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.
Category: Politics
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
Don John Threatens War
Egomaniac politicians are zealots when it comes to committing your sons, daughters, mothers, and fathers to fight their fights or to back their ego trips. Where have all the flowers gone?
Arizona Politics
In an effort to enlighten the public on issues of poorly funded educational systems, corporate control of the legislature, rampant dark money influence, efforts to block voter initiatives, and republican control of the vote and legislature, this topic will be added to the Categories listing.
The “Promise” of jobs?
The main reason jobs are an issue is that the “bread and butter” manufacturing jobs of the post World War II economy disappeared over the last 35-45 years. While the Military Industrial Complex is well in America, it is not the employer of the ages gone by. The component pieces of our military, consumer, and industrial goods are manufactured overseas in factories whose employees are economic slaves within that country and whose employees cannot rise out of that desperate situation.
We Americans cannot compete with that economically as our costs of living are astronomical high compared to those employees. Further efforts to tax or tariff the import of cheap goods is going to raise our costs without any increase in employment in our country. The international cartels of corporations will keep the price just under the level that would make sane business people invest in making the goods within our borders.
When we have frittered away the trillions we needed on infrastructure, gutted the Affordable Care Act, defunded Medicaid, and otherwise allowed the fanatical conservative right of the Republican party to refuse to support the society, we will begin to experience subsistence living akin to what our ancestors experienced around preindustrial agrarian times in America.
Simple things like running water, roads, food, electricity, communications, and transportation will become carefully and closely managed priority needs for every one of the 98%. The promise of “increased productivity” simply means that the corporations will minimize the use of humans beings and human knowledge to produce the products for those same people to consume.
As that has gone in my lifetime the erosion of “native talent” went with it. In my parents time, post WWII, all you needed to do was produce because the want and need was unfulfilled and you could largely name your own price. Today incomes are so low that we must return to “going without” or “producing it ourselves”.
Most people do not have the basic tools and skills to accomplish this. The patient planning, preparation, and forbearance required for raising food is beyond most American’s skills and means. You can still get a couple of burgers, fries, and a drink for less than five bucks. This will be available until the water, electric, fuel, and infrastructure fail or crumble.
History dictates that all civilizations will rise and fall. The governments organized by the citizens are the cause of their demise. Government overburdens the citizenry and causes the citizen to overdrive the resources fueling their lives. It is gradual and ultimately leads to individuals working alone and away from the encumbrances of the politicos and their surround. The hard working, thick skinned, determined, and unafraid will wander off and care for their small clan. The ability to learn will be more valuable that accreditation. Knowledge will be employed. Philosophies will be simple. Actions and their results will be most valuable.
What do you think?