Republican Party success in advancing its climate change goals

The GOP is achieving it's goals for the climate. The New York Times writes:

For four years under President Donald J. Trump, the United States all but stopped trying to combat climate change at the federal level. Mr. Trump is no longer in office, but his presidency left the country far behind in a race that was already difficult to win.

A new report from researchers at Yale and Columbia Universities shows that the United States’ environmental performance has tumbled in relation to other countries — a reflection of the fact that, while the United States squandered nearly half a decade, many of its peers moved deliberately.

The report, called the Environmental Performance Index, or E.P.I., found that, based on their trajectories from 2010 through 2019, only Denmark and Britain were on a sustainable path to eliminate emissions by midcentury.

China, India, the United States and Russia were on track to account for more than half of global emissions in 2050. But even countries like Germany that have enacted more comprehensive climate policies are not doing enough.

The United States ranked 43rd overall, with a score of 51.1 out of 100, compared with 24th place and a score of 69.3 in the 2020 edition. Its decline is largely attributable to the bottom falling out of its climate policy: On climate metrics, it plummeted to 101st place from 15th and trailed every wealthy Western democracy except Canada, which was 142nd.

The climate analysis is based on data through 2019, and the previous report was based on data through 2017, meaning the change stems from Trump-era policies and does not reflect President Biden’s reinstatement or expansion of regulations.

The Republican Party, pro-pollution, pro-corruption, pro-Christian fundamentalism, anti-inconvenient truth and anti-democracy. What a fun party!

Would public showing of images of gun violence help?

This issue is being considered now for some reason. Maybe the fairly close timing of recent mass shootings and murders of innocents is triggering some introspection at least in the mainstream media. Vanity Fair writes: 

“WE CANNOT SANITIZE THESE KILLINGS”: NEWS MEDIA CONSIDERS BREAKING GRIMLY ROUTINE COVERAGE OF MASS SHOOTINGS

As journalists descend on Uvalde—as they did on Columbine, Newtown, and Parkland—some are questioning whether a more graphic approach is required to capture the reality of America’s gun violence epidemic. “It’s time,” suggests one industry leader, “to show what a slaughtered 7-year-old looks like.”

The Texas Tribune’s staff has felt determined to aggressively cover this week’s horrific school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, said editor in chief Sewell Chan, even as they are “exhausted that we have to cover this at all, exhausted that we have to cover this again, and resigned to taking part in what sometimes seems like a numb, meaningless ritual.” In newsrooms across America, a country where mass shootings have become a gruesome facet of daily life, the process has sadly become routine. “We all know the playbook by now. We all know how it unfolds,” Chan added. “The grief, the announcement, the outrage. Some semblance of public debate. And then generally no action. And that has been the pattern, really, for at least two decades, going back to Columbine.”

Indeed, as NPR national correspondent Sarah McCammon put it, “I was in high school when Columbine happened. I had a kindergartener during Sandy Hook. I have an elementary school student now. And I’ve covered so many of these.” With Tuesday’s killing of at least 19 children and two teachers at a Texas elementary school coming on the heels of a mass shooting in a Buffalo supermarket—and amid decades of recurring tragedies in Newtown, Parkland, and elsewhere—journalists and academics are questioning whether the traditional coverage model is adequately capturing the carnage, and even considering whether showing more graphic footage would force the public, and political leaders, to fully confront the sickening reality of America’s gun violence epidemic.

The New York Times writes: 

WASHINGTON — After Lenny Pozner’s six-year-old son Noah died at Sandy Hook, he briefly contemplated showing the world the damage an AR-15-style rifle did to his child.

His first thought: “It would move some people, change some minds.”

His second: “Not my kid.”

Grief and anger over two horrific mass shootings in Texas and New York only ten days apart has stirred an old debate: Would disseminating graphic images of the results of gun violence jolt the nation’s gridlocked leadership into action?

“What makes this a challenging ethics call is that when you’re a photo editor, you never really do know which is the photograph that is going to seem exploitative, and what image will touch the conscience of people and move the needle on the debate.”

Mainstream news organizations sometimes show disturbing images of people who have died to illustrate the horrors of an event, like the photograph by Lynsey Addario of a mother, two children and a family friend killed in March in Irpin, Ukraine, or the image of a three-year-old Syrian Kurdish boy whose body washed ashore in Turkey in 2015. But they rarely show human gore.

“We’re always trying to balance the news value of an image and its service to our readers against whether or not the image is dignified for the victims or considerate toward the families or loved ones of those pictured,” said Meaghan Looram, the director of photography at The New York Times. “We don’t want to withhold images that would help people to understand what has happened in scenarios like these, but we also don’t publish images sheerly as provocation.” 

Noah Pozner was among the first children buried after the Dec. 14, 2012, shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., which killed 20 first graders and six educators. Noah hid with 15 classmates in the classroom bathroom, a 4½ by 3½-foot space into which the gunman fired more than 80 rounds from a Bushmaster semiautomatic rifle, killing all but one child.

Bullets tore through Noah’s back, arm, hand and face, destroying most of his jaw. Mr. Pozner and Noah’s mother, Veronique De La Rosa, held a private, open-coffin viewing before his funeral service, which was attended by Dannel Malloy, Connecticut’s governor at the time. When Mr. Malloy arrived, Ms. De La Rosa took him by the hand to see her son, lying in a mahogany coffin in a room at the back of a funeral home in Fairfield, Conn.  

“I’m thinking to myself, ‘I’m going to pass out. She’s going to show me open wounds and I’m not going to handle it very well,’” Mr. Malloy said in an interview for my book “Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy and the Battle for Truth.”

The damage to Noah’s mouth was hidden by a square of white fabric, so Mr. Malloy was not shown raw wounds. “I wouldn’t have taken it to that level,” Ms. De La Rosa said. But the governor “was still looking at a dead child,” she said. “A child who practically the day before had been running around like a little locomotive, full of life.”  

After Sandy Hook, Connecticut passed some of the most stringent gun safety measures in the nation.

The cognitive biology of it

Human are visual creatures. The human mind is a story or narrative creating machine that operates automatically, fast and unconsciously. We respond to things we see at least as much as we do to things we hear. Without images of reality, people cannot understand that specific reality, but their minds create realities they are comfortable with. For most people, they do not conjure up images of bodies with bullet holes and blood. It is too uncomfortable to most many people to even think that, so they don't. Think of your own experiences. What images of bodies did you think of after hearing about the mass shooting in Uvalde, TX? I guarantee that your mental blankness on this point would not be nearly so blank if you had seen a couple of images of bloody, dead, bullet mangled children.

