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.
We are sitting ducks for either external aggression or continued self-immolation.
More than 41 million Americans are jobless. In the coming weeks temporary eviction moratoriums are set to end in half of the states. One-fifth of Americans missed rent payments this month. Extra unemployment benefits are set to expire at the end of July.
What is Trump’s response? Like Herbert Hoover, who in 1930 said “the worst is behind us” as thousands starved, Trump says the economy will improve and does nothing about the growing hardship. The Democratic-led House passed a $3TN relief package on 15 May. Mitch McConnell has recessed the Senate without taking action and Trump calls the bill dead on arrival.
It’s an unpleasant reminder but let’s go with it: you are looking at policeman Derek Chauvin methodically, professionally even, take a knee to the life of small time criminal George Floyd. The world would interpret this image in racial terms–just like that, we’re in South Africa when power was white and slavish labor was black.
However, these two knew one another as bouncers in the same bar. Could something else have been taking place?
Also, Floyd’s wife, now divorcing him, was not white but Asian from Laos. Might we be witnessing an expression of sadistic dominance on the part of a bouncer and cop with a track record involving the applying of excessive force?
Call that 2020 hindsight and in philosophical rather than political sense, conservative (forensic) reason.
China’s Democrats, Russia’s Republicans?
Oh, the accusations — and each the reflection of the other!
Biden & the Socialist Far Out Left Democrats: everybody stay home (unless your importance and wealth justifies the hop to a good dinner somewhere else). We’ll shutter your business, put your employees out of their jobs, and worry about repairs later.
Sure they will.
Trump & the Fascist and Strident Far (White) Right: everybody back to work, but we’re not going to cover your losses (why should we? We’re wealthy and comfortable and take care of ourselves: what the hell happened to you? And sorry to hear it. Tough luck).
And the colored girls sing . . . .
Vanessa Paradis – Walk On The Wild Side [Lou Reed].
So, white girls, black girls, transvestites, LGBTs in general and all other Americans who might wish to be as God made them — or they chose to make themselves — what has happened to muscular Christianity in the U.S.A. Is it running the show? Is it losing the show? Has it found the secular humanist design of American democracy overrated and in need of a good strong power fix? America’s fear of America’s Old Money and its Puritan and other of the nation’s Christian cultural pillars seems at times in the mix as well.
Has the Great Society failed?
Regarding Biden : China and Trump : Russia, there should be no question that each has both a posture and relationship opposite the other on China and Russia. For the skinny on Trump and Russian entanglement, one may pick up Craig Unger’s findings here: https://www.amazon.com/House-Trump-Putin-Untold-Russian/dp/152474350X . Both China and Russia have made perhaps superficial moves toward the west in recent decades but have also reverted to their civilizational souls in regard to governance, power, and pride plus vanity.
China’s Communist Totalitarianism may be linked by the American Right to the latest edition of the nation’s Far Out Left (those socialist, communist, weirdo rebels!).
It doesn’t make much sense but suits for demonizing the Left.
The Left’s case against the Far Right and President Trump’s temporarily phantom (off-stage) relationship with Russia has more meat to it in blood-and-soil (white) nationalism planted in Christian conservatism and flag waving militarism. The formula established in Russia by Putin that has had a resurgent Russian Orthodox Church (funded by alcohol and tobacco revenue) beside an active military (capable of bombing undefended Syrian hospitals to smithereens) hasn’t really worked for Russians in any broad and modern sense: the might of church and state power may serve for some superficial pride in earlier grandeur and spirit, but the same, on the whole, would seem to serve Putin and his preferred company and not general and national economic redevelopment.
A “New Nationalist” United States may work differently by way of the long-term managing of the nation’s development in ways that have been over time culturally and geographically comprehensive and inclusive. One might say the pork barrel distribution of defense and development funds worked, and as long as tax revenues recycled through the nation’s economy, people worked too — and in both civilian and defense industries and downstream enterprise.
In any case, the return to feudal political absolutism in the three superpowers is something BackChannels will have to tackle in the future. For now, the felt insult of an authoritarian handling of Americans seems to be producing both the impression of a magically-thinking Left and a boot-in-the-face American Right, neither of which seem very American at the moment.
