The Hard Drug of Hard Power

Several months ago, while looking up something on Wikipedia, I came across a striking picture.  It is a digital reproduction of a painting made in 1887 by Viktor Vasnetsov titled, Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Now I know the saying that goes, "A picture is worth a thousand words", and I've just given the link to the picture so that readers can see it for themselves, but I'd still like to indulge myself in using a few words to describe the painting from my point of view.

The painting is rich in detail, yet what stands out immediately are four men riding four horses. The first is a king with a fierce face who, wielding a bow, is about to shoot someone with an arrow.  He is followed by a large, broad, thick burly guy who is wearing nothing except a loincloth (which I first mistook for an old-fashioned diaper). He is swinging a sword.  He is followed by a gaunt man with a fierce face who is carrying a pair of scales, holding them in his hand in such a way that one gets the impression that he's about to bash someone (or something) with the scales.  He is followed by a skeleton wrapped in a shroud and wielding a sickle.  All four characters are fearsome, yet although Vasnetsov made the large burly guy the central feature of his painting, I personally find the skeleton to be the most unnerving - especially since he is painted with eye sockets in the shape of a scowl and a jaw and teeth in the shape of a snarl.  (Imagine dreaming about that guy at night!)

Let's consider the large burly guy for a minute or two. This broad, thick guy is swinging a sword that looks like it must weigh as much as three or four sledgehammers. One can't help but think that if he went to chop off the head of an opponent, that opponent's head would go flying as if it were a baseball hit by a slugger.  Yet in the lower part of the painting, we see that the effect of this big guy's sword-swinging is not to directly kill men, but to induce men to kill each other.  For he and his horse (a horse that looks as if it had been scared nearly to death) are the artistic embodiment of a passage in the New Testament that reads, "And when He broke the second seal, I heard the second living creature saying 'Come.' And another, a red horse, went out; and to him who sat on it, it was granted to take peace from the earth, and that men should slay one another; and a great sword was given to him." (Revelation 6:3-4)

Today's post is not about making some predictive prophecy (after all, I'm not a certified prophet ;)), but I must say that the Scriptures which I have quoted, as well as the painting which was inspired by these Scriptures, seem to be an apt embodiment of the thinking of certain rich and powerful people in the present day.  For we have a few nations which have recently become fixated on building up their "hard power."  And while economic non-cooperation is a key element of both national hard power and of strategic nonviolent resistance, I'd like to focus on the element of hard power that most attracts the attention of nations that want to be bullies: military might.  

The point of amassing large amounts of hard power is to be able to say to other nations, "Give us what we want from you or we will ruin you."  In the case of the Axis powers prior to World War 2, this statement was usually phrased as, "Give us what we want or we will bash you." The actions of the Axis powers led to a lot of bashing and of counter-bashing as well, and the end result was that the Axis powers that started the bashing got decisively bashed themselves in the end.  Yet we can learn much from analyzing the motives which started the Axis powers on their destructive path.  For I would argue that the same motives are at work in those nations that are at present fixated on acquiring and building up hard power.

I suggest that some of those who are now seeking to build an overwhelming amount of hard power are doing so so because they feel an overwhelming sense of injury at the emergence of a world in which they can't instantly get their way, a world in which they are not worshiped as superior to all other humans and their demands are not instantly and abundantly satisfied. In the case of nations, this sense of injury is often felt by a dominant culture which loses or begins to lose its power over peoples or nations over which it had historically exercised domination. Thus, this feeling of injury is expressed in statements like, "We used to be great! We ruled over X and Y and Z! Now behold our humiliation, in that we must politely ask X and Y and Z for the things we want!  They're forcing us to say please and thank you and to wait our turn!!!!  Such humiliation is utterly unbecoming to a nation as great as ours!"

This sense of injury (an unjust sense, if I may say so) is what motivates the heads of nations which feel thus injured to begin to pursue the building up of hard power.  And the hard power they seek is almost always military hard power.  This is what motivated the arming of Japan in the early 20th century and the rearmament of Germany after World War 1. This is what motivated the Soviet Union to devote such a large percentage of its GDP to military expenditures after World War 2.  And it has been a key motivator of U.S. military expenditures from 1980 onward - especially under Republican presidential administrations. So what does the pursuit of this kind of hard power ultimately gain the pursuers? And what are the risks and costs of the pursuit of this kind of hard power?

First, while it is obvious that hard power deployed in overwhelming force can achieve short-term gains, it is also obvious from the record of history that the continued deployment of such power over a long time loses its effectiveness.  In fact, eventually the continued costs of the use of such power begin to exceed any benefits reaped by those who use this power.  It can be argued that even if there had been no intervention by the U.S. in the Far East or in Europe, in the long run neither Germany nor Japan could have held onto their territorial gains which they achieved from 1930 to 1941.  This is because both nations were so fixated on bullying the people they conquered that they provoked the kind of resistance that would ultimately have destroyed their hard power.  This is the lesson of the French (and later U.S.) failure in Vietnam, the Soviet (and later U.S.) failure in Afghanistan, and the ongoing Russian failure in Ukraine. Treating people like trash while threatening them at gunpoint is hardly the way to "win hearts and minds."

Second, the very process of both building up and deploying hard power is itself expensive in terms of human resources.  Fielding an army requires warm bodies to wear uniforms and carry guns.  Yet I would argue that equipping people with uniforms and guns and sending them out to try to bash their fellow humans in other countries is going to be increasingly expensive as the 21st Century continues.  The reason is that birth rates throughout the world are continuing to decline.  Those nations that are most eager to throw their weight around are among the nations whose birth rates are most steeply declining.  Thus it makes very little sense to train one's young men and women to invade other countries if it is likely that a significant number of those young men and women will get shot up during the invasion and subsequent military operations. This is especially likely in a fight between nations that are near peers.  Once those young men and women have gotten killed, who will be left to do the ongoing work of maintaining their societies at home?

Third, consider the material costs of building up and deploying hard power.  In 1983, Seymour Melman wrote a book titled Profits Without Production which accurately diagnosed many of the elements of the disease which is now destroying American industry.  He described the pernicious effect of the American military-industrial complex and how ever-increasing expenditures for "defense" were impoverishing other elements of the American economy and of American scientific and technical research.  His points were amplified and re-broadcast in a recent paper by Julia Gledhill of the Stimson Center titled, "The Ugly Truth about the Permanent War Economy."  The fact is that building war material costs some serious folding money - whether planes (~$100 million each for an F-35 fighter), ships, artillery, drones, tanks, or other instruments of mayhem.  Once natural resources and money are turned into war material, these resources can't easily be repurposed for more productive aims.  What's more, the body of knowledge needed to design and build these items frequently does not transfer well to other sectors of industrial production or of the overall economy.  (I should know - I used to work for a defense contractor who went out of business after the Cold War ended.  The reason why that contractor went out of business was because it was unable to make the switch to inexpensively producing things needed by the civilian market.  Later I worked for an engineering firm whose client base used to include many military agencies, yet which shrank over the years until it was designing MEP (mechanical, electrical, and plumbing) systems for fast food joints and amusement parks.)  And the money that is sunk into defense is withdrawn from other necessary elements of national infrastructure such as roads, dams, bridges, and similar civil infrastructure as well as schools and libraries.  Of course, here in the USA, the Rethuglican/conservative/libertarian organs of culture have managed to convince most of us over the last 45 years that only "sssssocialistssss!!!" and "lib-ruls!!!" want to use tax money to maintain roads, dams, bridges, wastewater treatment plants, schools, libraries, and other instruments of the public good.

