Tracker

This is probably a commentary on the smarts of the workers.

Yesterday I posted a longish article by an American Political History professor that was an excellent description of the current US political climate- "A Blueprint For The Next American Civil War". Worth a read.

Ukraine Seizes Control of Key Northeastern Border Area From Russia The Ukrainian armed forces claimed a psychologically and strategically important victory in their counterattack against Russia Monday, saying the country’s northeastern border with Russia, in the Sumy region, is once again under Ukrainian control. According to Ukrainian website zn.ua, Serhiy Bratchuk, a spokesperson for the Odessa Military Administration, said: “The state border of Ukraine in the Sumy region is under the control of the Armed Forces!” Ukrainian officials have been saying for several days that “Russian invaders” were leaving the area, which some analysts believe marks a change of strategy by Russia as it seeks to concentrate its military might on the east of the country. https://www.thedailybeast.com/ukraine-seizes-control-of-key-northeastern-border-area-from-russia?ref=home

Before the 1950's the GOP was the moderate, humane party, and friend to minorities. During the Kennedy era, the two parties switched allegiances and policies with the mutation becoming complete with the arrival of Ronald Reagan.

The Trump GOP has long abandoned shame, truth, guilt and ethics. All that they are interested in is "owning the libs" and gaining power at any cost. If it means the destruction of democracy and allying themselves with people like Putin, so be it.

A Blueprint For The Next American Civil War In the CIA's manual on insurgencies there are three stages. The United States is in the second stage. The CIA calls it the "incipient conflict stage," and it is marked by discrete acts of violence. Timothy McVeigh's attack in Oklahoma City was probably the very earliest instance. Here is what the CIA manual says, almost verbatim: "The insurgents' goal is to broadcast their mission to the world, build support and provoke a government overreaction to their violence so that more moderate citizens become radicalized and join the movement." The second stage is when the government becomes aware of the groups behind these attacks, but according to the CIA, the violence is often dismissed as the work of bandits, criminals or terrorists. What is so dangerous about the second stage is that citizens, politicians and law enforcement usually miss it. They don't connect the dots, they don't see that the movement is growing and that this is a precursor to open insurgency. Instead, these attacks are dismissed as idiosyncratic or the result of crazy people who have no connection to a larger movement. That's exactly where we are today. When you and other experts use the term "civil war," how is it defined? Experts use it as a type of umbrella term. Underneath that umbrella are all sorts of different forms of violence that can happen within a country. Civil wars mean violence that's fought by a domestic group within a country that targets the government for political purposes. It becomes a civil war or a major civil war if it kills a thousand people during the course of the war. Civil war can take different forms. There are social revolutions, such as the Russian Revolution or Mao's revolution in China. Social revolution is the most destructive type of civil war. It's a civil war where the rebels want complete political, economic and social change. There can also be a violent coup that kills a thousand people and is contained to a capital city. There is everything in between. What we tend to see frequently in countries with powerful militaries are insurgencies. These tend to be more decentralized and usually fought by multiple militias and paramilitary groups. These militias have political goals, but their methods are very different. They don't want to engage the military directly for the most part, don't want to target soldiers, because if they engage the U.S. military, for example, they're going to lose. They instead use unconventional methods, like guerrilla warfare, hit-and-run attacks, domestic terrorism, where they're targeting the soft underbelly of a society, such as civilian infrastructure. In the United States we are not going to see a civil war like we saw in the 1860s. What do we know about the public mood and emotion in a society that is about to experience a civil war or other mass violence? The groups that tend to start these civil wars and insurgencies are driven by resentment. As such, the groups who decide that violence is a justifiable means to try to create political and social change are those that are losing status and have a deep sense of resentment towards other groups who are perceived as rising or doing better. These are the "sons of the soil" groups. RELATED: America in 2021: From the end of empire to the prospect of a new civil war It is that resentment that motivates their leaders. Average citizens are motivated by a different emotion to follow such leaders. That emotion is fear, which is an incredible motivator for average citizens to pick up a gun and start fighting. Ethnic entrepreneurs, violence entrepreneurs — those individuals who want to start a civil war to catapult themselves to power — understand the power of fear. What they do is create propaganda and circulate it among average citizens. They tell them that their lives are under threat. In a given society, and most certainly here in the United States, most members of the general public, white Americans and privileged people in particular, are fence-sitters. They may know that something is deeply wrong in the country, but they will do nothing about it. What does that oft-discussed "silent majority" actually do when a society starts to fall apart and people are killing each other? Such people are going to hold on to hope as long as they can. They're going to plug their ears and cover their eyes and engage in wishful thinking as long as they can. And then, when something happens and they're forced to choose sides, their base instinct is to survive and to do whatever they need to do to survive. If there is a paramilitary group that is putting up roadblocks on their street, if there's a group of people wearing all black with no insignias controlling a roadblock in a neighborhood with machine guns, the average person is going to do whatever those people want them to do. Survival drives behavior. Those fence-sitters are going to hope they're not going to become the targets of the violence. RELATED: How white supremacy fuels the Republican love affair with Vladimir Putin Not all the far-right groups are white supremacists, but many of them are. What they want is for the United States to become a white "ethnostate," or at the very least for certain states like Michigan to become white ethnostates. These white supremacists understand that if they don't shoot at white people, then many white people are probably just going to keep their heads down and not do anything. It's exactly what happened in places like Germany, where if you see that the Germans are targeting Jews, you do everything possible to make sure that you aren't identified as a Jew. I believe that the average human who is trying to survive will do a whole lot of ugly things to keep themselves alive. How do we prepare the American people for this civil war or insurgency or other such right-wing violence? Will it be a series of escalating events? Isolated acts of violence? Something spectacular, like 9/11? Their ideal scenario is to coordinate, so that on a given day there would be multiple attacks. As I see it, it would almost feel like 9/11, where you wake up in the morning and you're watching TV and you know that something has happened and everything seems chaotic. You're not really sure who's in charge or what type of threat this is and what you should do about it. I see a scenario where there are bombings in multiple state capitals, or a series of assassinations, or maybe both at the same time. Suddenly the federal government is facing a leaderless resistance. The country's leaders are trying to figure out how to respond. In the meantime, the American people are watching this all happen and wondering: What the hell's going on, who's in charge, and what should we do? Some of these right-wing militias are going to want to capture territory in certain parts of the country and hold it. Some of them are going to pursue their own agendas. For example, I could imagine militias in Michigan saying, "We're never going to gain control of the federal government, but Michigan could be a white state — we just have to convince all the nonwhites to leave. We do that by bombing their churches and targeting their stores with attacks. Eventually, the nonwhites will be forced to move south and we'll ultimately get what we want." If the right-wing extremists are not able to coordinate their attacks, then we are just going to see a series of consistent attacks every few weeks. There will be a feeling that the country is under siege. Northern Ireland is a great example of this. The British military, as strong as it was, could not get rid of the IRA. The IRA continued to operate until the British government eventually negotiated with them. https://www.salon.com/2022/03/28/a-new-civil-war-maybe-so--but-it-wont-look-anything-like-the-first-one/

