If the GOP had the courage of the Senate Republicans in 1974, Milley never would have been in a position to worry that an American president might start a nuclear war just to hang on to power
Trump's record of catastrophic ignorance, mental & emotional imbalance as POTUS required intervention from the beginning. Without knowing the history, military capacity, or the countries bordering North Korea or within an easy missile lob, Trump recklessly engaged in actions that raised the risks of an accidental nuclear war:
In the end, and after guidance from leaders of other countries, including Russia & his military leaders, Trump settled for two photoshoots, some love letters, and zero diplomatic progress in addressing North Korea's nuclear threat. Rather than pursuing the one potential route through diplomacy with China to help negotiate a nuclear agreement with North Korea, Trump chose to declare a trade war with China, which soon escalated into a new cold war. In the meantime, North Korea went about perfecting its weapons arsenal, which Trump claimed was within their understanding of an unwritten and stealth agreement. Trump viewed North Korea's short-range ballistic missiles as unthreatening, even though we had troops stationed in Japan, South Korea, and Guam.
After striking out on the Korean Peninsula and raising tensions with China while losing his trade war, Trump figured Iran would be his next target of sponsored interest, starting with disassembling the Iran Nuclear Treaty. How could he lose? The U.S. spends almost a trillion annually on its military while Iran spends about 15 billion:
Again, Trump had not bothered to look at a map to determine the countries with significant oil production within the range of Iran's offensive missiles. It took an Iranian attack on Saudi Arabia's oil production to temper Trump for the moment, in addition to learning about the Straight of Hormuz. Russia was probably also instrumental in helping Trump understand specific options were off the table.
Seven months before the assassination of Qassem Soleimani, Trump was ready to improve his stature by assassinating Soleimani. However, in December of 2019, the House impeached Trump for putting his personal, political interests above the interests of U.S. foreign policy. Rather than learning a lesson from his new title of an impeached POTUS and its consequent disgrace, Trump became more determined to elevate his low standing and get reelected. However, he needed a justification to offset the risks of starting a major Regional War. Qassem Soleimani had been on Trump's radar for seven months. In his mind, a war would satisfy his sponsors, make him a wartime POTUS, and elevate his status in the Presidential Elections. Towards the end of 2019, before the pandemic, the American economy was slowing. Most economists predicted a recession, and of the massive new debt his Admin had created, 83% went to the wealthiest Americans and their concentrated ownership of corporate wealth.
When the military presented Trump with options to respond to probable Iranian involvement in an attack in Iraq, Trump chose the option that would benefit him the most and likely result in a counter-attack on undefended American troops in Iraq:
Fortunately, Iran was only interested in responding with a minimal but clear message. They don't want a war with the U.S. and don't try to start a fight when your troops are unprotected, as Trump couldn't wait to do.
To America, the message of the Trump Crises should be don't elect unqualified representatives who put their interests and pathologies above the country's, the general welfare, a sustainable future, the truth, and our democracy. Learn to spot a desperate & corrupt con man or woman. Demand that our democratic institutions provide the necessary, Constitutional checks and balances on each other.
Excellent synopsis of Trump's foreign-policy chops coupled to his incessant, all-consuming, self-defeating bid for reelection. Note to voters: Don't elect ignorant fools and mental cases.
One should not have to commit treason to prevent treason...
Such is life as we pass through the delicate membrane seperating reality from the absurd.
Perhaps in our last hours of knowability we will learn just how close a near miss may have occurred in Donald's final days as Demander and Thief.
Perhaps we will reform our lawful documents such that they are of a living nature, inclusive of nuance - rather than the static, technicality-ridden obstacle to the very "order" they fail to fulfill.
Samantha Bee said Wednesday that Republicans “need to be honest” about why they’re stoking anger about COVID-19 vaccines and mandates.
Republicans aren’t really afraid of them, said the “Full Frontal” host. They’re just terrified of “the hate-filled, conspiracy-loving base they have cultivated.”
Nope. Usually, it's only fair-minded Democrats (and courts) who worry over such nuances and niceties. Republicans, obviously, don't give a damn about the law and the Constitution, unless it can be wielded like a cudgel, appropriately or not.
So let's get real: The main reason America's actual traitors (by now, almost the entire Republican Party) are going after General Milley is to flip the narrative and deflect the charge of "treason" against themselves. Why? Because the insurrection on the first Wednesday, January 6, 2021 (the day of infamy) will be the determinate factor in the election on the second Tuesday, November 8, 2022 -- IF the Democrats keep it on the front burner, as they should and must to save democracy!
Forget strict definitions; who exactly is betraying their own country, its principles, and their fellow citizens: the party who harbors insurrectionists and terrorists within their ranks or a general who intervened, legally or not, to prevent a madman from ending the world in a nuclear holocaust?
If you have to think too long and hard on that one, it probably means you're a redneck ...so to speak.
What did General Milley know about any alerts on the Chinese end of this situation? Was he watching intelligence traffic from over there that alarmed him? Of course he would not be able to discuss anything classified he knew. His actions were pretty drastic. One of those calls was just before the election and the other was after the insurrection and Trump's Big Lie".
What is a moral, highly educated general supposed to do when he knows he is dealing with the psychopath in the White House, the one in Russia, and an authoritarian Chinese government that may have put their military on high alert? That's a lot of itchy fingers, and the stakes are high if someone makes a move and it is misinterpreted.