What a bullet does to living tissue

Yes, leave it to the family to decide whether to release photos or not. Some will not, some will. That would be the family's choice. But given America's gun violence situation, releasing the photos to the public is likely to be more beneficial than harmful. The families should at least have that right as an option to honor their murdered family member.

But do not leave it to the police, the NRA or the Republican Party. They will suppress all images they possibly can because they do not want the American people to see how hideous human on human violence actually is.

Firefighter carrying the body of 1-year-old Baylee Almon, who 

was fatally injured in the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995

Acknowledgement: Thanks to SNOWFLAKE for raising this issue on his blog and citing the articles.

Democratic Party detachment from reality and its internal weakness

An article in The Guardian that PD cited discusses the weakness of the Democratic Party. It is weak opposition to the Republican Party neo-fascist threat now gaining power over American government and society. The Guardian writes in a review of the book, This Will Not Pass, Trump, Biden, and the Battle for America’s Future:

This Will Not Pass is a blockbuster. Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns deliver 473 pages of essential reading. The two New York Times reporters depict an enraged Republican party, besotted by and beholden to Donald Trump. They portray a Democratic party led by Joe Biden as, in equal measure, inept and out of touch. 

On election day 2020, the country simply sought to restore a modicum of normalcy. Nothing else. Even as Biden racked up a 7m-vote plurality, Republicans gained 16 House seats. There was no mandate. Think checks, balances and plenty of fear.

Biden owes his job to suburban moms and dads, not the woke. As the liberal Brookings Institution put it in a post-election report, “Biden’s victory came from the suburbs”.

Said differently, the label of socialism, the reality of rising crime, a clamor for open borders and demands for defunding the police almost cost Democrats the presidency. As a senator, Biden knew culture mattered. Whether his party has internalized any lessons, though, is doubtful.

This Will Not Pass also amplifies the disdain senior Democrats hold for the “Squad”, those members of the Democratic left wing who cluster round Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Martin and Burns quote Steve Ricchetti, a Biden counselor: “The problem with the left … is that they don’t understand that they lost.”

Cedric Richmond, a senior Biden adviser and former dean of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC), is less diplomatic. He describes the squad as “fucking idiots”. Richmond also takes exception to AOC pushing back at the vice-president, Kamala Harris, for telling undocumented migrants “do not come.”

This Will Not Pass also attempts to do justice to Kyrsten Sinema, the Arizona senator and “former Green party activist who reinvented herself as Fortune 500-loving moderate”. In addition to helping block Biden’s domestic agenda, Sinema has a knack for performative behavior and close ties to Republicans.

Like Sarah Palin, she is fond of her own physique. The senator “boasted knowingly to colleagues and aides that her cleavage had an extraordinary persuasive effect on the uptight men of the GOP”.

It is not clear what can be done to fix the Dems. At this point, probably nothing. They cannot see the reality of the neo-fascist threat. They are distracted by internal bickering. How the 2022 and 2024 elections will play out ought to make reasonably clear whether the Dems will remain a significant source of opposition.

 

Some history on how the gun industry came to power

This 17 minute interview with historian Heather Cox Richardson describes some the history of the rise of the NRA to power. It still exerts enough power to block federal gun regulation legislation that a vast majority of Americans support. The Republican Party is firmly in the grip of the NRA in large part because gun demagogic propaganda has a firm grip on most of the GOP rank and file. Republican politicians still fear NRA opposition. They feel they need to tow the NRA line to stay in power, contrary public opinion be damned. 

In a comment on this, PD wrote:

The NRA doesn't have as much power as it did even 5 yrs ago, due to a bankruptcy and other troubles. But the their cause, and reputation on the Right remain intact because the socialization of 2 generations of Republicans into the GOP-style gun culture described by Richardson, has been so effective that, as one expert on gun violence says, "the machine can run on auto-pilot, with or without the NRA at this point." In essence, few GOP candidates want to defy the "base" on this issue anymore than on Trump, Roe, Climate Science and other issues that have now become emblematic of the Republican Identity.  

I am just as disgusted by the foolishness and detachment from reality in the Dem party as by the (to me) well-known depravity of Trump and his sycophantic GOP. The Dems present profiles in cowardice, and have not acted on the historical truth that they are under siege by a no-compromise party intent on winning by extra and/or anti-constitutional means if necessary, and imposing its ideology on the majority of Americans. .... Add the petty infighting between moderates and progressives (even worse than it seems from the headlines) and you get a weak and amorphous Dem party not only hated by all hard core Repubs, but increasingly by those who expected them to find common cause in the face of the GOP threat, and put aside differences for later on.

I'll keep warning about the Republican Party, the power of its propaganda and lies Leviathan as long as I can. The day may come fairly soon (~4-6 years ?) that people like me will be shut up by threats or force. Opposition will be deemed national security threats or whatever other excuse that Republican Party focus group data says would work best to crush opposition while still looking be democratic. That would start in earnest after Republican neo-fascism has come into full power. The process is likely to take shape after the 2022 elections.

Acknowledgement: Thanks to PD for his comments and bringing this interview to my attention.

A Fox News version in Canada? Is it POSSIBLE?

 

Would Poilievre fund a Fox News Canada?

https://www.nationalobserver.com/2022/05/27/opinion/would-poilievre-fund-fox-news-canada

It’s not often coups get planned in broad daylight, much less with coverage by the media, but that seems to be what’s unfolding in Hungary right now. In a special meeting of the U.S. Conservative Political Action Conference, better known as CPAC, America’s aspiring autocrats are taking lessons from Europe’s most successful one: Viktor Orbán.

Hungary’s prime minister, who has spent his 12 years in power transforming the country from a functioning democracy to a de facto fascist state, laid out a 12-point blueprint for how other Christian conservatives can follow in his footsteps. Chief among those points was the role the media, and Orbán’s control over it, has played in his Fidesz party’s consolidation of power.

“Have your own media. It’s the only way to point out the insanity of the progressive left,” he told the CPAC audience. “The problem is that the western media is adjusted to the leftist viewpoint. Those who taught reporters in universities already had progressive leftist principles.”

