Category: Politics

How It Happens

I just finished watching a documentary about Amelia Earhart done by PBS American Experience.  It details the meteoric rise to fame she enjoyed while learning and dedicating herself to flying and expanding women’s horizons on a grand scale.

Unfortunately the last world record flight she attempted ended in tragic loss of her life.  Conjecture about the causes of the loss points to the failures to train, to learn new radio direction finding, egoism, promotional avarice, failure to rest adequately, and a general underestimation of the limits caused by diminished mental acuity.

We find our lives rushing headlong into the future similarly hobbled by our misunderstanding of the hazards that lay before us.  A high mortality virus with the ability to spread long before it can be identified in one’s surround is making its way to every corner of the world.  Leaders are at first dismissing the threat then eventually admitting the dangers long after the pandemic is deeply seated in the population.  The cries for protection equipment, life support equipment, testing kits, and facilities to treat the afflicted are going unanswered as the hundreds of thousands of citizens are sickened and between two and four percent of them die.

The saddest part of this experience is learning that our experts at fighting this kind of fight were dismissed, unfunded, and removed years in advance of this current pandemic.  The executive and legislative leaders are now busy saying they are not responsible and are trying to redirect our attention in order to obscure their failures.

It is common in the collapse of civilizations for all of these things to take place.  If we could learn from our mistakes this would not have to happen.  Our first mistake is to allow others to have such critical control over our life.  The second is to assume anything is someone else’s responsibility.  The third is to enjoy our bread and circuses instead of organizing an effective correction of this self-inflicted demise.

Get to work!

For Trump Supporters….

From Kellyanne Conway’s husband, George Conway:

“For Trump supporters, let me make one thing VERY clear!

For the record NO ONE is blaming the President for the virus. Let me repeat. Coronavirus is not Trump’s fault.
Here’s a detailed list of what we are blaming him for:

* Trump declined to use the World Health Organization’s test like other nations. Back in January, over a month before the first Co-vid19 case, the Chinese posted a new mysterious virus and within a week, Berlin virologists had produced the first diagnostic test. By the end of February, the WHO had shipped out tests to 60 countries. Oh, but not our government. We declined the test even as a temporary bridge until the CDC could create its own test. The question is why? We don’t know but what to look for is which pharmaceutical company eventually manufactures the test and who owns the stock. Keep tuned.

* In 2018 Trump fired Homeland Security Advisor Tom Bossart, whose job was to coordinate a response to global pandemics. He was not replaced.

* In 2018 Dr. Luciana Borio, the NSC director for medical and bio-defense preparedness left the job. Trump did not replace Dr. Borio.

* In 2019 the NSC’s Senior Director for Global Health Security and bio-defense, Tim Ziemer, left the position and Trump did not replace the Rear Admiral.

* Trump shut down the entire Global Health Security and Bio-defense agency. Yes, he did.

* Amid the explosive worldwide outbreak of the virus Trump proposed a 19% cut to the budget of the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention plus a 10% cut to Public Health Services and a 7% cut to Global Health Services. Those happen to be the organizations that respond to public health threats.

* In 2018, at Trump’s direction, the CDC stopped funding epidemic prevention activities in 39 out of 49 countries including China.

* Trump didn’t appoint a doctor to oversee the US response to the pandemic. He appointed Mike Pence.

* Trump has on multiple occasions sowed doubt about the severity of the virus even using the word hoax at events and rallies. He even did it at an event where the virus was being spread. Trump has put out zero useful information concerning the health risks of the virus.

* Trump pretended the virus had been contained.

* Trump left a cruise ship at sea for days, denying them proper hospital care, rather than increase his numbers in America.

Repeat. We do not blame Trump for the virus. We blame him for gutting the nation’s preparations to deal with it. We blame him for bungling testing and allowing it to spread uninhibited. We blame him for wasting taxpayer money on applause lines at his rallies (like The Wall). We blame him for putting his own political life over American human life. I hope this clears things up.”

This is why the U.S. has the highest number of cases on the planet!!!

NPD vs Disaster

Narcissistic Personality Disorder versus a world disaster is the subject of this epistle. We have a leader who self-deals so extensively that a pandemic is dismissed as “in control” and represented in direct contradiction to medical experts around the world. As a result of this individual’s efforts to cut CDC funding in previous years we are unprepared as a nation to react to this virus spread in our country. The very part of the CDC that was set up to deal with such things was dismantled by that same individual.
The nature of this pandemic is also been misrepresented. It does spread prior to an individual showing symptoms in up to 66% of the Covid-19 exposed individuals. The most adverse outcomes manifest themselves in older or immunity challenged individuals. The governmental reaction is to order sequester.
The most extreme example of the profound ignorance associated with our NPD damaged leader is the refusal to test for Covid-19 after being exposed to individuals with the virus. One can only hope the virus can correct those undesireable behaviors.

Impeachment

Today the House has conducted the debates among politicians, largely lawyers, that argued rules, policies, constitutional law, moral law, and the basis for impeachment.

