The goals and their ordering are not encouraging.
Particularly not liking the choice of Goal 1, the lack of any
clear commitment to financial support, and the continuing emphasis
on Magic Covid Vaccines without pursuit of treatments like Ivermectin and others:
Goal One: Restore trust with the American people
Goal Two: Mount a safe, effective, equitable vaccination campaign
Goal Three: Mitigate spread through expanding masking, testing, data, treatment, workforce, and clear public health standards
Goal Four: Immediately expand emergency relief and exercise the Defense Production Act
Goal Five: Safely reopen schools, businesses, and travel while protecting workers
Goal Six: Protect those most at risk and advance equity, including across racial, ethnic and rural/urban lines
Goal Seven: Restore U.S. leadership globally, advance health security, and build better preparedness for future threats
About a week ago I posted thus: Oh Yes, but you have
guns you say. Well those pasty faced, namby, pamby West Coast
transgender wokeists, as you call them, may not be able to shoot
straight but they have drones, swarming drones, robots and God knows
what else in the way of weapons. They have satellite data and almost
perfect intelligence regarding your behaviour. They don't have to shoot
accurately, they have machines to do that. They can and will commit
unspeakable acts of murder and destruction before they turn off the
monitor and jog off for a Latte. After all if you are not with us you
are a domestic terrorist aren't you? There is no middle ground. smdh...., this is on a grad student's budget with open source technology. DAYYUM!!!
wired |When hackers exploited a bug in Parler to download all of the right-wing social media platform's contents
last week, they were surprised to find that many of the pictures and
videos contained geolocation metadata revealing exactly how many of the
site's users had taken part in the invasion of the US Capitol building just days before.
But the videos uploaded to Parler also contain an equally sensitive
bounty of data sitting in plain sight: thousands of images of unmasked
faces, many of whom participated in the Capitol riot. Now one website
has done the work of cataloging and publishing every one of those faces
in a single, easy-to-browse lineup.
Late last week, a website
called Faces of the Riot appeared online, showing nothing but a vast
grid of more than 6,000 images of faces, each one tagged only with a
string of characters associated with the Parler video in which it
appeared. The site's creator tells WIRED that he used simple open source
machine learning and facial recognition software to detect, extract,
and deduplicate every face from the 827 videos that were posted to
Parler from inside and outside the Capitol building on January 6, the
day when radicalized Trump supporters stormed the building in a riot
that resulted in five people's deaths. The creator of Faces of the Riot
says his goal is to allow anyone to easily sort through the faces pulled
from those videos to identify someone they may know or recognize who
took part in the mob, or even to reference the collected faces against
FBI wanted posters and send a tip to law enforcement if they spot
someone.
"Everybody who is participating in this violence, what
really amounts to an insurrection, should be held accountable," says the
site's creator, who asked for anonymity to avoid retaliation. "It's
entirely possible that a lot of people who were on this website now will
face real-life consequences for their actions." Fist tap Dale.
newrepublic | These Christians apparently believe that they
had no choice but to try to overthrow the Congress. For months, various
evangelicals have claimed in sermons, on social media, and during
protests that malicious forces stole the election, conspired to quash
Christian liberties, and aimed to clamp down on their freedom to worship
and spread the Christian gospel. They felt sure that the final days of
history were at hand and that the Capitol was the site of an epochal
battle. As one evangelical from Texas toldThe New York Times, “We are fighting good versus evil, dark versus light.”
Much
has been made about the evangelical community’s relationship to Donald
Trump. And typically, observers tend to view this alliance as purely
transactional, with nose-holding evangelicals pledging their support to
this least Christian of men in order to get something in return—most
notably, a trio of religiously conservative Supreme Court justices. This
dominant interpretation also treats Trump as the apotheosis of a
shape-shifting brand of grievance politics that unites and permeates all
factions of the right, very much including the evangelical movement.
But what is less understood—and what the Capitol riot revealed in all
its gruesome detail—is the extent to which Trump channels the
apocalyptic fervor that has long animated many white evangelical
Christians in this country.
For the last 150 years, white evangelicals
have peddled end-times conspiracies. Most of the time their messages
have been relatively innocuous, part of the broader millenarian outlook
shared among most major religious traditions. But these conspiracies can
have dangerous consequences—and sometimes they lead to violence. Every
evangelical generation throughout American history has seen some of its
believers driven to extreme conspiracies that blend with other strains
of militant political faith. This has meant that in the Trump era, with
the destabilizing impact of a global pandemic and a cratered economy,
white evangelical Christianity has become enmeshed with, and perhaps
inextricable from, a broader revolution against the government.
And
so an insurrection in the name of Jesus Christ broke out in tandem with
the Trump voter fraud putsch. The action is also, in all likelihood, a
prophetic foretaste of where this group might go once Trump is finally
out of office.
Evangelical
apocalypticism is grounded in a complicated and convoluted reading of
the biblical books of Daniel, Ezekiel, and Revelation, some of the most
violent books in the Bible. When read in conjunction with one another,
and overlaid with some of Jesus’s and Paul’s New Testament statements,
they reveal a hidden “plan of the ages.” The word apocalypse comes from the Greek word apokalypsis—an unveiling or uncovering of truths that others cannot see.
greenwald |The last two weeks have ushered in a wave of new
domestic police powers and rhetoric in the name of fighting “terrorism”
that are carbon copies of many of the worst excesses of the first War on
Terror that began nearly twenty years ago. This trend shows no sign of
receding as we move farther from the January 6 Capitol riot. The
opposite is true: it is intensifying.