So our carefully cultivated aversion to collectively contributing to the public good means that our infrastructure of the public good is falling apart. Moreover, we can't even seem to find the political will to pay down our national debt by requiring the rich people who call themselves Americans to pay their fair share of taxes. (By the way, the interest on the U.S. Federal debt now exceeds $1 trillion per year. And this does not even take into account the debt of U.S states, counties, and municipalities.)  Yet Donald Trump wants a $1.5 trillion budget for the Pentagon in FY 2027. (See also "The reality of Trump’s cartoonish $1.5 trillion DOD budget proposal," Responsible Statecraft, January 2026.) And Trump is not the only fool who wants to use a nation's declining stock of resources in order to build up one last expression of hard power.  There are other nations with declining birthrates, a depleting resource base and increasing government debt who also want to project hard power on the global stage of the 21st century. As Isaac Asimov once wrote, "Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent."  It's looking more and more like the burly thick guy I mentioned at the beginning of this post has successfully addled the wits of an increasing number of national leaders by bashing them upside the head with his huge sword.  

On Not Needing You, Part 2

This blog contains several posts which describe the psychological dynamics of national and ethnic narcissism.  Those posts have focused particularly on the United States and Russia as examples of deranged, narcissistic nations.  Many experts who have studied personality disorders have stated that the best way for normal people to deal with narcissists is to go No Contact.  In other words, to reduce one's dealings with the narcissist as much as possible and to sever, as much as possible, any relations of dependence on the narcissist.

The world was obliged to follow this prescription against Russia after Russia's thuggish violent attempts to conquer Ukraine.  (Note that Russia's attempted conquest of Ukraine was merely one component of a narcissistic Russian attempt to establish a world empire.)  Now the world is discovering that it is possible to take care of itself and to do beautifully good work without the United States.  The world is not caving to the threat of American tariffs against foreign goods.  And the rest of the world is coming together in surprising ways to create spaces of equity, fairness, and sustainable social arrangements without the involvement of the United States.  The process is actually easier now that the thuggish, misanthropic, racist, murderous regime of Donald Trump has withdrawn from a number of important international arrangements.  In short, the world is beginning to discover that it can live without the United States.  The U.S. may thus soon see how much harder it is to live in a world in which its soft power has been destroyed by self-inflicted wounds.  Check out these headlines:

• "Trump delays tariffs as the rest of the world plays hardball," BBC
• "Can the world be governed without the US?", Inside Story
• "This Fourth of July, the world declares its independence from America", The Guardian
• "To save the global economy, kick the US out of the WTO," Politico.eu

P.S. How do people build soft power in their societies and in the world at large?  Why, by becoming the sort of benevolent, wise, knowledgeable people that everyone else can respect, of course!  But soft power is not built by trying to take other people's stuff, by trying to conquer other people's countries, by trying to disenfranchise or enslave other people, or by trying to play smashmouth with the rest of the world.

Repost: Gantry Collapse

I must apologize for not writing a new post in a while.  Unfortunately, we in the U.S. are reaping the consequences of the curse that reads, "May you live in interesting times." This curse is commonly cited as originating in ancient China, but it was actually uttered for the first time by a British politician in the early 20th century.  (However, the Chinese do have the following deliciously appropriate phrase: 宁为太平犬，勿为乱人, which can be rendered, "Better to be a dog in peace than a man in chaos!")  

Anyway, the effort of dealing with national chaos (and its trickling down to the local level) has me quite busy, so I won't be writing a lengthy post in the near future.  However, I have been thinking about the current chaos as well as the architects of that chaos, namely Mr. Donald Trump and the Republican Party.  I am also thinking of one of the chief enablers of Trump, of the Far Right, and of Republicanism - namely, the white American evangelical/Protestant church and its subculture.  This is a church which claims to know Jesus, yet whose members hate their fellow human beings if those human beings are not American or white or rich or English-speaking, and whose leaders practice and tolerate the most egregious predatory sexual behavior - including felony-level sexual assault, pedophilia, and rape.  Reading the latest news about evangelical sex scandals and the culture which enables perpetrators to continue in the ministry made me think of a blog post I wrote over two years ago.  Therefore I am presenting to you the link to Gantry Collapse, for those who want a blast from the recent past.  Please note how that post documents the process by which religion used as a tool of domination eventually loses its power to dominate.

You Won't Mind Your Own Business, So Why Are You Trying To Mind Mine?

I have a post in the works which will address the attempts by the American Religious Right to establish a white supremacist theocracy in the U.S.  Hint: I have reason to believe that these attempts are about to fail spectacularly.  But I don't have time to write that post just yet.  (Entrepreneurs need to learn sometimes to say no to new work!)  So today's post will not be on that subject.  Today's post will also be short.

I have written in this blog about the ecological devastation being wrought on the Russian landscape under the reign of Vladimir Putin.  Specifically, I have written about the spectacularly widespread Russian wildfires of 2020 and 2021.  It should not be surprising therefore to learn that the Russian wildfire season of 2022 has started off with a bang.  (See this, this, and this for instance.)  According to a Wikipedia article on the subject, 

"The 2022 Siberian wildfires are a series of ongoing wildfires in Siberia, Russia that began in Siberia in early May 2022. Fires are concentrated in the Krasnoyarsk, Altai, Irkutsk, Kemerovo, Omsk, Kurgan regions, Khakassia and Sakha republics. The total area of ​​fires, as of 15 May, is about 20 thousand hectares, and since the beginning of 2022 - more than 100 thousand hectares."

The Wikipedia article also has a map which illustrates how much of the Russian landscape has been plagued by the fires this year.  (Click on this link to see or download the map.)  From this map we can see that nearly a third of the Russian land mass was affected by wildfires as of May.  Russian president Vladimir Putin called for aggressive action to deal with the wildfires, but it should be obvious that his statements are merely a blowing of useless smoke.  For the track record of the Russian government from at least as far back as 2019 shows a singular lack of willingness to effectively deal with the wildfire threat.  And by spending so many Russian resources in trying to take over other people's countries, Putin has left very little to competently manage the affairs of his own country.  Score another point for that thieving little man in his bunker and his piece-of-garbage regime.  This is the man who was worshiped by an idiot named Donald John Trump.

What We All Are Getting From Your Tax Rubles

In his book Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis speaks of pride as the deadliest of the sins.  And he notes how proud, arrogant people tend to turn off everyone they encounter.  As he puts it, "I now come to that part of Christian morals where they differ most sharply from all other morals.  There is one vice of which no man in the world is free; which everyone in the world loathes when he sees it in someone else' and of which hardly any people, except Christians, ever imagine that they are guilty themselves...The vice I am talking of is Pride or Self-Conceit..."  I must confess that I myself am guilty of pride, and so I must temper my tendency to condemn pride when I see it in others.  And yet when I encounter those people whose pride - whose narcissism (both personal and national) - moves them to try to turn the world into their own special possession, I do tend to regard as guilt-free pleasure the eventual humiliation of such people.  So we come once again to Russia.

