Where is one to start taking apart the chaos brought to America by Russian Active Measures, President Trump, the Strident White Right (say it three times fast) — the United States this day has reaped with others less noble, less honorably motivated, have sown.
As neighbors make the neighborhood, who gets into government in relation to whom (and why) should tell Americans and the world quite a bit about what has transpired to bring America’s most patriotic souls — and most delusional as well — to violence, disorder, and this afternoon’s attempt to disrupt Congress, ignore the courts of the land, and to in fact ignore the results of possibly the most well observed and secured election in the history of the nation.
Donald’s mob knows better?
Donald’s mob know nothing!
Try to remember that the United States of America has some deeply experiences, malicious, and sophisticated enemies, Putin’s Moscow foremost with its general “full court press” — broad spectrum hybrid warfare — against EU/NATO’s and all other evidence of western liberalism and authentic democracy.
So there’s Donald’s mob on the steps of the Capitol and in the building shouting “USA! USA! USA!” except what they’re doing is not “USA!”.
What DJT’s mob is doing is “banana republic”, i.e., would-be rule by the most corrupt, violent, and ruthless — and rallying and driving a disorderly mob into government buildings is how that works.
Live at Posting, 1/6/2021.
Reported: Protesters inside the Capitol; tear gas deployed; members of Congress being evacuated with masks on; condemnations all over the news . . . .
We may take some personal defense-related comfort in appropriate firearms ownership . . . and hunting now and then is a healthy good thing — good to be out on the range, beating the brush, getting into some “position” before dawn on the “opener” of deer gun season — but it’s amazing what can be done by nefarious actors with someone else’s imagination.
Excerpt from relatively conservative personal correspondence just this morning, January 6, 2021. Active Measures and massive foreign and domestic disinformation may well account for this latest in off-the-wall American spectacle made this afternoon by a deluded and deliberately lied to political base.
Thousands of President Trump’s supporters are in Washington for rallies Wednesday to falsely assert that the presidential election was stolen from him. Many in attendance see the demonstrations as a last stand for Trump on the same day that Congress votes to certify that President-elect Joe Biden won the election.
Trump — who lost the popular and electoral college vote — continues to dispute the results, without evidence, and has encouraged his supporters to attend the rallies in the nation’s capital. He took the stage about noon to roaring crowds, claiming he had won the election.
Reasoning: America cannot deny her changed posture with Russia since the December 25, 1991 end of the Cold War. The now 26-year term opened handily with cooperation in security and trade, but it appears Moscow’s old habits for authoritarian and central control die hard — or die or fade not at all. Most recent in evidence: Russia’s extraordinary hacking of data rich and powerful Federal institutions.
BackChannels may consider the Nashville Explosion a “follow on”.
What’s next?
As with the 2017 Las Vegas shooting and the targeting of America’s Cowboy Class from the exotically eastern-named Mandalay Bay Hotel (it seems major attacks against the Homeland involve such poetics), one might consider the range both of American Cowboy cities and symbols and otherwise centers of American commercial and defense might and vitality.
The tempo of aggression would seem within Moscow’s control while Americans read of discoveries and events in the news.
Posted to YouTube by Movieclips Trailers, September 25, 2014.
The Soviet Union collapsed in bankruptcy 26 years ago on December 25, 1991. Those who believed in the failed stated, believed also in absolute power with themselves as chiefs of state otherwise known as the Party Nomenklatura. On our side, we believed, however briefly, that the tension between the Capitalist West and an expanding and thieving Communist Russia, the most central sponsor of dictatorships worldwide, including Khomeini’s to come as the Islamic Revolution in Iran, had collapsed as well and that democracy and prosperity would be Moscow’s new fate with the western world.
It hasn’t worked out that way.
President Trump’s own disingenuous remonstrance involving Russia and his undeniable involvement with the Russian Federation tells the direction the Post-Soviet Era has taken, to wit, Russia has become an authoritarian and combined mafia and police state whose elite cook up and swallow money before breakfast while those less connected with Putin and Moscow mumble along without potent representation (even Alexei Navalny in the shadow of his latest poisoning has been forced to serve his Russian constituency from beyond Russia’s borders).
Here is Mikhail Gorbachev in 2016 speaking about the dissolving of his former state —
Posted to YouTube by BBC News, December 13, 2016.
Accusation in a Mirror in One Statement
“That which I intend for you I will claim as your intention for me.”
