At The Crossroads

For the king of Babylon stands at the mother of the way,

at the head of the two ways, to use divination; 

he shakes the arrows, he consults the teraphim, 

he looks at the liver.

- Ezekiel 21:21

"'We do all agree that Tianming's final words are very important.'... He then went on awkwardly. 'Then let's pick a spot to meet - somewhere other than the Earth.' ... Yun Tianming had very little faith that the Earth would survive."

- Death's End, Liu Cixin

I must report a rather sad fact.  The two cats who first came to live in my present home have died.  I believe one of them (Vashka) succumbed to feline leukemia virus (FELV) and the other (Koshka) began to suffer from severe edema and possible organ damage.  Both of them passed in 2024.  I now have two new cats.  The name of one of them is Paka and the name of the other is Neko.  However, from time to time I do think of Koshka and Vashka as I remember what cool cats they were.

The passing of Koshka was especially significant, as I was intimately involved in the process.  When I returned home from a trip out of state to visit family, I discovered that Koshka had not been eating, and that he was unsteady on his feet.  I put him into a cat carrier and took him to two vets on a Saturday evening during a snow/ice storm.  Those visits forced me to make some difficult decisions, although I was not without a bit of wry irritation during the first visit.  I did not realize it, but that first visit was to a vet from what I would call a "boutique" clinic, who started off by calling me a "pet parent."  He suggested a number of very expensive tests, but I did not have "pet insurance" and was unable to afford his suggested regimen.  What I felt I was getting was someone who wanted to use emotional manipulation to bleed me dry.  What I needed was someone who would do the necessary work to give me a basic diagnosis along with a reasonable prognosis given my limited ability to pay for my cat's treatment.  

The second clinic I visited specialized in emergency veterinary care, and when I brought my cat to them, they told me straight up that he was basically on his last legs, and that even drastic interventions would probably not lengthen his life more that several months.  Thus I made the decision to have him put to sleep.  That decision felt weird - both at the time I made the decision, and on and off for a long time afterward.  Here after all was a cat who had entered a trusting relationship with me, and yet now I was deciding to do this to him.  I seem to remember trying to second-guess my decision on more than one occasion afterward.  Yet objectively, my decision had to be constrained by such facts as my cat's condition, his prognosis, and my ability (or lack thereof) to pay for a heroic intervention.

I think many people can relate to the experience of being in a potentially emotionally charged situation, yet being forced to think objectively in order to make a rational choice.  So we come to the consideration of the United States in these present days, and the consideration of how we who are in the U.S. should choose to live in these days.  And to be a person of conscience in these days will inevitably lead to psychic distress as we see how the rich and powerful are preying on those who are weak.  For instance, the entire foreign policy of the second Trump administration has been and continues to be one long, violent, murderous tantrum against those who are not rich, not white, and not Western.  And Trump even sought to extend that tantrum to Canada, Europe and Greenland.  Trump's domestic policy is similarly poisonous.  And Trump is but the most prominent symptom of a greater American psychic disease, a disease shared by a majority of America's richest and most powerful citizens.  (Note that when I use the word "psychic", it means "pertaining to the soul."  I am not talking about supernatural or preternatural powers.)

Faced with this late-stage American pathology, many people of conscience are grieved.  This is especially true of those who have embraced the narrative that the United States once stood for a great and lofty ideal, and that Trumpism is merely an unfortunate aberration in its departure from that ideal.  Therefore for these people, "resistance" or "civil resistance" or "strategic nonviolent resistance" consists of trying to re-unite Americans around that higher ideal in the hope that those who are promoting the departure from the ideal might reform on their own initiative.  Such people place great hope in "advocacy" and mobilizing (as defined by the late Jane McAlevey).  But I think most objective observers would say by now that mobilizing and "advocacy" have not thus far been able to secure lasting beneficial change in the U.S.

Maybe the best thing then is to ask what is the current condition of the U.S., and whether it is even possible anymore to change that condition for the better.  I believe our condition has the following characteristics:

• Most of the flow of commerce and economic power is concentrated in a very small number of hands.
• Most of us who are not among the privileged live lives of great precarity and inequity.
• To be perfectly blunt, a majority of the members of the dominant culture are radically devoted to the promotion, maintenance, and re-expansion of white privilege.
• This has distorted our view of human rights and of basic morality to such an extent that a large number of Americans no longer wish to treat other people the same way they themselves want to be treated, but seek to do the exact opposite to their fellow human beings.
• The vast majority of mainstream American media outlets (yes, including the New York Times and the Washington Post) have shifted and are continuing to shift ever farther to the right.
• The rich and powerful have shifted the political process to such an extent that it will be very hard for ordinary people who are not rich and powerful to use ordinary channels to shift the process back to a more equitable foundation.  Those who seek to restore a right balance will increasingly have to work outside of established systems to do so.
• The moral distortions of the most powerful members of our society are leading to the kinds of distortions of thinking and reasoning that may well destroy the nation.

Can this condition be remedied?  That depends on whether or not there are sufficient numbers of people of conscience in our neighborhoods, towns, cities, and states.  How many people are there in your locality who possess a working moral compass?  The essence and starting point of a properly working moral compass is this: "Therefore, however you want people to treat you, you too do so for them, for this is the Law and the Prophets." - Matthew 7:12.

It also depends on whether it is possible to eliminate the continuation of sources of toxicity in our culture.  I am thinking especially of the overwhelming promotion of right-wing, selfish, libertarian, supremacist propaganda through American mainstream media, and the rabid anti-tax rhetoric that is destroying all the publicly-funded instruments of the public good in this country.  Trying to repair the damage done to our partially-destroyed society while the organs of right-wing media continue to pump out their message is like trying to clean up a basement that has been flooded by a sewage spill even while the broken sewer force main that initially caused the flooding continues to pump sewage.

