Have you noticed how the Trump campaign leaves so much division & ill will in its wake? People seem to be diminished by the contact. [Rest of text in “Year of the Fluke” pdf.]
Category Archives: Current Issues & Events
Garrison Keillor’s take
The end is upon us, but here’s a deal for you, Author: Garrison Keillor Published 1 day ago—July 23, 2016 Alaska Dispatch News
A week ago I felt good about America but no more. Coyotes are running freely in the streets of our big cities, the stock market is teetering on the verge of collapse, the monetary system will soon go belly-up, China and North Korea and Iran have a knife to our throats, our schools are in chaos, politicians corrupt, the media stupefied by political correctness, and everywhere you look you hear foreign accents. We are on the edge of the abyss. [The chock full article is included in the “Year of the Fluke” pdf., code-word & all.]
Clinton-Kaine’s Sunshine+PS
Looked like a great choice at the time…The gushing review is in the “Year of the Fluke” pdf. collection, for better & worse.]
Chief Big Dark Cloud
“It’s always darkest just before it’s pitch black.” –Mark Shields, PBS’ RNC coverage
The Big Dark Cloud could be the title of Trump’s acceptance speech, more for what it was in itself than for the world it supposedly represented. It was an hour & a quarter harangue of shrill shouting over a projected doom & gloom it claimed itself the antidote to, more accurately the agent of, guaranteed to stoke the nation’s amorphous fears & lynch-mob indignation as self-fulfilling justification of its radical disruptiveness.
The perverse irony is that, were he to get elected, he could very well bring the country & world the very dark cloud he rails at, being partly his own projection–though not his alone, tapping into a substratum of the social psyche easily stirred up. I imagine the extremists he uses as his foil hope for his election to turn a much larger segment of the Islamic world anti-American, shifting the balance against the west as it polarizes around a Muslim-Christian split rather than around the distinction between violent separatist extremism & pluralist, multi-cultural modernism.
Given the strange electoral climate, & the amount of scattered madness in the world, the strategy of sowing fear, gloom & doom could just work, remaking the atmosphere sufficiently in that direction to get elected–despite its dislocation from the original facts. If so, it will be because of a bad combination of circumstances & the lingering effectiveness of demagogy–starting with repetitive assertion, viscerally delivered.
[The full article is in the “Year of the Fluke” pdf., including the “Way of the Assertion,” & its key example, “I alone can fix it.”]
BETTER TOGETHER–Campaign 2016
- This should be the campaign slogan for a Hillary + Elizabeth Warren ticket.
B E T E R T O G E T H E R !
It sums up the core message of the campaign on many levels–-wings of the party; the diversity that makes the country so great, however one slices; the larger world we are inevitably part of. It also takes the “unifier’s” high ground, in stark contrast to the wall-builder-divider’s separatist nationalism. –4 July 2016[This was just before the “Stronger Together” official motto was announced. The rest of the article is in the “Year of the Fluke” pdf.]
BIG SURPRISE in the Wings? (Gary Johnson & Bill Weld)
As for the ultimate outcome of the presidential race, there’s a potential BIG SURPRISE lurking mostly out of mainstream sight in the possibility that the “None of the above” & “Hold your nose” segments could start gravitating to the Libertarian ticket.
[Full article on what didn’t happen is in the “Year of the Fluke” pdf.]
The Obama-Biden legacy
While no one can prove how an Al Gore led world would have gone (and in retrospect there were serious strategic flaws in his campaign, including his choice of Lieberman rather than Bradley as v-p), we do know that the Bush-Cheney leadership was among the worst–an eight-year run ending with the world economy, Islamic crescent, and political infrastructure all in shambles. With things rapidly falling apart in the fall of 2008, markets tanking, foreclosures starting to rise, the country voted for competence & inspiring ideals over service & possible flakiness.