At the time of this writing, Ukraine still exists as a sovereign non-Russian country.  And the events of the last several weeks have shown that Russian president Vladimir Putin is not quite the chessmaster he had made himself out to be.  In fact, he has stumbled rather badly.  Now in the West, many of us have been brought up to believe that the governments of nations exist for the purpose of providing for the common good of their citizens, and that this purpose is the reason why citizens pay taxes.  So I thought it good to enumerate for you who are of the Russian people the things you are getting for your tax rubles.

First, you all know - just from looking around yourselves in day-to-day life - how things are going for you.  I too have some idea, based on materials I have read from reliable sources.  What those sources tell me is that things are not going well for you who are citizens of Russia.  There is the botched response to COVID-19, there is the staggering wealth inequality, the surge in death rates across all regions in Russia, and the death of the Russian middle class.  There have also been awesome ecological disasters, such as the huge wildfires of 2019, 2020 and 2021.  I fully expect that this year, 2022, will see outbreaks of wildfires whose size and extent of damage will dwarf the damage done by the previous years' fires.  I also fully expect your government to do nothing to address these wildfires or any of the other crises I have mentioned.

So then, what exactly are your tax rubles buying?  Perhaps not for you, but for the rest of the world?  Here again I have a fairly strong idea, based on materials I have read from reliable sources.  I know that from at least 2010 until 2020, your tax rubles bought the destabilization of liberal democracies throughout the world.  I also know that your money bought the breaking of sovereign governments in many nations which had been part of the Soviet empire and had managed to break free and re-establish their own national identity after the Soviet collapse.  Such nations include Georgia, Belarus, and Montenegro, among others.  In each of these recaptured nations, the pro-Putin puppet governments have managed to reproduce the same little bits of Putinesque hell on earth that characterize daily life for most Russians.  Your government tried to do the same thing here in the United States, and so for four years we endured the piece-of-garbage presidency of Donald Trump.

Your government has been especially active in the wrongful spending of your money during the last twelve months.  During that time Putin has sent troops into the Czech Republic in order to destroy Czech defense plants.  He has sent troops into Kazakhstan in order to put down a civil resistance uprising against the pro-Putin government there.  Those troops have shot unarmed protesters.  Kazakhstan is interesting, because it is an oil-producing country whose mineral wealth is being stolen by Russia as the pro-Putin government rapes the country to enrich that thieving little man in his bunker.  (It is only natural that ordinary Kazakh citizens would object to this sort of thing.)  And he has sent troops to the Ukraine border in what he thought would be an easy bid to conquer Ukraine.  That bid has turned out to be not so easy.

For Putin has begun to buy a few unexpected things for himself along the way.  His soft power (as well as the soft power of Russia) has begun to erode.  Soft power is at its maximum when a people or nation genuinely demonstrates itself to be a model worthy of imitation because it brings genuinely good things to the world.  I think of Japan as a case in point.  I am a small business owner and recently I discovered some fascinating Japanese commercial cultural practices that make me think that Japan has some really cool people who are worth getting to know because they have something to offer.  I also think of Indonesia and the musical inventiveness which I have seen in some of the artists from that nation.  For instance, there is an Indonesian fingerstyle guitarist named Alip Ba Ta who in my opinion is the current reigning king of those who play an ax.  In short, there are nations which produce cultural or scientific or commercial artifacts which bring genuine pleasure or benefit to the world.  On the other hand, there is Russia as it now is under Putin.  Putin's Russia seems genuinely to be good for nothing.  Rather, to Putin, the rest of the world exists solely as a source of supply of living human victims to sacrifice on the altar of his narcissism.  We are not interested.

Nimrod's High School Yearbook

 

Tower of Babel, Mathys Schoevaerdts, created

between 1682 and 1702, public domain

On the 13th of this month, a ninety-year-old, formerly somewhat well-known Canadian actor took a ride in a rocket manufactured and owned by Jeff Bezos, the owner and former CEO of the vast Amazon.com empire.  The name of the actor who took the ride is, of course, William Shatner, who was the main star in an American sci-fi TV series that first aired well over fifty years ago.  The name of that series was Star Trek.  And Star Trek, which initially struggled to find acceptance with the executives of the network on which it aired, has become enough of a cash cow that over the years it has spawned several big-screen movies and a number of spin-off TV series.  (Some might say that Star Trek has by now become in the American consciousness like a piece of chewing gum that has been left in a person's mouth for 55 years...)

Some interesting things about Shatner's Star Trek character, Captain Kirk: he was supposed to be a youthful super-achiever whose drive and determination had helped him to become the youngest captain in Starfleet.  He was also modeled very much after the type of Germanic war-hero typified in ancient Anglo-Saxon fables such as Beowulf - that is, he was always the first member of his crew to confront any mortal danger, the bravest and most physically capable (with the possible exception of his first officer, Mr. Spock), the point man leading the charge as his ship, the U.S.S. Enterprise, boldly went where no man had gone before.  (He was also a champion womanizer.  Lucky for him that there were plenty of compatible alien women on those planets where no man had gone before!)  According to several sources, Shatner struggled at times with his association with Captain Kirk during the first years after the original Star Trek series was canceled by its host TV network - perhaps being fearful of typecasting.  But those struggles soon died away and Shatner began to consciously associate his own personality with the larger-than-life character of Captain Kirk.  And as Kirk had commanded the lion's share of attention in both the original series and the movies that resulted from it, Shatner sought to command all available attention for himself in any social setting in which he found himself.  I speculate therefore that the chance to ride in Jeff Bezos' rocket must have seemed the chance of a lifetime for him to recapture some of the lost glory of his youth.

Some interesting things about Shatner's rocket ride: most media outlets wrote that Shatner became "the oldest living human being to go into space."  But that begs a question: where and what, exactly, is "space"?  For if one digs beneath the surface (and if one is sufficiently geeky to do so), one learns a few things.  So watch yourselves, because I'm going to geek out for a few paragraphs.  First off, let's look at the launch vehicle that Shatner and his fellow passengers rode.  It is named the New Shepard 4, and its typical flight profile is thus: it launches vertically, then ascends under power for 140 seconds, reaching a maximum velocity of 3,615 km/h (2,247 mph).  Once the powered phase of the flight ends, the crew capsule coasts upward to an altitude of 66.1 miles above the ground, which is just above the von Karman line.  The von Karman line is a widely accepted definition of the boundary of space.  Given the fact that other definitions used by some of the armed forces of the world's most advanced nations are a bit more lenient (allowing for definitions of a boundary of space below 60 miles), we must hand it to Mr. Shatner.  He really did go into space after all.  But could he have stayed there for any appreciable time?  The answer is no.  The velocity of his capsule at its maximum altitude was far below the velocity required to achieve orbit.  And even if his capsule had achieved orbital velocity at its maximum altitude of 66.1 miles, atmospheric drag would have degraded its orbit very quickly so that in much less than a 24-hour day, he would have fallen back to earth again.  Such facts cut Shatner's trip a bit down to size.