Trump supporters put faith in "Space Force" to overturn 2020 election Supporters of Donald Trump are voicing insane conspiracy theories ahead of his Saturday rally in Michigan. The "opening prayer" for the rally was delivered by a conspiracy theorist who falsely claimed Trump is the "current" president of the United States. One Trump supporter interviewed by Right Side Broadcasting Network said that the Space Force is part of efforts to return Trump to power in a bizarre QAnon rant caught on camera. "The election, I believe, was stolen," said a woman with an America flag draped over her shoulders. "But we know that, Space Force has it all, Trump has all the information, it's going to be overturned," the woman claimed. "What do you think Space Force has?" the interviewer asked. "Space Force is a military branch, you know, just like the Army, you know, all the military. And they literally...the night of the election they literally watched the election be stolen. They watermarked the ballots, they know exactly what happened with every ballot," she said. "They know what countries were involved, they followed the money, they know what every every politician that's been paid off." "There was 260,00 — 269,000 sealed indictments, but I think it might even be up to 500,000 sealed indictments. And I believe that we're going to have an emergency broadcast and the military is going to come in with martial law and we're going to be shown, 8-hours on, 8-hours off, of videos for seven days — the world. And they're going to be showing us taped tribunals, taped confessions, and the world is going to be awakened to what's really going on with the deep state," she claimed. https://www.salon.com/2022/04/03/supporter-puts-faith-in-space-force-to-overturn-2020_partner/

When the Ukrainian army retook the suburbs of Kharkiv, they found about 380 dead civilians who had their arms tied behind their backs and had been shot in the head. There have been several reports of Russian troops using children as human shields, even tying them to the front of armoured vehicles.