In its secret life, Putin’s Russian Federation has mounted a challenge to the open democracies of the modern west. In Crimea, for example, it has produced the “Little Green Men” of “Hybrid Warfare” fame (it has also launched audacious cyber attacks against Ukrainian assets). Previously in the United States, it has sought to troll the nation into confusion (read up on “Cozy Bear” or the “Internet Research Agency”). Around the world and still in the domain of a perverse modern warfare, it has managed to sustain “Frozen Conflicts” that serve to inflict continuous insecurity in target states while providing comparatively safe harbors and transit zones for Transnational Crime Organizations (TCOs). Here’s a wrap by international energy consultant Agnia Grigas (2016) —
Posted to YouTube by the Atlantic Council, June 30, 2016.
The Nashville Explosion that took place Christmas morning involved procuring and producing an RV Bomb, arming it in addition with a powerful sound system and patiently programmed tape, possibly including attention-getting gunfire, and it went off in a sufficiently symbolic (there’s that cowboy thing!) location but one also deeply sensitive with AT&T communications infrastructure. Given the day and hour, there was little interest in carnage or sustained drama and attention — there was, when it was over, direct damage to a major American communications hub.
Imagine the same form of attack repeated in one city after another.
Sufficient threat shifts state positions in small and unseen ways, but an attack appropriately interpreted serves as a wake-up that in a democracy calls for “clear, accurate, and complete” public analysis as well as some necessarily immediate, opaque, and sophisticated countermeasures.
Simple Criminal Act — or Act of Terror or Act of War
Perhaps the “Nashville Christmas Morning Explosion” will turn out to be about lone nut case motivated by personal grievance and armed with money and know-how.
You know I’m in real estate, don’t you?
(Not a chance).
Addendum – In Which the Editor Considers Going Into Real Estate
The confirmation of Anthony Quinn Warner as the perpetrator has stalled where it had for Las Vegas shooter Stephen Paddock, i.e., the “why?”.
The story will shift to the mystery woman on the other side of Warner’s “Quit Claim” in L.A., and, as with Paddock, there may still be no official explanation.
Troublesome here: “East-West Rivalry”; the “Whole Russian Thing”; The Location — Nashville, 2nd Street, hard by a critical AT&T communications center; the Christmas morning timing; the planning involved, the mockery (“Downtown”), the labor intensive execution, which had to include the gathering together and assembling of components, including the production of the tape and the creation or recording of the female voice on it.
How do you think you know what you think you know?
Where is the “Deep State”? What is “The Swamp”?
No medieval rumor mill in history competes with the accusations, innuendos, and wild conspiracy theories and faked-up notions promoted by the Far Gone Right.
To date, DT has lost numerous lawsuits for lack of evidence of fraud. AG Barr has rightly refused to walk with him over the cliff into anti-American authoritarian control of the nation by way of narcissistic paranoia and force.
“Your reputation is amazing. I will not let you down,” Trump told Jones, who for years had been pushing a message that “elites” and “globalists” are part of a secret conspiracy that controls the world. “You will be very — very impressed, I hope.”
Wisdom: “He who points the finger has three pointing back at himself.”
“I just learned of absolute incontrovertible evidence of North Korean boats delivering ballots through a harbor in Maine, the state of Maine,” Stone said. “If this checks out, if law enforcement looked into that and it turned out to be true, it would be proof of foreign involvement in the election.”
Maine Secretary of State Matt Dunlap addressed Stone’s claims in a statement to NEWS CENTER Maine Thursday, saying the “vague rumor has absolutely no validity.”
On Election Day 2016, I sat in the passenger seat of Alex Jones’s Dodge Hellcat as we swerved through traffic, making our way to a nearby polling place. As Jones punched the gas pedal to the floor, the smell of vodka, like paint thinner, wafted up from the white Dixie cup anchored in the console. My stomach churned as the phone I held streamed live video to Facebook: Jones rambling about voter fraud and rigged elections while I stared at the screen, holding the camera at an angle to hide his double chin. It rarely worked, but I didn’t want to be blamed when he watched the video later.
What has the medieval world — its views of humanity and related political methods — been doing in our modern one?
Perhaps I’ve been naive about the evolution of the political management of power across time, for I have thought my modern American democracy and its many responsible and responsive institutions the most wonderful humanist and secular invention on earth and in history. However, some beg to disagree with the evolution of the optimal organization of open modern democratic communities, and here are we Americans saddled with surprisingly medieval mobs, an “authoritarian” president (on his way out) and, at least before the recent election, a senate full of head-bobbing lords before his questionable majesty.