We have witnessed an orgy of
censorship from Silicon Valley monopolies with calls for far more
aggressive speech policing, a visibly militarized Washington, D.C.
featuring a non-ironically named “Green Zone,”
vows from the incoming president and his key allies for a new
anti-domestic terrorism bill, and frequent accusations of “sedition,”
“treason,” and “terrorism” against members of Congress and citizens.
This is all driven by a radical expansion of the meaning of “incitement
to violence.” It is accompanied by viral-on-social-media pleas that one
work with the FBI to turn in one’s fellow citizens (See Something, Say Something!) and demands for a new system of domestic surveillance.
Underlying all of this are immediate insinuations that anyone
questioning any of this must, by virtue of these doubts, harbor sympathy
for the Terrorists and their neo-Nazi, white supremacist ideology.
Liberals have spent so many years now in a tight alliance with neocons
and the CIA that they are making the 2002 version of John Ashcroft look like the President of the (old-school) ACLU.
The more honest proponents of this new domestic War on Terror are
explicitly admitting that they want to model it on the first one. A New York Times reporter noted
on Monday that a “former intelligence official on PBS NewsHour” said
“that the US should think about a ‘9/11 Commission’ for domestic
extremism and consider applying some of the lessons from the fight
against Al Qaeda here at home.” More amazingly, Gen. Stanley McChrystal —
for years head of Joint Special Operations Command in Iraq and the
commander of the war in Afghanistan — explicitly compared that war to
this new one, speaking to Yahoo News:
I
did see a similar dynamic in the evolution of al-Qaida in Iraq, where a
whole generation of angry Arab youth with very poor prospects followed a
powerful leader who promised to take them back in time to a better
place, and he led them to embrace an ideology that justified their
violence. This is now happening in America….I think we’re much further
along in this radicalization process, and facing a much deeper problem
as a country, than most Americans realize.”
mtracey | Question:
does anyone with a media job find this situation to be worthy of some
further inquiry? Or in other words, worthy of questioning the premise of
why such an extravagantly intensive military presence is allegedly
necessary? Is it proportionate to the scale of the purported threat? Has
the nature of the threat itself — whatever that might be, exactly —
been adequately probed to determine whether it is grounded in reality?
Already a bunch of purported threats
initially trumpeted across the media with the usual five-alarm-five
hysteria have dissipated in short order, so there is perhaps some reason
for doubt in that regard.
Instead
of applying a modicum of skepticism to this gigantic show of military
force, much of which appears to be “security theater” in its purest
form, our vaunted media is doing little other than cheering it on. And
of course, inflating the threats being cited as justification for it.
They can repeat over and over again that what occurred on January 6 at
the Capitol was an “attempted coup,”
and therefore everything and anything is justified to retaliate, but
everyone with a brain by now should be able to recognize that the
government was never at a greater than 0% risk of being overthrown that
day. Fear-inducing terms like “insurrection,” “domestic terrorism,”
“seditious conspiracy,” “armed rebellion,” and others have been
marshaled intentionally to inure the public to extreme actions such as
the swiftly-executed corporate censorship purge and now, the
transformation of the country’s capital into a military fortress.
It’s
doubly odd because the deployment of military personnel to various
cities last summer, though generally welcomed by locals and intended to
quell what had genuinely been a sudden outburst of destructive chaos, was depicted by media members at the time as the rawest incarnation of violent fascism. The New York Timesnearly imploded
in a spasm of wild outrage. Suddenly though, this unprecedented
militarization of DC is greeted by the same media hive-mind as the
triumph of good over evil, light over darkness. It’s almost like the
ultimate variable is not principled apprehension about the force of the
state, but whose political priorities are being defended by such force —
and who is being punished.
As the republican party detonates before our eyes the core of the right which has deeply bought into the above is not going away. So what are they going to do?
Remember in 2015 Mike Pompeo said: “‘America had worshipped other Gods and called it multiculturalism. We’d endorsed perversion and called it an alternative lifestyle.'”
So how do you get from that to jointly running a country? You don’t unless folks like him change their minds as the only other option is to give up your identities. Democracy is a very fragile thing and unnatural in the light of history. We are in serious trouble……
A tweet from Mike Pompeo today:
Woke-ism, multiculturalism, all the -isms — they're not who America is. They distort our glorious founding and what this country is all about. Our enemies stoke these divisions because they know they make us weaker. pic.twitter.com/Mu97xCgxfS
Having a fair amount of direct experience in helping foment revolutions (to overthrow an existing govt that the US wanted removed – frequently democratic in nature), helping suppress anti-government movements (normally seeking what we consider ‘freedoms’ – thus keeping an authoritarian/dictatorial regime in place), and spending about half of my US govt career (in one of ‘those’ orgs) working operations targeting various terrorist groups…I can say Mr. Black Ant is dead wrong.
The Juan Cole article is very accurate. If one has experience in these things it is pretty obvious it is real and about what stage it is in – we who live here in the US can be thankful it has not progressed to much more violent acts, but it is likely they are on the horizon.
I understand the strong desire for it not to be true and the natural reaction to deny its existence – it is frightening. To someone who has been there and done that it is clear America is in the early stages of a civil war. Whether this development continues is to be determined of course and we need to reverse it if possible – personally I am not optimistic. There are a host of actors in the nascent right wing terrorist groups in the US who are determined to further its progress. They are backed up (or led to some extent) by visible media personages, politicians, some from the 1% who are helping formant in many minds the beliefs which will help gain supporters, structure a mythology around their movement, and so on.
