Regarding “The Morning Gloss” (have you Glossed yet?) 🙂 , it should be evident that I have been fiddling with how to deal with the earliest portion of each day’s barrage of impressions involving the mediation of reality.

What should one get out of the comparatively isolated experience of sitting at a desktop computer (or other device) absorbing opinion and reportage from around the world?

Where is one to dwell?

In some ways, the shine has come off the Internet with familiarity and the formation of routines involving it. Politics, pizza, porn, and groceries plus unlimited other shopping have not only brought worlds to my eyes but (within the bounds of both law and preference for an honorable existence) to my door.

For all the improvements . . . where has been the improvement?

So with an electronic node on the pulse of the world as well as options for enjoying someone else’s ride through the countryside (virtual drives), I am with age approaching decluttering, downsizing, essentializing — not minimalizing: one may still enjoy having options within every common category of accoutrement, hobby, and tool — and the melancholy but necessary business of cleaning up after one’s own life.

What to do with BackChannels?

Rather than answer, my first inclination is to retreat some from “life online”, return to reading at length for depth and insight as well as the pleasure of it when in the company of accomplished authors and poets.

We are very few of us — analysts, bloggers, researchers — possessed of power beyond our insights and perspectives, and I would guess many prefer as I do a healthy solitude.

–33–

By the Editorial Board of The Washington Post:

The events of the past week in Virginia mark a dark new stage in President Trump’s effort to turn federal law enforcement into a personal tool of oppression and vengeance. He is undermining a core promise of the American justice system: the fair and equal enforcement of the law.

On Thursday evening his handpicked federal prosecutor for the Eastern District of Virginia, Lindsey Halligan, obtained an indictment of the former F.B.I. director James Comey on highly dubious charges. The indictment came just four days after Mr. Trump installed her on an interim basis and just days before the statute of limitations on the charges would have expired.

The charges were filed in the eastern district of Virginia only after Erik Siebert was forced out as US attorney for reportedly finding no grounds to indict Comey. The justice department replaced him with a Trump loyalist with little prosecutorial experience, Lindsey Halligan, and shortly after, a grand jury indicted Comey on one count of making a false statement to Congress and one count of obstruction of a congressional proceeding.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/26/james-comey-indictment-reaction

About Lindsey Halligan

Before she was sworn in Monday as interim U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, Lindsey Halligan, a 36-year-old former White House aide and Florida insurance lawyer, had no prosecutorial experience. Less than four days into her new role, she brought charges against former FBI director James B. Comey, despite the objections of career prosecutors that there was insufficient evidence to do so.

Scraping’s the worst . . . but every look-see into the paranoid delusional work of the world’s now foremost malignant narcissist tells of the methodical degrading of American law, national security, and power. Donald Trump has become his own worst enemy, inspiring contempt, not respect, for his unchecked authoritarian stance and the cowardice and sycophancy required for him to achieve and sustain it. His persecution of James Comey — criminals hate investigators and judges — will play before a cognizant and reasoning public, and he will find his place in memory beside Hitler, Mussolini, Putin, and Stalin–only he will be judged more backward, cowardly, deranged, and smaller than any of the others on which he appears to have modeled himself.

On X: https://x.com/JS_Oppenheim.

–33–

Call it the Morning Gloss: The American Prospect kneecaps the Trump Administration in relation to other sordid episodes involving corruption at the Department of Justice; in the same feudal-medieval mafia Donald dimension, the indictment of James Comey plays this morning as another act of his personal brand of retribution and the further degrading of America’s governance; for The Washington Post, Emily Yahr recaps Jimmy Kimmel’s triumphant 6.2 million viewer return to the televised and streaming stage; Global Trends, a national security contemplation of global threats published every four years has been found politically inconvenient by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and therefore eliminated;

If you are an American, I don’t care who you voted for, but I might care about what you voted for if you didn’t mean to vote America’s secular democratic republic out of business.

This sort of American bigotry, a product of Adolph Trump’s fondness for the manipulation of American white Christian nationalists, AKA American White Supremacists and related political and racial species, appears typical: “The latest target of the Trump administration is one of the world’s most influential foundations, funded by one of the right wing’s foremost boogeymen: George Soros.” For additional background on Soros: https://conflict-backchannels.com/2020/08/08/ftac-a-short-note-on-the-demonizing-of-george-soros/.

Humor Helps

—33–

“All general officers in command in grade O-7 through O-10 and their general officer senior enlisted advisers are directed to attend within operational constraints,” the order states, according to one person who saw a copy. O-7 through O-10 refers to the military’s classification for all generals and admirals.

None of the people who spoke with The Post could recall a defense secretary ever ordering so many of the military’s generals and admirals to assemble like this. Several said it raised security concerns.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2025/09/25/hegseth-generals-quantico-meeting/

I love speculation in fiction; I hate it in reportage.

However, there are possibilities: will Donald Trump exact an oath of loyalty to himself from America’s admirals and generals?

Is Trump preparing for a civil war?

Or a war with Russia?

Whatever announcement, cause, or program Donald Trump has in mind, it’s certain to be adverse to America’s national security in the dimensions of force readiness — the senior leadership will be in Quantico (so The Washington Post reports) — and possibly force cohesion and trust if or as as the assembly of commanders suffers dismissals on the spot.

Being American: United States of America — Basic Training

–33–