The desire for human dignity and freedom exacts a price from all who would have both in security perpetually. In the silhouette, an American Civil War cannon faces southwest in the direction of General Robert E. Lee’s then retreating Confederate army (Sept. 17-18, 1862). In BackChannels’ humble opinion, the one bloody day of battle marked the beginning of the end of absolute power, landed aristocracy, and slavery in the soon to be reunited and reconstructed United States of America. We should wish today not to return — or be returned — to the feudal past, its abuses, criminality, excesses, and inhumanity, however complex, convoluted, and modern the legal, political, and technological means.
The blog has also associated America’s deep and frequently extreme political polarization with “Active Measures” and related “hybrid” and “information” warfare designed by the dictatorships running Moscow and Tehran against the will of their people. It seems surreal that a French President would now stand before the American Congress and underscore those points while a populist American President stands some to the side and between as regards accommodating, so far, aggression in Ukraine and an unspeakable horror show for humanity in Syria, which has been strengthened also for Iranian and Russian forces as well as their proxies and “little white men” (same as those “little green” ones who literally walked into Crimea).
Best Solution – Digital Data and Artificial Intelligence
Screenshot: Sophia AI on the cover of an Indian edition of Cosmopolitan.
BackChannels heartily endorses fair and free trade, global cooperation that is constructive for all — no zero-sum games or negotiations — and, of course, due attention to the psychological and social ramifications of exchange involving Big Data and. God bless Sophia and her engineers, the revolutions to come in artificial intelligence.
I was drawn away from the desktop during this morning’s speech, but am very glad here to have returned to a recording of it (thank you Fox 10 Phoenix for fair use and fine editing) and spent the afternoon with it.
I think it safe to say that America LOVES French President Macron. At the end of this clip, I seen no one sitting in protest. I don’t know if that’s a rare occasion (another remark made about this event and one best left unremarked), but I’m going to be feeling it — feeling its goodness — for a while).
Visitor’s Center, Antietam National Battlefield Park, Sharpsburg, Maryland, June 1, 2017.
For visitors from other lands, the small patch of Maryland countryside on which the center has been planted represents the beginning of the end of slavery as an institution in the United States of America. In one horrific days of battle, General McClennan’s forces pushed General Lee’s Confederate army from the field but left it also to retreat west across the Potomac River and thence to fight a long war that would end about where it began but with the moral vision and structure of the country forever changed in favor of equality under the law and “liberty and justice for all”.
It takes a long time to change men — and to change their attitudes and beliefs about money and about one another. My America remains a work in progress, but as long as the work hews to the liberal view of man and the earnest distribution of political power through democracy accompanied by integrity, I think we Americans — and everyone else — will continue getting better in the building or forming of greater societies.
Where we have let people down, I’m sure we are going to be made to remember it. Where we have helped people up, one may hope we’ll be remembered for that too.
Possibly: when the Soviet Union dissolved Dec. 25, 1991 and then presumably ended the Cold War, it’s possible (possibly) that American and Russian security elements thought to cooperate on issues confronting both states, Islamic Terrorism high on the list of possibilities conveniently at hand for that.
For the United States, one presumes that cooperation would have been intended to reduce the power and presence of dictatorship in the world and (in domino effect) remove the vestiges of the defunct Soviet Union in global foreign affairs. In the way of political “optics” — how things look — the American and other EU / NATO constituencies would have perceived some great measure of peace and trade taking place between the former superpower antagonists, so when Clinton and others signed off on “Uranium One”, it may have been in that context that the deal went down.
East and West had taken the great leap forward toward peace in 1992 and by 2010 business involving uranium, a strategic asset, appeared to have been conducted in overall calm, bureaucratic, and peaceful conditions.
While other business and political mixers were proceeding, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and Muammar Qaddafi’s Libya were also transformed (in 2003 and 2011, respectively), at least as regards the deposing of each dictator — and let none remember them fondly: they were both monsters in each their own demonic way.
Then in 2011: Syria.
When offered the choice, Putin refused the liberal western path and reverted to the KGB past. At that moment, possibly(!), Team Security USA, in some part, discovered that it had been duped
(Note: intervention in Libya preceded the perceived (Wikipedia) start date of the Syrian Civil War — on BackChannels, the “Syrian Tragedy” — by five days).
Moscow had intended to refuse the adoption of democratic liberalism all along.
What the United States and EU / NATO had done for peace between 1992 and 2011?
I don’t know.
However, one may imagine the possibilities.
However, the old news cross my desktop a few minutes ago, and it seems to add its little bit to the BackChannels perspective on Cold War / post-Cold War / Phantom of the Soviet history.
If you haven’t hit the link, the “old news” was this:
Syria was a key participant in the C.I.A. rendition program at a time when President George W. Bush’s administration labelled Damascus part of the “axis of evil,” according to a report by the Open Society Justice Initiative.
The report – titled “Globalizing Torture” – said President Bashar al-Assad’s regime was one of the “most common destinations for rendered suspects,” indicating an established security relationship between Syrian intelligence and Western agencies.
The story — and not written for conservative Americans — traces its thesis back to at least 2003.
Apparently, Moscow and Washington had been fighting terrorism together in the double-0’s of the new century.
Welcome Moscow’s post-Cold War totalitarian design and the west’s apparent partial cooperation with it, possibly, up to the Syrian gambit of spring 2011 when Obama tested Putin’s navigational tendencies.
In Russia’s persistent feudal mode, states serve power, and power need see no difference between property and persons, sovereignty in the politically absolute mode implying the right — more: even the obligation and demonstration — to destroy either with impunity and without explanation. A little foolery with political perception and CIA “rendition” programs (to fight al-Qaeda and others) would be one thing, but to travel further with Moscow and Damascus in their tyrannous journey appears to have been something Washington could not bring itself to do.
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And the incumbent President has not been so? Has the news really been fake? Had his vendors been paid completely and on time at completion of work? And then with hindsight, we could update this chart appearing in POLITICO last March:
Here’s the nut: “Did he or didn’t he?” doesn’t matter.
What matters is America’s coherence in its confidence in its presidency.
Where is that now?
The prompting statement to the effect that the “Clintons are pathological liars.”
Even if accepted in the nonpartisan spirit, where are Americans with their critical evaluation of the present leadership?
While drafting this temperature-checking note, I had asked “Where is the United States today as regards the Skripal poisoning in the United Kingdom?”, and I had expected to find not much given President’s Trump image as an autocrat in line with Putin’s encouragement of EU / NATO “New Nationalism”, an element part and parcel in the prying apart of the Alliance.
The two log lines — ” . . . with UK ‘all the way'” and ” . . . hesitant to blame Russia for the attack . . . .” address the ambivalence and suspicions that have dogged the Trump Presidency from before the elections (perhaps starting with the eyebrow-raising Trump campaign association with the now indicted Paul Manafort).
However Americans may feel about the American President at this moment, it’s the “Phantom of the Soviet” and the “phantoms of the Soviet” in issues that are being spotlighted in relation to KGB-style political assassinations that in turn have been evaluated by the intelligence services of the three NATO states now apparently in agreement on their origins.
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