What is happening is not an overreaction in any way. It is actually an underreaction – govts almost always react slowly to internal dissolution and that gives a big advantage to those trying to overthrow them. When you have not been burrowed into these kinds of activities you don’t see the steps being taken as being serious and incremental progress towards that break. Not being a citizen of the culture means one does not pick up the subtle clues as to what some things actually mean as opposed to what they might be interpreted from an outside perspective. As someone who has direct experience in these things and who also has lived for decades in right wing American culture I can guarantee this is very serious. There were people in the Capitol building who would have killed Pense, Pelosi and others should they have caught them. That kind of action is one of the next most likely steps in this kind of process.
Political assassination is clearly on the table – I have heard some of my militia neighbors talk about killing ‘liberals’ many times down at the local gun range. It is common talk among those types and as one should be able to see from recent events they are serious about the ‘need’ to do this. And that makes it likely there will be some level of such actions soon as there are people in these groups who are very committed to changing how America is run.
What makes it more likely is when it is not directly addressed. The perpetrators/supporters always say something about getting on to the ‘healing’ process, or not to overreact as they are just blowing off steam and such. We are way past that here in the US. The citizenry is very broken and divided. That families are broken to the point that they are taking actions against each other is a perfect example of that. It is much easier to take action against strangers than family. Family frequently will protect members who are way out of line and even into serious criminal activity. But that only goes so far. In the American Civil War it was not uncommon for family members to fight on opposite sides as we are seeing signs of here now.
The linkages to outside (non-US based) organizations that the article details is actually very important and should not be discounted. Thinking that the very limited number of Americans who went to the Ukraine and have come back add any meaningful amount of military expertise to the these radicals is just mistaken. They are a drop in a giant bucket. American is chock full of men (and a some women) who are combat veterans (far more than any other country on earth). Counting up just those who have been in the military and wars since 9/11 is in the millions and when you go back further there are millions still hanging around from Vietnam (and if you watched the videos of the Capitol attack some of them were there), not to mention the huge numbers from in between those 2 large scale events. And these people are NOT separate at all from the ‘gun-nut Trumper in Omaha’ as they are all part of the same mozaic. America is armed, trained, has experience, and is motivated and it is ripe for real disruption.
It is not relevant to this discussion but I cannot help it since you brought it up. Having been involved in the immediate response to 9/11 and having friends who hit the ground in Afghanistan within days and having knowledge of the state of Afghanistan at the time the Taliban was in no way a spent marginal force (they were totally in charge of the country for all intents and purposes). Now it certainly did not take long before that situation changed. But the only relevant thing about Afghanistan to this discussion is the lesson we need to keep in mind about how terrorist groups can use contacts in other countries to garner support for their activities elsewhere – a key point of the article.
To sum up (this explanation/discussion could go on for hundreds of pages obviously) what is happening in the US is typical of events which have occurred in other countries which fell into open violent civil war. We are on the cusp of it right now and there are a large number of actors who are trying to make it happen. The current state of the situation is in their favor, but not by a huge margin (I think). The country has to track down everyone it can who is actively trying to overthrow the government (it is breaking the law after all) and to put lots of pressure on those supporting it to stop (with in generally legal guidelines – but be careful not to fail at this). Our security services must get a handle on the leaders and members of the organizations who will be the troops which go violent and be prepared to stop them.
This is their duty and one of the prime reasons for their existence – and yes I know that this activity will be problematic and there is no way to avoid that. The other side is bent on revolution and what they are doing is treason and will lead to great suffering. Thus my pessimism about getting out of this intact. One cannot fight an active insurgency except by fighting and this always hardens both sides further. Once the real fighting starts (and it hasn’t yet) there is no viable solution other than defeating the opposition – you have to choose sides at that point. So let’s treat this with the seriousness it deserves and try hard to contain it short of open warfare. That is the only option we actually have.
I’m leading the call for national security powers to not be expanded in light of the attack on our nation’s Capitol that occurred two weeks ago, as such measures often lead to the erosion of Americans’ civil liberties. pic.twitter.com/K6IHTPQzne
In Juan Cole world right now, he and I are living in different universes. In mine, I go to work, see family, and interact with Trump voters and supporters on a regular basis, all of whom, and I do mean that I haven’t met any, are far from radicals.
In Dr. Cole’s world, the US is now struggling with an al-Qaeda/Taliban insurgency at home that is made up of violent revolutionaries that are planning massive actions to destroy the republic.
It can be a frighteningly effective tactic. Accelerationism, what I call “sharpening the contradictions,” was the tool that al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia and then ISIL used to take over 40 percent of Iraq. They have also had some success in pushing France to the far right and in damaging French traditions of civil liberties and tolerance. … Not all anti-government groups are organized on a paramilitary basis. They estimated that there are 181 militias. It was members of the militias who were dressed in military garb as they invaded the Capitol, and who appear to have contemplated violence against our elected representatives.
The SPLC has gathered information on 25,000 militiamen. The capabilities of the militiamen have been vastly enhanced by the veterans of Bush’s Iraq and Afghanistan Wars, who have joined them in significant numbers and have brought with them tactical and firearms and explosives expertise.
So in Juan Cole world, there’s 25,000 people preparing RIGHT NOW to destroy the United States. That’s a remarkable claim.
His two main sources for these arguments are the FBI and the SPLC. The point of these stories is not to get the facts right, but to establish a narrative that, by dint of repetition, becomes accepted as common sense by the targeted audience. In the past few days, there have been *lots* of comments by and interviews of current and former FBI and CIA, etc. officials on network and cable news that tend toward this same direction.
