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Quote:Here is some context for you:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Slate being Slate: Takes something Trump says completely out of context.
Why military leaders rejected Trump's view of racial conflict
Analysis by John Harwood
www.cnn.com/2020/06/14/politics/trump-military-racism-analysis/index.h
tml
Updated 7:19 AM ET, Sun June 14, 2020
It sounds off at first that conservative-minded military leaders would break with a Republican President -- first over preserving "law and order," then over Confederate symbols.
But it isn't. The split quickly comes into focus when you consider its underpinning in radically divergent views about race in a diversifying America.
Today's military leaders not only welcome racial diversity, they depend on it for America's national security. For the 21st century GOP President Donald Trump leads, diversity represents a mortal threat.
The repudiation Trump suffered, from the men in uniform he has surrounded himself with to convey an image of toughness, was initially cast in the language of civilian-military relations.
Defense Secretary Mark Esper spurned Trump's idea of deploying active-duty troops against Americans protesting police brutality against blacks. Former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis added his indictment of the President's preference for division over unity, casting it as fundamentally un-American. Retired Marine Gen. John Kelly, once Trump's White House chief of staff, joined other prominent military figures in echoing that scathing assessment.
Yet their words reflected much more than disagreement over the applicability of the 1807 Insurrection Act, which Trump has threatened to invoke as cover for bringing in the military to quell civilian unrest. The racial conflict Trump embraces is something the armed forces, as one of the most successfully-integrated institutions in American history, simply cannot abide.
From Truman to Powell
President Harry Truman ended segregation in the armed forces by executive order in 1948. Within four decades, the military sociologist Charles Moskos concluded, "Blacks occupy more management positions in the military than they do in business, education, government, or any other significant sector of American society."
Colin Powell became the first black chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1989, two decades before Barack Obama became the first black President. While African Americans are about 13% of the US population, they represent 11% of Army officers and 24% of enlisted Army soldiers.
"We can't exist without some sense of racial fairness," observes retired Army Gen. Barry McCaffrey.
Air Force Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., who was confirmed on Tuesday as the first black service chief in the US military, underscored that point by reflecting publicly on protests over the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police.
"I'm thinking about how full I am with emotion not just for George Floyd, but the many African-Americans who have suffered the same fate," Brown said in an online video. "I'm thinking about a history of racial issues and my own experiences that didn't always sing of liberty and equality."
The GOP and black voters
The civil rights movement took the Republican Party in the opposite direction. After Democratic President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act in 1964, over the opposition of Republican opponent Barry Goldwater, white conservatives, in the South and elsewhere, exited the Democratic Party in droves. They expanded and transformed the GOP, helping create a presidential majority that won five of six White House contests from 1968 to 1988.
But at the same time, black support for the GOP plummeted. Now demographic change -- shrinking the white share of the electorate from nine in 10 to seven in 10 and dropping -- has given Democrats the upper hand. Every uptick in non-white voting erodes Republican power, leading the GOP to fight measures
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John Harwood is an Activist and CNN is trash.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:You are unemployed poor white trash, temporarily on an even keel until Trump loses, but with a continuing weakness for substance abuse and Trump is a racist. What is your point? That you don't believe what you don't want to know?
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
John Harwood is an Activist and CNN is trash.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
Trump Is a Racist. If You Still Support Him, So Are You.
www.thedailybeast.com/trump-is-a-racist-if-you-still-support-him-so-ar
e-you
Military leaders open up about race
The nation's military marked a huge step forward this past week ... a step that, national security correspondent David Martin tells us, underscores just how difficult advancement for black officers has been, as Air Force General Charles Q. Brown and Sergeant Major of the Army Michael Grinston open up about discrimination in a way military leaders never have before.
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Goldie Taylor is an activist and The Daily Beast is trash.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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This book’s introduction uses science-fiction to explain America to Americans:
The Decadent Society - How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success
Ross Douthat (2020)
Download the book at https://libgen.unblockit.pw/search.php?req=Ross+Douthat
Introduction
The Closing of the Frontier
The peak of human accomplishment and daring, the greatest single triumph of modern science and government and industry, the most extraordinary endeavor of the American age in modern history, occurred in late July in the year 1969, when a trio of human beings were catapulted up from the earth’s surface, where their fragile, sinful species had spent all its long millennia of conscious history, to stand and walk and leap upon the moon.