Orbán clearly practices what he preaches. In Hungary’s most recent election, state-controlled media outlets made it almost impossible for opposition candidates to have their message heard, much less supported. As the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe said in a report, “The campaign itself was characterized by a pervasive overlap between the ruling coalition’s campaign messages and the government’s information campaigns, amplifying the advantage of the ruling coalition and blurring the line between state and party.”

As American scholar and former assistant secretary of state J. Brian Atwood wrote in a recent op-ed, Orbán’s populist message in the recent Hungarian election blamed immigrants, universities, Muslims and the LGBT community, along with “faceless bureaucrats in Brussels,” for the country’s problems. “Orbán’s drift over time toward corrupt autocratic power and xenophobic populism is a case study of how democracies can be perverted,” he wrote.

To other European nations, Hungary’s retreat from democracy is hard to watch. But for the Trumpist right, it’s a how-to guide for the 2024 election and beyond. Orbán told the Trumpist Republicans in attendance at CPAC that they should run shows like Tucker Carlson Tonight “24-7” in order to bend the broader narrative in their favour.

That’s a lesson Canadian conservatives who are watching at a distance could also take to heart. It wasn’t that long ago, after all, that Stephen Harper was tweeting his delight at Orbán’s 2018 election victory. “Congratulations to Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and Hungary's Fidesz for winning a decisive fourth term! The IDU [International Democratic Union, an international alliance of conservative parties] and I are looking forward to working with you.”

Canada isn’t in any danger of embracing Hungarian-style fascism, but Orbán’s manipulation of the media could easily serve as an inspiration for our conservatives — and specifically the one poised to become leader of the Conservative Party of Canada.

Already, we’ve seen Alberta Premier Jason Kenney use tens of millions of taxpayer dollars to fund a “War Room” in order to shift the narrative around Alberta’s oil and gas industry and get his own call-in radio show from one of the province’s biggest radio stations. Doug Ford’s government beat him to the punch here by creating Ontario News Now, a blatant attempt to do an end-run around actual journalists and their pesky questions. And, of course, the ultra-cozy relationship between his director of media relations, Ivana Yelich, and Postmedia columnist Brian Lilley speaks for itself.

But the big prize is at the federal level, and that’s where this campaign to sideline the media will almost certainly move next. In a recent interview with Jordan Peterson, Conservative leadership hopeful Pierre Poilievre hinted he had plans to rejig the Canadian media landscape. “(Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s policies) make the entire media apparatus dependent on the goodwill of the state,” he said. “I haven’t made an announcement on exactly how I’m going to fix that problem yet, but … stay tuned.”

Defunding the CBC, as Poilievre has promised to do numerous times, might not be the hill he really wants to die on. But reviving Sun TV, the failed attempt from a decade ago to create a Canadian version of Fox News, could theoretically be on the table.

If Poilievre wanted to do that, ensuring the mandatory carriage status it was denied in 2013 by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) would go a long way towards meeting Orbán’s prescription. It would fill Canada’s airways with openly partisan — and unapologetically conservative — content and force millions of Canadians to pay for it. Poilievre has never said he would fund a right-wing media operation like this, but it’s not hard to see why he would try.

If it did ever happen, the Trudeau Liberals would have to be credited with an unintentional assist. By opening the door to government funding of media organizations and outlets, they have invited conservatives to test the limits of what does and doesn’t qualify as journalism. And while the first iteration of Sun TV was a clunky attempt at cloning Fox News, it’s hard to imagine the people behind it didn’t learn from their mistakes.

There will be no Ezra Levant in the next version, as just one example. The production values will be better, if only because they probably couldn’t be any worse. And conservative pundits and politicians have years of gaslighting practice on issues like free speech and diversity of opinion that they could easily bring to bear on the government regulators at the CRTC.

So brace yourself, Canada. We’re not at risk of backsliding away from democracy the way Hungary has and America’s Republicans clearly want to, but Harper and the IDU are almost certainly still working with Orbán in one way or another.

If they get their way, our media ecosystem may soon get even more conservative than it already is.

The Republican Strategy to make climate change worse

The weather is always changing. We take climate change seriously, but not hysterically. We will not adopt nutty policies that harm our economy or our jobs. -- The one and only mention of climate change in Rick Scott’s 11-point Republican Party plan to destroy America

 

Yes, there really is a GOP strategy to make sure climate change is not interfered with. This is serious and real, not a joke. The Republican Party goal is staunch, all-out support for continuing to pollute as usual. That Tragedy of the Commons strategy will continue to provide profits to polluters, campaign contributions for Republicans and more environmental damage and misery for the rest of us. The New York Times writes:

How an Organized Republican Effort Punishes Companies for Climate Action

Legislators and their allies are running an aggressive campaign that uses public money and the law to pressure businesses they say are pushing “woke” causes.

In West Virginia, the state treasurer has pulled money from BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, because the Wall Street firm has flagged climate change as an economic risk.

In Texas, a new law bars the state’s retirement and investment funds from doing business with companies that the state comptroller says are boycotting fossil fuels. Conservative lawmakers in 15 other states are promoting similar legislation.

And officials in Utah and Idaho have assailed a major ratings agency for considering environmental risks and other factors, in addition to the balance sheet, when assessing states’ creditworthiness.

Across the country, Republican lawmakers and their allies have launched a campaign to try to rein in what they see as activist companies trying to reduce the greenhouse gases that are dangerously heating the planet.

“We’re an energy state, and energy accounts for hundreds of millions of dollars of tax revenue for us,” said Riley Moore, the West Virginia state treasurer. “All of our jobs come from coal and gas. I mean, this is who we are. This is part of our way of life here in the state. And they’re telling us that these industries are bad.”

“We have an existential threat here,” Mr. Moore said. “We have to fight back.”

In doing so, Mr. Moore and others have pushed climate change from the scientific realm into the political battles already raging over topics like voting rights, abortion and L.G.B.T.Q. issues. In recent months, conservatives have moved beyond tough words and used legislative and financial leverage to pressure the private sector to drop climate action and any other causes they label as “woke.”

“There is a coordinated effort to chill corporate engagement on these issues,” said Daniella Ballou-Aares, chief executive of the Leadership Now Project, a nonprofit organization that wants corporations to address threats to democracy. “And it is an effective campaign. Companies are starting to go into hiding.”