Faced with the challenge of trying to repair our partially destroyed society, some have concluded that repair and healing are impossible.  These people hold out very little hope for the long-term survival of the United States.  Thus many people are choosing to try to emigrate.  It will be interesting to see how many of them succeed, and what they will find in their new homelands.  Emigration is an extreme example of the withdrawal of economic and political cooperation which I have been promoting in my remarks on strategic nonviolent resistance.  However, I can still see other ways of achieving nearly the same level of withdrawal.  What a person chooses will depend on the diagnosis, and hence the prognosis of the American condition which he or she is able to construct.  Here's a hint to my prognosis: I think that there are still many steps of withdrawal that can be taken by people of conscience who must still live in the United States.  But we'll have to be willing for some hard work.

Blog Post Recommendation from "Diary of An Autodidact"

I haven't had much time over the last few weeks to write a new blog post, but I do want to recommend a post from another blogger.  The name of the blog is Diary of an Autodidact, and the post is titled "Underground by Haruki Murakami".  Like me, the author of this blog is a survivor of an American white supremacist fundamentalist/Evangelical cult, and he has noted several similarities between present-day white evangelicalism and the Aum Shinrikyo doomsday cult which perpetrated a massive terrorist attack on Japanese subway commuters in March 1995.  I have myself commented on the lessons which I learned from reading (or in my case, listening to the audiobook version of) Haruki Murakami's book Underground, with its detailed description of the process by which many Aum participants lost their souls to the delusions of the evil man named Shoko Asahara.  It is interesting to see how others are drawing the same lessons in order to understand the present partly destroyed state of much of mainstream American culture.  To quote from the author of Diary of an Autodidact, "In the end, this is the legacy [of cults of narcissism] - dozens of deaths, thousands of injured, and little else to show for it. Thus is the end of every doomsday cult eventually. And, for that matter, of every Fascist movement. Death, destruction, and ultimately oblivion."  These sentences give us some idea of the final outcome of Trumpism.

And as for white evangelicalism/Protestantism (particularly the American flavor) - which has been the enabler of slavery, attempted genocide, and wars of conquest for centuries - I too am struck - as the author of Diary of an Autodidact was struck - by this quote from Underground:

“People the world over turn to religion for salvation. But when religion hurts and maims, 

where are they to go for salvation?” 

Two Knuckleheads Versus A Near-Peer

So once again I'm so out of touch with the rest of the world that a couple of acquaintances had to tell me today that the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran before I became aware of this fact.  Why have I chosen to isolate myself to such a degree that I'm not aware of breaking news? Simply because I already know that the world is a messed-up place, and that this is due in no small part to the United States of America.  We are now reaping the chaos that results from over 45 years of behind-the-scenes machinations by white supremacists and American exceptionalists.  The combination of white supremacy and American exceptionalism has worked synergistically to produce an extremely potent social toxin.  That toxin produced Trumpism, but it certainly did not begin with Trump.  Rather, there is an entire cabal of damnably malignant men to blame, an entire coterie of rich and powerful people, an entire demographic of people whose souls are a pile of garbage.

I'll say at the outset that from my limited reading of the situation, the attack against Iran was unprovoked.  It was not an act of retaliation against any Iranian attack on Israel or the U.S.   In other words, Iran did not throw the first punch.  This shows that the regimes of both Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu are guilty of a criminal act.  (Regarding Israel, my last shreds of sympathy for Israel are evaporating right now.  Netanyahu seems like a singularly rigid, unimaginative, and brittle head of state in such times as these.)  The problem for both nations is that Iran is much closer to a near-peer to the U.S. than Venezuela was, and is much more populous than Israel.  Attacking Iran has probably erased any fault lines that previously existed in Iranian society, and the attack will harden anti-Israel sentiment across the entire Mideast. Israel, having managed to alienate many people by its actions in Gaza, seems bent on escalating the alienation still further.  As for Iran, it has defensive and offensive missile capabilities which pose a serious threat to U.S. military assets in the region.  It has begun to use those capabilities.  And those capabilities are about to be augmented.

It's time for the rest of the world to recognize that the United States is now itself a rogue state.  The rest of the world does indeed have the collective power to bring this rogue state to heel, but only if it presents a united or nearly united front.  As for whether bringing the U.S. to heel involves military responses, I will reserve any comment or opinion.  However, the rest of the world can definitely impose the kinds of steps of economic noncooperation (including even sanctions) that can render the U.S. powerless.  Please decouple from the U.S. - completely.

I'll also say that those members of the U.S. military who choose to obey Trump's orders are men without conscience.  They may be merely people who have chosen to indulge in what Hannah Arendt called the banality of evil, or they may have chosen more enthusiastically to support the Trump/America First agenda, but either way they are people who have thereby forever lost my respect.  Right now I don't support our troops.

An additional problem for the U.S. is that this nation's malignant narcissism - expressed through the potent poison of white supremacy and American exceptionalism - may damage and erode the capability of the leaders of the U.S. to discern reality to such an extent that they will choose to launch unprovoked military attacks on nations that are even closer to near-peer status than Iran.  This could result in disastrous consequences for the world in general and for the U.S. in particular.  These consequences may last a very long time.

Of Monkeys, Gourds, and Peanuts

I've been pleased to learn over the last few weeks that Donald Trump is losing the support of his base, as reported in such articles as "Three Polls That Show Donald Trump Is Losing His Base" (Newsweek, December 2025), "Trump's Support is Collapsing. But why?" (Vox, December 2025), and "How divides emerged at the heart of Trump’s Maga world" (BBC, December 2025). It is interesting to see that among the reasons for the collapse of Trump's support among white American males is the fact that MAGA Trump-ism has begun to seriously hurt the economic prospects of the people who comprise his base.  This is due to such factors as the costs of Trump tariffs to ordinary Americans, the harms to American industries and businesses from the international backlash against Trump-ism, and the negative economic impacts of Trump's mass deportations on America's farming sector.  But it must also be acknowledged that some of the negative economic impacts are due to the boycotts of businesses whose owners support Trump-ism.  Consider, for instance, how badly Elon Musk's businesses were hurt by boycotts in early 2025.  Consider also the decrease in revenue suffered by Amazon, Target, and Home Depot over their abandonment of workplace diversity, equity, and inclusion policies in their bid to curry the favor of Donald Trump.