And maybe the boasts of the people who put him into space ought to be cut down to size a bit as well, as well as the boasts of their competitors.  The two most dominant figures in the privately funded race to space are Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk.  They are now locked in a lawsuit over space, by the way.  (See this also.)  And both have made a number of rather outlandish claims about what they are going to do to get humans back into space again in a big way.  Bezos seems to me to have painted himself as the visionary humanitarian whose interest in space travel springs from his desire to make a better future for humanity.  Musk, on the other hand, seems to me to have painted himself as the uber-smart inventor whose genius has imbued him with the power to work magic.  Bezos boasts that his company is intending to build a space station as a place for researchers and industrialists to get some out-of-this-world work done.  Musk, on the other hand, has promised to colonize Mars.  (See this also.)  But geeks like me must ask, How?  Who's going to pay for it all?

For the undeniable fact is that space travel - the way it is done at present - is expensive.  The unavoidable element of expense consists of providing the kinetic energy required to accelerate a load to orbital velocity.  And it gets even more expensive if you're trying to accelerate that load to a speed that will enable it to escape the gravitational pull of Earth.  That required amount of energy is captured in the following formula:

where k.e. stands for "kinetic energy", m stands for mass, and v stands for velocity.  If you're handy with math, you can therefore calculate the amount of energy possessed by an object with a certain mass when it is traveling at a certain velocity.  That's how much energy must be supplied by the fuel which any rocket uses to accelerate a mass to orbital velocity or to escape velocity.  And when you calculate how much chemical energy is contained in any given amount of the fuels now used in rockets, you see that it takes a lot of fuel to put a given mass into space.  Moreover, there's a hard upper limit on the amount of energy you can extract from fuels that are burned in chemical reactions.  Making large amounts of these fuels costs some serious folding money.  That's why Bezos, Branson, Musk, and others will find that they will fail in the same places in which the governments who initially pioneered space flight have failed.  No one will be able to pay for their dreams.

But some might protest, saying, "We can always use nuclear fission rockets!  They have much higher potential energy densities than chemically fueled rockets!  And one day we'll have fusion rockets, which have even higher energy densities!"  However, the promise of cheap space travel via nuclear fission rockets depends on the possibility of an abundant supply of plutonium fuel, and an abundant supply of plutonium fuel depends on the ability to construct breeder reactors that are both safe and commercially viable.  At present, breeder reactors are neither safe nor commercially viable.  One problem which breeders have is that operation of the reactors destroys the materials the reactor is made of, by processes such as neutron embrittlement.  The same process threatens to make nuclear fusion commercially non-viable for the foreseeable future.  And this of course does not take into account the problems with proliferation of weapons-grade nuclear material and large amounts of radioactive waste, as well as environmental degradation.

So now, let's drop the geek persona for a bit and ask some philosophical questions.  Could it be that the space boasts of Branson, Bezos and Musk are part of a larger cultural trend?  Could it be that fantasies of space conquest are a sort of psychic defense mechanism for the most high-flying members of the Global North as the Global North is increasingly forced to confront the signs of its own mortality, its own loss of dominance, its own passing?  Could dreams and boasts of space conquest serve the same function as the magazines I see from time to time in the checkout line at Winco when I shop for groceries - magazines commemorating the life of John Wayne or of America's best rock bands or the British royal family or the Apollo lunar landings or World War 2 or the Beach Boys?  Could it be that the flight of William Shatner was, in the grand scheme of things, really nothing more than a very expensive moment of nostalgia?  Perhaps what's needed now is not a cultural escape into fantasies of unlimited success, brilliance, beauty, power and love, but a realistic letting go of lost glories and a realistic embrace of a future that is actually coming.

The Scorching of the 45th And Beyond

 This is another quick post.  In view of the record-breaking heat across much of the Global North this summer, I thought it might be instructive to document the effect which that heat has had in my particular locale.  So here are a few pictures from my garden and backyard, along with some comments.  These pictures were taken about ten days ago, and they document the damage which was caused by the Pacific Northwest heat wave of late June.

Heat stress suffered by a shade tree in the backyard.  Note the yellow, dead leaves.

Another view of the same tree.

Damaged leaves and fruit on the apple tree.

Heat damage suffered by a hazelnut tree.  Again, note the discolored leaves.

Heat injury to a conifer.  Note the dead branches and withered needles.

What the heat did to the kale.  The scorched leaves are discolored.

About two weeks before the heat wave of late June, I planted onion seeds.  The heat killed most of them.  Not all news is bad, however.  Some of the hardier and more well-established plants in the garden continue to produce, as seen below:

The artichoke plant turned into a space alien!

The summer squash did well.  The zucchini (not shown) - not so much.

Whoa!  Vashka!  How'd you get into this picture?!

And now for some comments.  I live just a bit north of the 45th parallel of latitude in the United States.  Temperatures this summer have been at least ten degrees above historical averages for much of the last two months.  This is true of nighttime temperatures as well.  The fact that nighttime temperatures have been so high is an undeniable proof of the effect of increased levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, since carbon dioxide blocks longwave infrared radiation (IR), but is transparent to shortwave IR.  This means that as the earth warms during the daytime because of absorbed shortwave IR, it is increasingly unable to release the heat thus stored when the sun goes down, because the heat released from the ground (and from hardscapes in urban heat islands) is radiated as longwave IR.  That is why such low-tech adaptations as opening windows at night are less effective now than they used to be.

The fact of anthropogenic - that is, manmade - climate change is undeniable.  However, as we have seen during the last year and a half, there are two potential responses to the undeniable.  The first response is to make peace with reality and to try under that peace to live gracefully with reality.  So we have nations such as China.  China is actively researching collective, intelligently-planned ways to adapt its society to mitigate the local effects of a warming climate.  The Chinese are especially interested in using natural, low-tech means of lowering ground-level temperatures in urban areas, as documented in a BBC report titled, "Can You Cool A House Without Air Conditioning?"  

Then there are nations such as the United States, in which a distressingly large percentage of the population have given themselves to national narcissism.  For the sake of their damnable goal of white supremacy they are willing to sacrifice reality on the altar of their narcissism.  Their last, best chance of achieving their goal of total domination of the world was embodied in the presidency of Donald Trump.  But Trump made a serious (even though willful) mistake in his handling of the coronavirus pandemic, so we got a bunch of doofuses who refused to acknowledge the mistake and refused therefore to treat the coronavirus pandemic with the seriousness it deserved.  These doofuses showed up mask-less and armed to the teeth at the state capitols of states with Democratic governors in order to "liberate" their states from mask mandates and other public health directives which these governors put into place to attempt to deal with the pandemic.  These idiots have also by and large refused to get vaccinated in 2021, as documented by a news story titled, "No, We Didn't Get The Vaccine...We're Republicans" and another story titled, "GOP Legislators in Missouri Oppose Vaccine Efforts as State Becomes COVID Hotspot."  You see, to admit the reality and seriousness of COVID-19 would be to admit that their chosen hero majorly dropped the ball.  And as good, textbook cases of narcissism, they cannot admit any mistake whatsoever.

This is why I believe that it will be very difficult for the United States to mount a coordinated, collective, realistic response to the climate crisis which has now begun to severely bite us.  For the Republican/white supremacist/evangelical devotion to predatory capitalism and unrestrained economic growth at any cost represents a mistake of much longer standing than the mistake of backing a doofus who dropped the ball in dealing with a pandemic.  If the MAGA crowd were not willing to wear masks, they sure won't be willing to deal intelligently with a climate crisis which is beginning to destroy their livelihoods.  They are a textbook case not only of narcissism but of cultic thinking.