This tells me that the legislation is coming, whatever we think of it. The task between now and February or March is to sufficiently saturate corporate media outlets with the official narrative so that bipartisan establishment support for the legislation becomes accepted and even expected. Some liberal-left Democrats like Rashida Tlaib will be allowed to voice mealy-mouthed objections to the legislation, but none will actually expend political capital contesting it. It will pass by large (nearly unanimous) majorities in the House and Senate and will involve further restrictions on the open internet, independent platforms, etc. and will further merge the interests of establishment Washington with the tech monopolies.
The one wrinkle in the above is whether enough Republicans can be convinced to turn on Trump and his voters, because the true Trumpists will reject the coming legislation (for mostly the wrong reasons).
caitlinjohnstone | A
new viral video calling on liberals to form “an army of citizen
detectives” to gather information on Trump supporters and report their
activities to the authorities has racked up thousands of shares and
millions of views in just a few hours.
The hashtag #TrumpsNewArmy is trending on Twitter as of this writing due to the release of a horrifying video
with that title from successful author and virulent Russiagater Don
Winslow. As of this writing it has some 20 thousand shares and 2.6
million views, and the comments and quote-retweets are predominantly
supportive.
“On orbefore
January 20th, Donald Trump will no longer be the Commander-in-Chief: he
will lose control of the Army, Navy, Airforce, Marines, Special Forces
and America’s nuclear arsenal,” Winslow’s voice begins ominously. “On
January 20th Donald Trump will become Commander-in-Chief of a different
army: this army.”
Viewers
are then shown footage from Trump rallies while being told that they
are looking at “radical extreme conservatives, also known as domestic
terrorists”.
“They
are hidden among us, disguised behind regular jobs,” Winslow warns.
“They are your children’s teachers. They work at supermarkets, malls,
doctor’s offices, and many are police officers and soldiers.”
Winslow
talks about white supremacists and the Capitol riot, warning that Trump
will continue escalating violence and fomenting a civil war in America.
“We
have to fight back,” Winslow declares. “In this new war, the
battlefield has changes. Computers can be more valuable than guns. And
this is what we need now more than ever: an army of citizen detectives.
I’m proposing we form a citizen army. Our weapons will be computers and
cellphones. We, who are monitoring extremists on the internet and
reporting our findings to authorities. Remember, before the Navy Seals
killed Osama Bin Laden, he had to be found. He was found by a CIA
analyst working on a computer thousands of miles away. It’s up to you.”
The
viral video is being loudly amplified by popular #Resistance accounts
like Majid M Padellan (better known as Brooklyn Dad Defiant) with
frighteningly paranoid and HUAC-like rhetoric.
WaPo | The
fiery rallies that preceded the deadly riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan.
6 were organized and promoted by an array of established conservative
insiders and activists, documents and videos show.
The
Republican Attorneys General Association was involved, as were the
activist groups Turning Point Action and Tea Party Patriots. At least
six current or former members of the Council for National Policy (CNP),
an influential group that for decades has served as a hub for
conservative and Christian activists, also played roles in promoting the
rallies.
The
two days of rallies were staged not by white nationalists and other
extremists, but by well-funded nonprofit groups and individuals that
figure prominently in the machinery of conservative activism in
Washington.
In
recent days, as federal authorities rounded up those involved in the
Capitol riot, promoters and participants of the rallies have denounced
the violence and sought to distance their events from the events that
followed.
“I
support the right of Americans to peacefully protest,” wrote Georgia
Attorney General Chris Carr, chairman of the Republican Attorneys
General Association (RAGA), “but the violence and destruction we are
seeing at the U.S. Capitol is unacceptable and un-American.”
Organizing
warm-up events is not the same thing as plotting to invade the Capitol.
But before the rallies, some used extreme rhetoric, including
references to the American Revolution, and made false claims about the
election to rouse supporters to challenge President-elect Joe Biden’s
victory.
Unless
Congress responds to the protests, “everyone can guess what me and
500,000 others will do to that building,” tweeted Ali Alexander, a
former CNP fellow who organized the “Stop the Steal” movement. “1776 is
*always* an option.”
On Jan. 5, at Freedom Plaza in D.C., Alexander led protesters in a chant of “Victory or death.”
Alexander
did not respond to a request for comment for this story. He previously
told The Washington Post that he had “remained peaceful” during the riot
and said his earlier speeches “mentioned peace” and were being
misrepresented.
“Conflating
our legally, peaceful permitted events with the breach of the US
Capitol building is defamatory and false,” he said in an email to The
Post. “People are being misled and then those same people are fomenting
violence against me and my team.”
In
the days and hours before the riots, Alexander and his allies attracted
tens of thousands of protesters from around the country — a crowd that
included white supremacists, Christian activists and even local police
officers.
Events
included a “Patriot Caravan” of buses to Washington, a “Save the
Republic” rally on Jan. 5 and a “Freedom Rally” on the morning of Jan.
6. A little-known nonprofit called Women for America First, a group run
by Trump supporters and former tea party activists, got approval to use
space on the Ellipse for what they called a “March for Trump,” according
to the “public gathering permit” issued on Jan. 5.
dossier | In the wake of the Capitol Hill melee last week, the news media has been
breathlessly reporting on the possibility — citing an intelligence
bulletin from the FBI — that there will be widespread armed protests in
all 50 states on and leading up to Inauguration Day. If the FBI is to be
believed, there is a serious, deliverable plot in motion that involves
armed insurrectionists simultaneously storming each and every state
capitol.
The hysteria has reached new heights this week, with prominent pundits,
politicians, reporters, and other personalities claiming that a wave of
pro-Trump right wing violence is right around the corner.