So many Republicans had the chance to take out the trash but decided to cash-in instead. They know Trump is a psychopath, but they think he is THEIR psychopath. Some like this idea, but it's not how that works. He has no conscience concerning them, their families, the country, or anyone's fate but his own. General Mark Milley may well be a hero, not a traitor. Did he fall on his sword to protect us? Does Secretary Austin know it, and is that why he is trying to stand by him?
General Milley is truly a hero. He was forced to think outside the Trump box. It's downright scary to realize how close to the brink we had come with a psychopath leading the Party of Death.
Only because Trumps cabinet and VP would not do their job and invoke the 25th Amendment. Or that 49 Republican Senators voted twice not to impeach when they knew that he had broken the law.
For the havoc the scandalous, scoundrel senators wreaked upon our country, there should be no forgiveness and no forgetting. When McConnell is gone, there will be celebration. Much of what we have heard from those conscienceless senators as well as from many House members comes straight from the Fox Nuisance Channel. Fox likewise takes what emanates from the Republicans and plays it on endless loops with more than a little elaboration, embellishment, and distortion to rile their gullible viewers.
Blame has been well-placed, and shame is well-deserved. However, we must not forget that these people won elections, by whatever guile and corrupt means that were available to them. They managed to persuade and con voters with the aid of mendacity, money, and misinformation. But without voters who were too anxious to believe lies and too ignorant about practically everything to be able to discriminate between real and unreal, good and bad, and just and unjust, they would not have ever won those elections or obtained the support they had.
While democracy has been undermined and compromised in many ways, we do still rely to a large extent on votes counted (which may soon change) in combination with unbalanced electors, which reflects a public which has a strong tendency to shoot itself in the foot, or quite often, in the head and heart. There is only one way to reverse the trend and you know what I’m going to say. We must find ways to allow our youth to discover a path to education without dumbing them down or making them inordinately inept, cynical, and dependent on authorities in the process.
I will say it again. That cannot happen in schools where obedience to authority is the most prominent feature of the contrived and controlled rotten-to-the-core curriculum. Authority in school is the poison pill. Eliminating bad laws is the antidote.
Right on the mark and well put, Robert B. I would only quibble with the notion that a path to a good, well-rounded education, teaching the proper curriculum in a loving and intelligent manner, while emphasizing critical thinking skills and independent thought as well as balanced emotional behavior, cannot happen in the setting of our public school system.
Ours especially has the inherent potential to be the greatest in the world and in history -- but only in the right hands!
Remember, any public program designed to help people achieve their potentials is still just an abstract concept, a naked skeleton without life. Well-intentioned concepts must be realized by real flesh and blood humans beings with hearts and brains who are well-learned and deeply committed to honesty and openness in education.
Teachers of our young are the most under-appreciated and under-paid unsung heroes of our time. After all, the most influential scientists, artists, writers, public servants, social workers, reporters, doctors, nurses, business leaders, innovators, entrepreneurs, educators, and other deep thinkers who have contributed to the positive advancement of society and the preservation of the environment, once had to sit in classrooms somewhere as children with brains of fresh clay and pay close attention to a schoolmarm and/or schoolmaster, whether they liked to or not. In the right setting, those great minds came to love education and continued learning for the rest of their lives.
There is simply no excuse for substandard teachers populating a substandard public school system with a substandard curriculum in the world's wealthiest country. C'mon people -- the United States of America has resources aplenty, bursting the seams of Uncle Scrooge's Money Bin! How it's used depends on who we elect.
Does the lion's share of wealth end up in the pockets of everyday people who need to spend it in order to have a decent chance at a decent life, or does it get locked away in the secret bank accounts of the obscenely rich, out of circulation and hidden from fair taxation? A healthy economy, and therefore a healthy "human infrastructure," works from the bottom up, not the top down. That means it works for the most people, not the fewest. That's just Economics 101.
Unfortunately, the latter is the world we live in today. And that needs to change pretty damn soon before another generation loses sight of the whole point of a people's democracy!
Thank you for your acknowledgement and thoughtful comments. It is unlikely that you have seen my previous comments or expositions. I was unaware that comments could be sent here to the printed version of Thom’s rants. Some notices come to my regular mailbox, and some show up in the junk mail section for some reason. I’ve written at great length several times recently in response to the audio version, which is apparently separate. I would like to address your comments fully, but maybe you can go back to see where I’m coming from in those earlier comments. I am burned out and exasperated with the lack of interest at this point.
I will say that the prescription you offer is old hat, or as one of Thom’s guests quipped the other day, “old cheese”. You are saying, I believe, that we have a good “system” or structure, but that the best people or the “right” people are not being selected or properly trained, remunerated, and respected. You seem to be calling for reform.
My point in the piece you read about bad politicians is that they are what too many people want, and they fit into a dysfunctional schema very well because we have deviated too far from the original design and intent. The personnel we have in our school systems are precisely what too many people want, also. There have been uncounted reform attempts for generations, none of which have materially improved the circumstances students face.
Reforms such as you allude to with flowery, elegant, and somewhat idealistic language require that relationships between students and teachers be quite radically changed. The monkey wrench in the gears, however, is the hierarchical nature of the “systems”, which is inescapable under compulsory attendance laws. Authority is indispensable. Control is indispensable. Subservience is indispensable. A canned curriculum is indispensable. Meaningless measurement is indispensable. (“Good Lord, the thing was a mystery – and we measured it!” author unknown.) The result is an authoritarian bureaucracy.