So today I'd like to write a bit more about the agenda of Donald Trump and his supporters, and the necessity of economic noncooperation from those who are the intended victims and targets of Trump and his supporters.  To be quite plain and blunt, Donald Trump is one of the de facto leaders of a revanchist movement among white supremacists.  He and his supporters want to bring back a world which is the undisputed empire and sole possession of a small group of fat, privileged, evil people who have Made Themselves Great Again at the expense of all the other peoples on earth.  This is the goal of his international policy, which is why he is engaged now in violently trying to conquer other people's countries.  It is also his domestic policy, a policy whose goal is to return the United States to being a paradise for one privileged group of people while turning the rest of us into the domestic servants of this privileged group.  

But he and his supporters depend on an economic machinery which in turn depends on the support and patronage of large numbers of the very people whom he wants to dispossess and subjugate.  In this he and his supporters are like the British were in relation to India and China in the 19th and early 20th centuries.  India was a supposed British "possession", yet the prosperity of the British economy depended on Indians buying British goods.  This fact was expertly used by Mohandas Gandhi to hurt the British economy during India's struggle for independence.  For Gandhi persuaded his fellow Indians to stop buying British goods and to begin to develop their own self-sufficiency.  This drastically raised the costs of empire for Britain and was one of the factors that led to India's independence from Britain.  As Marshall Ganz once said, systems of oppression always depend on the people whom they exploit.  One powerfully effective, yet nonviolent way for the oppressed to hurt the owners of these systems of oppression is to deny them the payoff they are hoping to gain from their oppression.  Don't feed the beast.

A more-than-likely fictional example may be helpful.  I'm going to repeat a story I heard long ago when I was a member of an abusive church, and which I've seen repeated since in the evangelical-o-sphere.  Supposedly there are countries in the developing world in which villagers go out day by day to hunt monkeys.  They are supposedly able to trap these monkeys by spreading hollowed-out gourds on the ground.  Each gourd has a small hole in its shell, and inside the gourd are a few peanuts.  When monkeys find the gourds, they reach inside and grab the peanuts as the hunters watch.  When the hunters come to seize the monkeys, the monkeys are so fixated on the peanuts that they won't let them go - even though by holding the peanuts they are unable to remove their hands from the gourds.  The gourds in turn are so big and heavy that the monkeys cannot run away from the hunters.  Thus the hunters are able to catch the monkeys and crack their skulls, and the monkeys are turned into monkey stew.  One note: I personally don't know whether most monkeys anywhere in the world would fall for such a trick, as I've never owned a monkey as a pet.  I specialize in cats.  I also suspect that the originators of this story have never seen a monkey in their lives, except in pictures or on TV. But let's assume for the moment that this story is true.

Now consider a person who is a member of a historically marginalized group, or a group which is targeted for oppression by a rich, powerful piece of garbage like Trump or like one of his supporters.  If the person who has been targeted for oppression continues to buy things made and sold by the Trump-oids, isn't he financing the very people who want to bash his brains out and turn him into cooked monkey meat?  How many of us allowed ourselves to be made into monkeys during this past holiday season?  How many of us splurged in our spending during Thanksgiving, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas, and New Years? How many people of color bought Teslas in 2025?  How many will want to buy a Tesla in 2026? How many of us will watch the Superbowl in 2026? How many of us will join the military in 2026 even though the U.S. military is likely to be deployed against our brothers and sisters in foreign lands?  How many of us are signed up for Amazon Prime and YouTube and Hulu and Fox and Netflix and ESPN and HBO? How many of us are still using Spotify (which has for a long time been involved in cheating musicians out of their earnings, and which in 2025 ran recruitment ads for ICE)? Boycotts and other forms of economic noncooperation mean letting go of the peanuts. Don't let the present system of oppression make a monkey out of you.

Image courtesy of Craiyon (craiyon.com). Created 17 October 2025.

(Yes, yes, I know - this is a picture of an ape and not a monkey.

But you can't expect too much from the free version of an AI service!)

Farewell to YouTube

I find myself once again in a somewhat familiar position this week.  Over the years, I have been exposed to things that tasted or felt so good that partaking of them quickly became a habit.  However, as time passed, I began to notice that the things which had become habits had some unavoidable downsides - downsides which eventually became too great to ignore.  Thus it was that I was forced eventually and reluctantly to give them up.  Examples include television, sugary sweets, coffee (except in small doses) and talk radio.

This week, YouTube joins that list.  This has been a long time coming.  I have tuned in to YouTube primarily to hear and watch a number of insanely awesome fingerstyle guitar players.  But during the last year - a very traumatic year! - it seemed to me that YouTube's algorithms were deliberately seeking to amplify trauma by showing links to politically provocative videos in their "Recommended For You" sidebar.  I have no idea why these videos were "recommended for me" especially when I think of how most of them were either racist, right-wing, or linked to conspiracy theories.  Perhaps the people at Google thought that by showing me things that are offensive, threatening, terrorizing and outrageous, they could get more pageviews, and hence, earn more advertising revenue.

They were wrong.

The final straw for me has come in learning that YouTube is dragging its feet in removing Donald Thug Trump's YouTube channel - even after the attempted violent seizure of the U.S. Congress by Trump's band of church-going thugs.  Note to these thugs: there is no "grace for your hearts."  Rather, what you can expect for yourselves is spelled out in Hebrews 10:26-31.  You body-slammed police officers; you bashed police officers in the head; you came with guns, zip-ties, rope, racist slogans and rhetoric; you planted pipe bombs; you came ready to murder.  Don't ever again try to give me Bible lessons.  You don't know what you're talking about.

And as for YouTube, I will find alternatives.  But I won't be coming back.

