Category Archives: United States of America

FTAC: A Note on Greed

30 Monday Aug 2021

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, A Little Wisdom, American Domestic Affairs, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, North America, transnational crime, United States of America

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Greed obliterates authentic purposes to become an end in and of itself. Perhaps it helps create an ordered society, bureaucratic, impersonal, programmed — but that rather misses the mark as regards human services and well-being.

By way of cold categorization, it might be said that all addicts are criminals, but one may wonder what part are themselves predators and what other part preyed on by dealers and doctors or equivalents in counseling.

“Florida Shuffle“.

From time to time, I catch the boilerplate conservative prescription “personal responsibility!” in relation to the kind of damaged, enslaved, marginalized, and traumatized person that has lost all agency, confidence, efficacy, and esteem and wonder how pernicious and greed-ridden a society we have become. Can we tell the difference between the sad sack hipster and self-serving and profiteering sociopaths? Have we overemphasized the substance — whatever it may be or have been — and under-emphasized disconnection, marginalization, ostracism? And if so, for what?

In business terms, we are each and everyone of us our own “cost centers” — we want to live with means; we wish to pay our way; and for the most part, that’s what we do — but for a portion of America’s 320 millions souls — about a million or so the last time I checked (2019 with figures from 2017 compiled by authorities in 2018)— personalities or problems attach to expensive dependencies, and those persons then become the smallest of “profit centers” — revenue generators — for the money mad among sociopaths, and that from the curb to the corporate suite. Family’s gone and all the connections left are “fiduciary”, i.e., all about money and control bereft of conscience and soul.

As so often happens, a frantic mother called us about her 19-year-old daughter, who I’ll call Jen. A heroin addict, Jen had been shuttled between multiple treatment centers and sober homes by greedy marketers looking to cash in on the teenager’s insurance benefits by keeping her perpetually in recovery, but never sober.

Aronberg, Dave. “Opportunists Are Exploiting the ACA to Prey on Opioid Addicts.” Time, September 20, 2017.

Related Online

Aronberg, Dave. “Opportunists Are Exploiting the ACA to Prey on Opioid Addicts.” Time, September 20, 2017.

Daniels, Lisa. “My Son Got Stuck In the ‘Florida Shuffle’ and Lost His Battle to Addiction.” RyanHampton, January 13, 2019.

Fix the Florida Shuffle. “What is the Florida Shuffle?”

Lopez, German. “She wanted addiction treatment. She ended up in the relapse capital of America.” Vox, March 2, 2020.

National Association of Drug Diversion Investigators. “Florida Shuffle.”

Wooten, Colton. “My Years in the Florida Shuffle of Drug Addiction.” The New Yorker, October 14, 2019.

“There’s more to life than a little bit of money, you know.”
Published by Vice News, August 30, 2021.

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At the Far End of the Poppy Field

29 Sunday Aug 2021

Posted by in 21st Century Modern, American Domestic Affairs, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, transnational crime, United States of America

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In the American failure lies a paradox: Washington’s massive military juggernaut has been stopped in its steel tracks by a small pink flower – the opium poppy. Throughout its three decades in Afghanistan, Washington’s military operations have succeeded only when they fit reasonably comfortably into central Asia’s illicit traffic in opium – and suffered when they failed to complement it.

McCoy, Alfred. “How the heroin trade explains the US-UK failure in Afghanistan: Western intervention has resulted in Afghanistan becoming the world’s first true narco-state.” The Guardian, January 9, 2018.

The world’s mafia — call them “Transnational Crime Organizations (TCOs)” for this world made smaller by the Internet and jets — sustain themselves through corrupt or intimidated officials who keep the traffic illegal, the profits high, and the goods coursing through the financial bloodstreams of the world as well as, of course, the bodies and minds of the world’s addicts. At the far end of the poppy field and well beyond its horizons, a human refuse washes up on the world’s streets, leaving governments in which the corrupt grow rich while the good drown before a dangerous and endless;u horrifying surge of affliction, crime, bodily damage, and emotional need that repeatedly defies bureaucratic processes and solutions.

Here for about 10 minutes is what the end of the poppy field looks like.

Recorded along Philadelphia’s Kensington Avenue on July 26 and posted to YouTube by kimgary on July 29, 2021, conditions may have been attenuated some by a clean-up of the street on August 18, but the greater story bearing down on that street hasn’t changed. “Heroin tourism” by the user community and guys with cameras continues. And the money changing hands in proximity to the above location: $1 billion annually, so suggested to Mike Newall writing for The Philadelphia Inquirer (listed in “Related Online”).