When we were living just south of Alberta, High River experienced its fourth catastrophic flood since 1950, each one worse than the last, with the last one creating horrendous property damage and taking the lives of three people immediately and many more later. Apparently each of the preceding floods was met with the identical response from the provincial government. First, politicians toured the area, wringing their hands and making promises to ensure this would never happen again. A committee was struck and disappeared from public view shortly thereafter. Months later, a report was issued detailing the causes and costs to correct them. The government made somber statements that the report would be given full consideration, and more months passed. Eventually, the minister responsible declared that this was a once-in-a-lifetime event , was terribly expensive to prevent it happening again but would be watched closely. Then the government shelved the report and retreated into a comatose state, refusing to answer any further questions as the whole thing was ancient history. We humans seem constitutionally incapable of learning from past mistakes.

Disney hysteria and litter boxes: Republicans' deeply odd war on LGBTQ people escalates. The new Republican war on LGBTQ right is a full-blown "Satanic panic"-style frenzy of urban legends — and violence The GOP's choice to make QAnon-style hysterics the centerpiece of their 2022 midterm strategy is most heavily hurting LGBTQ Americans. From Fox News to the Senate Judiciary Committee, Republicans are embracing rhetoric that insinuates — and sometimes outright declares — that there's a widespread conspiracy of Democrats, school teachers, liberal judges and Disney employees to "groom" children for sexual abuse. The primary victims of these lies are LGBTQ people, who are facing a renewed effort to roll back hard-won rights, all under the guise of "saving" children from imaginary "predators." Across the country, Republican state legislatures are passing bills and using executive orders to make life hell for LGBTQ kids by denying them medical care, forcing them to remain closeted at school, excluding them from extracurricular activities, and even taking them away from loving parents. All of this damage is done in the name of "saving" children. One of the surest signs that this is a Satanic panic-style frenzy is how downright weird the situation is getting, with right-wingers whipping themselves up with urban legends and lurid fantasies. Have you heard that schools are putting litter boxes in the bathrooms to indulge students who "identify" as cats? If not, well, if you're on Facebook, you will soon enough. Earlier this week, Nebraska state Sen. Bruce Bostelman went off during a recent legislative session about how kids "meow and they bark " and "now schools are wanting to put litter boxes in the schools."

Looks ain't everything. Sooner or later you gotta have a steak to go with the sizzle.

More scary than sad. It has been said that we get the government we deserve, so if the GOP gains power once again, America will be unrecognizable in a few months, and America will deserve it.

Ukraine Strike On Russian Territory Reported As Peace Talks Resume KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Talks to stop the fighting in Ukraine resumed Friday, as another attempt to rescue civilians from the besieged port city of Mariupol broke down and Russia accused the Ukrainians of launching a cross-border helicopter attack on an oil depot. The governor of Russia’s Belgorod region said the alleged airstrike by a pair of helicopter gunships caused multiple fires and injured two people. A Kremlin spokesman said the incident on Russia’s territory could undermine the negotiations between Russian and Ukrainian representatives. “Certainly, this is not something that can be perceived as creating comfortable conditions for the continuation of the talks,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov replied when asked if the strike could be viewed as an escalation of the war in Ukraine. It was not immediately possible to verify the claim that Ukrainian helicopters targeted the oil depot or several nearby businesses in Belgorod also reported hit. Russia has reported shelling from Ukraine before, including an incident last week that killed a military chaplain, but not an incursion of its airspace. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/russia-ukraine-war-chernobyl_n_62469696e4b068157f754a88

DC Police Find 5 Fetuses In Home Of Anti-Abortion Activist Lauren Handy Lauren Handy, 28, has been charged with federal crimes for allegedly blockading a reproductive health clinic. D.C. police also found five fetuses in her home. Lauren Handy, 28, has been charged with federal crimes for allegedly blockading a reproductive health clinic. D.C. police also found five fetuses in her home. Washington, D.C., police found five fetuses in the home of an anti-abortion activist on Wednesday. The activist, Lauren Handy, sat outside her home as officers brought out coolers containing the fetuses, WUSA9 first reported. Handy declined to tell a reporter outside her home what was inside the coolers, but said, “People will freak out when they hear.” The Metropolitan Police Department confirmed to HuffPost on Thursday that it had found the five fetuses after being sent to investigate a tip. “Upon further investigation, MPD located five fetuses inside a residence at the location,” a police statement said. “The fetuses were collected by the DC Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. This is currently a pending investigation.” https://www.huffpost.com/entry/dc-police-fetuses-anti-abortion-activist-lauren-handy_n_6245e9a5e4b068157f749d7f

But the deadline for filing has passed.

