ve morphed into. Related Story
The meritocratic class has mastered the old trick of consolidating wealth and passing privilege along at the expense of other people’s children. We are not innocent bystanders to the growing concentration of wealth in our time. We are the principal accomplices in a process that is slowly strangling the economy, destabilizing American politics, and eroding democracy. Our delusions of merit now prevent us from recognizing the nature of the problem that our emergence as a class represents. We tend to think that the victims of our success are just the people excluded from the club. But history shows quite clearly that, in the kind of game we’re playing, everybody loses badly in the end.
Has the bottom layer of the upper crust, which may be quite Up There in fluff and light, the need for institutionalized nobility even if without title?
For the purposes of cultural and political stability, such a need may be functional, good, and open to entry across America’s colorful quilt, but one may question whether it needs chicanery in the process.
Several EU/NATO states have slid into anti-democratic authoritarian political management, albeit in different ways for different reasons. Hungary, Italy, Poland, and the United States have created cause for doubting the authenticity of democratic processes in their respective domains. While I’ve cherry picked the above links, one may evaluate each independently. With regard to the United States, Evan Osnos, writing for The New Yorker, notes the following:
The latest edition was published last week, and, as you might expect, it recorded the fourteenth straight year of deteriorating freedom around the world; sixty-four countries have lost liberties in the past year, while only thirty-seven registered improvements. (India, the world’s largest democracy, has seen some of the most alarming declines.) Its assessment of the United States is also disturbing. In 2009, the U.S. had a score of ninety-four, out of a hundred, which ranked it near the top, just behind Germany, Switzerland, and Estonia. In the decade since, it has slipped eight points; it now ranks behind Greece, Slovakia, and Mauritius. Looking at the United States, Freedom House analysts note the types of trends that they more customarily assign to fragile corners of the globe: “pressure on electoral integrity, judicial independence, and safeguards against corruption. Fierce rhetorical attacks on the press, the rule of law, and other pillars of democracy coming from American leaders, including the president himself.”
Osnos goes on to more broadly explain the decline of democracy in select states worldwide. For the United States, the broader view takes in Administrations prior to Trump’s.
Nonetheless, the political picture looks grim for Americans facing up to what increasingly looks like the necessity of casting a negative vote in the coming 2020 elections, i.e., voting for a so-so candidate in order to deny the incumbent a longer stay.
Threats posed by Beijing and Moscow to America’s governing principles and way of life should not be dismissed as somehow attached to Mr. Trump who has taken appropriate measures to deal with each, even if ineffectually. The sanctioning of some of Putin’s inner circle, for example, may not have the leveraging effects wanted given the ability to move money and persons around despite the reach of American power, but the status is visible worldwide and unflattering. With Beijing and jousting over trade, there may come the reminder that in a mutually pugnacious negotiation, one’s own side might lose — but that doesn’t make the other side’s position (in this context, Beijing’s) right. In addition to the large maneuvers the public cannot avoid, there are equally large issues involving communication signals and satellites that are more known to specialists than to the public at large.
Such issues will not go away with a Biden win in the coming election and may be exacerbated by it. What may recede are the authoritarian and malign narcissistic bullying, chaos, flailing, and lying — now imagined or real — associated with the incumbent President’s previous actions and current presence, reputation, and style.
Some of my Right Wing Nut friends hate Black Lives Matters, Democrats, George Soros, any compassionate souls qualifying as “Libtards”, and probably just plain puzzled (and suffering) human faces on general terms. While the United States of America heads now into rougher waters — here’s a schematic –>
COVID-19 –> National Stand-Down of Basic Economic Activities (Bars & Restaurants and Events) –> Peonage (Americans in Unsustainable Debt) –> Foreseeable Loss of Hope, Independence, Opportunity, Property, and Stability –> De Facto Enslavement (and more about that on this blog later) –>
–> these same complain about “appeasement” before “radicals” (misguided youth generally among them) when governments stay their forces a moment to give peace a chance and clarify essential battlespace as the opponent has cared to define it. Those old levels of contempt, determination, and penchant for violence may remind us of how differently America works — when it’s working.
From the Awesome Conversation
Internally, Americans accommodate, compromise, and repair conditions through argument, reason, and talk.
None of that compares to “appeasement”.
Where are there foreign actors, however, fitting the label “agent provocateur”, then our tolerance of their presence, or disinterest in it, would amount to appeasement.
In its feudal and narcissistic way, it’s self-centered with the Ummah in mind, but universalized, most statesmen would recognize the problem of having foreign agents in one’s domestic business.
BLM is domestic, somewhat poisoned by old rhetoric, and it may be infected by interlopers, but having become a visible element in OUR politics, it has to have its conversation with other Americans in public.
America’s two “rivals” in international influence and powers, Beijing and Moscow, believe in force and totalitarian control.
We don’t.
We don’t muzzle our critics: we defend protest; we investigate issues and try to bring their components into public view; we face political and social challenges and address them with peaceful but vigorous means. The day we stop listening, arguing, reasoning, accommodating, and compromising, and agreeing is the one on which we have failed as a democracy.
Those we refer to as “extremists” and “violent radicals” believe they have cause and permit to abandon those tenets and achieve their ends “by any means necessary”. Well, it’s at that point that the state must stand firm and take apart what has defined itself as a martial adversary. Generally speaking as regards that kind of “revolution”, the state wins.
If the state has been compromised, corrupted, and weakened from within, well then it may lose.
Even if a politically repressive regime “wins” against an enemy representing the better part of human values, as I believe democracies represent, it loses for being and displaying its ultimately closed, controlling, and destructive character.
Porch Talk at Magic Hour, Annapolis, Maryland, September 4, 2005. (c) 2005, J. S. Oppenheim.
On FB, one reader posed the question, “What’s to like?”
Here’s the BackChannels answer –>
Our system of governance remains strong, i.e., embraceable and not yet hollowed out. I am certain most Americans are counting on America to work some political magic and return the ship to firm and steady sailing. Our present turmoil devolves to our hosting so many authoritarians, extremists, sophists, and zealots that supporting an authentic _and reasoning_ conversation has become nearly impossible. While throwing mud at one another, we seem to be ignoring “America the Beautiful” while melting down in fits of jealousy, greed, and resentment. When idiots have tired themselves out with fighting or raiding — down on the street or up in the boardrooms — then more real people, so one may hope, will come out to sweep up the glass, turn over indictments, produce new law, and so on, and cobble the place back together and refresh it as it should be.
BackChannels 