Make no mistake about it. Ignore all the hype. Our schools are operating exactly as intended. Education has never been the objective. Civic engagement is nowhere to be found as a serious and sincere priority. Intellectual depth or heft are purely accidental and will always be seen as subversive by those with power and influence. These are institutions under a mandate meant to serve the interests of a tiny segment of the population and a narrow range of purposes deemed important by moralistic reactionaries with too much money. It is no fluke that over 70 million people voted for a sociopathic dictator wanna-be, not once, but twice. When obedience is drilled into brains for twelve years, an authority to obey will be sought after.
The other point I am obliged to address, once again, is the idea that scholars and great leaders and successful people owe their skills, talents, intellect, or character to having sat passively in classes taking in the wonderful knowledge and wisdom emanating from teachers or brilliant historical figures and literature. I’m going to be polite and just say that is mythology.
You were probably a good student. However, I would bet dollars to donuts that your education is a benefit more of the times when you were able to think and ruminate without being deluged with useless information, repetitive crap, and assignments. I honor great teachers and you may have been helped and inspired by some heroic mentors who happened to be teaching in schools. But, the best teachers typically find it necessary to circumvent rules and risk their careers to do real teaching and the credit goes to the student, the family, those exceptional teachers, and most importantly to the sheer persistence of the student to cut through the BS and politics to formulate a coherent picture of the world.
Compulsory attendance laws are the bane of a student's existence and undermine democracy and civil society because they are based on illegitimate authority. They must go, or we can kiss our way of life good-bye.
Awesome! Your lucid thoughts are a good springboard into deeper water.
The best teacher is the grand magnificence of life itself, the purity of which remains untouched by human thought. At best, we can only offer up a dim and woefully inadequate description of what is just partially detected with severely limited senses and abilities.
Life and death, the greatest mystery.
Peering into the night sky, into the abyss, into eternity, should be a humbling experience for every human being still miraculously alive on this "pale blue dot." What is that point (if, indeed it exists) where the arrogance of man and woman can come to an end naturally, effortlessly -- when petty, self-centered, fractured thoughts are shocked into silence by unplanned and unforeseen ..."awe"? (How else can one describe "what is"?) In that vast, unimaginable "silence", perhaps real learning begins.
This is not something Twighlight Zone-ish. From birth onward, at one time or another in those quiet, drifting moments in between an otherwise busy day, we have all experienced the profound mystery forever presenting itself before us with such immense power. It’s just that our little minds are incapable of retaining a memory of that which cannot be retained by memory.
Even looking at the profound mystery of a simple tree in all its glory provokes shock and awe (or at least it should) before thought has a chance to kick in and squelch the timeless second. Thought as knowledge comes after the fact, forever following a moment behind the absolute present when the cutting edge of existence actually happens. Call it an "open" classroom where knowledge is secondary to understanding, which must come first for knowledge to make any sense.
Of course, systems and institutions are only as good as the people who invent them and operate within them. And the fact remains that each individual IS the society, both a product of it and a contributor to it. Let's face it, our so-called "individual" thoughts are really just secondhand thoughts we share with everyone else on the planet who so chooses to partake.
We just string pieces and parts of it together to our liking, as a tapestry of our life. Right? But then, that's the nature of knowledge. It's a good thing, but it's a static thing with no life. People give it life and meaning.
Thought and knowledge are "things" that we can all share and add to, while as a society we methodically accumulate ever more facts and figures for good or ill. But then, even when one dwells on that astonishing fact for a while, it becomes, in and of itself, an awe-inspiring, remarkable achievement that somehow out of necessity we evolved the ability to do so. Nature is remarkable to say the least much more "intelligent than we purport to be.
Why must we stop evolving? In the bigger picture when all the pieces come together, as the greed-head dominant species on this godforsaken speck of dust, it sure looks like we're at that easily predicted, do or die moment. There is just no getting around hard-cold facts on such a scale.
Ergo, shouldn't the next question be why human thought has so utterly failed to address the utter chaos it has created, despite 200,000 years of trying not to be complete idiots in danger of going extinct, or something else godawful for sure? If our fractured thought patterns created such immense problems in the first place, why does anyone "think" more of the same will somehow "solve" them -- without making them horribly worse?
Think Afghanistan; it’s the same goddamn pattern throughout history! "Where Man goes, war goes." Physically, we have evolved; technologically, in leaps and bounds; mentally and emotionally, not so much. We're still the same hairy mammals we've always been -- violent, selfish brutes who happen to be good at science. That makes us dangerous.
Perhaps the firsthand, unvarnished observation of THAT stubborn fact in all its glory will shock the individual and society into silence and will change us fundamentally. Ah yes, wishful thinking. Just a little thought experiment. Think of us as little antennae covering the surface of Earth, loudly broadcasting most of the time, and way too busy to just receive and listen.
Ideals are dangerous things. They are ethereal thought constructs with no substance that pull the mind in predetermined directions as if we have risen above our own limitations, foreseeing a perfect future that doesn't exist. (And besides, how would we even "know"?)
Like Charlie Brown, Lucy, and the football, we always convince ourselves that the outward chaos of human society has some non-chaotic solution that can be attained if only we think about it hard enough. The ego demands it.