How environmentalism and the far right are becoming an unlikely ‘ecofascist’ combination: report The far right has a long history of attacking environmentalists as “tree huggers,” railing against green energy and denying that climate change exists — even though countless scientists have offered concrete proof that it does. Former President Donald Trump, a strident defender of fossil fuels, even made the ludicrous claim that coal is much cleaner than green energy and that wind turbines cause cancer. Being conservative doesn’t automatically mean being totally opposed to environmentalism. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) started under President Richard Nixon. But among far-right Republicans of the MAGA variety, hating environmentalists is a badge of honor. Nonetheless, there are times when the far right and environmentalism intersect, and National Public Radio (NPR) journalists Ari Shapiro, Matt Ozug and Casey Morell discuss that unlikely combination in an early April report. “Conservative leaders, from Rush Limbaugh to former President Donald Trump, have certainly denied climate change in the past,” the NPR reporters explain. “But today, a different argument is becoming more common on the conservative political fringe…. On the podcast ‘The People's Square,’ a musician who goes by Stormking described his vision for a far-right reclamation of environmentalism.” Stormking argued, “Right-wing environmentalism in this country is mostly — especially in more modern times — an untried attack vector. And it has legs, in my opinion.” Shapiro, Ozug and Morell cite Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich as an example of a Republican who made a right-wing environmental argument. Railing against illegal immigration, Brnovich argued, “We know that there's information out there that says that every time someone crosses the border, they're leaving between six and eight pounds of trash in the desert. That trash is a threat to wildlife. It's a threat to natural habitats.” The NPR reporters go on to note that in 1998 and 2004, “anti-immigrant factions tried to stage a hostile takeover of the Sierra Club's national board” but “failed.” According to Hampshire College’s Betsy Hartmann, fearing the destruction that climate change is causing fits in with the “doomsday” element of the far right. “If you have this apocalyptic doomsday view of climate change,” Hartmann told NPR, “the far right can use that doomsday view to its own strategic advantage.” Shapiro, Ozug and Morell describe the intersection of far-right views and environmentalism as “ecofascism” and consider it a “problem” that will continue to grow. “The problem is visible now, and there is time to address it,” they write. “But the longer people wait, the harder it's going to be.” -NPR

So far, that looks to be the case.

Apparently the lust for fame and power is seductive.

This too shall pass.

The 8% of disbelievers in the Green party is a surprise. Those of us in the 60+ age group are used to trusting research as opposed to opinion, but global warming is only part of the problem- the climate change model when it was created in the 80's also predicted more violent storms exaggerated droughts and cloudbursts, higher highs and lower lows and more unpredictability in weather forecasts. All this has come to pass and still the disbelievers cling to their beliefs like drowning people clinging to flotsam.

Hard to reduce from zero.

And it might reduce the credibility of the Republican party.

U.K. Spy Chief Says Russian Military Is a Bloody Mess, Shot Down Own Plane -Getty Vladimir Putin “massively misjudged the situation” in ordering the invasion of Ukraine and surely knows just how poorly things are going for Russian forces even though his closest advisers are hiding the truth from him, according to the head of Britain’s spy services. In a speech at the Australian National University in Canberra on Thursday morning, GCHQ director Sir Jeremy Fleming said the Russian leader’s “unprovoked and premeditated attack on Ukraine” has been “shocking in every sense of the word.” He also said Putin, a former KGB officer, was caught completely flat-footed by what he found. “It’s clear he misjudged the resistance of the Ukrainian people,” Fleming said. “He underestimated the strength of the coalition his actions would galvanize. He underplayed the economic consequences of the sanctions regime. He overestimated the abilities of his military to secure a rapid victory. We’ve seen Russian soldiers—short of weapons and morale—refusing to carry out orders, sabotaging their own equipment and even accidentally shooting down their own aircraft.”