Security is being ramped up in capital cities across America, with many
states announcing that they are bringing in National Guard units to
prepare for the chaos that they’ve been told will meet them on or before
the 20th.
The FBI, which has not gone on the record publicly to speak about
this potential massive national security issue, has decided to
communicate it to the public by leaking this bulletin to select
individuals in the news media. As shown above, it has been the source
for blaring, intense headlines across the legacy media landscape. The
details within this “internal FBI bulletin” have now been shared by a variety of news sites such as CNN, Yahoo News, ABC News and other establishment outlets.
CNN reports on the FBI intel report:
The
FBI has received information indicating "armed protests" are being
planned at all 50 state capitols and the US Capitol in Washington, DC in
the days leading up to President-elect Joe Biden's inauguration on
January 20.
ABC reported on the memo:
Starting
this week and running through at least Inauguration Day, armed protests
are being planned at all 50 state capitols and at the U.S. Capitol.
WaPo | The
FBI privately warned law enforcement agencies Monday that far-right
extremists have discussed posing as National Guard members in Washington
and others have reviewed maps of vulnerable spots in the city — signs
of potential efforts to disrupt Wednesday’s inauguration, according to
an intelligence report obtained by The Washington Post.
The
document, a summary of threats that the FBI identified in a Monday
intelligence briefing, warned that both “lone wolves” and adherents of
the QAnon extremist ideology, some of whom joined in the violent siege
on the Capitol on Jan. 6, have indicated they plan to come to Washington
for President-elect Joe Biden’s swearing-in ceremony.
The
FBI also said it had observed people downloading and sharing maps of
sensitive locations in Washington and discussing how those facilities
could be used to interfere in security during the inauguration.
But
the intelligence briefing did not identify any specific plots to attack
the inaugural events that would be akin to the Jan. 6 siege on the
Capitol and noted that “numerous” militia and extremist groups are
publicly denouncing any violence targeted at the transition of
presidential power.
While
the FBI has picked up “suspicious traffic” in monitoring the kinds of
communication systems used by some participants in the Capitol siege, it
includes “nothing that points to any specific action.”
The
FBI on Monday declined to characterize the credibility or gravity of
the threats it outlined for law enforcement in advance of the
inauguration.
The
agency instead pointed to remarks FBI Director Christopher A. Wray made
last week, when he said the agents were monitoring a “extensive amount
of concerning online chatter” and noted the challenge of “trying to
distinguish what’s aspirational versus what’s intentional.”
“We’re
monitoring all incoming leads, whether they’re calls for armed protest,
potential threats that grow out of the January 6 breach of the Capitol,
or other kinds of potential threats leading up to inaugural events and
in various other targets. So we’re latched up with all of our partners
in that regard,” Wray added.
A
spokesman for the Secret Service also declined to comment on the threat
report or to characterize the agency’s level of concern.
theatlantic | The most famous dysfunctional family of 1990s television enjoyed, by
today’s standards, an almost dreamily secure existence that now seems
out of reach for all too many Americans. I refer, of course, to the
Simpsons. Homer, a high-school graduate whose union job at the
nuclear-power plant required little technical skill, supported a family
of five. A home, a car, food, regular doctor’s appointments, and enough
left over for plenty of beer at the local bar were all attainable on a
single working-class salary. Bart might have had to find $1,000 for the family to go to England, but he didn’t have to worry that his parents would lose their home.
This lifestyle was not fantastical in the slightest—nothing, for example, like the ridiculously large Manhattan apartments in Friends. On the contrary, the Simpsons used to be quite ordinary—they were a lot like my Michigan working-class family in the 1990s.
The 1996 episode “Much Apu About Nothing”
shows Homer’s paycheck. He grosses $479.60 per week, making his annual
income about $25,000. My parents’ paychecks in the mid-’90s were
similar. So were their educational backgrounds. My father had a two-year
degree from the local community college, which he paid for while
working nights; my mother had no education beyond high school. Until my
parents’ divorce, we were a family of three living primarily on my
mother’s salary as a physician’s receptionist, a working-class job like
Homer’s.
By 1990—the year my father turned 36 and my mother 34—they were
divorced. And significantly, they were both homeowners—an enormous feat
for two newly single people.
LATimes | During his first days in office, President-elect Joe Biden plans to
send a groundbreaking legislative package to Congress to address the
long-elusive goal of immigration reform, including what’s certain to be a
controversial centerpiece: a pathway to citizenship for an estimated 11
million immigrants who are in the country without legal status,
according to immigrant rights activists in communication with the
Biden-Harris transition team.
The bill also would provide a
shorter pathway to citizenship for hundreds of thousands of people with
temporary protected status and beneficiaries of Deferred Action for
Childhood Arrivals who were brought to the U.S. as children, and
probably also for certain front-line essential workers, vast numbers of
whom are immigrants.
Both Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris have said their
legislative proposal would include a pathway to citizenship for millions
of immigrants in the U.S. illegally, and The Times has confirmed the
bold opening salvo that the new administration plans in its first days
doesn’t include the “security first” political concessions of past
efforts.
“This notion concerning immigration enforcement and giving
Republicans everything they kept asking for … was flawed from the
beginning,” she said.
Biden-Harris transition team officials declined to comment on the record.
But
on Saturday, Biden’s incoming chief of staff, Ron Klain, sent a memo to
the administration’s senior staff that said the new president’s agenda
includes “the immigration bill he will send to Congress on his first day
in office,” which Klain asserted would “restore humanity to our
immigration system.”