A Brief Comment on Narcotics, Realpolitik, and East-West Rivalry

I don’t want to go too far into Darkness and Light on this post, but it may no longer prove sufficient to “Act Locally, Think Globally” in light of an apparent willingness in states as well as persons to serve not only both sides of a conflict (with visible sales of common enough deliverables) but as well demonstrated in Afghanistan both the Devil and God or the Evil and the Good. Toward the end of America’s long tour in Afghanistan, generals made note of the use of Russian arms and materiel by Taliban forces, a black market trade if ever was — but who has picked up the chips, so to speak, in Asia but Russia, which is now doing a brisk business in defense sales to the neighbors of a soon to be Talibanized Afghanistan.

For heroin laced with fentanyl, credit China’s mafia interests that appear to have had until relatively recently fair latitude for keeping the west’s glamorous or vulnerable or both high and high on their way out of this world. For lack of directed Chinese resources, they may still have it.

Around the world, “Kash”, so it may be called, is King, and ain’t manipulation o’ the King — and on the King’s behalf and one’s own — part and parcel of all politics?

Obama may not have flinched when he authorized a billion dollars worth of cocaine sales for Hezbollah in the JCPOA deal, but from a strategic if not moral perspective, one wonders whether he should have stood at that juncture and said “No!” for the greater effects such a decision might have on long-term American political cohesion and coherence.

An America Broken, Compromised, Lost

Whatever the motives of each of its drifted “residents”, McPherson Square’s “Needle Park” and Kensington Avenue’s Junktopia host a portion of the nation’s most damaged and most lost children, “dipping” and homeless as well as short on options into recoveries more reliable than stopovers for intramural billing between service-providing bureaucracies and their subcontractors. Few, if any, have a clue as regards the nefarious “international relations” and “supply chains” that put the poppy seed in the ground and nursed it all the way to a spoon and needle and arm on the streets of Philadelphia (“City of Brotherly Love“) for some in Beijing and Moscow to smile and between them say, “How well America takes care of her people!”

Related Online

AFP News Agency. “Poppies bloom across Afghanistan as drought eases.” YouTube Video (1:30), April 18, 2019: “Though we are cultivating the poppies, smugglers are the ones who pocket all the money by converting it into heroin” (1:07).

AML Films. Assorted YouTube video testimonials on heroin addiction between 6 and 35 minutes each.

Brown, Erik. “I Work Near the Largest Open-Air Heroin Market On The East Coast: Philadelphia shows us what it looks like when a city commits suicide.” Dialogue & Discourse, Medium, May 25, 2021.

Byman, Daniel. “Hezbollah, Drugs, and the Obama Administration: A Closer Look at a Damning Politico Piece.” Lawfare, January 30, 2018.

Congressional Research Service. “Illicit Fentanyl and China’s Role.” PDF. Federation of American Scientists (FAS), January 29, 2021.

Dasa, Pandit. “Karma: What Goes Around Comes Around.” HuffPost, Januarary 11, 2012.

Felbab-Brown, Vanda. “Fentanyl and geopolitics: Controlling opioid supply from China.” Brookings, July 22, 2020.

Feng, Emily. “‘We Are Shipping to the U.S.’: Inside China’s Online Synthetic Drug Networks.” NPR, November 17, 2020.

Gibbons-Neff, Thomas. “Russia is sending weapons to Taliban, top U.S. general confirms.” The Washington Post, April 24, 2017.

kimgary. “Streets of Philadelphia, Kensington Ave Story” – Assorted videos, 16-to-25-minutes.

Marin, Max. “‘There still is no answer’: Philly cracks down on Kensington encampments again as homelessness crisis intensifies.” BILLYPENN, August 18, 2021.

Meyer, Josh. “The secret backstory of how Obama let Hezbollah off the hook.” Politico, December 2017.

McCoy, Alfred. “How the heroin trade explains the US-UK failure in Afghanistan: Western intervention has resulted in Afghanistan becoming the world’s first true narco-state.” The Guardian, January 9, 2018.

Newall, Mike. “Business and bloodshed.” The Philadelphia Inquirer, May 21, 2021.