American Police Shooting at Journalists
I cannot remember a day — never! — in which American police, any, took aim at the faces — or cameras — of journalists, well marked, to inflict harm in the crowd control process.
My eye can open just a smidge and it looks like the iris hasn’t changed color. Stitches are healing nicely. Doctors are pleased so far. pic.twitter.com/YczeQko3lS
What’s that like, being shot at by your own fellow Americans?
This infamous event involved the Ohio National Guard and produced a national conscience and passion opposite intentions to quell protests. Unknown to the students, the Soviet Union had put $1 billion dollars into funding their anti-war efforts.
“On this day: Four killed in Kent State shooting” (May 4, 1970).
How all of the above looks today, a part of the plastering of culture-altering dramas — “The Pandemic!” — Remember that one from, like, you know, a week ago? and now “Race Riots!” How long before the Next Big Thing sweeps this latest news into dimming (and crowded) memory?
“Scenes from protests, riots across the U.S. after killing of George Floyd” – CNBC Television.
The police appear to be taking and following orders.
However, given the glimpse of the above violence shown an accredited reporter and photographer, however casually dressed, are they defending America’s Constitution — or making the first small violent motions in the process of killing it?
— On Thursday, Gov Abbott said in a news release: “Throwing Texans in jail who have had their businesses shut down through no fault of their own is nonsensical, and I will not allow it to happen.”
“That is why I am modifying my executive orders to ensure confinement is not a punishment for violating an order. This order is retroactive to April 2nd, supersedes local orders and if correctly applied should free Shelley Luther.” —
In a letter to state District Judge Eric Moyé, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton called Shelley Luther’s sentencing outrageous.
“The trial judge did not need to lock up Shelley Luther,” Paxton wrote. “His order is a shameful abuse of judicial discretion, which seems like another political stunt in Dallas. He should release Ms. Luther immediately.”
“As a current Member of the Bar, you certainly should be aware of the impropriety of this contact, as prohibited by Canon 3(b)(8) of the Texas Code of Judicial Conduct,” the letter to Paxton stated. “In this context, for you to “Urge” a Judge towards a particular substantive outcome in this matter is most inappropriate and equally unwelcome. Please do not communicate with the Court in this manner further.”
The cover of a national medical emergency — and so the emergence of COVID-19 was that for a brief period — made way for the absolute power of governors (whose states have rightly had jurisdiction over emergencies within their boundaries) who then got their constituents to shutter their businesses and leave their jobs, willingly or not, in the name of containing the (uncontainable) contagion. Now has come the time to reverse tracks, assess and address the damage done, and get America fully back to work — and then some.
Some rote —
More than 7,700 Americans die every day from all causes, for America’s annual rate of morbidity has been about 2.813 million souls annually (may all rest in peace).
COVID-19 continues to associate with preexisting conditions in the vast majority of deaths (may we please all stop ageing and remain healthy forever!).
From the Awesome Conversation
And the unfortunate story of money: exchange –> tax base –> public spending –> private earnings via contracts and investments; interagency exchange; $$$ in support of basically every system of defense and survival we collectively depend on for what we have called “The American Way of Life”.
Given our spending on defense and security, we really should have been ready to roll out treatment and morbidity facilities and services much, much more quickly than we have. Generally speaking, how we choose to assess and meet risk — whatever the source may be — has been up to us privately rather than collectively.
From global pandemic to the barber shop, there’s the whole story unless we “Earthlings” choose to do away with money altogether.
. . . .
Nope.
I’m not seeing it.
Rx. Avoid exhaustion and stress; find love; stay healthy and well; and for how it ends, inevitably, try to develop a good and noble philosophy with which both to fight a fair battle and, sigh, return to God, nature, and the universe in the way that all living must (with partial exception made for the elders among cedars and redwoods).
HE declared war and laid claim to emergency Presidential powers.
The Nation — and its governors — Blundered Big Time!
Event: business owners and workers protest today in Indianapolis, Indiana, April 18, 2020. Photo by Michelle Vezina Peterlin and edited by J. S. Oppenheim
Even the most dumb of politicians know that when a business or person has been shut down financially–and however that may have happened–the whole community suffers the loss of that entity’s earning, investing, spending, and tax contributing power.