Yet, as in most things human, the truth, the understanding, the ending of the problem -- whatever it might be -- always seems to lie just beyond the limitations we impose upon ourselves.
Quite the dilemma. The gross stupidity of present-day Homo sapiens won't end well. We do know that at least. But no amount of education and knowledge, no matter the venue, will change our frightening reality unless we as individuals and extensions of a worldwide society truly wake up.
That moniker appears to be completely appropriate. I don’t know if you are a poet who waxes philosophical or a philosopher who waxes poetic, but you write on a plane that engages a lot of synapses and goes to the heart of what life is all about. I am at a loss to reach that plane for a challenging discussion.
I did find a couple of things that I must ask you to think a little more about. You said knowledge is a good thing but that “…it’s a static thing with no life.” I believe I have come to a similar conclusion with respect to the traditional cartesian definition of knowledge. However, modern science and especially neuroscience has provided persuasive proof, or strong evidence at least, that cognition, and therefore knowledge, is embodied. We think using physical structures and substances, i.e., synapses, nerve cells, glia, chemical substances (hormones and other chemicals). That is how we know and what we know. The symbols, data, information, language, and whatever else one finds in various media is not knowledge. Knowledge is only cognition, memory, emotion, sensation, perception, etc. It is and must always be alive and it is not static. It exists solely in the mind/brain/body of a living and breathing human being.
Our refusal so far to abandon the cartesian paradigm for schooling and education or philosophy within the broader society is one major factor we appear to have stopped evolving and why “…human thought has so utterly failed to address the utter chaos it has created…”. We are three centuries late to the party.
I am Earthbound and unable to achieve your level of thought and imagination. I am just trying to show people that the laws we choose to perpetuate introducing authority and coercion into the daily lives of children is destructive. Most people reject the idea. Many of the people who claim to care simply to not care quite enough to call a spade a spade and bad laws paternalistic, counterproductive, and unconstitutional. I had hoped that I had found people who would at least listen and discuss the merits of my argument. What I suggest is no so much a “non-chaotic solution” as the reversal of a monumental error from the mid-19th century based on ideas from the 16th century!
I do not foresee a “perfect future that doesn’t exist”. I am not a Utopian or even a revolutionary. This, for me is not about ego or about creating a mutual admiration society. More of the same, as you point out is not going to cut it. Rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic won’t save anyone. But it sure would be nice if we could stop miseducating kids, harming them and undermining democracy in the process. Don’t you agree?
Every child is a new hope for a better world -- if we don't corrupt their minds. Hate in the form of racism, misogyny, xenophobia, religious and political extremism, and all its other numerous expressions is a learned behavior tearing the world apart.
It makes the mind dull and petty like all bad habits that become entirely too comfortable as we become isolated within the confines of our thick, boney skulls, a mental prison that light cannot penetrate. Sadly, such negative self-identity is very difficult to change, especially as people age.
It's like an over-the-top, narrow-minded gun nut whose entire world revolves around a hunk of plastic and metal. It has special esoteric meaning only to the initiated and becomes all important, even to the point of death.
Literally, if we are to survive and thrive on this little planet lost in the cosmos, we must individually and collectively unlearn our destructive mental patterns. As Carl Sagan warned: No one out there is going to come to the rescue. We're on our own.
Thought viruses spread much like real viruses -- from person to person. The vaccine is awareness.
Good discussion. Thanks for the opportunity to rant.
The problem, as I see it, is that no one has to be teaching, modelling, or somehow projecting hate and xenophobia for profound damage to be done. Messages and conceptions are intuited by students, and self-blame and guilt/shame are routinely internalized in schools where compliance and performance are rewarded, and any deviation, reluctance, failure, or refusal is likely to result in chiding, browbeating, and some form of humiliation or punishment.
Obedience is lesson number one. Authority MUST be recognized and respected in a typically unilateral power relationship where respect goes one way. Every imaginable strategy, methodology, and reform has been tried (the re-invention of the educational wheel) but illegitimate authority cannot be dispensed with when laws compel attendance, along with hundreds of other behaviors or prohibitions. There must be winners and there must be losers. Values 101 will never be an option. Values, morals, ideals, principles, and empathy must be developed as a function of positive and edifying experience, self-regard, and consistent examples within a hospitable environment. In addition to creating a values vacuum (because as agents of the state, teachers must be neutral) students are fed a steady diet of Pabulum and meaningless platitudes and, instead of intellectual stimulation, they get trivial pursuit, abstractions, and incessant testing and evaluation.
Thank you for your input and ideas. I am greatly impressed by your ability to articulate good ideas with amazing skill. BTW, did I tell you that I've written two books on these issues? I have had no success finding a publisher, ostensibly because I'm attacking a sacred cow. The first is about 360 pages and the second is a scaled-down version at about 120 pages - available upon request. You would really find my chapter on embodied knowledge in the earlier book right up your alley. It is based on Lakoff & Johnson's brilliant book, "Philosophy in the Flesh".
Trump's record of catastrophic ignorance, mental & emotional imbalance as POTUS required intervention from the beginning. Without knowing the history, military capacity, or the countries bordering North Korea or within an easy missile lob, Trump recklessly engaged in actions that raised the risks of an accidental nuclear war:
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/north-korea-crisis-how-events-have-unfolded-under-trump-n753996
In the end, and after guidance from leaders of other countries, including Russia & his military leaders, Trump settled for two photoshoots, some love letters, and zero diplomatic progress in addressing North Korea's nuclear threat. Rather than pursuing the one potential route through diplomacy with China to help negotiate a nuclear agreement with North Korea, Trump chose to declare a trade war with China, which soon escalated into a new cold war. In the meantime, North Korea went about perfecting its weapons arsenal, which Trump claimed was within their understanding of an unwritten and stealth agreement. Trump viewed North Korea's short-range ballistic missiles as unthreatening, even though we had troops stationed in Japan, South Korea, and Guam.
