American Social Unease

Is there going to be a calm?

A topic of intense personal interest is what is going on in people's heads. What are they thinking, feeling and why. IMO, the social glues that used to hold us together have been attacked by the radical right for DECADES. The glues are seriously weakened or broken entirely. Partisan political distrust is slowly destroying American democracy and the concept of the rule of law. Apparently, some other people seem to be having similar thoughts. AP writes in an article, A divided nation asks: What’s holding our country together?:

Weeks after the votes have been counted and the winners declared, many Americans remain angry, defiant and despairing. Millions now harbor new grievances borne of President Donald Trump’s baseless claims of election fraud. Many Democrats are saddened by results that revealed the opposition to be far more powerful than they imagined.

And in both groups there are those grappling with larger, more disquieting realizations: The foundations of the American experiment have been shaken — by partisan rancor, disinformation, a president’s assault on democracy and a deadly coronavirus pandemic.

There is a sense of loss.

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Trump immediately began sowing doubts about the vote, tossing out specious claims of fraud. Tens of millions of Americans — 36 percent of Republicans in a recent Fox News poll — now believe the claims that the election was rigged and he was the rightful winner.

“I think the election was totally paid for and rigged by the Democrats. I believe there was huge amounts of fraud and representation and illegal processing,” said Pamela Allen, a 72-year-old retiree from Holiday, Florida, who has supported Trump since he came down the escalator in Trump Tower in 2015 to announce his candidacy.

Allen, who worked as a poll watcher in Pasco County, said she saw no problems on Election Day.

“Here in Pasco I have to admit it was very well done,” she said. But she believes things she’s seen on the conservative Trump-favored Newsmax about alleged voter fraud in other states. She is “baffled” as to why Attorney General William Barr didn’t arrest anyone, and “amazed” that the Supreme Court didn’t rule in Trump’s favor. Barr, viewed by Democrats as a staunch Trump loyalist, instead made clear before leaving his job that he had seen no evidence of widespread fraud.

Allen believes that if Biden takes office, he will retire quickly, leaving the presidency to Vice President-elect Kamala Harris. She also thinks House Speaker Nancy Pelosi will become vice president. However, Allen hopes Trump will prevail prior to Inauguration Day, Jan. 20.

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In suburban Michigan, a coalition of suburban women achieved what it set out to do — help evict Trump from the White House. But Lori Goldman, in Oakland County, Michigan, who runs the group Fems for Dems, can’t shake the sense that the mission now is more critical than it’s ever been.

“We got rid of this blight, this cancer,” said Goldman, 61. “We cut him out. But we know that cancer has spread, it’s spread to soft tissue, other organs. And now we have to save the rest of the body.”

Trump isn’t gone, not really, she said. She is horrified at the number of Americans who believe his unsubstantiated claims of widespread voter fraud.

“That’s a dangerous, dangerous place to be in,” she said. “This country is in a lot of trouble.”

It feels to her that the United States is caught in a period of great transition. The bright, progressive future she longs for seems inevitable. But she thinks a large portion of America would prefer to turn back the clock.

Goldman can’t understand why 74 million Americans voted for Trump. She went on national television and said she was ashamed that most of her own relatives were among them. Now some of her siblings don’t want to talk to her anymore.

To her, this is a microcosm of one of the greatest challenges this country has faced: that tribalized politics has pitted people against each other in a way far more profound than ever before. It is no longer Republicans versus Democrats. It has splintered families and friends.

She weeps when she talks about the rift.

The AP article is long. It discusses the feelings of other people who are uneasy about what is happening and what is to come next.

Vaccine Distribution Stories

The Washington Post writes on how the vaccine effort is going. The article is not behind a paywall. It will be updated over time to stay current.

More than two million people have received the first dose of one of the two coronavirus vaccines approved for emergency use. Enough first-doses for 15.7 million people are scheduled for distribution over the next week, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The latest figures show 7.7 million doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine will be en route by the end of this week and 8 million doses of the Moderna vaccine.

The supply will cover almost 5 percent of the country. It’s enough for about three-quarters of the medical workers and nursing home residents and staff, according to Post analysis.

Both vaccines require a follow-up shot three or four weeks after the first dose. Those will be distributed starting early in January. The CDC’s counts include the 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, island territories and five federal agencies that are getting their own distributions: Bureau of Prisons, Veterans Affairs, Indian Health Service, State Department and Defense.

Meanwhile, disputes are already arising over who should get the vaccine immediately. Executes at Stanford Health were criticized for putting themselves ahead of front-line workers. And politicians -- from the White House, Congress and governors’ suites around the country -- are getting vaccinated despite not being at the top of the official priority lists.

Following the CDC guidelines, many states are prioritizing health-care workers and nursing home residents and staff members. States are free, however, to set their own vaccination priorities. Some are emphasizing first responders, prison staff members or people who received placebos in completed vaccination studies.  

Once there are enough vaccines, the latest CDC guidance recommends adding frontline essential workers (first responders, teachers, day-care staff, grocery store workers and prison guards), and adults 75 and over as the next priority groups. After them, CDC recommends everyone with a preexisting condition such as diabetes, heart problems or obesity, and older adults. These are provisional priority groups from federal study groups. (emphasis added)

One can reasonably wonder if some of the politicians cutting ahead in line are among the radical right GOP crackpots who promoted promoting the spread of the infection by calling the pandemic a hoax or "just" the flu and/or by opposing masks and social distancing. Ah, the stench of fresh politician hypocrisy, GOP flavor.[1]

Each state is listed and its situation discussed. Some of the California discussion is below.