“Four assassinations later,” wrote Norman Mailer of the march from JFK’s lunar promise to its Nixon-era fulfillment, “a war in Vietnam later; a burning of Black ghettos later; hippies, drugs and many student uprisings later; one Democratic Convention in Chicago seven years later; one New York school strike later; one sexual revolution later; yes, eight years of a dramatic, near-catastrophic, outright spooky decade later, we were ready to make the moon.” We were ready—as though the leap into space were linked, somehow, to the civil rights revolution, the baby boomers coming into their own, the transformation in music and manners and mores, and the hopes of utopia percolating in Paris, Woodstock, San Francisco.
Mailer’s was a mystical take on history, but one well suited to its moment. For the society that made it happen, the Apollo landing was both a counterpoint to the social chaos of the 1960s and the culmination of the decade’s revolutionary promise. It proved that the efficiency and techno-optimism of Eisenhower-era America could persist through the upheavals of the counterculture, and it represented a kind of mystical, dizzy, Age of Aquarius moment in its own right. As much as anything that happened here on earth, the fire on the moon helped make the summer of ’69 seem like a beginning, not a peak—an opening into a new era, in which the frontier would no longer be closed, the map no longer filled in, and human beings would expand their explorations, their empires, their arguments and imaginations and ambitions into the very stars.
This was the space age, which lasted for about thirty years: from Sputnik in 1957 to the space shuttle Challenger explosion in 1986. And we who live in its aftermath have forgotten just how confidently it was expected to continue. In The Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age, his magisterial narrative of the period, Walter McDougall runs through the expert predictions of the 1960s and 1970s: that soon reusable spacecrafts would be constantly “ascending and descending like angels on Jacob’s ladder” into space; that by the year 2000, both superpowers would have lunar colonies; that human missions to Mars would begin within a decade of the moon landing; that space would soon become the site of revolutions in energy production, weather control, and more. Likewise with Apollo-era pop culture: 2001: A Space Odyssey promised a manned mission to Jupiter in its eponymous year, while the timeline of the future on Star Trek assumed that space exploration and colonization would follow as naturally from the Apollo program as sailors and settlers had followed the course discovered by Columbus.
This dream did not quite die with Challenger, but it had lost adherents across the disappointingly earthbound seventies, and from the Reagan era onward, it became a fond and somewhat fantastical hope, invoked as a flourish by presidents seeking to inspire and pursued by the sort of eccentric billionaires who also invested in cryonics. As it became clear that we would not master the vastnesses of space as easily as explorers crossing the Atlantic, the public’s attention waned, political support diminished, and science fiction lost its gee-whiz edge and turned dystopian. The movies especially began to treat the infinite spaces differently—as a zone of terrors
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I think this William Tell did the best job explaining the situation in The Liberation of Earth in 1953:
https://epdf.pub/william-tenn-the-liberation-of-earthf20ebfe36bdda0257
f9000096e11b16559059.html
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:The Afterword of the story says that the author was thinking of the American Left vs Right over the Korea War:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
I think this William Tell did the best job explaining the situation in The Liberation of Earth in 1953:
https://epdf.pub/william-tenn-the-liberation-of-earthf20ebfe36bdda0257
f9000096e11b16559059.html
Quote:(It’s 66 years later. If beating Communism had truly been important to Americans, they won’t have quit fighting after only 36,516 dead Americans in 4 years. Flu kills more in some years. Covid-19 kills more and those deaths are meaningless, not a noble sacrifice to beat the Commies and save Korea.)
The period covered was roughly the same as the Red-Scare years that began with the Dies Committee and ended with the Senate censure of Joseph McCarthy in 1954. As a result, the organized Left inveighed against what it called "Truman's War," and urged us to get the hell out of Korea; the official Right not only supported the war but considered it perhaps the most crucial element in the battle against the godless Communists. In writing the story, all I wanted to do was point out what a really awful thing it was to be a Korean in such a situation.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Shaky COVID response lays bare a decades long crisis in government
A highly politicized system that encourages short-term thinking has hindered the government’s pandemic response – as have outmoded technology, overlapping mandates, and a steep decline in public trust.