Once again, the GOP’s abject moral rot with its anti-democratic neo-fascism is on display in broad daylight for woke minds to see. Unwoke minds are not going to see it. To those closed minds, climate change is a Chinese hoax, Democratic Party socialist ploy, Democratic pedophilia, liberal atheism or whatever other slanders the Republican propagandists’ focus group data says will be most effective for trapping minds in the GOP’s various mental sewers.

“AMERICANS DESERVE TO KNOW WHAT WE WILL DO WHEN GIVEN THE CHANCE TO GOVERN.” — Rick Scott’s 11-point plan to screw us once the GOP gets back in power, which is going to be pretty soon; what they are going to do is defend and expand pollution and their campaign contributions

Rick Scott’s lies and slanders at the start of  

his evil neo-fascist plan

Bad COVID news

The Washington Post writes:

Vaccines may not prevent many symptoms of long covid, study suggests 

A large U.S. study looking at whether vaccination protects against long covid showed the shots have only a slight protective effect: Being vaccinated appeared to reduce the risk of lung and blood clot disorders, but did little to protect against most other symptoms.

The new paper, published Wednesday in Nature Medicine, is part of a series of studies by the Department of Veterans Affairs on the impact of the coronavirus, and was based on 33,940 people who experienced breakthrough infections after vaccination.

The data confirms the large body of research that shows vaccination greatly reduces the risk of death or serious illness. But there was more ambiguity regarding long covid.  

Six months after their initial diagnosis of covid, people in the study who were vaccinated had only a slightly reduced risk of getting long covid — 15 percent overall. The greatest benefit appeared to be in reducing blood clotting and lung complications. But there was no difference between the vaccinated and unvaccinated when it came to longer-term risks of neurological issues, gastrointestinal symptoms, kidney failure and other conditions.  

At the Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center’s Post-Acute COVID Syndrome Clinic, Christina Martin, an advance practice nurse, said that since November, her staff has noticed a “worrying trend” of vaccinated people having breakthrough infections and developing long covid.

When the clinic was founded a year ago, she said, they anticipated seeing fewer new patients by this time as more people became vaccinated. Unfortunately, they’ve seen the opposite, with patient numbers going up.

“We now feel that long covid is here to stay. … This will have profound implications on our health-care system and resources,” Martin said.

This is not good. It seemed reasonable to think that vaccinated and boosted people would have reduced chances of getting all kinds of long covid disease. Apparently, that is not the case if this data holds up. Given how large the database is, 33,940 patients, this finding is probably reliable.

It's beginning to look like covid is just never going to go away. The human species just cannot get its act together to fight this. Self-serving crackpots and liars like Faux News and Republican Party elites feed the endless torrent of disinformation, confusion and stupidity, which helps stymie efforts to deal with this. That is not going to change. Dark free speech is legal. It is necessary to keep radical right neo-fascists in power and wealth. Covid has and still is costing trillions, but we just cannot do squat about it on a global scale. 

Maybe it's time to accept this new risk as another bad new normal for a long time to come. Maybe forever.

US Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene wins GOP primary in Georgia

A defiant U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene easily defeated five fellow Republicans on Tuesday in a primary race that showed her conservative Georgia constituents standing steadfastly beside her after a turbulent freshman term.

Greene showed no signs of mellowing in her victory speech late Tuesday. She called, as she has in the past, for the impeachment of President Joe Biden and dismissed his election as the product of “fraudulent electoral votes.” She likened pandemic mask and vaccine mandates to “medical tyranny,” and bemoaned “the cruel and illegal treatment of many nonviolent Jan. 6 protesters.”

Greene called Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell one of Congress’ “failed leaders” and said to loud applause that she’s part of a “majority who even now wants to see Hillary Clinton in jail.”

“Sending me back to Washington will send a message to the bloodsucking establishment: It is we who will set the policy agenda for the next decade and not them,” Greene said. She added: “We’re going to start speaking the truth more forcefully and more loudly than ever before.”

Greene, 47, will be back on the ballot in November facing Democrat Marcus Flowers in northwest Georgia’s 14th District, a seat drawn to give Republicans a huge advantage. Flowers, an Army veteran who raised $8.1 million, easily beat two other candidates in the Democratic primary.

Greene became a celebrity of the Republican Party's far-right fringe with her election two years ago as she embraced former President Donald Trump’s false claim that the 2020 election was stolen, and engaged in conspiracy theories about the coronavirus.

Greene spoke at an event organized by a white nationalist where the crowd chanted “Putin!” after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and launched other partisan attacks that critics said promoted racism and violence.

Greene remained on the primary ballot Tuesday in Georgia's 14th Congressional District after a failed effort to disqualify her by opposing voters. They argued Greene engaged in insurrection by encouraging the Jan. 6, 2021, riot that disrupted Congress’ certification of Joe Biden’s presidential victory. Georgia's secretary of state and an administrative law judge dismissed the claims.

Still, fellow Republicans refused to give Greene a free ride to reelection. Though her first term won loyal followers, it left others in the GOP embarrassed.

Leading the slate of Republicans running to oust Greene in the primary was Jennifer Strahan, founder of a suburban Atlanta health care advisory firm who pitched herself to voters as a “no-nonsense conservative.”

“This is not the time for unserious politicians who just want to hear themselves talk,” Strahan said in one campaign ad, without mentioning Greene by name. In another she stated bluntly: “Our current U.S. representative isn’t doing her job.”

Greene was stripped of her committee assignments last year by House Democrats who accused her of spreading violent and hateful conspiracies. In recent months, Greene got banned from Twitter for spreading coronavirus misinformation.

Green has been largely unrepentant. In a campaign ad posted recently to her Facebook page, she calls Biden and Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi “communist Democrats” who “hate America, hate God and hate our way of life.”

Greene proved popular enough that she raised more than $9 million for her reelection bid, placing her among the year’s top fundraisers in Congress, according to the Federal Election Commission. Greene spent more than $6.6 million before the primary.

Strahan's $391,000 in fundraising trailed far behind Greene but dwarfed that of other Republican contenders — retired physician Charles Lutin, engineer James Haygood, Marine Corps veteran Seth Synstelien and logistics executive Eric Cunningham.