A Time for Celebration and a Time for Caution

It is with great satisfaction that I am enjoying some of the news this evening.  The Democratic Party has just retaken control of the United States Senate.  This was due in no small part to the groundswell of community organizing and constructive resistance in the African-American community.  This encourages me to add diligence to my own organizing plans.  I also find it bitingly funny that the African-American players in the WNBA managed to oust a team owner from the U.S. Senate.  

The news is not all good, however.  The supporters of Donald Trump - consisting mainly of white evangelicals who don't seem to read their Bibles - rioted in Washington DC to prevent the Congressional ratification of Joe Biden as the next President.  These are the people who regularly use the term "thugs" to describe unarmed people of color.  Who are the real thugs here?  Even in this, however, there is a silver lining: those who study strategic nonviolent resistance know that violence always backfires against those who choose to be violent.  As a result of the violence of the pro-Trump rioters (who were incited by Trump himself), some of the Republican members of Congress who had intended to object to Biden's ratification have chosen instead to support him.  Even Mike Pence and Mitch McConnell have turned against Trump.  Trump has become a lame duck in every sense of the word, as it was Vice President Pence who coordinated with the military to call National Guard troops to stop the rioting.  Clearly Trump is no longer counted among the adults in the room.

For you who are among the marginalized and oppressed, continue to organize constructive resistance!  Continue to remain nonviolent.  Continue to speak truth to power.  Support those even among the Republicans who are finally beginning to speak truth.

One last thing.  I believe it is time for those of us who desire to be decent people to organize a permanent boycott of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, and possibly YouTube as well.  The role of these social media platforms in facilitating the kind of chaos that has characterized the Trump years is undeniable.  The boycott should therefore last until the owners of these platforms are bankrupt.

An Open Letter to the Black Lives Matter Organizers

I am writing as an African-American who really wants us to win our struggle for liberation and who really wants us to succeed in removing Donald Trump from office.  But I am afraid that events that took place yesterday in Seattle may make it more likely that we will lose.  This is why I am writing today.

You know, I am sure, that the world is watching the ongoing protests against the murders of unarmed Black Americans in this country and in Portland.  These protests fall within a certain category of tactics of nonviolent resistance.  (By the way, when I talk about strategic nonviolent resistance, I am not talking about Martin Luther King!  Rather, I mean what Jamila Raqib of the Albert Einstein Institution is talking about in her TED video.)  In the literature on strategic nonviolent resistance, nonviolent resistance actions can take two forms: tactics of concentration and tactics of dispersion.  Tactics of concentration include mass rallies and street protests.  One problem with street rallies is that they can be hijacked by agents of the State who incite violence (including property destruction) in order to discredit the protesters by claiming that they are anarchists.  Thankfully, that narrative had begun to shift because of the Wall of Moms in Portland (joined lately by the Wall of Dads and the Wall of Vets).

But in Seattle yesterday, violent infiltrators disrupted what should have been a peaceful protest and instead provided the world with images that play right into the hands of Donald Trump.  Those images make us look like criminals and undermine our attempts to discredit the system that is oppressing us.  Note also that the NAACP has commented on how what started as a Black expression of struggle against White oppression has been dangerously hijacked.  The protests are no longer really about Black lives, but about attention-seeking White people.  As I said above, I support the Wall of Moms - especially because they have put themselves at the service of their Black and Brown neighbors.  But I agree 100 percent with the NAACP condemnation of the anarchists and other agitators.

Therefore, I am begging you as a fellow African-American to shift your resistance to tactics of dispersion.  I'd also like to ask that you please stop holding mass rallies and protests unless you create a system to make sure that everyone who shows up will remain nonviolent.  This applies especially to White people who show up at a protest, because most of the violence (including property destruction!) that has been perpetrated at protests over the last two months was done by White people.  If you want to see why nonviolent discipline is so important, please watch this video by Professor Erica Chenoweth (and this one also).

I would also ask that you all study not only the literature on strategic nonviolent resistance, but that you also study the literature on effective community organizing.  This falls right in line with what the family of George Floyd asked of us all in the aftermath of his murder by the police.  Note that George Floyd's brother condemned the violence that had erupted even in the early days of the protests over George Floyd's murder, and he demanded that those who want to see changes happen work in a positive manner to make those changes happen. 

I have not suffered like George Floyd's family (or Tamir Rice's family, or Michael Brown's family, or Stephon Clark's family, or Breonna Taylor's family).  But as a kid I was exposed to a lot of intense racist physical bullying.  I went to White churches where the racism was more subtle, yet just as damaging.  I've been followed by police and even stopped by police simply because I am Black.  I've suffered workplace harassment.  To me, it seems that Donald Trump wants to bring back an America in which it's okay for white supremacy to treat us all like trash.  Trump has been losing this year because of his incompetence.  But if he wants to try to rescue his reelection by picturing himself as a law-and-order president protecting the world from chaos, why do you want to hand him situations where he can "prove" his claims?  I don't want to suffer another four years of his garbage.  Do you?

And if you are White and you are reading this, please stop showing up to BLM protests unless you know that you can control yourself and not vandalize property or provoke law enforcement officers by stupid stunts like throwing firecrackers or other objects at police.  You're not the heroes you seem to think you are when you pull such stunts.

Thanks to all who take the time to read this.

The History of the Suffragettes - Further Proof Of What the ICNC Has Lost

The International Center On Nonviolent Conflict (ICNC) has recently tried to advise those protesting the brutal racism against people of color in the United States, and specifically those protesting the murders of unarmed African-Americans.  As I have written previously, I used to be a supporter of the ICNC and greatly enjoyed reading its offerings, as I thought that the ICNC presented an excellent education in strategic nonviolent resistance as a means of neutralizing an oppressor's power.