When the guy on the top of the executive branch deals for himself, however and in whatever form, he is violating the laws of the people. This is not arguable through manipulations of language. To go further and slander and debase his critics is uncivilized.

The American democracy has very few political parties. The arguments being offered right now by some of the parties speaks to the lack of moral integrity that most of those folks enjoy. It is obvious that politicians will argue. Look at how little they have done in the last several decades.

The fond hope of the powers that are in charge at this moment is that they can wear down the American voters spirit, hide the real dealings going on, and otherwise exhaust us. This tends to keep folks away from the polls.

We need everyone to make it to the polls this next November. We cannot be indifferent, lax, tired, to busy, confused, or in any way diverted from our duty as citizens.

Bernard Lambert – December 18, 2019

What About Us?

What About The Citizens?

In the political frenzy being paraded in front of us let us not forget the purposes for which we elected the representatives and senators. Critical issues close to the safety, comfort, and health of individuals, their communities, their states, and their country are at risk of being ignored or “back paged” during these next months.

Our municipal, county, township, borough, state, region, and nation are not attached to the issues touted in the media or by the politicos. Quietly the money powers are redirecting our attention away from fundamental issues.

Human need starts with safety at the base of everything. If you’re feeling safe right now they have sufficiently redirected your attention.

If you feel like you belong to something, ask whether it is a form of shelter from the outside influences on your life. If you feel you belong to something ask whether it is shelter or enhancement of your life quality. If it is enhancement then the redirection has diverted you once again.

The air you breath, the water you drink, the havoc nature is wrecking on your surround, the nervousness you feel about affording anything, the lack of work and life balance, health, and countless other serious human issues are what our congress men and women are to be working on.

We have received none of these from the current government in Washington. Woe are the people who do not get out and vote in the next election.

  • Bernard Lambert Friday the 13th of December 2019

The 70’s Miniseries

I just finished watching the miniseries The Seventies produced by Tom Hanks and Gary Goetzman.  They also did The Sixties.   It reminded me of what I grew up in and what went on around me.  I highly recommend these.

The presentations provoked thoughts that had remained dormant for these many years and renewed how my present life was formed.  I played in a band, I protested, I played sports in school, I went to concerts, I enjoyed all the youthful experiments in drugs, marijuana, sex, music, cars, motorcycles, and cohabitation.  Our ideals were dismissed roundly in the early years.  Many things have made it into the mainstream.  The real loss has been our youthful optimisim. 

While I remain optimistic about our lives in this world, I am convinced that there are large capable forces at work erasing and diminishing the hopes of the 60’s and 70’s.

Please comment on this subject.

 

BLL 2019-09-26

Two Civilizations?

History tells us that civilizations rise and fall. Typically the nation state rises as it conquers the surrounding countryside and resources. Peoples are assimilated into this. The cycle is to pioneer the frontier, civilize the outlands, redistribute the resources and wealth, centralize power and distribution of the wealth, and tax production until the resources are overrun and go into decline. Concurrently government and its infrastructure further burdens the populace and the available natural resources.

Fast forward to today. We no longer make anything, as individuals, from the natural resources. Corporations have been formed to do most of that bidding with a scant few “hardy individualists” left to attempt it solo. With this love of the corporeal entity has come a furtherance of the civil and criminal rights of the non-human to the point of creating two civilizations.

If the corporation cannot feel pain and is only obligated to generate wealth at any expense then it is free of the normal human encumbrances like pain, hunger, love, empathy, and many other such feelings. Running roughshod over people and protecting their well being is not in corporate policy for the most part. Policy is sculpted to provide legal protections and not human protections.

The work of the marketeers, spindoctors, and politicos then becomes catering to the deep pockets of the corporations. Altered states of awareness are pushed onto the masses by every means imaginable in order to gain acceptance for the behavior of businesses and their representatives.

The general population is kept distracted by finance, need, manufactured want, and entertainment. As in Roman times; bread and circuses. Today it is popcorn, nuts, beer, hot dogs, halftime shows, and sporting events. And it is all sponsored by the corporeal entities.

Two civilizations exist and the general population is NOT the one benefiting the most from the experience.

What Our National Security Did Not Do

I just finished watching this documentary called “A Good American”, a film by Friedrich Moser.  The story is about Bill Binney who once worked as an analyst for the NSA.  Oliver Stone is the Executive Producer.  What it offers in pretty clear language and evidence is how badly misappropriation of public monies, corrupt Washington insider activity, political appointments, and gross incompetence lead up to the losses of 9/11 and subsequent years.

Bill and others employed at the NSA developed a program called thinthread which, when placed in the communications streams being monitored by the NSA, traced communications packets from source to destination and saved the data about the data (called metadata) into a large database.  Then, using techniques Bill developed in previous decades, reports could be made showing the interconnections between hundreds of millions of telephone and internet users worlwide.

It was so successful that it could find threats developing well before anything would happen and allow for a substantial advanced warning on threats about to happen.  Bill’s earliest use of the analytical techniques told of the impending Tet Offensive in Hue in Vietnam.  He perfected the automation of the techniques with the introduction of the personal computer.