 

Footnote: 

1. As usual, the politicians will bicker, blither and bloviate. For some, their moral compasses are so broken that they do not know if they are showing leadership by example or just garden variety hypocrisy. A different WaPo article commented: "All members of Congress qualify for vaccine priority but disagree on whether this shows leadership by example or special treatment. .... The internal medicine resident at MedStar Georgetown University Hospital watched with frustration last week as inoculations were administered to scores of government leaders — including lawmakers who refused to wear masks and Trump administration officials who minimized the pandemic — while she and her colleagues were initially left unprotected because their hospital had received fewer than 1,000 doses of the scarce resource." (emphasis added)

That smells like GOP hypocrisy to me, even if it is leadership of some sort.

Russian Tyranny Rising

Dictator-kleptocrat for life Putin 

lying to Russian journalists a couple of weeks ago

The last remnants of democracy in Russia are being swept away as Putin crushes what is left of democracy and freedom in Russia. The Washington Post writes:

MOSCOW — As the Kremlin awaits what it fears will be a hostile Biden presidency, President Vladimir Putin is shifting course on two fronts — accelerating a drive to full-blown authoritarian control at home and escalating his defiant rhetoric against the West.

Domestically, a grudging tolerance for opposition and protest has been all but abandoned, while internationally, the Kremlin is taking particularly sharp aim at the United States ahead of the change of administration next month.

Russian-U.S. relations are going “from bad to worse,” Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said Wednesday, adding that Russia doesn’t expect “anything good” from President-elect Joe Biden and suggesting it adopt a policy of “total deterrence” toward Washington, with minimal dialogue.

In addition to signs that Biden will pursue a tough line with Moscow, Putin has seen his popularity slowly decline even as parliamentary elections loom in 2021. The move to double down against both the West and opponents at home reflects a perception of them as enemies working hand in hand to undermine Russia.

In this view, critical journalists and bloggers are potential terrorists, extremists or spies, and civic activists and nongovernment organizations may be labeled foreign agents. The Russian heroes Putin extols are spies who hack into U.S. agencies and domestic intelligence agents whose main role, like that of Stalin’s secret police, is the repression of dissent.

A raft of new, repressive laws sees Russia moving from partial to all-out authoritarianism, said Andrei Kolesnikov, a political analyst at the Moscow Carnegie Center.

“There is an open war with civil society,” he said, noting the Kremlin’s concern that Putin — who could legally stay in stay in power until 2036 — may someday face protests like those in Belarus, where the August presidential election was condemned as rigged by the opposition and Western nations.  

A blizzard of recent legislation in the State Duma has made it harder to protest, easier to target opposition figures and activists and has given authorities broad scope to brand individuals as “foreign agents,” with five-year jail penalties for failure to meet reporting requirements. The government is also moving to curb foreign Internet sites such as Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.  

Putin maintains his grip by allowing loyalists in the military, intelligence, bureaucracy and law enforcement to guzzle Russia’s resources, Inozemtsev said. “This is a situation where this elite gang owns the country like private property and actually uses it for its enrichment.”

The tyrant-kleptocrat Putin is now fully showing his vicious dark heart. All the lies and hypocrisy his rhetoric and politics has been based on for years are as clear as an be. His friends and enablers must be overjoyed -- Utopia at last!! The tyrant and state has even moved to protect itself forever, giving Putin and his key enablers a pre-emptive pardon from everything for life in new laws. For example, Putin now has immunity from prosecution for life from all acts. He really can go out in the street and shoot widows, orphans and his relatives with impunity. America's tyrant-kleptocrat president is no doubt jealous of such wonderful possibilities.

On top of that, new laws classify as state secret all financial and personal information of millions of members of Russian intelligence bodies, security agencies, the judiciary, law-enforcement and regulatory agencies, the Russian military, and their relatives. Even crazy pedophile uncle Igor and sadist aunt Natasha are safe to do their things in peace and freedom.

Just think if all of that applied to Melania, Ivanka, Jared, Eric, Don Jr., the president and all the GOP crooks. Yuck, to say the least.

One can only feel sorry about the hopeless misery, kleptocracy and brutality that most or nearly all average Russians will live their lives under. If he had his way, that would be Putin's plan for America and Americans.

A Wealth of Insight

 

At the campus of the University of California, Berkeley, social psychologist Paul Piff paired off approximately 200 undergrad students and sent them into windowless rooms to play the board game Monopoly. With a random coin toss, one of the players in each game was selected to be the “rich” player, which granted them myriad advantages: they received twice the initial game money; they were entitled to double the normal bonus for passing “Go”; and they were allowed to roll two dice rather than one.

The altered rules made it clear to most participants that they were part of some kind of behavioral study, but they were unsure of its purpose, so they just played as instructed. With the use of hidden cameras, researchers observed that within 15 minutes, most of the rich players began to exhibit involuntary dominant behaviors. They slammed their game pieces more forcefully upon the board, made open displays of celebration, mocked the poor players for their misfortunes, and ate considerably more of the free pretzels on offer. But when they were interviewed after the game, the majority of the rich players tended to cite their own playing prowess for their victories, giving little or no credit to the initial, overwhelming, and randomly assigned economic advantage.

A related study by the same group of researchers took place in California, where the law requires drivers to stop for pedestrians waiting to cross at a crosswalk. The study showed that there is a strong inverse correlation between the expensiveness of an automobile and its driver’s tendency to yield to pedestrians.

https://www.damninteresting.com/curio/a-wealth-of-insight/