Biden’s proposal lays out what
would be the most sweeping and comprehensive immigration package since
President Reagan’s Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, which
granted legal status to 3 million people who were in the country without
documentation.
theburningplatform | As an adult, I have witnessed the world I grew up in fall to ruin. I
have watched as our currency and our economy have been shamelessly
corrupted beyond redemption. Since we’ve been married, my husband and I
TWICE had our meager investment savings gutted by the market that we
were told to invest in, now that pensions no longer exist and we working
stiffs are on our own. We will be working until we die, because the
Social Security we’ve been forced to pay into has also been robbed from
under us.
I have watched as our elected officials enter Congress as ordinary
folks and leaves as multi millionaires. I have watched my blue collar
husband get up at an ungodly hour every day and come home with an aching
back that we pray will hold out long enough to get him to old age in
one piece. Outside of shoes, socks and underwear, almost everything my
family wears was bought used. We’ve been on one vacation in 12 years.
We don’t have cell phones, or cable, or any sort of streaming
services, just a landline and internet. We hardly ever eat out. Our
house is 1400 square feet, no air conditioning. I cook from scratch and I
can and I garden and I raise chickens for eggs and meat and I moonlight
selling things on Etsy. Still it is barely enough to pay the bills that
go up every year while service quality and the longevity of goods goes
down. What I just described is the life you can live on 60K a year
without going into debt.
At last calculation, when you consider all of the federal, state and
local taxes plus registration and user fees, Medicare and SS payroll
taxes, almost a third of what my family earns is stolen by the govt each
year. What’s left doesn’t go far, just enough to cover the basics and
save a little for when the wolf howls at the door.
I watched as my family’s health insurance was gutted and destroyed.
Our private market insurance, which we had to have because my husband’s
employer is too small to have a group plan, was made illegal. We were
left with the option of either buying an Obamacare plan with
unaffordable deductibles and insanely ridiculous out of pocket maxes, or
paying the very gov’t that destroyed our healthcare a fine for not
buying the gov’t mandated plan that we cannot afford. We now have short
term insurance that isn’t really insurance at all, and I live in fear of
one of us getting injured or sick with anything I can’t fix from the
medicine cabinet.
I have watched as education, which was already sketchy when I was a
kid, became an all out joke of wholly unmathematical math, gold stars
for all, and self-loathing anti-Americanism. My family has taken an
enormous financial hit as I stay home to home school our child. At least
she’ll be able to do old-fashioned math well enough to see how much
they are screwing her. A silver lining to every cloud, I guess.
I’ve sat by and held my tongue as I was called deplorable and a
bitter clinger and told that I didn’t build that. I’ve been called a
racist and a xenophobe and a chump and even an “ugly folk.” I’ve been
told that I have privilege, and that I have inherent bias because of my
skin color, and that my beloved husband and father are part of a
horrible patriarchy. Not one goddamn bit of that is true, but if I dare
say anything about it, it will be used as evidence of my racism and
white fragility.
Raised to be a Republican, I held my nose and voted for Bush, the
Texas-talking blue blood from Connecticut who lied us into 2 wars and
gave us the unpatriotic Patriot Act. I voted for McCain, the sociopathic
neocon songbird “hero” that torpedoed the attempt to kill the Obamacare
that’s killing my family financially. I held it again and voted for
Romney, the vulture capitalist skunk that masquerades as a Republican
while slithering over to the Democrat camp as often as they’ll tolerate
his oily, loathsome presence.
And I voted for Trump, who, if he did nothing else, at least gave a
resounding Bronx cheer to the richly deserving smug hypocrites of DC.
Thank you for that Mr. President, on behalf of all of us nobodies. God
bless you for it.
sicsempertyrannis | It appears to me that Schumer has in mind to try former President Trump in the senate with John Roberts presiding. IMO this is unconstitutional. As Alan Dershowitz said on the TeeVee today, the prospect of such a procedure should be horrifying to all. Why? If the congress can try a private citizen and bar him/her from holding federal office, then whichever party controls the congress can simply bar significant opposition figures from office by re-defining the meaning of statutes, imputing motive where there is none and through guilt by association. This all begins to smell like Stalin's show trials in the 30s in which he killed off his Old Bolshevik comrades and the leadership of the Red Army. Trump will always remain vulnerable to the civil courts. The Dems fear that Florida or federal courts in Florida will not extradite him? They should live with that in the interest of maintaining the Union.
We now have most of downtown Washington, DC transformed into a Green Zone on the Baghdad model. 25,000 federalized National Guard troops plus various kinds of cops occupy that zone. 25,000? How about 1,000? How about 2.000? What do they expect, an attack on the Biden inauguration platform from the other end of the Mall? The bridges from Virginia are closed by order of his majesty Ralph Northam. We live here under Ralph's imperial decrees in a vast outdoor prison. The ability of the imperial authorities to wall us up, each in our own crummy little domain bodes ill for the future.
Not for the first time am I disgusted by the susceptibility of those I thought my countrymen to waves of hysteria. German and then Communist spying in WW1, Prohibition, internment of Japanese descended citizens of the US in WW2, McCarthyism, the 2K fantasy in which people waited for the end of civilized life, 9/11, after which the whole country went into a profound funk and stumbled about terrified of the NEXT ATTACK. And now, we have the Left's desire to destroy opposition, the opposition of 75 million citizens and to do it through mass mobilization of political hysteria.
This will never be the same country again. We have lost the talent needed to maintain a federal republic.
nakedcapitalism | Upgrading the physical security around the country’s political
institutions is of little long-term value, especially if the activities
that occur within them continue to manifest ongoing dysfunction worthy
of a banana republic.