At the NSA he was given charge of a small team of individuals to automate analysis of the data being collected.  The team quietly did that and demonstrated it’s efficacy at several “research” operations the NSA ran around the world.  It was discovering things that no other individuals or systems were able to discover.

As the world threat levels loomed and Osama Bin Laden began financing the terrorism, Bill’s thinthread was detecting those activities in advance.  The problem was that the appointed head of the agency, the director in charge of analysis automation, the assistant director in charge of analysis automation, and the newly hired systems vendor had a vested interest in making sure Bill’s thinthread did not get to play throughout the agency.  They made millions burying it and touting their nonworking, expensive, protected system offered by the vendor SAIC.

As a good American Bill then pursued notifying the Defense Department of the missteps by the bosses.  What he did not anticipate was the fallout.  The NSA had pulled the plug on thinthread and buried all information about it at the direction of the bosses who were enriching themselves pushing the nonworking system SAIC had produced.  They even went after him, his team members, his Congressional liason, et al as enemies of the state.  Later the FBI’s case was dismissed due to falsified charges.

There was another feature Bill and team worked into the code that prevented anyone in the United States from being spied upon without the proper court authority.  Those same bosses stripped it off.  The NSA is not to spy on U.S. citizens by law.  The bosses were also law breakers.

In subsequent years Bill and team tried selling this technology to other government agencies and were stymied by the NSA at every turn.  Well into the post 9/11 era the NSA still did not have or use the thinthread or any equivalent of it but instead continued to push the SAIC vendor solution.

Bill and the team members are retired now.  They had to “retire”.  Our country is at greater risk without them.  Our government agencies are accelling at their incompetency and trouncing our civil rights to privacy all at the same time.

 

A Veteran’s Story

Less than a decade after the Vietnam War I met a man who was delivering my mail. In the ensuing years we became fast friends. In those years he often would deliver the mail in the blisteringly hot July afternoons while on foot. He enjoyed being outside and the heat was just a consequence of doing his work.

On one such occasion he stopped to talk. I offered him water which he gladly took in. The conversation got around to what his experience was in the Army. We had spent time together and talked some about his experience but on this day he went into great detail.

At first he confessed that he had never told anyone this story. It was too painful a memory. He had to get this load off his chest.

He began by talking about how as an infantryman in the Army in Vietnam it was quite a grueling slog. It was punishing and it drained you. His company was often called upon to traverse the jungles, find the enemy, and engage them. It was not uncommon for them to “party it up” a bit at night at the end of one of those kind of days.

It was on one of these occasions that something terrible and life-altering occurred. As he awoke in the morning he discovered that every other member of his team had been slain during the night in their sleep. Their heads were cut off and placed on their chest. As he looked down the row of his fellow soldiers he could see a severed head on every other body.

Certainly that was an emotionally and physically traumatic experience. What troubled him most was the fact that how did he get chosen to live. This is one of the most profound emotional issues with veterans. The question is why did I survive? The answers are seldom forthcoming.

As it happened on this hot July day under the shade of the big tree in front of the house, he told the story for the first time. He nearly collapsed as he told the story and came to the realization that once again he did not know why he was spared and that he had just confessed for the first time to the pain and the suffering he had been carrying around.

Through the tears and embraces we consoled each other. What was irreconcilable was why was he chosen to live. It was never resolved at that time. What would take place years later would finally give him solace.

As with many men and women they work hard to take care of their families, to do their job well, and to make life be purposeful. This veteran performed in that manner in a stellar way. He was very good with his family. They often traveled and met together at various homesteads throughout the state. On this one occasion near Casa Grande Arizona, his question would be answered.

The family gathered together and barbecued at one of the homesteads. It was a trailer on a lot in the open desert. It was nothing fancy. They lit up the grill and cooked hot dogs and hamburgers… maybe some steaks. Everyone ate well. Lots of potluck was brought along. It was a wonderful day and as evening descended upon them they retired to their beds and their cars and the grill was placed next to the trailer. There was no wind and the charcoals were nearly out.

In the night screams awoke the veteran. The winds had come up and the grass was caught afire. The flames had begun to consume the trailer. All of the children were in the trailer. Nieces, nephews, sons, and daughters were all about to be consumed by the flames. He threw the door open and ran to the back of the trailer. He broke out a small window and began to hand the children out one at a time. The flames were burning his flesh. He was in anguish but he was determined to get those children out. The other parents gathered those kids up as quickly as they could and got them away from the trailer. By then the flames had the entire rest of the trailer involved. The window was too small for him to get out. It was obvious he was not going to make it. It was at that point that he stood up and looked out the window and waved goodbye. He had saved all the children.

It was not until some time later I heard of his demise. It was then that I remembered the confession under the shade tree in the front yard. I knew that now he would be at peace.

If you believe in the soul and the spirit and the value of life it’s difficult for anyone to go into war and to come back whole. It is our responsibility to take care of those individuals. The government and the politicians cannot do it.

I would hope that on that day under the shade tree I had given some solace to a heroic veteran. I am sure that now he is in a good place.

June 9, 2017

Bernard Lambert