(One note: I am almost finished with my series of posts on Gene Sharp's book From Dictatorship to Democracy.  I want to do another series of posts which are coordinated around a central theme, but I can't decide which theme I want to tackle next.  One theme that appeals to me is the theme of how cults - both religious and secular - establish themselves in a society.  It seems to me that this would be especially applicable to the United States, which seems to form cults as easily as some bodies form tumors...)

Lastly, I want to talk a bit about the use of natural mitigation strategies for local climate change effects.  From the pictures above, one can clearly see that just planting trees may not be enough to guard against urban heat island effects.  Rather, the trees must be managed so that they themselves can survive heat stress.  And it may be that trees that are historical natives to many northern climates will have to be augmented with trees that are not natives to the far North, but are native to historically hot and dry climates, trees such as the fig tree, which is able to establish a deep root system and to mitigate heat islands by efficient evapotranspiration.  This will require further research.

P.S. Not only has much of the United States dropped the ball on climate change mitigation, but Russia has hugely dropped the ball.  The wildfires in Siberia are now bigger than all other wildfires on the earth combined.  Putin's flying monkeys tout his so-called intelligence and wisdom, but Putin's Russia isn't doing very well right now.

Causes of Cognitive Dissonance and National Narcissistic Rage

Here's another "quickie" post.  And it has to do with White American foreign policy under Donald Trump and the perceptions of other nations which have been created for American consumption by its most powerful media outlets.  I want to make one suggestion and one observation.  The suggestion: the foreign policy of the United States against China is actually an expression of White supremacist narcissistic rage against China on account of the fact that a nation of over one billion non-White people has made itself an independent success.  That was not supposed to happen.  Rather, China was supposed to live forever in the thrall of the United States, because China was supposed to be forever dependent on the United States.  The United States was supposed to be forever the dominant player, dictating to everyone else on earth what they can and cannot do.  China is neatly contradicting that expectation.  You may not know this, but China has successfully orbited two space stations and sent a robot probe to the moon, and has launched a robot mission to Mars. 

And China is not the only nonwhite, non-European nation to have begun its own exploration of outer space.  The United Arab Emirates has also launched a robot probe to Mars.  China and the UAE join India in the successful development of demanding technologies for space travel.  

But the most pleasantly surprising news is much closer to home.  When COVID-19 first broke upon the world scene, many commentators in the Global North expected that the pandemic would decimate the nations of Black Africa, who were seen as perennial "savages" perennially in need of rescue by White "saviors."  However, it now appears that the nations of the African continent have done very, very well in containing the pandemic and limiting both infections and deaths.  Living on the African continent is becoming safer than living in the United States.  This is due to the commonsense approaches of various African governments to the challenge of providing health care for the common good.  (For what it's worth, I should also note that according to one source, the nations of Africa have a better airline safety record than Russia.)

In short, the rest of the world seems to have learned in large measure how to live (and to live well!) without the United States.  This will undoubtedly deprive Trump of the narcissistic supply he had hoped to enjoy by withholding access to America and its resources from people whom he deemed to be much more needy than America.  Instead of that enjoyment, Trump now finds himself in the position of the evil mother in the Grimm fairy tale Snow White.

A Bed In Sheol

 Twilight comes early.

Sunset choked to death on clouds of ash. 

"Eat the fruit of this tree

and you shall be like God" -

but the idol of our godhood,

kindled by that pyrotechnic tree,

burns now to the ground.

I live in a city which hasn't seen blue sky or stars now for the last five days and counting.  I have been inside my house for about the same amount of time, and during that time there has not been a day in which the air has not smelled like smoke.  I should have gotten a lot done in that time (including house cleaning and repair, writing a blog post, and other business), but instead I must confess that I've been somewhat glued to websites like this:

• Portland Oregon Weather Underground
• Oregon Department of Environmental Quality - Air Quality Monitoring Data
• Oregon Smoke Information
• AirNow Interactive Map of Air Quality
• Smoke Forecast - FireSmoke.ca

Call my preoccupation a fetish, but as Samuel Johnson once said, "Depend upon it, Sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully."  This year is beginning to feel to me like the run-up to a mass execution.  First, the stupidity and malignancy of Donald Trump.  Then the coronavirus.  Then the emergence of a blatant, murderous racism reminiscent of the American South in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, including the very public murders of unarmed African-Americans.  Now massive wildfires for those of us in the American West, and a very active hurricane season for those on the eastern and southern seaboards of the United States.

A few facts about the wildfires.  First, for the last three days, the smoke has produced widespread areas of pollution levels that have been designated as hazardous by State and Federal agencies.  That's "hazardous", as in, "Any exposure to the air, even for a few minutes, can lead to serious health effects on everybody. Avoid outdoor activities."  Second, the three biggest pollutants of concern have been smoke particles with diameters of 2.5 microns and below, smoke particles in the 10 micron range, and carbon monoxide.  The presence of carbon monoxide is especially troubling because CO is only produced when there is not enough oxygen present to ensure at least a stoichiometric mix of oxygen and carbon-bearing materials.

Many of the fires have been caused by downed power lines or by lightning.  Many of the fires have also been caused by typical human activity.  But the fires have also become yet another occasion for political posturing by the American Right.  Trump claims that this season's wildfires are the result of "poor forest management," but the facts don't support him.  Many of the wildfires that have started this fall did not originate in forests.  And there is overwhelming scientific evidence that the worsening fire seasons worldwide are a consequence of manmade climate change.  Much of that evidence was compiled over the last two or three decades by national laboratories funded by the United States Government.  Names like Livermore, Berkeley, and Argonne come to mind.  These national laboratories are now the victims of Trump budget cuts.  Therefore I expect that like the coronavirus, or deteriorating social relations, or fraying social safety nets, or a declining currency, Trump will willfully and deliberately botch his response to this exigency also.

And that had me thinking at 4 am this morning.  You see, these things don't just impact me as a series of facts that fit into an analysis.  (Even though I'm rather strongly geeky!)  I am thinking of how last Monday I enjoyed an evening walk through the neighborhood and spent time in my backyard watering the veggies and playing my guitar beneath a clear twilight sky with two cats at my feet.  That was my chill time, my therapy which enabled me to cope with a world that has recently become chaotic because of rich and powerful doofuses who want to Make Themselves Great Again due to long-standing inferiority complexes.  Trump is such a doofus.  But I thought I had learned to take him in stride even as I saw through his attempts to cause chaos.  Now the consequences of his doofus chaos have flared up in new and unexpected ways - much like the re-emergence of flames from a fire that was not properly put out.  And it's not just his doofus-ness.  It's his constant gaslighting, his absolute refusal to tell the truth about anything, lest he lose what he perceives to be the advantage of pulling the wool over the eyes of those who listen to him.  It's getting to be a bit much.

So because I had a hard time sleeping at 4 am, I was searching the Web for stories of Americans who have left the country for good within the last few years.  And I was checking out what it would take for me to emigrate to Canada.  (I found out that I'm just a few points shy of the minimum needed for a technical professional to be allowed to emigrate.)  But then I thought of the people I'd be abandoning if I did such a thing.  And I thought of how even the world's best places did not start out that way.  They were built by the sweat equity of those who were willing to sacrifice to try to construct a righteous order in the midst of chaos.  I also thought of how some of the world's best places are under attack from those who want to impose their chaos on what was a righteous order.  Becoming a refugee is a temporary protection at best.  And one can't be a refugee forever.