Spanning a stretch of northwest Georgia from metro Atlanta to the state line at Chattanooga, Tennessee, Greene's district was drawn to favor Republicans even after state lawmakers slightly shifted its boundaries during redistricting last year.

https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/world/us-rep-marjorie-taylor-greene-wins-gop-primary-in-georgia/ar-AAXGiqa?ocid=mailsignout&li=AAggNb9

Any thoughts on the latest mass slaughter and the normal non-response that will follow?

 

Republicans pay homage to Hungary’s neo-fascist dictator, again!

American fascists in the 1930s

The New York Times writes in an opinion piece by Jamelle Bouie:

This year, the American Conservative Union decided to hold one of its Conservative Political Action Conference gatherings in Hungary. The group met last week in Budapest, guests of Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who — since winning back office in 2010 — has led the country away from liberal democracy toward a system he proudly calls “illiberal democracy.”

Of course, with its endemic corruption, repression of sexual minorities, de facto state control of media, constitutional manipulation and an electoral system designed to give supermajorities to the ruling party whether the votes are there or not, there is little that is democratic about Orban’s democracy.

For American conservatives, however, the degradation of Hungarian democracy is a feature, not a bug, of Orban’s rule.

Hungary isn’t a particularly large country (by population, it’s about the size of Michigan) or a particularly rich one (its gross domestic product puts it somewhere between Nebraska and Kansas), but it is a showcase for how a reactionary movement in an ostensibly free society might seize control of the state to reshape society in its own image. And the goal, for both Orban and his American admirers, is the suppression of wokeness, a pejorative term for a broad range of progressive ideas about race, gender and sexuality. This includes, for some, the mere existence of L.G.B.T. people on an equal basis.

That shared goal of suppressing wokeness is why Tucker Carlson, one of the most prominent conservatives in the United States, hosted his show from Hungary for a week last year. “If you care about Western civilization and democracy and families and the ferocious assault on all three of those things by the leaders of our global institutions,” Carlson told his audience at the time, “you should know what is happening here right now.” It’s also why Rod Dreher, a popular conservative blogger and author, wrote that his readers “ought to be beating a path to Hungary.” And it’s why Donald Trump endorsed Orban’s re-election campaign not once but twice.

Which is to say that this CPAC session may have been held in Hungary so that conservatives can learn a little more about how they might unravel American democracy in order to impose their cultural and ideological vision on the country. They even got a little encouragement from Orban himself. “We need to take back the institutions in Washington and Brussels,” he said in opening remarks on Thursday. “We need to find friends, and we need to find allies. We need to coordinate the movement of our troops, because we have a big challenge ahead of us.” Attendees heard from Trump, his former chief of staff Mark Meadows and Carlson himself, whom Orban singled out for praise: “His program is the most watched. What does it mean? It means programs like his should be broadcast day and night. Or as you say, 24/7.”  

What’s striking about this display of longing and affection for Orban’s regime — beyond the obvious spectacle of people who are ostensibly American nationalists working in concert with a foreign autocrat — is how it underscores a defining trait of conservative populists, if not conservative populism itself. For all the talk of “America First,” there is a deep disdain among members of this group for both Americans and the American political tradition.

The Republican Party neo-fascism, Christian nationalism and laissez-faire capitalism constitutes a deadly threat to democracy, the rule of law and civil liberties. The threat is obvious and undeniable. People either see it, or they cannot or could but won’t.  

Going forward, additional evidence of neo-fascist intent probably will not chance many minds. After all that has gone before, it is hard to imagine that  there are more a just a few open minds left, maybe ~5%, maybe less? The battle lines are drawn. War is coming to America.

Canada sees a threat from rising American conservative authoritarianism

A lot of people all over the planet are coming to recognize just how severe a threat the Republican Party, the ex-president and their propaganda Leviathan are to both American and Canadian democracy and liberty. A CBC article comments:

Canada should rethink relationship with U.S. as democratic 'backsliding' worsens: security experts

Canada's intelligence community will have to grapple with the growing influence of anti-democratic forces in the United States — including the threat posed by conservative media outlets like Fox News — says a new report from a task force of intelligence experts.

"The United States is and will remain our closest ally, but it could also become a source of threat and instability," says a newly published report written by a task force of former national security advisers, former Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) directors, ex-deputy ministers, former ambassadors and academics. Members of the group have advised both Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and former prime minister Stephen Harper.

Now is the time for the federal government to rethink how it approaches national security, the report concludes.

The authors — some of whom had access to Canada's most prized secrets and briefed cabinet on emerging threats — say Canada has become complacent in its national security strategies and is not prepared to tackle threats like Russian and Chinese espionage, the "democratic backsliding" in the United States, a rise in cyberattacks and climate change.

"We believe that the threats are quite serious at the moment, that they do impact Canada," said report co-author Vincent Rigby, who until a few months ago served as the national security adviser to Trudeau.

"We don't want it to take a crisis for [the] government of Canada to wake up."

Tucker the neo-fascist slandering Trudeau falsely claiming  

he set up a dictatorship in Canada

Evidence that information can flow backward in time

In 2011 researcher Daryl J Bem published a paper with data indicating that (i) information from the future could flow backward in time several seconds, and humans are unconsciously respond to it as if they are aware of it in the past. That article, Feeling the Future: Experimental Evidence for Anomalous Retroactive Influences on Cognition and Affect, sparked controversy. The experiments and data interpretation were relentlessly attacked and rejected. As far as I can tell, the data is still being attacked and rejected. There is no mechanism known to science that could account for information flow backward in time. The phenomenon is called precognition and is part of research into psychic phenomena, or psi research.

In an ongoing effort to show that the results are real, Bem and colleagues published updates in 2015, 2016 and 2022 of analyses of follow-on studies designed to replicate the original results of 2011. Those updates are described in the article, Feeling the future: A meta-analysis of 90 experiments on the anomalous anticipation of random future events.[1] According to Bem et al., the results are real and humans can sense at least some future events. 

Future events are shown to be sensed by the human brain or mind by showing images on a computer screen. Most images are neutral and do not elicit a detectable brain response. But images of erotic or strong negative content do elicit a detectable brain response. A computer randomly shows images, so humans are not involved in that aspect of the experiment. The data is that a few seconds before the computer “chooses” a response-eliciting image humans respond to it with a detectable burst of brain waves. That looks like information is flowing from the immediate future to a human in real time. Some people take this kind of data as evidence that a God(s) can exist and that psi phenomena are real.

