Balanced perspectives for our time - JUST in time?

Just before the consequential US election (I am optimistic we can prevail over Putinism), my previous posting offered a compiled packet of jpegs and quick bullets to use if you still have a marginally approachable, residually sane neighbor or relative who is 'sanity curious.' A truly comprehensive compendium! From the under-appreciated superb economy to proved dangers of pollution. From Ukraine to proof of Trump's religion-fakery. From saving science to ...

... the biggest single sentence of them all... "Almost every single honest adult who served under Trump now denounces him." Now numbering hundreds. 

And Harrison Ford emphasizing that point with eloquence.

Anyone able to ignore that central fact... that grownups who get to know Trump all despise him... truly is already a Kremlin boy.

== More sober reflections == 

Fareed Zakaria is by far the best pundit of our time - sharp, incisive, with well-balanced big-perspective. And yet, even he is myopic about what's going on.

On this occasion, he starts with The Economist's cover story that the U.S. economy is the "Envy of the World." 

Booming manufacturing and wages, record-low unemployment, the lowest inflation among industrial nations (now down to 2%), with democratic policies finally transferring money to the middle class, after 40 years of Supply Side ripoffs for the rich. 

The Wall Street Journal - of all capitalist and traditionally Republican outfits - calls the present economy 'superb at all levels' and 'remarkable,' with real growth in middle class wages and prosperity.

 And yet, many in the working classes now despise the Rooseveltean coalition that gave them everything, and even many black & hispanic males flock to Trump's macho ravings.

Zakaria is spot-on saying it's no longer about economics - not when good times can be taken for granted. Rather, it's social and cultural, propelled by visceral loathing of urban, college educated 'elites' by those who remain blue-collar, rural and macho. 

One result - amplified in media-masturbatory echo chambers and online Nuremberg Rallies - has been all-out war vs all fact using professions, from science and teaching, medicine and law and civil service to the heroes of the FBI/Intel/Military officer corps who won the Cold War and the War on terror.

Where Fareed gets it all wrong is in claiming this is something new!  

Elsewhere I point out the same cultural divide has erupted across all EIGHT different phases of the American civil/cultural war, since 1778. Moreover, farmers and blue collar workers, etc. have been traumatized for a century, in one crucial way! As their brightest sons and daughters rushed off from high school graduation to city/university lights...

... and then came back (if they ever come back at all) changed. 

It's been going on for 140 years. And the GI Bill after WWII accelerated it prodigiously.

I won't apologize for that... but I admit it's gotta hurt.

While sympathy is called-for, we need to recall that the recurring confederate fever is always puppetted by aristocrats - by King George, by slaver plantation lords, by gilded-age moguls, by inheritance brats and today's murder sheiks & Kremlin "ex"-commissars... and whenever the confederacy wins (as in 1830s, 1870s and 1920s in the United States and 1933 Germany) the results are stagnation and horror. And every "Union" victory (as in the 1770s, 1860s, 1940s, 1960s) is followed by both moral and palpable progress.

See also Fareed Zakaria's perspectives in his recently released book, Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present.

== For this last week ==

Trump has learned a lesson from his time in office. Never trust any adults or women and men of accomplishment and stature. He has said clearly he will never have another Kelly, Mattis, Mullen, Milley... or even partisan hacks with some pride, like Barr, Pence, etc... allowed anywhere near the Oval Office. 

In fact, he wants many people in his potential administration who have criminal records and cannot get security clearances under present rules. He wants to have a private firm do background checks instead of the government and military security clearance process. 

This should give a bunch of corrupt or blackmail-vulnerable criminals access to and control over our most critical and sensitive secrets.

And anyone can doubt any longer that he is a Kremlin agent?

== A final note of wisdom ==

Only one method has ever been found that can often (not always) discover, interrogate and refute lies and liars or hallucinators.**

That method has been accountability via free-speech-empowered adversarial rivalry.  Almost all of our enlightenment institutions and accomplishments and freedoms rely upon it... Pericles and Adam Smith spoke of it and the U.S. Founders enshrined it...

...and the method is almost-never even remotely discussed in regards today's tsunamis of lies.

And even if things go super well in the Tuesday election, this basic truth must also shine light into the whole new problem/opportunity of Artificial Intelligence. (And I go into that elsewhere.) 

 It must... or we're still screwed.

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** I openly invite adversarial refutation of this assertion.

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Okay okay. You want prediction? I'll offer four scenarios:

1.     Harris and dems win big. They must, for the “steal” yammer-lies to fade to nothing, except for maybe a few McVeigh eruptions. (God bless the FBI undercover guys!) In this scenario, everyone but Putin soon realizes things are already pretty good in the US and West and getting better... and the many of our Republican neighbors – waking up from this insane trance – shake off confederatism and get back to loyally standing up for both America and enterprise. 

And perhaps the GOP will also shake away the heavily blackmail compromised portion of their upper castes and return to the pre-Hastert mission of negotiating sane conservative needs into a growing consensus.

2.     Harris squeaks in. We face 6 months of frantic Trumpian shrieks and Project 2025 ploys and desperate Kremlin plots and a tsunami of McVeighs.  (Again: God bless the FBI undercover guys!)  In this case, I will have a dozen ideas to present next week, to staunch the vile schemes of the Project 2025ers.

    In this case there will be confederate cries of "Secession!" over nothing real, as they had no real cause in 1861. We must answer "Okay fine this time. Off you go! Only we keep all military bases and especially we keep all of your blue cities (linking them with high speed rail), cities who get to secede from YOU!  Sell us beef and oil, till we make both obsolete! And you beg to be let back in.  Meanwhile, your brighter sons and daughters will still come over - with scholarships. So go in peace and God bless."

3.    Trump squeaks in and begins his reign of terror. We brace ourselves for the purge of all fact using professions, from science and teaching, medicine and law and civil service to the heroes of the FBI/Intel/Military officer corps who won the Cold War and the War on terror.  And within 6 months you will hear two words that I am speaking here for the 1st time: 

                    GENERAL STRIKE. 

    A legal and mammoth job action by those who actually know stuff and how to do stuff.  At which point then watch how redders realize how much they daily rely on our competence. And how quickly the oligarchs act to remove Trump, either through accelerating senility, or bribed retirement or... the Howard Beale scenario. At which point then Peter Thiel (briefly) owns America. It's Putin's dream outcome as the USA betrays Ukraine and Europe and the future... and tears itself apart. But no matter how painful, remember, we've recovered before. And we'll remember that you did this, Vlad and Peter. And those who empowered them.

    Oh, yes and this. Idiot believers in THE FOURTH TURNING will get their transformative 'crisis' that never had to happen and that they artificially caused (and we'll remember.) Above all, the Gen-Z 'hero generation' will know this. And you cultists will not like them, when they're mad.

    4. Trump landslide. Ain’t gonna happen. For one thing because Putin knows he won’t benefit if Trump is so empowered that he's freed from all puppet strings and blackmail threats. At which point Putin will suddenly realize he’s lost control - the way the German Junkers caste lords lost control in 1933, as portrayed at the end of CABARET. 

Still confused why Putin wouldn't want this? Watch Angela Lansbury’s chilling soliloquy near the end of THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE. This outcome is the one Putin should most fear. 

By comparison, Kamala would likely let Vlad live. But a fully empowered Trump will erase Putin,-- along with every other oligarch who ever commanded or extorted or humiliated him - like those depicted below. And the grease stains will smolder.

Again... here's your compiled ompendium of final ammo. To help us veer this back to victory for America, the planet, and the Union side in our recurring civil war... 

...followed by malice toward none and charity for all and a return to fraternal joy in being a light unto the world.