30 April 2020
Trump’s Sycophants
One of the latest demonstrations of the obsequiousness
surrounding President Trump was the appearance of Vice President Mike Pence at
the Mayo Clinic without a face mask.
Like the respected medical science authorities on the White House
pandemic task force and, just yesterday, with the congratulatory statement of
Jared Kushner, it appears that those who may have some inkling that they might
someday be in a position to rescue the country from complete disaster are
afraid to set Trump off by
contradicting
him publicly.
They are probably smart
not to rely on the constitutional method for removing him from office, given
the reluctance of the Republicans in control of the Senate to jeopardize their presumed
reelection chances by convicting him in an impeachment trial.
What a fix our founding fathers put us in!
It is as important, therefore, that the
election campaign this Fall devote itself as much to aligning both Houses of
Congress in opposition to a Trump White House as to simply replacing the
President.
# posted by frank : 11:18 PM
21 April 2020
Coronavirus Testing
The most important function that can be
performed by universal testing of infection by the virus that causes COVID-19
is to help promote the adoption of behavior that prevents the spread of the
pandemic. Testing is a political tool that will provide the information that
can be used to convince the public of the effectiveness of social distancing
and other practices that will tame the virus and give us the time needed
to develop a vaccine as well as to enable our healthcare system deal with a
manageable number of infected persons in the meantime. Secondarily, it
will also guide us in identifying hotspots where medical attention can be
concentrated and allow us to phase in the re-opening of the economy. But
it is crucial that the health benefits of testing be realized first in order to
assure our ability to restore the country’s commerce.
# posted by frank : 2:33 PM
19 April 2020
Trump Thinks He’s Entitled
President Trump may have been elected in 2016 because his
voters thought they were as entitled as he thinks he is.
Indeed, the Donald was endowed by his father
with a real estate fortune and America has been the wealthiest, technologically
and, arguably, aesthetically leading nation in the world since the middle of
the last century.
Because of these
advantages Mr. Trump has really never had to worry about the consequences of financial
failure.
The people who supported him four
years ago thought that they too should be able to enjoy the rewards of global
dominance.
They admired Mr. Trump for
his experience in living that way.
The coronavirus pandemic does not respect entitlement.
It soes not skip over the U.S. or other
wealthy nations.
And its resolution cannot
be achieved without sustaining unimaginable pain snd suffering.
No one is “entitled” to govern a democracy of
330 million people, particularly when it is faced with an inevitable crisis.
Moreover, no earthly nation can hope ultimately
to escape anomalous tragedies without responsible leadership.
There is nothing in President Trump’s background that demonstrates
any concern for others, either contemporary or future.
If he
is to be replaced in the While House, It will require an effective campaign to
convince Americans that their only lasting right is vigilantly to select leaders
who will govern in their best interest, not in order to achieve personal magnificence.
# posted by frank : 6:32 PM
16 April 2020
The total disregard that Donald Trump displays for civility
and conformance with societal rules of behavior in politics, finance, or in
personal life, must derive from the way he was raised.
I imagine that his parents, Fred and Mary Anne, did not discipline him as a child.
They must always have bailed him out of costly
mistakes.
Aparently they thought that It
was enough to enroll him in military high school and left it up to his
instructors to rein him in.
Unfortunately,
that didn’t work, to the regret of several contractors, banks, students and investors.
His
election as President of the U.S. was the result of a lucky combination of America’s
peculiar electoral system and the public’s weariness with “political
correctness.”
Of course, impetuosity is not grounds for removal from
office, either by impeachment and conviction or by electoral defeat.
However, if his sense of autonomy or
self-sufficiency has led him to violate the Constitution, either the Congress
or the electorate at large must rid our country of a scourge that could destroy confidence
in the ultimate fairness of the American nation.
# posted by frank : 4:55 PM
10 April 2020
IG Independence and Press Freedom
An Inspector General is supposed to be independent of the
agency he works for so he can root out corruption.
However, how much honesty can he assure in
the Presidency, from which he apparently is not independent, particularly when
his presidential appointment is only “temporary.”
Can a Congress that is stymied by the
President’s toadies prevent White House corruption either?
Some in the Press have been trying to
perform that function.
They have to rely
on making the electoral process transparent.
However, they may ultimately be vulnerable to the same fate as the
recently fired Pentagon IG and others.
It has happened before, in other countries over the years.
What will it take to prevent it from
destroying the freedom of the Press this time?
More importantly, what will it take to assure that the public pays
attention?