A “tax base” is never a printing press.
America’s COVID-19 episode is worse than that, for the businesses and persons “stood-down” represent the base of the economy from which money trickles up!
Bars, restaurants, events?
That’s America’s soul: where we dine; where we meet; what we do and what we talk about afterward.
When COVID-19 “national uptake” began, we really didn’t know what we were facing.
We know today.
COVID-19 morbidity appears well associated with age — 55/65-85 — and persons, younger and older, with serious other health degrading issues, i.e., those more vulnerable and less able to weather the intruder. Whether created in a laboratory or evolved in nature and passed through to humans, COVID-19 has turned out a fascist’s wet dream, i.e., a deadly pathogen certain to cull a portion of the old and / or weak. Well, today we know that not everyone contracts C19 (but may) and most certainly, not everyone becomes seriously ill with it, and of those who do encounter continuous coughing (my case) or shortness of breath, not everyone dies of it.
COVID-19 has proven itself survivable — and perhaps by all still “well” enough (x age and ability at encounter) to fight back.
Why are Americans not working?
Our governments — Federal defense, emergency preparedness, and security elements — were supposed to have been prepared as were State Emergency Management Agencies and National Guard.
Where was that preparedness?
Where was that flexibility and capacity to procure or produce field hospitals, staff, and ventilators? To quell disinformation and public panic? To fight back while sustaining business and livelihoods despite the misery?
What a poor showing has been made of this encounter with a relatively mild even in the “CBRN Warfare” type category!
It should come as no surprise that Americans en masse have been angered by the loss of control over their own lives and fates. Powerful governments — but only so powerful as the cooperation of their military and police — have stepped in to “flatten the curve” (mission accomplished!) while coming up to speed in treatment and death-related services far at the expense of the nation’s complex and integrated business and social organization and financial prowess.
Now we’re going to borrow or print tons of money while perhaps (think ahead) having a fight with China over American debt held in bonds.
Before anything else, Let’s get America Back To Work!
BackChannels is always looking for “Radical Moderates”, Democratic or Republican. It has long been devoted to finding the middle channel in our most raucous and vicious partisan extremism and ignorance.
More than 2.8+ Americans die annually (all causes). COVID-19 morbidity associates strongly with age x health condition, and "Baby Boom" generation has reached that demographic itself. Are we crying for ourselves? https://t.co/0HApjexzTLhttps://t.co/FU4eEhDujl
Our nation really panicked and blundered on C19, a briefly alien presence for which neither our public nor private sectors were evidently ready with emergency treatment or burial facilities and services. We’re paying a high price for public (and partisan) responses to it. In defense language, “reflexive control” — I don’t want to ask whether the virus has been a blasting cap, the thing that sets off the greater explosion, but the results would seem to point that way.
Fast correspondence aids brevity.
C19 Lessons Learned Since January
Be Prepared, Be Ready. C19 may bump America’s annual rate of morbidity from 2.813 million dead souls to 2.9 million. We were not prepared to respond with emergency facilities or, sadly, or basic carnage related to holding or burying the dead.
Don’t Panic, Stay Calm. The Great “Killer Virus” has taken some older and health-imperiled lives or younger and not so well, but, by and large, it has been a bust for those yet healthy enough to fend it off.
Think (and think again) about the consequences of hasty public policy, especially episode the shutting down of the base and much of the soul of our nation’s economy and related vitality.
Time to get back to work?
In 2020 hindsight, of course, the hours, days, weeks, and months should not have been lost in the first place but voluntarily as the degrees of risk became known.
We’re Americans.
Americans have been braving the Devil a long time.
The report, written by the Chemical and Biological Intelligence Unit of the FBI’s Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate (WMDD), does not give the name of the Chinese scientist carrying the suspected SARS and MERS samples, or the intended recipient in the U.S. But the FBI concluded that the incident, and two other cases cited in the report, were part of an alarming pattern.
Whether in recent years or over many, there appears no end in relation to the breadth and depth of Chinese espionage in the United States. The cost to Americans: well into the billions of dollars.
Of immediate concern: could C19 (COVID-19) have escaped or even been ferried from the kind of lab that works with deadly pathogens?