Days before Donald Trump became president, Obama administration officials hosted a “tabletop exercise” for the incoming Trump team. One of the hypothetical challenges: dealing with a novel strain of influenza that was sweeping the globe.
Cases were appearing in California and Texas, according to the simulation. It could be the worst flu pandemic since 1918. There would be shortages of essential equipment like ventilators. A “whole of government” response would be needed.
Some 30 Trump appointees attended the meeting. Today, only eight still work for the president, according to a Brookings Institution tally.
In the rearview mirror, of course, everything can look crystal clear.
Aspects of the Trump administration’s early pandemic response have met with harsh pushback. The U.S. government had been warned in early January of the deadly new virus in China, and should have been better prepared for its arrival on American soil, critics say. When it did arrive, a combination of conflicting messages and a lack of a clear leadership structure delayed the adoption of safe practices to contain the spread, they add.
Even allies of President Trump take issue with aspects of the federal government’s response. “There will be 600-page books on the mistakes that were made,” says conservative economist Stephen Moore, an informal adviser to the president.
Much has been made of the turnover and turmoil of the Trump presidency – including the 2018 closure of the White House office on global biothreats.
But as the nation’s economy slowly reopens, with cases beginning to pick up again in at least 20 states, and the U.S. death toll now over 115,000 and rising – the highest tally in the world – a larger question hangs over the crisis: Is America’s complex, multilayered system of government itself simply too outmoded – too cumbersome, overly partisan, ill-equipped to keep up with the pace of global change – to capably handle a once-in-a-century pandemic?
In other words, despite all the stumbles of the Trump team, would another administration necessarily have done all that much better?
Cabinet departments and other federal agencies are topped by some 4,000 political appointees, and out of those, some 1,200 are Senate-confirmed. “No other democracy has anything close to that level of political infiltration in the institution of the government,” Mr. Stier says.
That, in turn, results in a top echelon of leaders who don’t necessarily know what they’re doing, he says.
In Congress, hyper-partisanship has led to dysfunction in budget-setting, leading the government to run increasingly on a form of funding autopilot known as “continuing resolutions,” punctuated more and more by government shutdowns. Oversight can be ineffective or nonexistent; Senate confirmations slow.
Through the decades, Mr. Light has watched history repeat itself many times. Between 2000 and 2015 alone, he counts 48 breakdowns in federal governance, including the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and the botched rollout of the “Obamacare” insurance website in 2013.
The details vary from crisis to crisis, but Mr. Light keeps coming to the same conclusion: We keep having breakdowns, because “we just don’t pay much attention to how organizations work.”
More at www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2020/0615/Shaky-COVID-response-lays-bar
e-a-decadeslong-crisis-in-government
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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T 
Deep state describes dedicated, educated professionals. 
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:The Afterword of the story says that the author was thinking of the American Left vs Right over the Korea War:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
I think this William Tell did the best job explaining the situation in The Liberation of Earth in 1953:
https://epdf.pub/william-tenn-the-liberation-of-earthf20ebfe36bdda0257
f9000096e11b16559059.htmlQuote:(It’s 66 years later. If beating Communism had truly been important to Americans, they won’t have quit fighting after only 36,516 dead Americans in 4 years. Flu kills more in some years. Covid-19 kills more and those deaths are meaningless, not a noble sacrifice to beat the Commies and save Korea.)
The period covered was roughly the same as the Red-Scare years that began with the Dies Committee and ended with the Senate censure of Joseph McCarthy in 1954. As a result, the organized Left inveighed against what it called "Truman's War," and urged us to get the hell out of Korea; the official Right not only supported the war but considered it perhaps the most crucial element in the battle against the godless Communists. In writing the story, all I wanted to do was point out what a really awful thing it was to be a Korean in such a situation.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
It's applicable to the American Right vs the American left always.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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