After striking out on the Korean Peninsula and raising tensions with China while losing his trade war, Trump figured Iran would be his next target of sponsored interest, starting with disassembling the Iran Nuclear Treaty. How could he lose? The U.S. spends almost a trillion annually on its military while Iran spends about 15 billion:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-54972269
Again, Trump had not bothered to look at a map to determine the countries with significant oil production within the range of Iran's offensive missiles. It took an Iranian attack on Saudi Arabia's oil production to temper Trump for the moment, in addition to learning about the Straight of Hormuz. Russia was probably also instrumental in helping Trump understand specific options were off the table.
Seven months before the assassination of Qassem Soleimani, Trump was ready to improve his stature by assassinating Soleimani. However, in December of 2019, the House impeached Trump for putting his personal, political interests above the interests of U.S. foreign policy. Rather than learning a lesson from his new title of an impeached POTUS and its consequent disgrace, Trump became more determined to elevate his low standing and get reelected. However, he needed a justification to offset the risks of starting a major Regional War. Qassem Soleimani had been on Trump's radar for seven months. In his mind, a war would satisfy his sponsors, make him a wartime POTUS, and elevate his status in the Presidential Elections. Towards the end of 2019, before the pandemic, the American economy was slowing. Most economists predicted a recession, and of the massive new debt his Admin had created, 83% went to the wealthiest Americans and their concentrated ownership of corporate wealth.
When the military presented Trump with options to respond to probable Iranian involvement in an attack in Iraq, Trump chose the option that would benefit him the most and likely result in a counter-attack on undefended American troops in Iraq:
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-iraq-security-usa-iran/trump-authorizes-military-to-respond-after-deadly-attack-blamed-on-iran-backed-militia-idUSKBN20Z251
Fortunately, Iran was only interested in responding with a minimal but clear message. They don't want a war with the U.S. and don't try to start a fight when your troops are unprotected, as Trump couldn't wait to do.
To America, the message of the Trump Crises should be don't elect unqualified representatives who put their interests and pathologies above the country's, the general welfare, a sustainable future, the truth, and our democracy. Learn to spot a desperate & corrupt con man or woman. Demand that our democratic institutions provide the necessary, Constitutional checks and balances on each other.
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/order-from-chaos/2020/01/14/why-did-the-pentagon-ever-give-trump-the-option-of-killing-soleimani/
Excellent synopsis of Trump's foreign-policy chops coupled to his incessant, all-consuming, self-defeating bid for reelection. Note to voters: Don't elect ignorant fools and mental cases.
One should not have to commit treason to prevent treason...
Such is life as we pass through the delicate membrane seperating reality from the absurd.
Perhaps in our last hours of knowability we will learn just how close a near miss may have occurred in Donald's final days as Demander and Thief.
Perhaps we will reform our lawful documents such that they are of a living nature, inclusive of nuance - rather than the static, technicality-ridden obstacle to the very "order" they fail to fulfill.
Samantha Bee said Wednesday that Republicans “need to be honest” about why they’re stoking anger about COVID-19 vaccines and mandates.
Republicans aren’t really afraid of them, said the “Full Frontal” host. They’re just terrified of “the hate-filled, conspiracy-loving base they have cultivated.”
Notice how wingers, frothing at the mouth, never fret about the strict constitutional definition of treason when hurling the epithet at their political opponents. https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?path=/prelim@title18/part1/chapter115&edition=prelim
Nope. Usually, it's only fair-minded Democrats (and courts) who worry over such nuances and niceties. Republicans, obviously, don't give a damn about the law and the Constitution, unless it can be wielded like a cudgel, appropriately or not.
So let's get real: The main reason America's actual traitors (by now, almost the entire Republican Party) are going after General Milley is to flip the narrative and deflect the charge of "treason" against themselves. Why? Because the insurrection on the first Wednesday, January 6, 2021 (the day of infamy) will be the determinate factor in the election on the second Tuesday, November 8, 2022 -- IF the Democrats keep it on the front burner, as they should and must to save democracy!
Forget strict definitions; who exactly is betraying their own country, its principles, and their fellow citizens: the party who harbors insurrectionists and terrorists within their ranks or a general who intervened, legally or not, to prevent a madman from ending the world in a nuclear holocaust?
If you have to think too long and hard on that one, it probably means you're a redneck ...so to speak.
What did General Milley know about any alerts on the Chinese end of this situation? Was he watching intelligence traffic from over there that alarmed him? Of course he would not be able to discuss anything classified he knew. His actions were pretty drastic. One of those calls was just before the election and the other was after the insurrection and Trump's Big Lie".
What is a moral, highly educated general supposed to do when he knows he is dealing with the psychopath in the White House, the one in Russia, and an authoritarian Chinese government that may have put their military on high alert? That's a lot of itchy fingers, and the stakes are high if someone makes a move and it is misinterpreted.