But during the last several months I became concerned by the appearance of writers and "teachers" attached to the ICNC who suggested that low-level violence (including property destruction!) could help a nonviolent movement succeed faster with better outcomes than strictly nonviolent resistance.  Because of my previous readings on the efficacy of nonviolent civil resistance and my understanding that autocrats and oppressors frequently try to inject violence into a nonviolent movement in order to undermine it, I could only conclude that the ICNC had been infiltrated by a person or persons working for Trump, Putin, or the regimes they represent.  One example of my concern lies in the article written by Professor Tom Hastings in which he lays out his opinion of "when destruction of something may be helpful to a nonviolent campaign," as well as his own story of how he was arrested three times for destroying military property.  From his article it is obvious that Mr. Hastings believes that there are times when property destruction is both justified and helpful to a movement.

The only thing is, Mr. Hastings is dead wrong.  And the experience of the suffragette movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries in Britain and the United States proves it.  According to a 2015 analysis by George Lakey, the British suffragette movement achieved much less than the American movement, and it did so even though it started earlier and many more women were involved.  Why?  Because the American women who agitated for the right of women to vote did so using entirely nonviolent acts, whereas in Britain (oh, such a staid and proper society!), women resorted to arson, blowing up post offices, and smashing windows.  That's why, by 1920, while waging a nonviolent campaign that ran all the way through World War 1, the American suffragettes won equal access to the ballot box, while in Britain (where the women were forced to suspend their campaign during the war), by 1918 only women who were over 30 and owned property were granted the right to vote, even though they had begun their campaign five years before the American suffragettes.  It wasn't until 1928 that British women gained fully equal access to the ballot box - eight years after this victory was won in the United States.  Lakey asks what slowed the British women down, and the answer is that they undermined themselves and their movement by engaging in property destruction.

Mr. Hastings should maybe read the article by George Lakey.  Or he might read the essay by Jack DuVall (formerly of the ICNC) which criticized the property destruction instigated by some supposed "anti-fascists" in the early days of the Trump administration.  That violence played directly into the hands of Trump.

Thankfully, the protesters now facing down Federal troops in Portland do not seem to be listening to Tom Hastings.

(God bless the Wall of Moms!  Now that shows innovation in tactics of protest!  Compare what they are doing with what the Mothers of the Disappeared did to the Argentine military regime before it fell.  They also did it to the Pinochet regime in Chile. And note: the Wall of Moms is spreading to other cities.  How can Chump - er, I mean, Trump - call these women thugs?!)

As long as these protesters continue to remain nonviolent in the face of Federal violence perpetrated against them, they will continue to show the world that the real thug and violent actor is the one and only Donald J. Trump.

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 Scapegoating of the Named Patient

Those who have followed my blogging for a long time know that I originally began blogging in order to document and reflect on my experiences in an abusive fringe evangelical church in the United States. That church was founded by a dysfunctional husband-and-wife team and their two dysfunctional sons. These four formed the original leadership core of that church (or, to use their terminology, that "Assembly"), and I am convinced that from the very beginning the sons knew fully and accurately just how much of a counterfeit their parents were, and therefore knew fully and accurately just how much of a scam their "Assembly" was. Quite naturally, the dad appointed himself the "head honcho" of that sorry bunch (or as he put it, "the Head Steward of the Work!").

As time passed, the Assemblies grew both in the total number of groups and the total number of members in each group, and this necessitated the promotion of certain ambitious members of each group to places of leadership. Once a person was inducted into a leadership role, he almost always found himself in a select inner circle whose members were allowed to see aspects of our head honcho that were hidden from the rest of us. Those aspects consisted of embezzlement, corruption, hypocrisy, secret malignancy, and exploitation (including sexual sin) - although from time to time, all the rest of us could see the open malignancy, pride, narcissism, and bullying that flashed forth from the leadership and from our head honcho.

The interesting thing that happens to people who exist for a long time in such an environment is that they tend to become like their environment. This means that most of us tended to become jerks (and few things are more annoying than a religious jerk), and because our head honcho was a king-sized jerk, the people closest to him - his deputy leaders - became some of the biggest jerks in our group. Many of us who were not in the inner leadership circle did not recognize the extent to which we were becoming corrupt in our zeal to become like our leaders. When that corruption was pointed out to us by outsiders, we were able to justify it by saying that our gung-ho zeal, and the pushiness of our proselytizing/recruiting of others, and the way we disparaged anyone who had a life outside our group was all actually evidence of our spirituality. (I guess it was! Just not the way we thought.) We also justified our attempts to find people whom we could boss around by claiming that this was an evidence of our desire to "grow in stature." I must say, though, that our inability to recognize the foolishness of the things we were being taught to emulate is no excuse, but rather an evidence of almost criminal stupidity. (And for every finger I point outward, I recognize that there are three pointing back at me.) But the men (and some women) who comprised the inner circle of leadership knew something the rest of us didn't know - that the leading family - the head honcho and his wife and sons - were engaging in criminal behavior, including domestic violence. Yet they became the chief enablers of the head honcho and his family. Not only this, but many of these deputy leaders became petty tyrants and bullies in their own right, causing much distress for the people under their authority.

Although this system was corrupt, it did seem to possess a certain durability, in large part because it had evolved a very efficient means of dealing with any honest, non-corruptible people who were recruited into its midst. Such people usually left soon after being drawn into an Assembly, and when they left, the leaders would tell very convincing lies about how these leavers left because of some hidden "sin." Some of these leavers made the mistake of trying to persuade us "stayers" that they left because they saw holes in the head honcho's doctrine and preaching. Whenever that happened, the leaders would simply say that the leavers left because of "spiritual pride." But the leaders and the head honcho got something more than they could handle when a few of these leavers and some of those in the process of deciding to leave found out about the domestic violence, financial irregularities, and adultery going on with the head honcho and his family. Our "Assemblies" therefore suffered an existential crisis from 2000 to 2003, and it was a crisis which most of our groups did not survive.