Without the collapse of both domestic economy and foreign floundering, Obama would never have been elected. Only the worst of times made such an unconventional choice possible. It wouldn’t be easy to pick a worst president in my lifetime, and maybe W. wouldn’t be top choice, but he’d certainly be on the short list. I suppose one have a similar list for the best, but at this point, at the end of their eight-year run, I’d give that honor to Obama & Biden, individually & as a team.
[Reasons are included in th efull article, in the “Year of the Fluke” pdf.]
What’s Next?
WHAT’S NEXT?
With all the rapid changes in culture & society recently, more & more people are asking WHAT’S NEXT? To help answer that question, WHAT’S NEXT staff has
# looked into its crystal balls
# consulted prognosticators
# asked experts
# surveyed random people
# spun itself into a dizzy trance
# used proprietary supplements under supervision of a certified shaman
# suggested the following “probabilities”:
The Marine Corps will make “SEMPER BI” its alternative motto.
[Not wanting to be left behind, other branches of the Navy will try to stay competitive by advertising its Co-Ed Spirit & LGBT Friendly-Anchors Away atmosphere,” while the submarine service will keep its current motto—“Going Down Together,” which the rest of the Navy has never been comfortable with, ever since first cabled from a sinking ship.]
Campaign 2016 –& Supreme Quart Vacancy
The stew thickens. I don’t see Trump or Cruz making it, each with high negatives that are flip sides of their attractions—one a loose canon, the other too evangelical. It’s amazing how little traction Jeb has been able to get, despite so much backing. Kasich & Rubio will pick up some steam. Kasich is positioning to be the go-to compromise, an acceptabled (i.e., solid) choice. Rubio has survived his knock-down from Christie (who hasn’t), however.
Don’t tell Republicans, but a Rubio-Haley ticket would be extremely hard to beat, even more than Rubio-Gardner. We’ll see if that thought gets a kick start from today’s S. Carolina primary (2/20/16). “Winning” particular contests isn’t where the action is, besides, but getting to a majority of delegates, preferably without totally alienating supporters of one’s also-rans, whether outright or available as fall-back. In primaries, how one wins makes a difference, whether for mending sufficient fences or bringing in new support.
[Obviously, the crystal ball was a bit murky…. The rest of its revelation is in the “Year of the Fluke” pdf.]
(Rare) COMMON SENSE–#1, Terrorism, a clearer view
Hopefully, the article below will shed some light on the term & its use, as well as the reasoning behind actions so labelled. While political motives & government policies are often factors, further thought (& the latest act of domestic terrorism reported in today’s news) may remind us that the term is also frequently used to describe entirely apolitical actions, which have little or nothing to do with government policies.
As reported again earlier today (Oct. 1, 2015), a shooter enters a school to conduct “10 minutes of terror.” Whether or not associated in the shooter’s mind with political &/or religious content, the majority of such actions are carried out for more or less purely psychological motives, with no attempt to change institutional or government policies. The motive is far more personal in such cases, to get back at the world for some perceived slight, to show “them” you were someone of consequence, to bask in the thoughts of the limelight to follow, to achieve fame, to live out the excitement of the violent video game or follow the compulsive directions of an inner voice disassociated from the human world.
When you think this through a level further, it becomes obvious that these psychological motives also play a role in many politically framed operations, particularly for the lowest level of recruits, who carry out such actions supposedly on behalf of the expressed cause. In some few actual cases, the suicide bomber, for example, may actually believe (however strategically naive or misled) that the contemplated action will have such-&-such a political influence. In many other cases, however, the disassociated state of mind, whatever its cloaks of dogma & quasi-religious rallying cries, is not much different from that of the delusional warrior who kills his mama & then shoots up an elementary school.
If there’s a political or sectarian veneer, in other words, it’s often not the critical element that draws the sacrifice on the ground. The political & sectarian objectives may be more significant for those higher up the operational chain–not the ones who blow themselves up, but who recruit, brainwash, & manipulate the psychologically vulnerable.