So many Republicans had the chance to take out the trash but decided to cash-in instead. They know Trump is a psychopath, but they think he is THEIR psychopath. Some like this idea, but it's not how that works. He has no conscience concerning them, their families, the country, or anyone's fate but his own. General Mark Milley may well be a hero, not a traitor. Did he fall on his sword to protect us? Does Secretary Austin know it, and is that why he is trying to stand by him?
General Milley is truly a hero. He was forced to think outside the Trump box. It's downright scary to realize how close to the brink we had come with a psychopath leading the Party of Death.
Only because Trumps cabinet and VP would not do their job and invoke the 25th Amendment. Or that 49 Republican Senators voted twice not to impeach when they knew that he had broken the law.
People who think this had anything to do with "helping" the Chinese have their head up their.....and yet that's how the spin will go.
For the havoc the scandalous, scoundrel senators wreaked upon our country, there should be no forgiveness and no forgetting. When McConnell is gone, there will be celebration. Much of what we have heard from those conscienceless senators as well as from many House members comes straight from the Fox Nuisance Channel. Fox likewise takes what emanates from the Republicans and plays it on endless loops with more than a little elaboration, embellishment, and distortion to rile their gullible viewers.
Blame has been well-placed, and shame is well-deserved. However, we must not forget that these people won elections, by whatever guile and corrupt means that were available to them. They managed to persuade and con voters with the aid of mendacity, money, and misinformation. But without voters who were too anxious to believe lies and too ignorant about practically everything to be able to discriminate between real and unreal, good and bad, and just and unjust, they would not have ever won those elections or obtained the support they had.
While democracy has been undermined and compromised in many ways, we do still rely to a large extent on votes counted (which may soon change) in combination with unbalanced electors, which reflects a public which has a strong tendency to shoot itself in the foot, or quite often, in the head and heart. There is only one way to reverse the trend and you know what I’m going to say. We must find ways to allow our youth to discover a path to education without dumbing them down or making them inordinately inept, cynical, and dependent on authorities in the process.
I will say it again. That cannot happen in schools where obedience to authority is the most prominent feature of the contrived and controlled rotten-to-the-core curriculum. Authority in school is the poison pill. Eliminating bad laws is the antidote.
Right on the mark and well put, Robert B. I would only quibble with the notion that a path to a good, well-rounded education, teaching the proper curriculum in a loving and intelligent manner, while emphasizing critical thinking skills and independent thought as well as balanced emotional behavior, cannot happen in the setting of our public school system.
Ours especially has the inherent potential to be the greatest in the world and in history -- but only in the right hands!
Remember, any public program designed to help people achieve their potentials is still just an abstract concept, a naked skeleton without life. Well-intentioned concepts must be realized by real flesh and blood humans beings with hearts and brains who are well-learned and deeply committed to honesty and openness in education.
Teachers of our young are the most under-appreciated and under-paid unsung heroes of our time. After all, the most influential scientists, artists, writers, public servants, social workers, reporters, doctors, nurses, business leaders, innovators, entrepreneurs, educators, and other deep thinkers who have contributed to the positive advancement of society and the preservation of the environment, once had to sit in classrooms somewhere as children with brains of fresh clay and pay close attention to a schoolmarm and/or schoolmaster, whether they liked to or not. In the right setting, those great minds came to love education and continued learning for the rest of their lives.
There is simply no excuse for substandard teachers populating a substandard public school system with a substandard curriculum in the world's wealthiest country. C'mon people -- the United States of America has resources aplenty, bursting the seams of Uncle Scrooge's Money Bin! How it's used depends on who we elect.
Does the lion's share of wealth end up in the pockets of everyday people who need to spend it in order to have a decent chance at a decent life, or does it get locked away in the secret bank accounts of the obscenely rich, out of circulation and hidden from fair taxation? A healthy economy, and therefore a healthy "human infrastructure," works from the bottom up, not the top down. That means it works for the most people, not the fewest. That's just Economics 101.
Unfortunately, the latter is the world we live in today. And that needs to change pretty damn soon before another generation loses sight of the whole point of a people's democracy!
Deepspace,
Thank you for your acknowledgement and thoughtful comments. It is unlikely that you have seen my previous comments or expositions. I was unaware that comments could be sent here to the printed version of Thom’s rants. Some notices come to my regular mailbox, and some show up in the junk mail section for some reason. I’ve written at great length several times recently in response to the audio version, which is apparently separate. I would like to address your comments fully, but maybe you can go back to see where I’m coming from in those earlier comments. I am burned out and exasperated with the lack of interest at this point.
I will say that the prescription you offer is old hat, or as one of Thom’s guests quipped the other day, “old cheese”. You are saying, I believe, that we have a good “system” or structure, but that the best people or the “right” people are not being selected or properly trained, remunerated, and respected. You seem to be calling for reform.
My point in the piece you read about bad politicians is that they are what too many people want, and they fit into a dysfunctional schema very well because we have deviated too far from the original design and intent. The personnel we have in our school systems are precisely what too many people want, also. There have been uncounted reform attempts for generations, none of which have materially improved the circumstances students face.
Reforms such as you allude to with flowery, elegant, and somewhat idealistic language require that relationships between students and teachers be quite radically changed. The monkey wrench in the gears, however, is the hierarchical nature of the “systems”, which is inescapable under compulsory attendance laws. Authority is indispensable. Control is indispensable. Subservience is indispensable. A canned curriculum is indispensable. Meaningless measurement is indispensable. (“Good Lord, the thing was a mystery – and we measured it!” author unknown.) The result is an authoritarian bureaucracy.