Bem’s 2022 update claims that the results are rock solid real, not an anomaly, statistical fluke or flawed research protocol: 

We here report a meta-analysis of 90 experiments from 33 laboratories in 14 countries which yielded an overall effect greater than 6 sigma, z = 6.40, p = 1.2 × 10-10 with an effect size (Hedges’ g) of 0.09. A Bayesian analysis yielded a Bayes Factor of 5.1 × 109, greatly exceeding the criterion value of 100 for “decisive evidence” in support of the experimental hypothesis.

Statistical significance at a level of ‘6 sigma’ means that the results have about a two in one billion chance of being a fluke or false positive result. In physics, reports of fundamental new phenomenon require proof at a level of at least 5 sigma, or about 1 in 3.5 million. Physicists accepted the reality of the Higgs Boson, the last of the undetected fundamental particles the standard model of the universe predicted. It was proven at the 5 sigma level. If that is true, then what Bem has been arguing in the face of years of overwhelming criticism is real and his critics are wrong. One cannot rationally argue with 6 sigma results unless there are unknown flaws in the research and/or data analysis protocols.

Assume that Bem is right and this phenomenon is real what are the implications? Is there a God? Why don't brains produce responses to “neutral” images the computer shows? Are other psi phenomena real, e.g., telepathy or clairvoyance?

Reseasrchers inclined to believe Bem’s results acknowledge the difficulty most people have accepting this psi precognition phenomenon as real. A 2018 paper commented: 

“Most scientists consider the idea that prospection may also involve influences from the future to be flatly impossible due to violation of common sense or constraints based on one or more physical laws. We present several classes of empirical evidence challenging this common assumption. If this line of evidence can be successfully and independently replicated using preregistered designs and analyses, then the consequences for the interpretation of experimental results from any empirical domain would be profound.” 

In the face of Bem's analyses and his persistence, current research on this is getting more sophisticated. Results continue to come out that continue to undermine Bem’s explanation. A 2021 paper, found evidence of precognition with one experimental protocol, but it went away in a second protocol that was designed to control for past visual experiences. That paper commented: 

“Results from some individual participants suggest on the first glance a precognition pattern, but results from our second experiment make a perceptual history explanation more probable. On the group level, no precognition effects were statistically indicated. The perceptual history effects found in the present study are in confirmation with related studies from the literature. The precognition analysis revealed some interesting individual patterns, which however did not allow for general conclusions. Overall, the present study demonstrates that any future experiment about sensory or extrasensory perception urgently needs to control for potential perceptual history effects and that temporal aspects of stimulus presentation are of high relevance.”

This is an example of how science progresses. As something unexplainable comes up using early generation research protocols, later protocols are designed with better controls. That's especially important for social science research. Since we do not yet have a deep understanding of the brain-mind,  unknown biases and human complexities can lead to false conclusions.

Footnote:

1. The 2022 version of Bem’s paper comments: 

Precognition is one of several phenomena in which individuals appear to have access to “nonlocal” information, that is, to information that would not normally be available to them through any currently known physical or biological process. These phenomena, collectively referred to as psi, include telepathy, access to another person’s thoughts without the mediation of any known channel of sensory communication; clairvoyance (including a variant called remote viewing), the apparent perception of objects or events that do not provide a stimulus to the known senses; and precognition, the anticipation of future events that could not otherwise be anticipated through any known inferential process.

 

Buy Republican!

 There's a simple tried-and-true solution to climate change.

By Milt Policzer

Courthouse News columnist; racehorse owner and breeder; one of those guys who always got picked last.

Sometimes solutions to seemingly intractable problems pop up in unexpected places.

I was reading a New Yorker article on energy storage last week when, toward the end of the piece, this quote appeared: “The politicization of climate and energy policy comes from fossil-fuel companies that give enormous amounts to the Republican Party.”

Aha! Of course!

I’ve often wondered why any politician would be against saving the planet they live on. If not for themselves, at least for their children. Apparently, money is a factor.

So now we know how to save the planet — offer Republicans more money than the anti-planet people.

I know you’re thinking this is not possible — but it is. We don’t have to offer a mountain of money to the entire Republican Party. The U.S. Senate is equally divided. We just need enough money to buy a couple of votes.

Throwing some cash at Joe Manchin alone could make a huge difference.

Yes, I know some of you think this sounds like bribery. That’s because it is bribery. Let’s not quibble about a tried-and-true solution.

Is corruption that saves the planet really corruption?

https://www.courthousenews.com/buy-republican/

Is Milt - one of those guys who always got picked last - onto something here?

An expert opines: Russia is fascist

Timothy Snyder is a prominent scholar who studies how democracies fall and how tyrannies work. He wrote a 2017 book, On Tyranny, that described concrete steps average people can take to oppose the fall of democracy to tyrants. In an opinion piece in the New York Times, We Should Say It. Russia Is Fascist, he writes:

Fascism was never defeated as an idea.

As a cult of irrationality and violence, it could not be vanquished as an argument: So long as Nazi Germany seemed strong, Europeans and others were tempted. It was only on the battlefields of World War II that fascism was defeated. Now it’s back — and this time, the country fighting a fascist war of destruction is Russia. Should Russia win, fascists around the world will be comforted.

We err in limiting our fears of fascism to a certain image of Hitler and the Holocaust. Fascism was Italian in origin, popular in Romania — where fascists were Orthodox Christians who dreamed of cleansing violence — and had adherents throughout Europe (and America). In all its varieties, it was about the triumph of will over reason.

Because of that, it’s impossible to define satisfactorily. People disagree, often vehemently, over what constitutes fascism. But today’s Russia meets most of the criteria that scholars tend to apply. It has a cult around a single leader, Vladimir Putin. It has a cult of the dead, organized around World War II. It has a myth of a past golden age of imperial greatness, to be restored by a war of healing violence — the murderous war on Ukraine.

Many hesitate to see today’s Russia as fascist because Stalin’s Soviet Union defined itself as antifascist. But that usage did not help to define what fascism is — and is worse than confusing today. With the help of American, British and other allies, the Soviet Union defeated Nazi Germany and its allies in 1945. Its opposition to fascism, however, was inconsistent.

Before Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, the Soviets treated fascists as just one more form of capitalist enemy. Communist parties in Europe were to treat all other parties as the enemy. This policy actually contributed to Hitler’s ascent: Though they outnumbered the Nazis, German communists and socialists could not cooperate. After that fiasco, Stalin adjusted his policy, demanding that European communist parties form coalitions to block fascists.