Let this be our wake-up call, America’s “Beirut blast.” The bomb
explosion that devastated large parts of Beirut last summer was not an
isolated, unfortunate occurrence, but the profound manifestation of
decades of incompetence, complacency, and corruption in the Lebanese
government—an outcome of the ruling classes’ criminal neglect of
essential public needs.
By the same token, the events of January 6th should be viewed as the
point U.S. political dysfunction reached its breaking point. While the
country still appears to remain economically powerful, it has become
politically weak and socially fragile in ways characteristic of a
society in decline. The focus on the relatively small group that broke into the Capitol as a result of lax security
is akin to focusing on the Beirut blast wreckage to the exclusion of
all else. Far more significant are the surveys of representative samples
of Americans that reveal deepening mistrust of the core institutions
and a growing commitment to sectarian interests which have, in many
parts of the nation, superseded commitment to the republic itself.
This sheds a different light on the events. While the spark that
ignited the violent pro-Trump upheaval was the incumbent’s allegations
that the November Presidential election was fraudulent, for many the
assault on the Capitol was also an insurgency against the entire
political class. “All these politicians work for us. We pay their
salaries, we pay our taxes. And what do we get? Nothing. All of them
inside are traitors”—as a member of the mob stated.
On this particular point, the grievances of the violent mob and the
findings of scholars align: America is an oligarchy, not a functioning
democracy, as the detailed study by
Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page argued in 2014. Thus, much as this was
an assault on American democracy, the storming of the Capitol was also a
sign that American democracy had already failed. Surely, these clumsy
“revolutionaries” did not storm the Capitol because they are living the
American Dream—and they are blaming, unsurprisingly, the whole political
class for their malaise.
Whenever economic explanations of this radicalization are attempted,
inequality is singled out as the root of working-class discontent.
Commentators from Joseph Stiglitz to Thomas Piketty or Emmaunuel Saez
relentlessly hammer on one theme above all others: an economic
inequality that has deep roots in the political system. A cross-party
consensus is now emerging on fighting inequality through
redistribution—from raising the minimum wage to increasing unemployment
benefits.
One reason why inequality has attracted so much attention is that it is easily measurable. Indeed, reports of the top 1% of Americans taking $50 trillion from the bottom 90% easily appeal to our sense of injustice. However, there are studies
of the white working class which reveal that despite the outrage about
inequality, many in this demographic still admire the rich.
Additionally, the singular focus on economic inequality obscures another
phenomenon—the massive economic insecurity which is affecting broader
swathes of the population beyond the ‘precariat’ (those in poorly paid
and insecure jobs). While insecurity is not easy to measure and report,
it is in fact at the root of the social malaise of Western societies.
nakedcapitalism | Katie Porter has been a star since being elected to Congress in 2018.
Two years after narrowly ousting GOP incumbent Mimi Walters– 158,906
(52.1%) to 146,383 (47.9%)– the Republican Party was on the war-path in
Orange County but not serious about taking on Porter. They defeated
corporate conservative Democrats Harley Rouda and Gil Cisneros but never
really got behind former Mission Viejo mayor Greg Raths, their
candidate against Porter. The NRCC spent no money on Raths’ behalf and
Porter beat him 221,843 (53.5%) to 193,096 (46.5%).
Several weeks ago, Porter was elected Deputy Chair of the
Congressional Progressive Caucus. Having won two terms in Congress as a
supporter of Medicare for All in a district where Republicans outnumber
Democrats, she is best known for holding corporate special interests
accountable and advocating for stronger worker protections. Her star
shined brightly as a fierce questioner of banksters and government
bureaucrats who came before the House Financial Services Committee.
On Thursday evening, I read that Pelosi has pushed her off the committee
at the urging on the banksters, the Fed and Wall Street special
interests. In a conversation with another member of the committee, an
admirer of Porter’s, I was told that it was a combination of the Fed and
Wall Street that demanded her removal. The member told me that “It is,
in fact, a tragedy for that committee to lose someone like her. It’s a
staff-run committee, with revolving-door staff… Also taking someone off a
committee means they’re losing their committee seniority, which is
very, very bad karma, since the whole system is built on that.”
I’m honored and excited to rejoin active service on @HomelandDems, where I plan to focus on highlighting and finding solutions to the scourge of white nationalist extremism. pic.twitter.com/JIhh0fOAPk
NYPost | Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell is joining the House Committee on
Homeland Security one month after it was revealed he was targeted by a suspected Chinese spy.
The California lawmaker — who was revealed to have been duped by a
Chinese honey-trap spy who cozied to him and other pols in a bid to
infiltrate the US political system — announced his appointment back onto
the sensitive post in a tweet on Friday afternoon.
“My committee memberships — along with my experience as a prosecutor
and as the son and brother of law enforcement officers — will give me a
unique opportunity to delve into one of America’s most serious national
security threats,” Swalwell wrote.
Members of the committee are responsible for oversight of the US
Department of Homeland Security and the nation’s security legislation.
Swalwell also still sits on the House Intelligence Committee.
Swalwell’s appointment to the Homeland panel follows a bombshell
Axios report which revealed the father-of-two had a relationship with
Christine Fang, an accused Chinese spy.
newyorker | One man angrily invoked the pandemic lockdown: “Why can’t I
work? Where’s my ‘pursuit of happiness’?” Many people were equipped with
flak jackets, helmets, gas masks, and tactical apparel. Guns were
prohibited for the protest, but a man in a cowboy hat, posing for a
photograph, lifted his jacket to reveal a revolver tucked into his
waistband. Other Trump supporters had Tasers, baseball bats, and
truncheons. I saw one man holding a coiled noose.
“Hang Mike Pence!” people yelled.