Quite often on this theme, I’ve hauled in “Basic Training” — the pledge of America’s civilian and military officials and officers to the Constitution — or, as here, made mention of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, but as this morning’s start brought the following ‘graphs flying off my desktop, well, a copy-and-paste seemed fitting. The first comment addresses the basic issue of having the past dragging the world’s future backward toward what has been known not to work. 🙂 The second excerpt deals with Russia’s 19th Century political ambitions for what should be a thoroughly hopping 21st Century EU/NATO.
From the Awesome Conversation
I’ve come to see the great divide in the management of power as that between feudal-medieval political absolutism underpinned by desperation, dogma, and some propensities for evil and the MODERN open democratic distribution of the same by balanced and checked integrated systems and related processes. I think there’s difficulty in popular understanding of what has been deeply planted in the soul of medieval leadership where one inevitably finds the despotic and malignantly narcissistic among kings, essentially. In the milieu of despots and Presidents-for-Life remains the endowment we have inherited from the “Old World”, and while it is here in us, we are all together still part of an evolving New World. Putin and Xi see no necessity for it. Where one may place the present personalities may well have to do with that “Medieval v Modern” theme.
From the Imperial Period to the Bolsheviks to Putin, Russia has not been able to escape feudal-medieval political absolutism. Worse, is has been able to encourage the same in EU/NATO with reversions in political modality standing out in Hungary, Italy, Poland, and Turkey. Great Britain has been a little mixed up in this too with its reaction to 9/11, post-9/11 attacks, and the Moscow-Damascus driven forced migration from Syria. It too chose to “swell” (as flesh does with stings and other assaults) against greater cooperation with Europe in the interest of sealing and securing its own culture and traditions via BREXIT.
Putin’s promotion of Russia as a pious White Russian Nationalist enterprise belies its own multicultural reality — and you have seen the Grand Mosque opening video from2015 — but for the time being in Russia and the European states mentioned, a resurgent past holds sway.
What we cling to for assurance and safety, no less than mother’s dress, is always somewhere back in time.
I’d say Moscow has had a good and medieval run against an unprepared West, but if the problem is the persistence of the Medieval world in our Modern one, then we may proceed with the greater development of a more modern and democratic world. It’s all a bump on time’s highway, not a permanent turnaround into a much, much less desirable past.
Our nation was born forward of the Age of Reason and designed to defy absolute power in favor of a checked and balanced distribution of power to be managed through democratic methods. The nation has (to this point) succeeded with that. In the regions of personal behaviors, ethics, and morals, it has been generous with tolerance but some part has migrated from raised eyebrows and winks (naughty!) into criminally dark enterprise plainly criminal incidents. Such matters require investigative and Justice Department solutions, not cultural overhauls.
For many in the States, the American breakfast table with its coffee and morning news, the blessing or curse (both) of close family, the coffee and pancakes, and the “hey, Martha, listen to this” off the headlines has been replaced by the wake-up brew slurped by the nation’s (the world’s) keyboard warriors. So it goes, and what caught my eye on Twitter first thing was a tweet (long lost when I tried to find it again) on Cruz assenting to defend Trump’s mind-bending effort to run around the relationship between the state’s voters and Electoral College representatives.
With relation to all of the above, the Far Out Left’s historical power-seizing mantra “By any means necessary!” appears revived on the dark heights of the nation’s Far Wrong Right in its fraud-fishing efforts to have Biden win reversed.
Verbatim but for identification of the thread host.
The inspiration was one of those grievance-laden rants about the Clintons and Obama, Comey, Brennan, Clapper, the Steele Dossier, George Soros, the CIA, the FBI, and “The Deep State”.
It’s not the truth, K. It’s polemic without basis, empirical, factual or otherwise.
Posted elsewhere on this thread . . . but I wanted to reply to you specifically —
Is there the possibility of your being wrong and having been wrong about President Trump and his claims?
There is in politics related to conflict a concept widely accepted as “Accusation in a Mirror”.
On YouTube, Republicans Voting Against Trump (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC03-Q9vq-JyiStTnqasADVg) voluntarily submitted recordings of their most personal political views and the insults and violations of their sensibilities brought to them by Donald J. Trump. Listen to them. Listen to their hearts. They are your fellow Republicans and fellow Americans.
Is there in your heart even the possibility that your information may be wrong and your conclusions faulty?
