Reflections...

 

This article from CNN got me to thinking about aftermaths.

Wednesday, January 20^th, 2021 marks a turning point of sorts for the U.S. Government; a changing of the guard, as they say.  So, like all “goodbyes,” it’s time to look back on a life well badly lived.

It’s time for us political-types, here on DisPol, to start reflecting on what Trump has left in his turbulent wake.  Are there lessons to be learned?  Oh, I think so.

Your Task: Start writing your post-Trump presidency epitaphs, obits, and/or speeches now. 

-Epitaphs are the shortest route.  You know, those “Here lies X,” followed by a single and succinct yada, yada, yada statement about that person.

-Or, if you are the wordy type, make it in a longer “obituary form” like we see in newspapers.  You know, “He was a” this and “he was a” that.  “He left behind a” this, and “He left behind a” that. 

-Or, if you fancy those corporate dinner speeches (or roasts ;) regaling the accomplishments of an outgoing CEO, “What can we say about our company’s leader that we all don't already know?  He was a…. [your speech here].” 

-Or, if you prefer some other route, go for it!  Granny Susan is an easy grader.  Whether rough or polished, everyone gets an “A”!  :)

Don’t delay.  Start working up your “Farewell to DJT" now! Next Thursday, assuming no nukes have gone off and the Earth still stands, I will solicit your responses.

Thanks for participating and recommending.

The Dangerous, Irrational Path Forward

The radical right GOP is struggling with how to maintain power and not lose too much public support. There is a split among hard core supporters of the president and the rest who appear to be uncomfortable to some degree with what he stands for, says and does. 

Regardless, the GOP will continue to act in the GOP's best interest first and in the public interest second. The fundamental struggle stays the same, i.e., concentrated power and wealth (autocracy) on the political right vs. distributed power and wealth (democracy) on the political left. What also looks to be constant is the irrationality and incoherence the radical right seems destined to continue to rely on in its messaging (dark free speech). 

A couple of recent articles support that assessment of the game going forward. A New York Times article discusses GOP thinking about upcoming the impeachment trial. The NYT writes:

But it remained unclear whether the 17 Republican senators whose votes would be needed to convict Mr. Trump by the requisite two-thirds majority would agree to find him guilty. Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, worked feverishly to whip up opposition to a conviction, arguing that it would only further inflame a dangerously divided nation.

Senators considering breaking with the president needed to look no further than Ms. Cheney to understand the risks.

In a petition being privately circulated among Republicans on Capitol Hill, a group of lawmakers led by Representatives Andy Biggs of Arizona, the chairman of the ultraconservative Freedom Caucus, and Matt Rosendale of Montana, claimed that Ms. Cheney’s vote to impeach the president had “brought the conference into disrepute and produced discord.”

“As we figure out where Republicans go from here, we need Liz’s leadership,” Representative Mike Gallagher, Republican of Wisconsin, said, praising her for being “unafraid to clearly state and defend her views” even if they were unpopular. “We must be a big-tent party, or else condemn ourselves to irrelevance.” 

The internal split is obvious. So is the radical right's incoherence and autocratic attitude. Graham's concern about further inflaming a dangerously divided nation is nonsense. The truth is that the GOP has relied heavily on dark free speech to successfully inflame and divide Americans. The radical right needs Americans to be inflamed and divided. By now it is clear that an impeachment is not going to significantly change that. 

The radical right's autocratic core ideology is on display in the rationale attacking Cheney because she “brought the conference into disrepute and produced discord.” What Biggs and the other hard core radical right authoritarians cannot tolerate is dissent within the party. They had their RINO hunts to get rid of internal dissent. The only disrepute to be found in what Cheney did is in the radical right tribe itself. With the rest of the public, what Cheney did created some credibility for the GOP and tended to reduce division, not foment it.

For context, it appears that the insurrection of last week is causing some loss of support for the president. Given that, convicting him of insurrection arguably would be more socially unifying than divisive. 

Disapproval is approaching an all-time high 

In another NYT article on the impeachment, the radical right's heavily biased perceptions of reality and thinking is apparent. That is highlighted in the following:

That the comparisons were apples and oranges did not matter so much as the prisms through which they were reflected. .... But [the president's] allies complained that he had long been the target of what they considered unfair partisan attacks and investigations. “Donald Trump is the most dangerous man to ever occupy the Oval Office,” declared Representative Joaquin Castro, Democrat of Texas. “The left in America has incited far more political violence than the right,” declared Representative Matt Gaetz, Republican of Florida. The starkly disparate views encapsulated America in the Trump era.