# posted by frank : 4:46 PM
07 April 2020
The Right of Kings
The Right of Kings
President Donald Trump can’t understand resentment of his irresponsible method of governing. Although it may give him more credit for historical knowledge than is his due. he may believe that election to the White House is as empowering as legendary Divine Right.
The English had to accept the foibles of Richard III; as did the French those of Louis XIV. We don’t. The attempt to impeach Trump last year failed. The election of 2020 offers another opportunity that should not be wasted.
# posted by frank : 3:19 PM
03 April 2020
Pandemics and the Immune System
The virus that causes COVID-19 has been lurking inside certain animals
(bats?) for no one knows how long.
It
may have been created by a random mutation; but only now has it emerged as a
human respiratory pathogen.
Because of
its novelty, our bodies’ immune systems were not prepared by prior experience
to annihilate or block it.
Perhaps those
bats’ immune systems have evolved in a way to defeat the COVID-19 virus, and
surely the search for a vaccine that will inoculate humans against this virus
includes investigation of that mechanism.
There is another lesson, however. to be drawn from the sudden
occurrence of this worldwide disease.
The number of viruses in existence in the world has been estimated at
over 50 million.
Some of them are
useful in other organic or inorganic systems. Some are inert.
And others are pathological, causing an
immunologic response in their hosts.
Harmful
viruses may emerge
only occasionally from their existence within host systems which are able to
control their pathogenic effects.
However, as the experience of the black plague, measles, small pox, the 1918 Spanish
influenza and the more recent polio, SARS, MERS, H1N1, and HIV epidemics have
shown us. viruses continually disturb the healthy status quo.
Moreover, the ever-increasing density and
easy frequency of communications of the earth’s population makes it more and
more vulnerable to viral attacks when the chief means of combating them is a
biological system that only slowly adapts to harmful novel agents.
It must be hard to anticipate the next viral attacks,
particularly owing to their random evolution.
Fortunately, modern science has improved our ability quickly to respond to
what will become a more frequent threat to human life.
God knows how much longer it will take to end
future viral epidemics if the same luddite and simplistic attitude toward them is
taken as has been directed at COVID-19 by the Trump-led federal government.
# posted by frank : 11:06 PM
01 April 2020
Do Facts Matter?
To whom do facts matter?
There are those who believe that only matters that they experience themselves are important and worthy of concern.
These creatures think that anything that does not result from events
while they are alive is imaginary.
They
also dismiss as trivial the history of things that are supposed to have happened before their
own existence.
While they may enjoy
speculative fiction, they don’t think that accounts of past events are any
different.
On the other hand, there are those who believe that the
world and other creatures in it exist independently of their own consciousness.
They may believe in an afterlife and govern
their behavior so as to conform with their assumptions about conditions and
expectations of that subsequent supernatural order.
Alternately, they may, in a Rawlsian sense, base their behavior on the
principle of altruism.
Facts of the world that is assumed to be real by the latter
class of persons (the realists) are irrelevant to the behavior of the former
(the solipsists).
However, certain
realists may be attracted to the policies advocated by the solipsists.
The solipsist’s disregard for scientific
findings and for the practices of democratic institutions can be accepted by realists when even only one of their results benefits their perceived self=interest.
When a calamity such as the COVID-19 pandemic breaks out or suffering
from human inequality becomes unbearable, it matters to the realists that their leaders behave in a manner correctly to resolve the problem.
It is important to the realists that their
leaders have the same realistic attitude towards social and governmental policy
as they, whether or not they agree with all the consequences of particular
policies.
Donald Trump does not behave
as though the welfare of the realists has any importance outside of his own narcissistic
mind.
Moreover, no facts exist because
the rest of the world, against which truth may be judged, does not exist
independently of him.
The
only choice of realists is either to accept that they are nothing but figments
of the solipsist’s mind or to deny him that power by depriving him of any
means of control.
Of course, no realist could accept the solipsist’s
monomania.
But it might serve certain
realists’ objectives to empower him if the solipsist’s actions would help
accomplish their goals.
They could
achieve this strategy by helping to create allegiance to his ascendance
to political rule.
The chief methods of
establishing that dominance have included obscurantism (willful denial of
knowledge) fanning of prejudice or, as in the present case of Trump’s regime,
corruption of democratic goals from serving the greater good of all to serving
the greater good of each individual.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t take much guile to transform even
a long-lasting democracy into a rubber stamp of immoral government.
It is not sufficient that
many of the realists who understand what has
happened rely on the corrupted electoral process automatically to
re-instill a commitment to democratic values in the voting public.
It
will take an active persuasive effort to right the ship of state’s
course.
I wonder if we have a promising
leader to guide us to achieve that goal.
# posted by frank : 12:39 PM