Make no mistake about it. Ignore all the hype. Our schools are operating exactly as intended. Education has never been the objective. Civic engagement is nowhere to be found as a serious and sincere priority. Intellectual depth or heft are purely accidental and will always be seen as subversive by those with power and influence. These are institutions under a mandate meant to serve the interests of a tiny segment of the population and a narrow range of purposes deemed important by moralistic reactionaries with too much money. It is no fluke that over 70 million people voted for a sociopathic dictator wanna-be, not once, but twice. When obedience is drilled into brains for twelve years, an authority to obey will be sought after.
The other point I am obliged to address, once again, is the idea that scholars and great leaders and successful people owe their skills, talents, intellect, or character to having sat passively in classes taking in the wonderful knowledge and wisdom emanating from teachers or brilliant historical figures and literature. I’m going to be polite and just say that is mythology.
You were probably a good student. However, I would bet dollars to donuts that your education is a benefit more of the times when you were able to think and ruminate without being deluged with useless information, repetitive crap, and assignments. I honor great teachers and you may have been helped and inspired by some heroic mentors who happened to be teaching in schools. But, the best teachers typically find it necessary to circumvent rules and risk their careers to do real teaching and the credit goes to the student, the family, those exceptional teachers, and most importantly to the sheer persistence of the student to cut through the BS and politics to formulate a coherent picture of the world.
Compulsory attendance laws are the bane of a student's existence and undermine democracy and civil society because they are based on illegitimate authority. They must go, or we can kiss our way of life good-bye.
Awesome! Your lucid thoughts are a good springboard into deeper water.
The best teacher is the grand magnificence of life itself, the purity of which remains untouched by human thought. At best, we can only offer up a dim and woefully inadequate description of what is just partially detected with severely limited senses and abilities.
Life and death, the greatest mystery.
Peering into the night sky, into the abyss, into eternity, should be a humbling experience for every human being still miraculously alive on this "pale blue dot." What is that point (if, indeed it exists) where the arrogance of man and woman can come to an end naturally, effortlessly -- when petty, self-centered, fractured thoughts are shocked into silence by unplanned and unforeseen ..."awe"? (How else can one describe "what is"?) In that vast, unimaginable "silence", perhaps real learning begins.
This is not something Twighlight Zone-ish. From birth onward, at one time or another in those quiet, drifting moments in between an otherwise busy day, we have all experienced the profound mystery forever presenting itself before us with such immense power. It’s just that our little minds are incapable of retaining a memory of that which cannot be retained by memory.
Even looking at the profound mystery of a simple tree in all its glory provokes shock and awe (or at least it should) before thought has a chance to kick in and squelch the timeless second. Thought as knowledge comes after the fact, forever following a moment behind the absolute present when the cutting edge of existence actually happens. Call it an "open" classroom where knowledge is secondary to understanding, which must come first for knowledge to make any sense.
Of course, systems and institutions are only as good as the people who invent them and operate within them. And the fact remains that each individual IS the society, both a product of it and a contributor to it. Let's face it, our so-called "individual" thoughts are really just secondhand thoughts we share with everyone else on the planet who so chooses to partake.
We just string pieces and parts of it together to our liking, as a tapestry of our life. Right? But then, that's the nature of knowledge. It's a good thing, but it's a static thing with no life. People give it life and meaning.
Thought and knowledge are "things" that we can all share and add to, while as a society we methodically accumulate ever more facts and figures for good or ill. But then, even when one dwells on that astonishing fact for a while, it becomes, in and of itself, an awe-inspiring, remarkable achievement that somehow out of necessity we evolved the ability to do so. Nature is remarkable to say the least much more "intelligent than we purport to be.
Why must we stop evolving? In the bigger picture when all the pieces come together, as the greed-head dominant species on this godforsaken speck of dust, it sure looks like we're at that easily predicted, do or die moment. There is just no getting around hard-cold facts on such a scale.
Ergo, shouldn't the next question be why human thought has so utterly failed to address the utter chaos it has created, despite 200,000 years of trying not to be complete idiots in danger of going extinct, or something else godawful for sure? If our fractured thought patterns created such immense problems in the first place, why does anyone "think" more of the same will somehow "solve" them -- without making them horribly worse?
Think Afghanistan; it’s the same goddamn pattern throughout history! "Where Man goes, war goes." Physically, we have evolved; technologically, in leaps and bounds; mentally and emotionally, not so much. We're still the same hairy mammals we've always been -- violent, selfish brutes who happen to be good at science. That makes us dangerous.
Perhaps the firsthand, unvarnished observation of THAT stubborn fact in all its glory will shock the individual and society into silence and will change us fundamentally. Ah yes, wishful thinking. Just a little thought experiment. Think of us as little antennae covering the surface of Earth, loudly broadcasting most of the time, and way too busy to just receive and listen.
Ideals are dangerous things. They are ethereal thought constructs with no substance that pull the mind in predetermined directions as if we have risen above our own limitations, foreseeing a perfect future that doesn't exist. (And besides, how would we even "know"?)
Like Charlie Brown, Lucy, and the football, we always convince ourselves that the outward chaos of human society has some non-chaotic solution that can be attained if only we think about it hard enough. The ego demands it.