Gaetz, a hard core supporter of the president and radical right autocrat, points to political violence of the left as if that somehow justifies what the president did. In this case, two wrongs do not make a right. Gaetz is reduced to blatant irrationality in his attempt to defend and deflect attention from what the president did.  

Assuming that people like Biggs and Gaetz represent the majority of the GOP leadership, the way forward looks to be irrational, reality-detached and dangerous. So far, Cheney's dissent is not the controlling mindset among radical right elites, which Cheney is part of. The threat her mindset poses to rationality and democracy is somewhat less. That appears to be the better part of the radical right.

He is Impeached: What's Next?

Piss off -- you don't pay me enough to take this job seriously

Welp, he's impeached again. The rhetoric from the majority of republicans who opposed impeachment did not signal any means or hint of reconciliation. They did not recognize the president's role in what happened. 

One radical right GOP line of argument was to point to the damage an impeachment would do. That clearly signals that future allegedly unwarranted and unreasonable democratic bad acts will justify similar future bad acts by republicans, e.g., impeachment. That logic is simple: If there is a democratic wrong in our opinion, we will do a second wrong when we get the chance. In other words, there was no hint of House republicans even wanting to rise above partisanship despite what the president did. What the president did is simply beside the point. It was not even something most House republicans acknowledged. So, if the dems do something in the future that republicans believe is bad and unjustified, republicans damn well will do the same back at dems when they get the chance. That logic is just plain nuts.

Another indication of the depth of partisan poison is McConnell's apparent change of heart about what the president did. Yesterday, he said he supported impeachment. Today he said he is unsure.

Is there more basis for optimism than I am seeing? If so, what am I missing? 

And, I am still trying to wrap my brain around the deplatforming of the president. The radical right is livid about it.

The Nipah Virus: The Next Pandemic?

Now that the SARS-CoV-2 virus is still out of control, it is time to widen our focus. Global monitoring efforts have produced a list of potential future pandemic pathogens. Included on the top ten bad bug list is the innocent-sounding Nipah virus. Who could be afraid of a little Nipah? 

This little stinker lives in fruit bats and occasionally infects humans. There is no treatment for it and the death rate is at least 40% (up to 75%). The BBC writes:

It's first light in Battambang, a city on the Sangkae River in north-west Cambodia. At the morning market, which starts at 05:00, motorbikes weave past shoppers, kicking up dust in their wake. Carts piled high with goods and covered in colourful sheets are perched next to makeshift stalls selling misshapen fruits. Locals wander in and out of the stands, plastic bags bulging with their purchases. Elderly ladies in wide-brimmed hats crouch over blankets covered with vegetables for sale. In other words, it's a fairly normal morning market. That is, until you crane your neck to the sky.

Hanging quietly in the trees above are thousands of fruit bats, defecating and urinating on anything that passes below them. On closer inspection the roofs of the market stalls are covered in bat faeces. "People and stray dogs walk under the roosts exposed to bat urine every day," says Veasna Duong, head of the virology unit at the scientific research lab Institut Pasteur in Phnom Penh and a colleague and collaborator of Wacharapluesadee's.

The Battambang market is one of many locations where Duong has identified fruit bats and other animals coming into contact with humans on a daily basis in Cambodia. Any opportunity for humans and fruit bats to get near to one another is considered a "high risk interface" by his team, meaning a spillover is highly possible. "This kind of exposure might allow the virus to mutate, which might cause a pandemic," says Duong. 

From 2013 to 2016, Duong and his team launched a GPS tracking programme to understand more about fruit bats and Nipah virus, and to compare the activities of Cambodian bats to bats in other hotspot regions.  

Despite the dangers, the examples of close proximity are endless. "We observe [fruit bats] here and in Thailand, in markets, worship areas, schools and tourist locations like Angkor Wat – there's a big roost of bats there," he says. In a normal year, Angkor Wat hosts 2.6 million visitors: that's 2.6 million opportunities for Nipah virus to jump from bats to humans annually in just one location.

Two of these are Bangladesh and India. Both countries have experienced Nipah virus outbreaks in the past, both of which are likely linked to drinking date palm juice.

At night, infected bats would fly to date palm plantations and lap up the juice as it poured out of the tree. As they feasted, they would urinate in the collection pot. Innocent locals would pick up a juice the next day from their street vendor, slurp away and become infected with the disease. 

There you have it pandemic watchers. Remember the little Nipah.

Question: Should some resource and effort to develop a Nipah vaccine be initiated, or should the US wait until it mutates into a more transmissible, pandemic-ready version, then put Trump in charge of the US response so that we develop herd immunity the old-fashioned way?