Stalin’s flexibility about fascism is the key to understanding Russia today. Under Stalin, fascism was first indifferent, then it was bad, then it was fine until — when Hitler betrayed Stalin and Germany invaded the Soviet Union — it was bad again. But no one ever defined what it meant. It was a box into which anything could be put. Communists were purged as fascists in show trials. During the Cold War, the Americans and the British became the fascists. And “anti-fascism” did not prevent Stalin from targeting Jews in his last purge, nor his successors from conflating Israel with Nazi Germany.

Because Mr. Putin speaks of fascists as the enemy, we might find it hard to grasp that he could in fact be fascist. But in Russia’s war on Ukraine, “Nazi” just means “subhuman enemy”— someone Russians can kill. Hate speech directed at Ukrainians makes it easier to murder them, as we see in Bucha, Mariupol and every part of Ukraine that has been under Russian occupation. Mass graves are not some accident of war, but an expected consequence of a fascist war of destruction.

Fascists calling other people “fascists” is fascism taken to its illogical extreme as a cult of unreason. It is a final point where hate speech inverts reality and propaganda is pure insistence. It is the apogee of will over thought. Calling others fascists while being a fascist is the essential Putinist practice. Jason Stanley, an American philosopher, calls it “undermining propaganda.” I have called it “schizofascism.” The Ukrainians have the most elegant formulation. They call it “ruscism.”

Spiritual but not religious...

“Spiritual but not religious.” Many people are claiming that designation these days, when asked about their religious affiliation.

Q1: How would you define that "spiritual" designation?  What’s the difference between those two designations?  Is it some kind of non-sequitur?  A cop-out?  Pure nonsense?  An attempt to insult/belittle orthodox religions?  What exactly are the missing/included ingredients that sets those two designations apart?

Q2: Have you ever experienced spirituality without religion?  If so, tell us your story.

Thanks for thinking about it, posting and favoriting.

Regarding the relationship between atheism, rationality and religious belief

An article at OnlySky by social science researcher Will Gervais examines the state of the science. The article, The treasured atheist idea that reason undercuts faith just doesn’t hold up, looks at recent research on the science of atheism and religious belief. Current data sets indicate that (i) a person’s rationality is not a source of atheism, and (ii) applying reason-based arguments against religion does not convert religious people to atheism. 

In 2012, Gervais and fellow researcher Ara Norenzayan published a paper in the prestigious journal Science, Analytic Thinking Promotes Religious Disbelief. That paper got significant public and researcher attention. That paper, plus another with similar results, sparked further research to confirm or deny and further explore relationships, if any, between atheism, rationality and religious faith.

Long story short, Gervais’ original data did not hold up to more rigorous experimentation with larger groups of subjects. He and his research partner disavowed their 2012 paper and its conclusions. The results were a false positive based on too small a sample size and a sloppy research protocol. Recent research data also indicates that instead of appeals to reason (the conscious mind), when one appeals to intuition, emotion and bias (the unconscious mind), that also does not nudge people toward religious beliefs and/or away from atheism.

Science still does not know what factors lead people into atheism or religious belief. Most atheists claim that reason led them to atheism, but the data suggests there is self-delusion in that for most. I thought that reason reinforced my own pre-existing atheism** decades ago, but maybe that is more false than true. Among Americans, there is a small correlation between people who score high on tests of rationality and atheism, but among humans everywhere, the correlation drops from small to negligible. 

** Pre-existing atheism means I think I was an atheist from early childhood (before my rationality kicked in), but maybe that is a personal illusion.

Gervais makes some useful observations. He writes:

Maxine Najle, Nava Caluori, and I recently published a study in which we tested various predictors of atheism against each other in a nationally representative sample of US Americans. We were able to conduct a statistical analysis to specifically pinpoint the relationship between rationality and atheism among those who were most strongly exposed to religion while they were growing up. And among these people most culturally brought up to be religious, the correlation between rationality and religious disbelief dropped to zero.

 
That’s right: among those folks with the most exposure to religion, there’s no reliable correlation between rationality and atheism. This means that among those with strong religious upbringings, the ones who are most rational are no more likely to end up as atheists than are those who are most inclined to trust their intuitions. Far from rationality being a key factor that leads people away from strongly religious upbringings and towards atheism, it turns out that rationality isn’t even modestly correlated with atheism among this subset of people. There is no relation whatsoever.

Rational atheism is (more or less) a myth.

What does it mean that rational atheism is largely a myth? Should freethinkers stop promoting rationality? Hardly! The promotion of rationality may intrinsically bring its own rewards and should be pursued on its own merits without any pseudoscientific pretensions that it will convert believers to atheism. I also firmly believe that abandoning the rational atheist myth may pay secondary dividends if it leads New Atheist allied thinkers to stop trying to use science and rationality to undermine religious faith. These efforts are incredibly unlikely to succeed. Worse still, they have substantial potential to backfire. Dawkins and others have long tried to use science and rationality to pry people away from religion, but they’ve misdiagnosed the source of atheism in the first place. Their efforts in all likelihood do more to drive believers away from science than they do to attract anyone to atheism.

That stuff is good to know. It helps keep atheists from getting too arrogant for their own britches. Two take-home points come to mind:

• Social science research is incredibly complex and difficult because humans are incredibly complex and messy. Scientific results on humans need to be replicated, and data needs to be obtained in well-controlled protocols and analyzed by rigorous statistical analyses. Unconscious human bias must always be kept in mind as a potential confounding factor that gives rise to false positive and false negative data interpretations. Reasonable humility is a good thing to have when doing science, especially science on humans.

• Once again, larger sample sizes show that positive results often melt away into small or non-existent cause and effect outcomes. The positives are an illusion. That has recently been shown for brain scan data, rendering many or most of those research findings suspect. I interpret this to mean that the human brain operates diffusely with thoughts, emotional impulses and biases operating not just unconsciously, but also in large areas of the brain. That makes it tricky to pinpoint small regions of the brain that are believed to cause or at least correlate with behaviors under study.

Who is disrespecting and threatening whom?