But trying to build or defend a righteous order in the midst of the chaos that is the United States just now seems to me like trying to make my bed in Sheol.  (Or if you like the King James Bible, it seems like trying to make my bed in hell.)  At least the Good Book promises that though I make my bed in such places, there is One Who is with me.  And the art of making a sleep-worthy bed in unpleasant places will become a valuable skill as the great societies of the world run up against the reality of resource constraints and as their leaders grapple with the involuntary ending of their dreams of godhood.  On that note, I'm going to lie down and try to take a nap.

P.S. Here and here are a couple of links to some interesting articles on wildfires and climate change.

The Go To Jail Truth

My worldview during the last five years has been based on the following premises:

1. That the universe which we all inhabit is a moral universe ruled by the moral standard of a righteous Creator;
2. That an essential pillar of that moral standard is the duty of each human being to treat his or her fellow human beings with dignity and charity;
3. That the Creator of the universe stands ready to enforce His righteous moral standard by imposing consequences on those who break that standard;
4. And that since the most privileged members of the United States have broken that moral standard in making themselves great by murdering and oppressing their fellow human beings, the consequences of this moral breach have begun to spread throughout American society.  I have called these consequences the outworkings of damnation. 

The theoretical basis and starting point for my worldview (and especially of point #4 of that worldview) is found in passages such as Proverbs 22:22-23; Jeremiah 7:9-10; Ezekiel 18:4; Ezekiel 22; and James 5:1-6.  Now when a worldview first comes into being, it is nothing more than a hypothesis.  In order for the worldview to become mature, it must be tested by observation.  Therefore, in order for me to be able to confidently assert the worldview I have laid out above, I must be able to point to destructive or damaging consequences which threaten the privileged and which are the direct result of the dirty tricks used by the privileged to gain and keep their privilege.

But what is interesting is that in searching for the evidences of the outworkings of damnation among the privileged, the searcher encounters various flavors and levels of "truth".  The particular flavor of truth which the searcher encounters will depend on whom he asks for that "truth".  If he or she asks the holders of power and privilege, the answer contained in their words will be very different from the answer which might be obtained by planting hidden cameras, listening devices and skillful spies to observe the affairs of the holders of privilege and power.   This is not surprising, since the wealth of the privileged consists not only in the actual physical assets which they have, but in the image of wealth and power which they are able to project to the world.  In fact, if a person's image is strong enough, he can get a lot of what he needs or wants based on image alone - whether it's obtaining a huge line of credit because he looks like he is rich enough to repay his loan, or whether it's successfully intimidating someone else because the bully has made himself look too powerful to resist.  We might call this projection of an idealized image "managed truth."  (Kind of like "managed democracy", isn't it?)

Last week, the United States was treated to an example of this "managed truth" in the latest employment report by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.  The Trump administration celebrated this report by shouting that the American economy is "coming back faster, bigger, and better than we ever thought possible" in the face of the coronavirus pandemic because 4.8 million jobs were added to the economy between mid-May and mid-June.  However, as a number of sources have reported (see this, this, and this for instance), this supposed recovery does not reflect the state of the economy as it is today.  For these jobs were added during the hasty and ill-conceived rush by many states to reopen their economies, and those states are being forced now to backtrack their reopenings due to an explosion of COVID-19 cases.  Moreover, the vast majority of jobs that were added are in the restaurant, hospitality and retail sectors - sectors which are most likely to be shut down again due to the resurgence of the COVID-19 pandemic.  Some actual figures from the BLS are given below:

• Hospitality and Leisure - 2.1 million jobs added
• Food Service and Drinking Places (bars) - 1.5 million jobs added
• Amusements, Gambling and Recreation - 353,000 jobs added
• Retail Trade - 740,000 jobs added.

That adds up to a total of 4.69 million out of the 4.8 million jobs that were added.  It should be noted that the resurgence of the pandemic threatens all of the job gains in these classes which I have listed.  Not only this, but the last two BLS jobs reports have contained a "misclassification error" which falsely lowered the reported unemployment rate.

So if seekers for the truth of things - especially those who wish to accurately track the outworkings of damnation - cannot rely on official statements from those who are experiencing that damnation, where can they turn?  One possible source of truth is the official reports and communications which the most privileged members of society share with each other, for it is these reports which are most frequently used as the basis for the decisions made by these privileged members.  Petroleum geologist Arthur E. Berman once referred to these reports as "the go to jail truth".  Why refer to these as the "go to jail truth"?  Because if the captains of certain industries lie to each other (or to government agencies like the Securities and Exchange Commission) about the actual state of their industries and market sectors, a whole lot of people stand to lose great big money - thus (hopefully) obliging the liars to go to jail.  The threat of jail time is usually enough to keep most people honest in their official reporting.

But what if the most privileged members of society have corrupted themselves to such a point that they will stop at nothing in order to enrich themselves at everyone else's expense?  For evil is progressive.  The first step is to disregard moral restraints against taking advantage of one's fellow human beings.  The last step is to disregard even the physical or financial realities of one's situation in the desire to be godlike.  Along the way, people who have thus given themselves to evil stop telling even the "go to jail truth", and the organizations, businesses and polities headed by them enter the realm of willful blindness.  Last week the State of Texas entered this realm, as a state which rushed the reopening of its economy and which is now facing the overwhelming of its medical system due to COVID-19 cases that have spiraled out of control.  But if you want to find out how much the Texas medical system has become overwhelmed, good luck asking the State government.  They won't tell you.

According to Margaret Heffernan's book Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore The Obvious At Our Peril, organizations and polities operating under willful blindness have certain characteristics.  First, most of the lower level inhabitants or employees know that something smells rotten.  Second, many of them can actually see some of the skeletons in closets and/or dead bodies under beds.  Third, the higher-ups in these organizations and polities will have created an environment that is hostile to truth-tellers.  Fourth, such organizations and polities tend to break down rather suddenly and dramatically in a way that surprises the outside world even though the lower level people on the inside could see the breakdown a long time in coming.  The collapse of Enron is a good case in point.

How can seekers of truth track the outworkings of damnation through organizations or polities which have entered the phase of willful blindness?  Ms. Heffernan gives us some suggestions on pages 237 and 238 of her book.  First, we need to have a sense of history - especially the history of the collapse of dysfunctional organizations.  By studying the collapse of a multitude of types of organizations along with a multitude of types of organizational dysfunction, we can get a sense of the general trends along which the outworkings of damnation are likely to propagate.  Once we recognize these trends, we watch the dysfunctional organization to see if we can spot the "weak signals" which indicate a trend.  Where the weak signals accumulate, a trend is likely emerging.  It was attention to these weak signals that enabled a CIA analyst named Herb Meyer to predict the collapse of the Soviet Union several years before it happened.