Yet, as in most things human, the truth, the understanding, the ending of the problem -- whatever it might be -- always seems to lie just beyond the limitations we impose upon ourselves.
Quite the dilemma. The gross stupidity of present-day Homo sapiens won't end well. We do know that at least. But no amount of education and knowledge, no matter the venue, will change our frightening reality unless we as individuals and extensions of a worldwide society truly wake up.
Time to look up at the night sky again...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GO5FwsblpT8
That moniker appears to be completely appropriate. I don’t know if you are a poet who waxes philosophical or a philosopher who waxes poetic, but you write on a plane that engages a lot of synapses and goes to the heart of what life is all about. I am at a loss to reach that plane for a challenging discussion.
I did find a couple of things that I must ask you to think a little more about. You said knowledge is a good thing but that “…it’s a static thing with no life.” I believe I have come to a similar conclusion with respect to the traditional cartesian definition of knowledge. However, modern science and especially neuroscience has provided persuasive proof, or strong evidence at least, that cognition, and therefore knowledge, is embodied. We think using physical structures and substances, i.e., synapses, nerve cells, glia, chemical substances (hormones and other chemicals). That is how we know and what we know. The symbols, data, information, language, and whatever else one finds in various media is not knowledge. Knowledge is only cognition, memory, emotion, sensation, perception, etc. It is and must always be alive and it is not static. It exists solely in the mind/brain/body of a living and breathing human being.
Our refusal so far to abandon the cartesian paradigm for schooling and education or philosophy within the broader society is one major factor we appear to have stopped evolving and why “…human thought has so utterly failed to address the utter chaos it has created…”. We are three centuries late to the party.
I am Earthbound and unable to achieve your level of thought and imagination. I am just trying to show people that the laws we choose to perpetuate introducing authority and coercion into the daily lives of children is destructive. Most people reject the idea. Many of the people who claim to care simply to not care quite enough to call a spade a spade and bad laws paternalistic, counterproductive, and unconstitutional. I had hoped that I had found people who would at least listen and discuss the merits of my argument. What I suggest is no so much a “non-chaotic solution” as the reversal of a monumental error from the mid-19th century based on ideas from the 16th century!
I do not foresee a “perfect future that doesn’t exist”. I am not a Utopian or even a revolutionary. This, for me is not about ego or about creating a mutual admiration society. More of the same, as you point out is not going to cut it. Rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic won’t save anyone. But it sure would be nice if we could stop miseducating kids, harming them and undermining democracy in the process. Don’t you agree?
I do agree.
Every child is a new hope for a better world -- if we don't corrupt their minds. Hate in the form of racism, misogyny, xenophobia, religious and political extremism, and all its other numerous expressions is a learned behavior tearing the world apart.
It makes the mind dull and petty like all bad habits that become entirely too comfortable as we become isolated within the confines of our thick, boney skulls, a mental prison that light cannot penetrate. Sadly, such negative self-identity is very difficult to change, especially as people age.
It's like an over-the-top, narrow-minded gun nut whose entire world revolves around a hunk of plastic and metal. It has special esoteric meaning only to the initiated and becomes all important, even to the point of death.
Literally, if we are to survive and thrive on this little planet lost in the cosmos, we must individually and collectively unlearn our destructive mental patterns. As Carl Sagan warned: No one out there is going to come to the rescue. We're on our own.
Thought viruses spread much like real viruses -- from person to person. The vaccine is awareness.
Good discussion. Thanks for the opportunity to rant.
The problem, as I see it, is that no one has to be teaching, modelling, or somehow projecting hate and xenophobia for profound damage to be done. Messages and conceptions are intuited by students, and self-blame and guilt/shame are routinely internalized in schools where compliance and performance are rewarded, and any deviation, reluctance, failure, or refusal is likely to result in chiding, browbeating, and some form of humiliation or punishment.
Obedience is lesson number one. Authority MUST be recognized and respected in a typically unilateral power relationship where respect goes one way. Every imaginable strategy, methodology, and reform has been tried (the re-invention of the educational wheel) but illegitimate authority cannot be dispensed with when laws compel attendance, along with hundreds of other behaviors or prohibitions. There must be winners and there must be losers. Values 101 will never be an option. Values, morals, ideals, principles, and empathy must be developed as a function of positive and edifying experience, self-regard, and consistent examples within a hospitable environment. In addition to creating a values vacuum (because as agents of the state, teachers must be neutral) students are fed a steady diet of Pabulum and meaningless platitudes and, instead of intellectual stimulation, they get trivial pursuit, abstractions, and incessant testing and evaluation.
Thank you for your input and ideas. I am greatly impressed by your ability to articulate good ideas with amazing skill. BTW, did I tell you that I've written two books on these issues? I have had no success finding a publisher, ostensibly because I'm attacking a sacred cow. The first is about 360 pages and the second is a scaled-down version at about 120 pages - available upon request. You would really find my chapter on embodied knowledge in the earlier book right up your alley. It is based on Lakoff & Johnson's brilliant book, "Philosophy in the Flesh".
Newsmax and the "News", https://www.yahoo.com/news/unhinged-newsmax-host-cuts-off-163329644.html
Republicans in my county are threatening Pediatrician's (with physical harm) that will not give mask deferments for their children, when mask mandates for unvaccinated children are mandated by health Department. https://kdvr.com/news/local/castle-rock-pediatrician-student-mask-exemptions/