Newall, Mike. “What it’s like to live at the edge of Needle Park.” The Philadelphia Inquirer, June 9, 2017.

Percy, Jennifer. “Trapped by the ‘Walmart of Heroin'”. The New York Times, October 10, 2018.

Project Cassandra.

Reuters. “Russia says boosts arms supplies to Central Asia amid Afghan conflict.” August 5, 2021.

Rowlatt, Justin. “Russia ‘arming the Afghan Taliban’, says US.” BBC News, March 23, 2018.

U.S. Department of the Treasury. “Treasury Targets Chinese Persons Involved with Drug Trafficking Organization Moving Fentanyl.” August 27, 2021.

Williams, Nick. “The history of heroin as a lyrical muse.” Dazed, August 22, 2017.

Whitlock, Craig. “Overwhelmed by Opium: The U.S. war on drugs in Afghanistan has imploded at nearly every turn.” The Washington Post, December 9, 2019.

Published by Afghanistan Geographic, May 24, 2021.
Posted to YouTube by Late Night Tales, September 20, 2014.

Everything we say and do determines what’s going to happen to us in the future. Whether we act honestly, dishonestly, help or hurt others, it all gets recorded and manifests as a karmic reaction either in this life or a future life. All karmic records are carried with the soul into the next life and body.

Dasa, Pandit. “Karma: What Goes Around Comes Around.” HuffPost, Januarary 11, 2012.

Moscow has positioned the Taliban of Afghanistan right where it wants them, i.e., as a block and goad to the west, as a proxy for war by needle, and as another of the most honorable, most pious, and most hypocritical entities of the world, preaching sobriety by the book while taking up its role as the world’s foremost exporter of intoxication and death.

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A Comment on ‘Trump Facebook Ban Upheld’

06 Thursday May 2021

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

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Posted by ABC News on YouTube, May 6, 2021.

Good!

In the age of “Active Measures”, widespread trolling, government-funded disinformation campaigns, a sad bump in east-west rivalry with Beijing and Moscow pitted against democracy, and extraordinary agitation and propaganda, the business of shamelessly lying to the American People should be treated no differently than speech associated with conspiracy to commit crimes, libel and slander, and incitement.

Related on BackChannels: Trump and the Question of Insurrection.

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FTAC: A Note on Totalitarianism and America’s Fractious Left v Right Politics

06 Tuesday Apr 2021

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

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Inspiration for this post —

Billingsley, Lloyd. “Lessons From a Journalist’s First Encounter with Totalitarianism.” Frontpage, April 6, 2021.

From the Awesome Conversation

As Facebook responses — this one appeared on the Bukovsky Center page — and blog presentations differ, I have opted to let the blogging system work by adding URLs to the original text and allowing importation as commercial interests (Amazon’s) have made possible.

While Lloyd Billingsley has got right the description of Communist Totalitarianism, it just does not follow that the American Left and main portion of the Liberal Community has some Stalinist bent. Even the fashionable “far left” — short of the armed-up separatists who do fit Billingsley’s description from the “Far Out Left” and “Far White Right” (my terms) — places some premium on frank discussion and reporting with integrity. Some, unfortunately, have made alliance with the Soviet / post-Soviet remains of Communist Group Think and will swallow old Kool-Aid like the Boycott Divestitures and Sanctions (BDS) malarkey, but on the whole will report with integrity.

Cullors, Patrisse and Asha Bandele; forward by Angela Davis. St. Martin’s Press, 2018.

I have found enough in Patrice Cullors (“Marxist Trained” is part of her self-promotion) to both validate a number of race-related and systemic American issues.

The truths may be uncomfortable, but raising points in an open society undermines efforts to install a more deeply pernicious totalitarianism in America’s own open society — and by extension the still open (or remaining) democratic societies of EU/NATO. IF we in the West should wish to live in authentic (as opposed to Potemkin) democracies, we bear the burden of listening to earnest complaint and testimony and finding appropriate and best ways of responding to it and associated public and private realpolitik.

“Accusation in a Mirror”, a term derived from Kenneth L. Marcus’s eponymous essay (PDF) befits the hothouse atmospheres of both strident conservatives and edgy liberals as each accuses the other of attempting to established a communist or fascism totalitarian state in their areas of influence and operations.