Social control in our competitor’s state, Russia, often involves medieval agitation and propaganda; today’s America has been deeply divided not by examined issues but by defamation, disinformation, innuendos, and the floating of wild conspiracy theories that just don’t add up or pan out with clinical examination. The post-Soviet (World Peace Council) Far Out Left knows the methods too, but here in the United States, it really has been a kind of Far White Right that has spun up delusion and paranoia in its ranks.
I am certain that more centered and moderate Americans encounter similar rants composed or copy-and-pasted from the Trump base, and I wouldn’t know what to tell them but to battle back the disinformation.
Turning Point USA’s featured meme, November 20, 2020.
From the Awesome Conversation
You are wrong, Turning Point USA.
Qualities of Living (QOL) anywhere involve complex economic, political, psychological, and social arrangements, the same that have states adjusting infrastructure and tax-related variables to attract business (see Foxconn, Wisconsin for an egregious example of bending over frontward) and put populations and jobs together with the help of appropriate transportation systems, none of which are ever without local, state, and Federal government support in one form or another.
It’s good that California is losing population while the host of America’s “activists” and economic developers wrestle with basic floor-level habitability and standards issues.
Of course, California’s compassion, generosity, and wealth have done their job in attracting both labor and predatory elements, but with regard to the latter and the impoverishment and ravaging of the seemingly marginal, the state that also glamorizes its demimonde (see, for example, the film _Barfly_ or, really, just about any modern product playing up the mix of crime and wealth) has drawn exactly what is has created and invited. — I saw Patrick Moynihan years ago at a subcommittee hearing in D.C. on growth, and he noted that the difference between Columbia, Maryland and Calcutta, India was . . . government and planning. He was right. I would add culture and the vision in total of our own humanity. — Sweep California’s social issues off the rug or under it has seemed to me the persistent conservative stance. Perhaps (as complement to other “Turning Point” businesses picking up the broken pieces), engagement with corruption and crime, distribution of population, site-locating of new financial hubs elsewhere (!), and development of small homes communities for those looking for their next California in the interior, would be the better way to go.
For America’s 328-million souls, the “report card” is not that awful but what comes of a kind of geospatial political affliction in population affects the entire nation. Those you seem to need to label as enemies are your fellow Americans, and many among them appear to be engaging issues you just don’t want to see.
The meme’s featured fellow is actually . . . rather clean cut — great teeth, clean clothes, finely photographed!
My confession: life’s a lot cozier and secure viewing the world from my desktop as opposed (for this moment at 65+ at which I need to work on my own “fitness level” before further adventure’s forth) to playing a male Dorothea Lange — and what she saw was the economic migration out to California. However, two examples among the more brave with friends and partners: Mark Horvath documenting the homeless via his work published on Invisible People TV; veteran war photographer James Nachtwey via a Time “Special Report: The Opioid Diaries” (2018). In the world far from the armed and gated bastions of wealthy Californian conservatives — at least a few, I’m sure — “Turning Point” has a different meaning. However, there’s much more than the narcotics trade at work within California producing conditions for social ills and outbound migration. Issues: affordability, crime, desperation, greed, and — out of practical necessity as well as individual personality factors — plain old cold-shouldered inhumanity.
What is to be done?
🙂
For improved Qualities of Living (QOLs) for any Area-Squared, it might help if governments try to balance population with variables associated with basic physical and psychological security. For the troubled floors of myriad urban and rural economies, the only process answer for that is to know who has come from where with what purposes at heart — know thy community — and start to encourage the development of distributed alternative resources for living reasonably, lawfully, and with hope.
I would add here the necessity of serious criminal “filtration” associated with the end-to-end channels of the Transnational Crime Industries. Suffice it to say there are currents and pools of “dark money” all over the world, and all of them scrape from off the streets of the world. With regard to that theme, BackChannels would rather write fiction.
Posted to YouTube March 10, 2019.
“This Tiny Home Community Gives Homeless Veterans A Chance – Working To End Veteran Homelessness” – Posted to YouTube November 27, 2019.
Posted to YouTube June 26, 2020.
Administrative Reality
The data provided by LAHSA showed that 31% of those leaving the shelters went back to the streets and 35% to unknown destinations. An additional 13% found other temporary housing, either with friends or family or in a program; 4% checked into a mental hospital, detox program or nursing facility; 2% went to jail; and seven — less than half a percent — died.
Fewer than half the placements in permanent housing included supportive services, such as case management and housing assistance. Most were in subsidized rentals or with family or friends.
Well, they’re not “invisible” anymore, and they’re providing impetus for innovations in basic minimum housing design, shelter placements and programs, and perhaps thinking about “client” autonomy, character, and drift.
BackChannels 