The attack on the Capitol was a predictable apotheosis of a months-long
ferment. Throughout the pandemic, right-wing protesters had been
gathering at statehouses, demanding entry. In April, an armed mob had
filled the Michigan state capitol, chanting “Treason!” and “Let us in!”
In December, conservatives had broken the glass doors of the Oregon
state capitol, overrunning officers and spraying them with chemical
agents. The occupation of restricted government sanctums was an
affirmation of dominance so emotionally satisfying that it was an end in
itself—proof to elected officials, to Biden voters, and also to the
occupiers themselves that they were still in charge. After one of the
Trump supporters breached the U.S. Capitol, he insisted through a
megaphone, “We will not be denied.” There was an unmistakable subtext as the mob, almost entirely white, shouted, “Whose house? Our house!” One man carried a Confederate flag through the building. A Black member of the Capitol Police later told BuzzFeed News that, during the assault, he was called a racial slur fifteen times.
Beneath the soaring dome, surrounded by statues of former Presidents
and by large oil paintings depicting such historical scenes as the
embarkation of the Pilgrims and the presentation of the Declaration of
Independence, a number of young men chanted, “America first!” The phrase
was popularized in 1940 by Nazi sympathizers lobbying to keep the U.S.
out of the Second World War;
in 2016, Trump resurrected it to describe his isolationist foreign and
immigration policies. Some of the chanters, however, waved or wore
royal-blue flags inscribed with “AF,” in white letters. This is
the logo for the program “America First,” which is hosted by Nicholas
Fuentes, a twenty-two-year-old Holocaust denier, who promotes a brand of
white Christian nationalism that views politics as a means of
preserving demographic supremacy. Though America Firsters revile most
mainstream Republicans for lacking sufficient commitment to this
priority—especially neoconservatives, whom they accuse of being
subservient to Satan and Jews—the group’s loyalty to Trump is, according
to Fuentes, “unconditional.”
The
America Firsters and other invaders fanned out in search of lawmakers,
breaking into offices and revelling in their own astounding impunity.
“Nancy, I’m ho-ome! ” a man taunted, mimicking Jack Nicholson’s
character in “The Shining.” Someone else yelled, “1776—it’s now or
never.” Around this time, Trump tweeted, “Mike Pence didn’t have the
courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country. . . .
USA demands the truth!” Twenty minutes later, Ashli Babbitt, a
thirty-five-year-old woman from California, was fatally shot while
climbing through a barricaded door that led to the Speaker’s lobby in
the House chamber, where representatives were sheltering. The
congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez,
a Democrat from New York, later said that she’d had a “close encounter”
with rioters during which she thought she “was going to die.” Earlier
that morning, another representative, Lauren Boebert—a newly elected
Republican, from Colorado, who has praised QAnon and promised to wear her Glock in the Capitol—had tweeted, “Today is 1776.”
thepitchkc |Flush with ambition and cash, a newcomer arrives like a bolt from the blue. Or, in Missouri’s case, red.
He jumps a line of
aspirational politicians, lands in a statewide elected office and
immediately sets his sights on a higher target, heedless of the wreck
just up the road.
Missouri has seen this movie twice in four years.
The original performance
starred Eric Greitens, who was largely unknown before he began his
improbable but successful 2016 run for governor, only to be forced out
of office after two years, enveloped in scandal.
The sequel features Josh
Hawley. His first elected office, also gained in 2016, was state
attorney general — a job that traditionally has gone to politicians who
have spent years in the trenches of the state legislature. Two years
later, Hawley vaulted to the U.S. Senate. He is now facing nationwide
wrath for prolonging baseless doubts about Democrat Joe Biden’s election, and for encouraging insurrectionists with a fist pump before they stormed the U.S. Capitol.
Outside of President
Trump’s deep red base—whose votes and affections Greitens and Hawley
both covet—the actions of the two wunderkinds have left many Missourians
embarrassed and wondering how their state has become the cradle for
ambition gone so wildly awry.
The explanation begins with
the two men themselves, who both grew up in Missouri, went elsewhere
and returned with the intention of using the state as a launching pad
for their presidential ambitions.
Greitens settled in the St.
Louis area and founded a non-profit to help military veterans. Hawley
landed a job as assistant professor at the University of Missouri School
of Law in Columbia.
While Hawley was
conscientious about teaching his classes and meeting with students, he
showed no interest in the life of the university or the usual faculty
activities, said Frank Bowman, a professor at the law school.
“It became clear that personal advancement was the priority behind which everything else had to fall,” said Bowman.
Rejuvenation Pills
-
No one likes getting old. Everyone would like to be immorbid. Let's be
careful here. Immortal doesnt include youth or return to youth. Immorbid
means you s...
Death of the Author — at the Hands of Cthulhu
-
In 1967, French literary theorist and philosopher Roland Barthes wrote of
“The Death of the Author,” arguing that the meaning of a text is divorced
from au...
9/29 again
-
"On this sacred day of Michaelmas, former President Donald Trump invoked
the heavenly power of St. Michael the Archangel, sharing a powerful prayer
for pro...
Return of the Magi
-
Lately, the Holy Spirit is in the air. Emotional energy is swirling out of
the earth.I can feel it bubbling up, effervescing and evaporating around
us, s...
New Travels
-
Haven’t published on the Blog in quite a while. I at least part have been
immersed in the area of writing books. My focus is on Science Fiction an
Historic...
Covid-19 Preys Upon The Elderly And The Obese
-
sciencemag | This spring, after days of flulike symptoms and fever, a man
arrived at the emergency room at the University of Vermont Medical Center.
He ...