Aside: I have long ago picked up on the idea that both communism and capitalism over-emphasize material well-being in their otherwise opposite philosophies, and if it’s true that such bipolar conflicts comes down to “owning the pie v sharing the pie”, the nation has other spiritual challenges. Personally, I would endorse the development of carefully constructed public-private compact with basic environmental and human interests and related principles and values foremost.

I would suggest to Lloyd Billingsley that he take in a less divisive and more magnanimous and realistic approach to an adjusted 21st Century politics; to Patrisse Cullors and others, black or white or other: let’s hear stories told with integrity while querying systemic shortcomings. Color — brown eyes or blue? — may be a “discriminator”, but what is one to do with hazel or flecked or green — or with skin cafe au lait, caramel, ochre, bronzed, freckled, eggplant, milky, peachy or with body types and facial features innumerable?

In my experience, nature more appreciates or favors variety than it does mono-cultures too isolated and too rigid to respond to the natural proliferation of antagonists (for the political portal associated with related science, see the Convention on Biological Diversity and its List of Parties).

One more opinion from off this desktop where with information I “collect, select, and opine”: to what extent do we as Americans really need our “hyphenates” and elaborated and ironically suffocating color, culture, and gender oriented taxonomies?

For the time being, we’re having issues with perceived political power and empowerment and related injuries, injustices, jealousies, and resentments. While not everything may be repaired, we might choose to look ahead toward what needs may be diminished (starting with our own rancor) and what may be improved, better integrated, more loved, more appreciated.

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2021 & 1960s Redux — It’s Always About Hair

31 Wednesday Mar 2021

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

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The bill builds off existing state laws, which generally prohibit workplace or school discrimination based on religion, gender, sexual orientation and race. But the CROWN Act expands the definition of “race” to include “traits historically associated with race, including, but not limited to, hair texture and protective hairstyles,” like braids, locs and twists. These and other styles known as “natural” looks do not involve processing to straighten the hair.

Norwood, Candice. “A yearslong push to ban hair discrimination is gaining momentum.” PBS New Hours, March 31, 2021.

The Crown Act (Home Page)

The greater part of the forces of conformity and order would seem to come from the control freaks of the private sector, who, well, foot the bill for their corporate look — and so they would seem entitled regiment employee appearances — but that regimentation may no longer fit the look of America, which has become naturally . . . natural, color filled, and creative and wild in personal expression and representation.

Thus has it been since at least the tumult of the 1960s and the race in commerce and finance to capitalize on the greater institutionalization of broadest inclusion (e.g., see United Colors of Benetton).

Of course, there’s more to contemporary racial discomfort than fashion.

And there’s more to it than this day’s hideous Far White Right angst-inspired hatred, the impersonal qualities of national course correcting quotas and programs (so that – and so I heard one academic leader proclaim long ago in relation to his institution – “our numbers look right”), Russian Active Measures (designed to disinform and enrage us in every way possible), and, sadly, incarceration rates.

There’s The Money — who has it, who produces more of it, who gets it, and how — and America’s future in its cultural, economic, spiritual development, evolution, and realpolitik.

Do we really believe in our ideals?

Have we the insight, will, and vision to construct what needs must become a Greater American Dream and Reality?

The latest to-do about hair, that most intimate and universal signal about how we roll, as it were, whether young peacocks or tigresses or balding old men, black as well as white, and haloed older ladies, may be more affirming in relation to America’s meta- and political cultures than challenging except near the separatist fringes where the most malign of narcissists insist that their own image and legacy define the world around themselves.

Posted to YouTube by Slave Play, March 1, 2021.

Of the few things a person may control in life, the body — and, as part of it, the haircut — would seem the most primary.

Add cloth.

Make an appearance.

If good, if lawful, if broad in outlook and of generous spirit, well then — welcome aboard America.

Welcome home.

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I Am An American

31 Wednesday Mar 2021

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, 21st Century Modern, American Domestic Affairs, United States of America

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I am an American.

I am not a Jewish American but for anti-Semites, tribal wranglers, and the boundaries of my own concessions.

I am not a German American, and not a word of it.

I am not a Polish American although I may appreciate the Polish tradition in tea cup and pot design.

*

I am an American who admires and appreciates the world, its myriad cultures, races, and religions but returns always to a pale-to-black nation separated from alliance with any one acknowledged church, life way, or god even though I may acknowledged the presence of an All that becomes the idea of God.