Now what is interesting about this crisis is that the vast majority of the members were forced to face the reality that the head honcho we had all been following was a thoroughly corrupt hypocrite. A corollary to this realization was the realization that our deputy leaders had been corrupt enablers of the head honcho. As this additional realization began to be spoken openly among us, the deputy leaders began to try hard to portray themselves as fellow victims with us against the head honcho. Some of them even went as far as trying to say that they tried without success to rein in our head honcho. And all of them condemned the head honcho and tried to wash their hands of him. Based on what I know of some of these leaders, I think their vehement final public rejection of the head honcho was motivated by a desire to pick up the pieces of the small-time religious "empire" which the head honcho had created, so that one or more of these deputy leaders might crown himself the new "head honcho." In other words, by their condemnation of the head honcho, these deputy leaders tried to scapegoat him (as the most obvious target) in order to draw attention away from their own complicity in perpetuating a toxic, abusive system. The thing that thwarted these deputy leaders in their ambition was the fact that the rest of us had by this time awakened to the fact that not only had we all suffered abuse at the hands of the now deposed head honcho, but that we had also suffered abuse from his deputies, and that these men had acted like jerks toward the rest of us. So it was that most of us, me included, walked away completely from that mess.

Years later, I found myself dealing with other dysfunctional systems, and this pushed me to read a large amount of literature on the dynamics of dysfunctional organizational systems, whether on a household level or on the level of something larger. One of the things I learned is that in dysfunctional systems controlled by an obviously sick, evil, or deranged person - the "named patient" (also known as the "identified patient") - the other members of the system frequently bear significant culpability for the continued survival of that system. Yet it is usually convenient for them to blame all the problems of the system on the "named patient."

So we fast forward to April 2020, and I have to say that a few recent essays in popular online news sources have raised my eyebrows. The essays have all been about the coronavirus pandemic and the completely and utterly dysfunctional response of the Trump White House to the pandemic. And while I agree with the fact that Trump botched things "bigly," what strikes me is that some of these essays have called for Mike Pence to take over the Federal coronavirus response because of Trump's malignant incompetence. The author of one such essay pleaded with Pence to "remove Trump and save us from the coronavirus." Another essayist stated that the coronavirus crisis would not have gotten as far out of hand in the United States had someone else been president - "Hillary Clinton, Jeb Bush, Mike Pence, really almost anybody else..." I am not a huge fan of Hillary Clinton, but I will agree that we would not be facing what is likely to become an economy-destroying crisis on account of the coronavirus if she had become President in 2017. But what I see in the mention by these essayists of Republicans who might have done a better job than Trump reminds me uncomfortably of the attempts by the deputy leaders of my former abusive church to rehabilitate themselves by means of loud public denunciations of our former head honcho. Except that this time, it seems to be certain members of the Republican Party and the conservative political establishment who are trying to rehabilitate themselves by condemning Trump.

The only problem is, they can't succeed. Not if they're honest with themselves. Just as the former deputy leaders of my former church condemned themselves by condemning our former head honcho, these must realize that they condemn themselves by condemning Trump. Don't get me wrong - Trump needs to be denounced, like my former abusive church head honcho needed to be denounced. But the voices on the right who are condemning Trump must admit that they themselves are the very people whose desire for moral impossibility combined with their ungodly access to concentrated wealth and power to bring us the regime of Trump in the first place. Trump is therefore a symptom of a wider dysfunction.  Aren't the Republicans the same people whose narcissism refused to acknowledge that their desire for what they want needed to be tempered by the recognition of the rights of the other peoples who live on the earth? Are not many of these people the same people who paid large amounts of money years ago to create the Tea Party movement? Many operatives from this movement are now loudly demanding that the restrictions on gatherings and businesses imposed by state governors in order to halt the spread of COVID-19 be immediately lifted.  And are not many Republican politicians just as insane as Trump? Do you think that a Sarah Palin presidency would look any different by now? Who among these people was protesting during the days of Trump's Muslim travel ban? Which of these people rebuked Trump for stationing U.S. Border Patrol agents and military personnel at the southern border to rip Mexican children out of the arms of their parents and throw them into cages? How many of them approved of the destruction of social safety nets in Wisconsin by former Governor Scott Walker? How many of them have secretly or openly agreed with some of the nutcase statements from Governor Sam Brownback about "God, guts and guns" - especially about his disdain for gun control even after high school students across the nation expressed outrage over the lack of effective gun control in this country? How many of them refuse to acknowledge anthropogenic climate change even to this day? How many of them are trying to disenfranchise voters in states controlled by the Republican Party by refusing to allow mail-in voting during the present pandemic?

These people are infected with the same malignant narcissism which animates Trump. Some of them may not be as far along in their disease as he is, yet they are all moving inexorably in the same direction toward a singularity of moral impossibility in which they demand supremacy at all costs, regardless not only of the rights of others (including both nonwhite and white others), but of physical reality itself (including the actual science of epidemiology and its bearing on the propagation of viruses). Blogger Olga Doroshenko describes this narcissism thus in its effects on Soviet Russia: "During [the Bolsheviks'] 73-year rule, the Russian narcissism reached the final stage: total separation from reality and hence, self-destruction of the nation." (Emphasis added.) As the United States and its leadership are wholly taken in their own narcissism, our own self-destruction looms as a distinct and unpleasant possibility.  We'll see who finally takes the fall for that self-destruction.  But if you are a Trump supporter, and you find yourself one day with a mouth full of gravel, don't just blame him.  Blame yourself also.

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.

Of Houses, Storms, Sand and Bedrock

Everyone therefore who hears these words of mine and does them, I will liken him to a wise man who built his house on a rock. The rain came down, the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house; and it didn’t fall, for it was founded on the rock. Everyone who hears these words of mine and doesn’t do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. The rain came down, the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house; and it fell—and its fall was great.

- Matthew 7:24-27, World English Bible

The words of the Scripture quoted above came to me this week as I pondered the progress of recent events worldwide and nationally.  The quoted parable defines wisdom quite specifically - namely as the willingness to do the things commanded by Jesus.  But it also points out a couple of other facts, namely, that everyone is building something, and that storms come from time to time to test every person's work.  If a person's house gets knocked down by the storm, he can't blame it solely on the storm - he must also admit admit that he was a stupid builder.