And this bears thinking about a bit more deeply.  For I'd like to suggest that Putin's Russia may be headed for a second collapse.  As someone living in America, I have focused largely on trying to track the outworkings of damnation in American society - yet the United States is by no means the only nation which is worthy of damnation.  Russia has proven itself over the years to be at least the equal of the U.S. when it comes to national narcissism and the desire to make itself great at everyone else's expense.  (See this, this, this, this, and this for instance.)  Putin's use of dirty tricks (such as election-tampering, promotion of far-Right/racist/skinhead organizations, assassinations, and now bounties) to make Russia great by tearing down the West have also been well-documented over the years.  Indeed, when one reads M. Scott Peck's description of malignant narcissism in his book People of the Lie, one can't help but think of Russia under Putin.  To quote Peck, "As life often threatens their self-image of perfection, they are often busily engaged in hating and destroying that life - usually in the name of righteousness."  When observing Russia, therefore, some weak signals to watch out for include watching what happens to truth tellers in Russia who reveal Russia's imperfections.  Another (not-so-weak) signal is the Russian attempt to meddle in other people's lives in order to destroy them. (He who spends all his time minding other people's business doesn't have time to mind his own!)  A third weak signal is seeing how frantic the Russians (and their mouthpieces in the West) become when the fig leaves sewn by Russia to cover its shame slip in the least bit to expose some raw flesh.  Watch the weak signals.

The Psychodynamics of Losing

I have started reading the Book of Lamentations in the mornings, having spent the last month or so reading the Book of Jeremiah.  The most obvious message of these books is the spiritual - namely that the kingdom of Judah was conquered and overthrown by Babylon because the Jews had chosen to deny the truth of God by worshiping other gods, and they had chosen to deny the truth that humankind is made in the image of God by oppressing each other - including the most powerless in their midst - the alien, the orphan, and the widow.  But my reading this time has opened up for me a fascinating glimpse into the psychology and psychodynamics of the ruling classes of nations that are in decline.

One can see these psychodymanics at work in the conflict between the ruling class (and their propagandists, the false prophets) versus the prophets of God who announced that God was about to destroy the kingdom of Judah.   One might call these rulers and their false prophets the revanchists, the "nationalists" and "patriots" of their day, because they represented the hope that Judah might remain as an independent kingdom subservient to no one, and that Judah might one day regain all the lost glory of the kingdom of Solomon.  Their desire for a return of lost glory could be viewed as an expression of national narcissism, because this desire for lost glory was not accompanied by a willingness to submit to their God. 

On the other hand were the true prophets who accurately prophesied that God was about to destroy Judah.  This sentence, "God is about to destroy Judah", had three implications:

• that the nation in which the rulers and the people had invested their identity was about to be destroyed;
• that God was the One who would do the destroying;
• and that this destruction was God's commentary, His verdict on the nation, its character and practices, as captured in the following quote: "Will you steal, murder, and commit adultery, and swear falsely, and burn incense to Baal, and walk after other gods that you have not known, then come and stand before Me in this house, which is called by My name, and say 'We are delivered!' - that you may do all these abominations?" (Jeremiah 7:9-10)

The true prophets did not have access to the political power and concentrated wealth of the ruling classes and their "prophets", so it was easy for the privileged members of society in Judah to label the true prophets as traitors who sought to incite sedition.  Therefore some of these true prophets wound up doing jail time, and a few got assassinated.  But what is so fascinating to me is the way the ruling class and their adherents reacted when the prophecies of the true prophets began to come true, during the twenty-two and a half years between the death of King Josiah and the fall of Jerusalem.  What we see is not just the rejection of true spirituality by the king and the people of Judah, but the refusal to submit to the king of Babylon, even as the military and political realities went increasingly against Judah and Jerusalem.  The darkening regional military and political realities are described well in some of the secular histories of this region during the final days of the kingdom of Judah.  But the Bible itself notes that during these last days, Judah was invaded and humbled three times by foreign powers, and that at the last, those who held Jerusalem resisted until "...the famine was so severe in the city that there was no food for the people of the land.  Then the city was broken into..." (2 Kings 25:3-4).  In other words, there were people in Judah who were willing to fight the inevitable, even if it meant a fight to the death.  That means that there was something they valued so much that the loss of the thing valued was to them a fate worse than death, even though they must have known that they were going to lose.

And this willingness to fight to the death to maintain a cause that is both immoral and losing made me think of other instances in history in which humans have chosen to fight for such causes.  There is the obvious case of the second destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD, a destruction which resulted from the rebellion of Jewish ethno-nationalists against the Roman Empire.  But there is also the case of Nazi Germany from 1942 to 1945, in which the Wehrmacht chose to fight to the death rather than lose an identity which had been carefully constructed for them by the rulers of their society and which made sense only within the context of that society.  (Side note: did you know that the motto of the Wehrmacht was "Gott mit uns" - that is, "God with us"?) And there is the example of the last days of both Rome and Byzantium.  The fall of the Byzantine empire is noteworthy, as the decline of Byzantium was a long time in the making.  The Byzantine emperors had focused for so long on infighting to maintain themselves as the top dogs in their empire that they had failed to notice that the world was changing around them while their empire was weakening.  Nearly a century before their final fall, one of their emperors was arrested in Venice for outstanding debts incurred by hiring Crusader mercenaries in an attempt to recapture lost territory.  (You might say that he nearly went broke trying to Make Byzantium Great Again.)  During its last years, the Byzantine empire could only watch helplessly as its enemies obtained the most advanced military technology of the day - namely, devices capable of shooting large projectiles by means of gunpowder.  These devices (cannons, to be precise) were the decisive factor in the fall of Constantinople, in which the last Byzantine emperor fought to the death.

Which brings me to the present day, in which those who cling to the hope of their own supremacy at the expense of everyone else on earth are beginning to fall on hard times.  I am thinking particularly of Donald Trump and the regime he represents and of which he is a chief symptom.  Consider these facts:

• The United States has lost its place among the top ten most innovative countries in the world.  This is due to decades of underinvestment in education at all levels in this country.
• The United States has seriously begun to lose intellectual capital from this country, as smart foreign nationals (and some smart native-born Americans) are choosing either to stay away, or to relocate to other countries.  (See this and this.)  These are the results of a certain American brand of xenophobia/racism combined with longstanding cuts in funding for basic research.  Continued American racism and hostility toward anything Chinese is not helping this trend.
• Speaking of China, by most accounts, Donald Trump has lost the trade war he started.  (As an aside, for those members of the global Far Right who were hoping that Russia could return the world to where it was several decades ago, it appears that Russia has lost its recent oil price war with Saudi Arabia.  In losing that war, it has lost far more in the process.)
• Because of Trump's blunders and malignant stupidity in his response to the coronavirus threat, the office of the Presidency (and with it the entire Executive Branch of the Federal Government) is losing its relevance in shaping American national life, as governors of states team up with each other to provide leadership for the good of their citizens without consulting Trump.  (See this also.)
• Speaking again of coronavirus, the United States has decisively lost its former place as global leader and coordinator of global crisis response, as over twenty nations (including the most powerful nations of Europe) have publicly met via videoconference this past week to begin coordination of a global response to the coronavirus pandemic.  (So much, by the way, for Russian hopes of fracturing the world order for its own benefit!)  The United States was not invited to the call.  (See this also.)  Note also that these nations have thrown their full support behind the World Health Organization - counter to the wishes of Mr. Trump.  This makes it very likely that effective remedies to the coronavirus pandemic will not be produced by the United States.
• According to some reports, the U.S. Dollar is about to lose a significant portion of its value vis-a-vis other currencies over the next several months.  This is partly the result of government-mandated corporate bailouts (pushed by Trump and the Republican establishment) that have helped corporations prop up stock prices without creating any new actual value in the American economy.