*

I am an American free to watch baseball or porn, to catch the world’s news or none at all, to reflect on my nation’s Constitution — or not worry over it, for it’s a strong thing by itself, and I am free and secure to fall asleep beneath clouds or stars, to read or write as spirit moves, to seek company or seclusion as my self sees fit.

*

I am an American aware of the effects of American Natives, the currents of European history, and the presence of ruthless and sadistic Puritans on the cultural outlines within the spacious boundaries and potentials of the now modern state.

*

I am an American easily, simply, spiritually.

*

I am an American.

My People are Americans.

For Divided America, a Kernel in a Tweet

31 Wednesday Mar 2021

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, 21st Century Modern, American Domestic Affairs, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, North America, Philosophy, Politics, United States of America

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FTAC: A Note on America’s Far White Right – The Sons (of the Sons of the Sons of the Sons) of the Pioneers

20 Saturday Mar 2021

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, 21st Century Modern, American Domestic Affairs, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Extreme Brown vs Red-Green, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Psychology, United States of America

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I don’t know if the groups and leaderships attending what the SPLC might refer to as “Neo-Confederate” and “Neo-Nazi” are authentically homegrown perennials or stylish annuals that keep seeding themselves from year to year, but it has occurred to me that world always moves on around its hotheads, especially the archaic and romantic who may wish to hold on to what they believe they once had. So from the awesome conversation with the world at my desktop, here’s a note on all of that.

From the Awesome Conversation

I would think the Southern Far White Right in part the great-great grandchildren of settlers and the last of the pioneers, invariably white and looking for their place in the developing New World and who bore with them from one generation to the next the legends of the settling of the west. Farms, ranches, railroads, trading posts, towns, cities, dirt tracks, and highways. Where are they now? Ill-educated, some; overrun, for sure, and no longer the law and the outlaw with a few Mexicans around for decoration. They’re working for their hires; the children of slaves are bosses (some, I’m sure); John Wayne’s a foggy memory; Denzel’s more the memory for America’s middle aged; Bond’s partner is a black woman . . . .

The cities may be cool or mildly restive with all while the rural lanes, whether real or just winding through the heart, may be still what they were and now surrounded by an alien colorful all-inclusive all-tolerated multi-gendered multicultural powerful hypermodern New American political and lifestyle culture.

Bureaucracy, law, and technology may support American domestic security, but it sure can’t solve cultural issues involving birthrights and expectations about how the world should work. It’s understandable that we would have some disappointed-struggling sons of old white sons for whom official favor might seem (by themselves) deserved.

Addendum

Who would stop history?

The processes attending conquest and the establishment of sovereignty across geopolitical space and time give way, inevitably, to periods of Administration either, Genghis style, for sustained plunder or, alas, for The Good, i.e., for renewed husbandry, shepherding, and stewardship of all that may be valued in peace. These days, bloody expansions needs must give way to community care, development, and trade, mere avarice proving insufficient for the defense of sustained new wealth.

My correspondent accused me of holding hackneyed views in relation to what I’ve labeled the “Far White Right”, a term invented for Donald John Trump’s not-so-colorful base. Members of the FWR, I was told, were also highly educated and wealthy and enamored of the American Dream, so I was told. My response –>

If “They both believe in and live the American dream”, wherefore the racial angst and want of (renewed) privilege?

Wherefore the want of racially-based political ascendance and dominance?

I’m inclined to publish my own words, but, as always would be interested in seeing what a true political topology looks like for those now deeply resenting the darker hues along with Jews.

I had also inserted a link to Far Out Lefty Noel Ignatiev’s book, How the Irish Became White.

Here’s the thing about race and white boys and black boys and girls and all the shades and stances between –>

As a species . . . .

Hitchhikers thumbs, cars, old shoes, planes, ships, and trains and legions of defenders, traders, and raiders — we sure do “get around” and have gotten around, and there’s nothing to undo it.

The mentalities of criminals and extremists seems always archaic, self-adoring, and self-aggrandizing as if humiliation and mortification somewhere near has compelled repair and some former perceived noble state of affairs may be found forward with an heroic defiance of the future.

Related Online

Hyman, Frank. “The Confederacy was a con job on whites. And still is.” McClatchy, DC Bureau, March 11, 2021.

Oppenheim, James S. “FTAC: The American Quilt, the Confederate Flag and Southern Pride, and the Soviet-Style Erasing of History.” BackChannels, June 13, 2020.

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