Thus the coronavirus pandemic might be viewed as a storm of a certain kind, and the leaders of nations might be viewed as those whose house-building is being tested.  In particular, two kinds of leaders are being tested:

• those who understand as the Proverbs say, that a king's glory is his people, and that the king had therefore better provide for the common good of his people so that his kingdom can be strong;
• and those who cannibalize their people in order to enrich themselves.

In the latter group we can put all of the politicians of the global far right who have become heads of state within the last four years, as well as their chief enabler, a certain Vladimir Putin.  The interesting thing about these people is that they were able to raise a base of certain members of the common people to back them by convincing them that narcissism, greed and selfishness are good things and that by these things they would make their countries (and their base) great again.  This then has been the character of the metaphorical "houses" they have built.

The current storm, however, is exposing a lot of shoddy workmanship, bad carpentry, and substandard building materials in these "houses".  Consider that Angela Merkel's Germany is weathering the coronavirus storm much better than the United States right now, because of two factors: a robust public health system, and a chancellor who tells the straight-up truth.  Consider also the robust, clear-eyed responses of South Korea and Singapore to the current crisis.  And lastly, consider the response of China, which after initially fumbling, took such steps as making testing free, removing all payment requirements for new patients seeking care, and enforcing of self-quarantine.  As a result, new cases of COVID-19 are now declining in China.  Compare that with the response of a certain Mr. Donald Trump, which can only be described as one long, continuous fumble.  As a result of Trump's fumbling, the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed today below the level it held on the day when President Barack Obama left office.  And coronavirus cases in the United States continue to climb.

Trump's initial response - namely to downplay the severity of the crisis while doing nothing to help the people of the United States - is remarkably similar to the response of Boris Johnson, the current prime minister of Britain, whose government decided that the best way to protect Britain was to allow the virus to spread naturally in order to build up "herd immunity" among Britons.  ("God save the Queen," you say?!  How about "God help Britain!"  With friends like these, who needs enemies?)  Political pressure forced him to abandon this plan, but its replacement still looks a lot like "doing nothing."

Russia, on the other hand, seems to have adopted a different approach.  According to the World Health Organization, Russia has only 199 confirmed cases of COVID-19 infection as of the time of this writing, with no confirmed deaths.  Russia is therefore nearly perfect, the very thing every narcissist wants to be...except that a large number of Russian doctors are now saying that the Putin government is forcing them to under-report cases of COVID-19, and that the Russian medical system is so decrepit that accurate assessments of the current situation in Russia are impossible.  They are also pointing out the extremely limited number of test kits available, the inaccuracy of these kits, and the fact that they are all made by one Russian monopoly.  There also seems to be a sharp spike in cases of "community-acquired pneumonia" and "community-acquired influenza", with entire hospital wards being emptied of other patients in order to accommodate the new cases.  Maybe Putin's government doesn't know the difference between COVID-19 and other viruses, but it does know how to try, at least, to capitalize on an opportunity to weaken nations that are better than Russia - as witnessed by an EU report stating that pro-Russian media outlets are sowing disinformation about the current pandemic in order to try to aggravate the public health crisis in the West. Nice to see what Putin's priorities actually are.

But it's not just heads of nations whose work is being tested by this storm.  It's individuals and families as well.  I am thinking of what our responses to a crisis say about our individual character.  Of particular note is the extent to which each of us is addicted to mass media, including social media with its news feeds.  And I am thinking of the mindset which I encountered when I was first exposed to the concepts of peak oil and resource depletion - the mindset which at the time was called prepping, but which I now call hoarding.  It is a particularly dysfunctional kind of hoarding which makes people go to Winco and buy out all the Top Ramen, toilet paper, and beans they can get their hands on.  And four times within the last nine months this behavior has appeared.  The first three times, it was because the weather reporters on the news predicted heavy snow.  Now, note - this happened in 2019 and early 2020 in Portland, Oregon.  Yet people seem to forget that in 2008 it snowed for two weeks, and everyone managed to live without resorting to hoarding.  People can be such...people...sometimes...  Is it possible that many of us have built our lives on a set of poisonous assumptions and bad moral choices?  How is your house holding up in all this rain?

No Room At The Realtor's

I am increasingly trying to live a disconnected life - as, in, disconnected from digital media.  It's one of my ways of coping with a world ruled by very bad actors who want to make very bad news.  (Another coping mechanism of mine is to work to create collective expressions of good news via collective constructive organic work.  But I digress.)

This week, however, a bad actor managed to insert a bit of bad news into my consciousness.  It happened while I was driving in Southern California on one of my regular visits to family.  If you don't have streaming Internet because you don't want to be addicted to your smartphone, and yet you do want to know why you're stuck in traffic (and boy, was I stuck!), you have little choice but to listen to the radio for traffic updates.  Being exposed to alarming headlines is an unavoidable risk of getting your information this way.  So it was that I heard that Donald Trump is starting to attack Democratic leaders from states that have been experiencing a surge in homelessness.

This piqued my interest for a number of reasons.  First, almost the only claims to legitimacy which Trump has are the performance metrics of the visible, formal economy.  Those metrics paint a wildly optimistic picture of the American economy.  (NASDAQ sets new records!  Dow sets new records!  Unemployment below 4 percent!)  Yet the "boots-on-the-ground" reality which many of us see paints an entirely different picture,  One of the parts of that picture concerns the epidemic of homelessness whose rate of increase jumped drastically under the Trump regime.

Trump's tweets this week about the homeless crisis contain a note of outrage over the lack of help which the homeless are receiving, yet as noted in at least one of the articles linked in this post, Trump is proposing actions which would exacerbate the homeless crisis even further by reducing the availability of affordable housing.  His outrage is therefore hypocritical.