A complaint that defenders of the rising neo-fascist Republican Party cite as justification to hate political opposition and targeted out-groups is that the feelings of conservatives have been disrespected and insulted. Yeah, in these days of vulgarity and disrespectful political discourse, that happens occasionally or maybe often. Manners and adult restraint are falling away. Sacred radical right ends morally justify all means. Hillary called some conservatives “deplorable.” What an outrage and emotional hurt. Lock her up!

Obama pointed to guns, bibles and personal frustrations in his comments: “They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” That caused a mega backlash among conservatives. Their fee-fees were hurt. Lock him up!

That’s the kind of rhetorical horrors usually coming from the Dems. Nasty business indeed, even though there is some truth in some of it.

But waddabout the nasty business coming from the radical right? There is some viciousness and bitterness in some of it. For example:

Christian hate-preacher Greg Locke told the people in his Tennessee tent church today, "You cannot be a Christian and vote Democrat in this nation!"

He later threatened Democrats watching him, "You ain't seen [an] insurrection yet." pic.twitter.com/UDlqYVAEDF

— Hemant Mehta (@hemantmehta) May 16, 2022

One does not hear any complaints from Republican elites about publicly stated death threats like those coming from the gentle preacher, Mr. Locke. His flock cheers, not boos, his incitement to a bloody American civil war against Democrats. And, our wussified, useless IRS lets him keep his tax exempt status. What an effing insult and moral outrage. The only thing the IRS is good for is taxing the crap out of the middle income classes and letting the wealthy sail their mega yachts serenely through massive tax loopholes that rich bought and wrote to benefit themselves. 

To be honest and transparent, my fee-fees are hurt. And they are very angry and resentful. As an atheist, the gentle Mr. Locke insulted me and my morality. I’ve been bigly disrespected. If there was a hell, Locke would go there and burn eternally in screaming agony for his hate, bigotry and lies. The real God isn’t a rage and hate factory. God is very much unlike Locke and his evil ilk. That ilk is evil, not just immoral because there is real malice in the death threats. 

Or, am I over-reacting? After all, this is just one deranged crackpot preacher spreading divisive lies and slanders while fomenting his lunatic rage, hate and bigotry. It’s all legal. So are his tax exemptions. In the eyes of the law and justice, he is a good boy. 

Question: Which side is generally more disrespectful of political opposition, radical right Republicans, Christian nationalists and their propagandists, or everyone else?

Be careful, the blind watery tart with the sword 

sometimes pokes the wrong person

Is America’s military headed down the same path as Russia’s?

 By Lt. Gen. David Deptula (ret.)

https://www.defensenews.com/opinion/commentary/2022/05/17/is-americas-military-headed-down-the-same-path-as-russias/

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s failure to rapidly defeat a much smaller foe is not just a failure of strategy, but an overestimation of his military’s capability, training and prowess. U.S. leaders need to take a hard look in the mirror and question whether we are treading similar ground with a set of military capabilities too small and too old given current threats.

American leaders are fond of saying ours is the best military in the world. They fail to realize that key elements of our forces have shrunk by half since our last clear-cut victory: 1991′s Operation Desert Storm. Furthermore, the U.S. has been unfocused on great power competition for over three decades as it overprioritized and overspent on counterinsurgency operations.

This means the United States is less able to deter conflict and fight to win if necessary. That is one reason why Putin felt emboldened to invade Ukraine. He sensed weakness in U.S. and NATO forces, and pressed forward with his aggression. We see the Chinese making similar calculations in the Pacific by seizing and militarizing neutral territory and flaunting international norms without an adequate U.S. response; freedom of navigation missions won’t cut it.

This should be a wake-up call to rebuild the U.S. military.

The threat of sanctions did not deter Putin, nor did Europe’s newfound unity change his mind. Diplomacy that is not backed by military might will fail. It all comes down to credibility behind the words. The U.S. has lost its edge in that regard from both a military capability and capacity perspective.

The choices Putin made with respect to his military’s force structure left him with the wrong force design and poor readiness for the war he chose to fight. Likewise, the choices the U.S. has made in recent years — and the ones it makes today — are inadequate to the challenges posed by its competitors.

Nor will we be able to build needed military power once the enemy triggers a tripwire. Today’s world moves too fast and is too complex to allow for a reactive buildup. F-35 fighter jets, B-21 bombers and Virginia-class submarines, plus their highly trained crews, do not manifest overnight. Unless we make the right defense choices today, there will be no time to recover when an adversary requires us to fight.

President Joe Biden’s fiscal 2023 defense budget plan steers America down the wrong path. Rather than reversing America’s 30-year decline in defense capability and capacity, it accelerates that decline. With inflation properly included, defense funding goes down from last year.

The effects of the proposed defense budget are corrosive. Consider that the Air Force is currently the oldest, smallest and least ready in its history. The FY23 budget plan calls for it to retire roughly 1,500 aircraft over the next five years while buying only 500 replacements. That reduces it a further 25%.

The Navy is set to shed 24 ships over the same period. In FY23 alone, the armed services combined are reducing personnel by 25,000. This is a recipe for disaster, not only for the United States but for Western democracies in general.

Unless the United States and its allies can achieve the strength necessary to defeat both Chinese aggression in Asia and Russian aggression in Europe in near simultaneous time frames, we cannot hope to deter our rivals.

However, defense leaders across multiple administrations, driven by budget concerns and nondefense priorities, have abandoned this approach. They now plan for wars to occur one at a time. Reality likely will not work like they expect. The only thing we will 100% achieve is not accurately forecasting the future. The ability to only handle one war at a time incentivizes our opponents — China, Russia, North Korea, Iran and a broad range of nonstate actors — to strike when we are consumed by the first crisis.

War is always more costly and devastating than maintaining the peace; witness the devastation in Ukraine. The cost of weakness is a bill we cannot afford to pay.

Germany and Japan get this. They understand the threats on their doorsteps, and that is why they both declared their intent to double their defense budgets. Their resolve to reinvest in their own defense reflects the pragmatic realization that only through investment and preparation can they hope to ward off those threats.

The United States does not need to double its defense budget, but it does need to reverse the decline in its capacity and capabilities to credibly deter and, if necessary, defeat both China and Russia simultaneously. Only then will we be able to deter those fights from occurring.

Retired U.S. Air Force Lt. Gen. David A. Deptula is dean of the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies and a senior scholar at the Air Force Academy. He helped plan the Desert Storm air campaign, commanded no-fly zone operations over Iraq and orchestrated air operations over Afghanistan.