Are we here in the "most powerful nation on earth" about to lose much of what we hold near and dear - especially the intangible psychic construct of ourselves?  And how do people react to the loss of an idealized grandiose self and of the belief system that props up that self?   In her book Willful Blindness, Margaret Heffernan explores the phenomenon of cognitive dissonance - the experience of having reality contradict deeply cherished beliefs - and the ways in which the brain of the person being contradicted tries to adapt.  One of the most perverse adaptations is to double down on the belief that has just been contradicted by reality.  Our President is succeeding in making himself and this nation irrelevant.  Will the members of Trump's base respond to the complete moral and intellectual failure of their champion by injecting themselves with bleach?

Playing With Matches In A Paper House

Today, 28 March 2020, as I write this, the United States of America has for the last few days been the world leader in confirmed coronavirus cases.  What's worse is that even though the number of confirmed cases has climbed to over 116,000, the growth rate continues to be exponential, as seen here.  The site captured in the last link also shows that the COVID-19 death rate continues to climb exponentially.  In light of these events, I thought it might be helpful to provide a short list of things we now know about the course of coronavirus infection in humans.

• We now know that of all people who become infected with COVID-19, approximately 80 to 81 percent will develop mild illness and fully recover.  However, 19 to 20 percent will develop severe disease, with five percent developing "critical disease" according to this source.

• We also know that while early reports stated that young people were significantly less likely to develop severe disease than older people, later data has shown that young people are still at significant risk of developing severe disease.  This source reports that nearly 40 percent of those hospitalized in the United States for COVID-19 were under 55 years old.  The majority of hospitalizations in New York are for people under 50 years old.  And there are sources such as this which present the personal stories of strong, accomplished young athletes who have been seriously sickened by COVID-19.

• We know that the death rate as a percentage of total cases of COVID-19 has been climbing in the United States.  When the first outbreaks occurred, the U.S. death rate was from 1 to 1.5 percent.  However, the latest percentage for New York City is approximately 1.7 percent.  (Click this link and then do the math.)  What happens when the health care systems of the various states are overwhelmed is another matter.  Consider, for instance, what would happen to the 19-to-20 percent of an infected population who develop severe disease, yet who don't have access to health care because their health care systems have been overwhelmed.  Then the U.S. death rate might almost certainly exceed 5 percent, and might even go as high as 10 percent.

We also know a few things about Donald Trump, the terrible titular leader of the United States in these terrible times.  We know that Trump had access to an Obama-era disease management playbook written by the National Security Council as a sort of "lessons-learned" document describing how the Obama administration successfully managed the Ebola outbreak of 2014-2015.  We also know that Trump disregarded it.  And we know that Trump was warned by intelligence analysts in January 2020 of the potential severity and impacts of the coronavirus pandemic.  He chose to ignore and downplay those warnings.

As I look at the ways in which Trump and his cohort have tried to spin this crisis, I have found myself asking questions, such as, what drives Trump?  What are his strategic motivations?  What is his long-term thinking?  (Sometimes I ask these same questions about either one of my two cats as I see them staring off into space.  But they are cool and not sinister, whereas Trump is evil.)

To the extent that he thinks at all, Trump seeks to rebuild White "great power" autarky as it existed over 100 years ago.  However, it was never really "autarky", was it?  What really happened was that the great colonial powers, after they had exhausted their own resource base, sought to keep themselves great by stealing the bodies, lands, and stuff of all the other peoples on earth, laying claim that "this piece of land which we 'discovered', along with its people, now belongs to this particular Northern nation."  This has been the motivation behind American military and economic interventions under Trump, as well as his thwarted desire to build a wall to keep the nonwhite nations of the earth from coming to the United States in search of that which was stolen from them.  But it has also been the motivation behind the efforts of the United States and Russia to neutralize and destroy any independent power centers that are not European or Slavic.  Hence, Trump has sought to "weaponize" the coronavirus in a soft-power sense by calling it "the Wuhan virus" or "the Chinese virus" in his bid to demonize and other-ize people of Asian descent.  Unfortunately, there are knuckleheads in the United States who have followed his lead and perpetrated recent hate crimes against Asian-Americans.  But this response is typical of the narcissism which says, "If there's any imperfection among us, it can't possibly be with me!  It must belong to someone else!"  Such a response is not helpful, because it ignores the fact that white people can transmit the coronavirus just as easily as anyone else.  Consider Boris Johnson, Rand Paul, and the flocks of high school and college students who went to beaches in Florida on spring break, got infected by each other, and brought the COVID-19 infection back to their fellows at their home campuses.

But while we can acknowledge the possibility that Trump "thinks" in some sense, it is also true that he "feels" - that is, certain situations produce in him strong visceral reactions.  As a narcissist, therefore, he cannot handle having to deal with predicaments that are beyond his control, predicaments which require a collective response shaped by many diverse points of view, a response that patiently takes a long view, a response that acknowledges that there are no quick fixes, a response that is humble and open in the face of difficulty.  The current COVID-19 outbreak is just such a difficulty, and Trump has acted like a fish out of water in the face of it.  Thus he has tried desperately to spin this crisis into something where he can be seen as decisively in charge, the leader of the cavalry coming over the hill with a promised quick fix.  This is what is behind the gaggle of questionable "medical experts" seen on Fox News who have backed Trump's assertions that the coronavirus was no worse than the "seasonal flu" or who have pushed questionable remedies such as chloroquine as a cure.

(Trump's obsession with chloroquine deserves special mention.  The only reason he heard about the drug at all in connection with COVID-19 is because of a certain French microbiologist with sketchy credentials and practices, who contacted Fox News and told them that he had successfully treated COVID-19 infected patients with the drug.  Note that chloroquine has never been used as an antiviral drug.  Note also that the Chinese government ran a study of their own which showed that chloroquine had no effect on the course of COVID-19 in patients.  Lastly, it should be mentioned that at least one person has died from trying to self-medicate using a form of chloroquine found in fish tank cleaner.)

And now, Trump has already long since tired of trying to act "presidential" in the face of a crisis which does not offer quick fixes.  (He and his friends are also tired of losing money to a crisis which they let get out of hand.)  Hence, he wants the United States to return to being "open for business" by Easter, with no restrictions on travel or gatherings (or, most importantly, shopping!).  That brings up some interesting possibilities.  Right now, his approval rating is hovering around 50 percent.  Say that represents 150 million Americans.  Say that they also do what he says and return to "life as normal" starting on Easter.  This means abandoning social distancing and self-isolation.  Say also that 70 percent of these people wind up becoming infected with COVID-19.  That would equate to 105 million people.  To make the numbers easier to deal with, let's say 100 million.  Out of these 100 million, 20 million will get sick enough to require hospitalization.  But long before we reach the 20 million mark, the health care systems throughout much of the United States will be overwhelmed.  That means that between 5 and 10 million could die.

The COVID-19 outbreak will cause an inevitable contraction of the American economy.  If the people of the United States do the right thing and continue to aggressively self-quarantine and self-isolate, the only thing we will lose is money - and we will be taking the shortest route to recovery in the process.  If we try to push our re-opening too soon, our economy will contract for another reason - the economic and social disruption that results from millions of us dying.  In seeking to re-open the country for business by Easter, Trump is playing with matches in a paper house.