It might be good to examine the roots of homelessness in the United States, for I want to suggest that homelessness is a feature (and not a bug) of the very system of oligarchic capitalism and radical individualism that characterize American society.  I don't have time today to get into a rigorous defense of my hypothesis, but I think it good to list a few items of history:

• Homelessness has been a feature of American society since the 1870's, and has been closely linked to two phenomena: the enforcement of the cultural notion that the only respectable living arrangement is for people to own their own homes (thus eliminating shared housing, boarders, and other "non-standard" arrangements), combined with the increasing expense of achieving this ideal.  (Source: "Home and Homelessness in the United States: Changing Ideals and Realities", A. R. Veness, 1991)
• Homelessness was a surprisingly strong feature of the "Roaring Twenties", which has been widely taught to children by historiographers as being a time of rising prosperity for the majority of Americans.  In reality, it was anything but.  (Source: "Poverty in the Prosperous Years: The Working Poor of the 1920's and Today," B. Payne, 2013)
• During the 1920's, more than 60 percent of Americans lived below the poverty line.  (Source: BBC GSCE CCEA, Retrieved 27 December 2019)

I want to focus particularly on the first bullet point.  Home ownership in the United States has long been touted as a big step toward respectability, as it is a key component of being able to live a completely individualized life, un-beholden to any responsibility for the collective of which the individual is but a part.  But home ownership has become rapidly unaffordable because the rate of inflation of home prices has far outpaced the rate of increase of most workers' wages for at least two decades.  Housing is an obvious example of the damage that results when oligarchs blow aspirational bubbles.  Post-secondary education is another.

Two further observations.  First, it is useful to see Trump as, among other things, a symptom of a greater evil.  We know that Russia worked hard to insure that Trump would capture the White House, so we can see Trump in a very real sense as a manifestation of the will of the oligarchy (and its chief oligarch Putin) who now rule Russia.  If the symptoms of extreme wealth inequality are now ballooning in America under Trump, it is only logical that we should see them ballooning in Putin's Russia as well, as has been noted in journalism covering the Russian homelessness crisis.  See "St. Petersburg Tackles a Homelessness Crisis Moscow Won't Address," for instance, where you will read that Russia treats its homeless population the same way a narcissistic parent treats an imperfect child - as a limb to be amputated.  One other similarity between Russia and the United States is that even during Russia's 21st-century supposed "roaring decade" (or more, accurately, "roaring few years" of high oil revenues from 2008 to 2015-2016), there were between one and five million children living on the street in Russia.

Second, both Trump and the Russian leadership find it useful to maintain a narcissistic facade of perfection, and to project their actual imperfections onto scapegoats who can be demonized by being "otherized."  But on closer examination, the perfection which they seek to portray looks unsettlingly similar to the fragile bubble-film perfection of America in the Roaring Twenties.  Most of 1920's America was suffering, yet the nation was deluded by the media portrayals of the good fortune of the rich.  It required only a very small shift in consciousness to burst that delusion.  The shift occurred once the wealthy were confronted with a crisis they could not handle.  And then suddenly those who had been suffering all along began to become "activized."  A similar phase change may be in our not too distant future.

The On-Line Airing of National Dirty Laundry

To those who may have missed blog posts from me over the last several months, I offer my apologies.  There are things in realspace which have demanded my attention, and there are only 168 hours in any given week...

But I thought I'd post a few links to information that reveals the extent to which mainstream American culture has become blatantly evil.  First, the Fullerton Observer has kindly rendered a good public service in posting summaries of the key findings of the Mueller Report On the Investigation Into Russian Interference In the 2016 Presidential Election.  At the end of their final summary, they have also kindly provided a link to audio recordings of a reading of the entire report.  This means that anyone who wants to know what the report says can get it all straight from the horse's mouth - even if they don't have time to read it all.

Secondly, there are a number of new reports exposing the hypocrisy of the white American evangelical/Protestant Church, which continues to staunchly support the presidency of Donald Trump.  Here's a small sample:

• New Study Exposes Hypocrisy of the Religious Right
• "Someone's Gotta Tell the Freakin' Truth": Jerry Falwell's Aides Break Their Silence
• Her Evangelical Megachurch Was Her World.  Then Her Daughter Said She Was Molested by a Minister.
• Haggard's Law  (Note: in posting this link, let me emphasize that I am a Bible-believing Christian.  However, I object to using "God-talk" to try to gain political leverage to elect candidates to office who use the power of the State to murder dark-skinned people - or to rip the children of these dark-skinned people out of the arms of their parents in order to throw the children into cages - er, I mean, "detention centers.") (A second note: Vladimir Putin may himself be a case of Haggard's Law in action.  Several years ago, during a photo op with Russian citizens, he lifted the t-shirt of a pre-adolescent boy and kissed the boy on his stomach.  You can watch it here.  Recently that boy, who is now a man, stated that he liked the kiss, but if you look at the linked photo, the boy seems to be surprised and slightly revolted.  Maybe he decided that he liked saying he liked it more than he liked the possibility that he would be forced to drink a polonium cocktail!  Putin as Катехон?  Ha, ha!)

Revelations such as these should arouse the kind of moral outrage that should sweep evildoers from power - except that the supporters of these evildoers no longer care about truth or justice or anything else except the naked exercise of power over their fellow human beings.  They have always been like this, but for a few decades between the 1960's and now, they were wolves in badly-done sheep disguise.  At least now they're being straight-up about being wolves.  And no, I don't expect them to listen to the Mueller Report.

One side note: remember all the supposed "terrorist" incidents involving so-called "Arab extremists" in Europe and the United States during the last decade?  These incidents had the convenient effect of turning public sentiment in Europe and the United States against immigrants - especially dark-skinned or non-Christian immigrants.  Many of us wondered at the time who could be behind these attacks, because we considered them to be false flags.  Having examined Russian propaganda over the last few years, I've come to a certain conclusion - a conclusion informed by the fact that Russia actively sought to build a network of regimes in the world's richest countries that worked to exclude the world's dark-skinned and/or non-Christian peoples from the wealth of these nations.  Russia has also become well-known for "hybrid warfare."  You draw your own conclusions...