As Dr. Antilla proceeded with his academic career, United States officials changed their view of China’s recruitment programs, which they say have been used to steal sensitive technology from American laboratories.
Casually going somewhere with a load of infectious material or toxins in pockets? Well, it’s not the kind of thing staff would do, but spies?
BackChannels will not cover the waterfront on Chinese espionage in America. Walk in anywhere and the subject expands. From the recruitment of scholars through the Thousand Lights Program through serious computer hacking and human infiltration into every potentially strategic walk in America’s operations, civilian and defense, the threats posed by China’s theft of industrial, scientific, and state secrets looms large. Examples may be found in a few proper nouns easily searched up on the web —
Candace Marie Claiborne (CIA mole) Charles M. Lieber (Alleged Concealment of Chinese Funding) Honjin Tan (Energy Storage) Jerry Chung Shing Lee (CIA mole) Kevin Patrick Mallory (CIA mole) Qingshan Li, Military Radio Equipment Xudong Yao (Industrial Infrastructure) Xueha Peng (State Secrets) Xudong Yao (Industrial Infrastructure) Yanqing Ye (Foreign Agent, Boston University, Physics, Chemistry, Biomedical Engineering) Zaosong Zheng (Cancer Research)
Related Online
Much of the reference section has been lifted from a previous post — “Note: COVID-19, Biological Warfare, and the Odds and Ambiguities” (March 19, 2020), but a few cogent others have been added to this growing collection of tributes to the theft of industrial, scientific, and state secrets by the People’s Republic of China on the world’s Internet-connected international stage.
Of course, where would any state’s security — or international agenda — be without its spies?
The trade is a fact of life also worldwide.
Nonetheless, this from Reuters provides a glimpse at the lucrative and powerful payoffs so far enjoyed by China given perhaps allowances for its investments (and recruitment) through the Thousand Light programs as well as an apparent absence of sufficient resistance to being intellectually tapped for the nation’s most sensitive scientific secrets.
China’s efforts to steal unclassified American technology, ranging from military secrets to medical research, have long been thought to be extensive and aggressive, but U.S. officials only launched a broad effort to stop alleged Chinese espionage in the United States in 2018.
“The theft of American trade secrets by China costs our nation anywhere from $300 to $600 billion in a year,” Evanina, director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center, said in advance of Thursday’s conference.
Copied from the previous post to help make the image of the state of affairs clear.
This first preliminary description of outcomes among patients with COVID-19 in the United States indicates that fatality was highest in persons aged =85, ranging from 10% to 27%, followed by 3% to 11% among persons aged 65–84 years, 1% to 3% among persons aged 55-64 years, <1% among persons aged 20–54 years, and no fatalities among persons aged =19 years.
Annual Rate of Death for the United States of America
Number of deaths: 2,813,503 Death rate: 863.8 deaths per 100,000 population Life expectancy: 78.6 years Infant Mortality rate: 5.79 deaths per 1,000 live births
BackChannels has more questions than answers in relation to the general stand-down of America’s basic restaurant, events, and services economy and related financial and labor impacts throughout the nation.
In the event of CBRN threats, emerging infectious diseases, or natural disasters, state, local, tribal, or territorial health departments may need medicines and medical supplies from the Strategic National Stockpile if local supplies are depleted. Through the Public Health Emergency Preparedness (PHEP) program, CDC collaborates with states and local jurisdictions to ensure they have plans and processes in place to receive and provide life-saving medicines and supplies.
How much money have Federate and State governments poured into emergency preparedness in the region of Chemical Biological Radiation and Nuclear (CBRN) preparedness?
The simplest way to judge whether we have an exceptionally lethal disease is to look at the death rates. Are more people dying than we would expect to die anyway in a given week or month? Statistically, we would expect about 51,000 to die in Britain this month. At the time of writing, 422 deaths are linked to Covid-19 — so 0.8 per cent of that expected total. On a global basis, we’d expect 14 million to die over the first three months of the year. The world’s 18,944 coronavirus deaths represent 0.14 per cent of that total. These figures might shoot up but they are, right now, lower than other infectious diseases that we live with (such as flu). Not figures that would, in and of themselves, cause drastic global reactions.
BackChannels 