Global Warming as a Precursor to a New Ice Age

Posted on August 6, 2021 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, August 6, 2021

Climate change is a long process whose effects vary considerably both geographically and over time. The latest phase of climate change, popularly referred to as global warming, has been producing record high temperatures and storms that increase in violence and frequency in some places, and calm, lovely summer days elsewhere. On most days, there are many more high temperature locations than low ones, causing an average annual increase in global temperature.

One reason there is so much controversy over global warming and so many people willing to believe profiteers who want to convince them it’s not happening is that the place they live might have perfect weather on any given day. From that vantage point, it’s impossible to grasp the global impact. It’s much like election campaigns. If those who profit from spewing carbon into the atmosphere spend enough money trying to convince people that climate change is a left-wing hoax, many of them will be willing to believe last week’s record heat wave was just an aberration.

Actually, there’s a lot to worry about, and it’s not only more hurricanes and tornadoes, record droughts, raging wildfires that consume more forests and homes every year, and rising sea levels. If all that weren’t enough, there’s another issue on our horizon that could catastrophically affect all of us. The problem is well-known to scientists and oceanographers who’ve warned us about it for decades. Most people who hear it think it’s just another disaster scenario designed to scare us into changing the way we live, but it’s very real and even more of a threat than was thought a few years ago.

The issue is the systems of Atlantic Ocean currents that control temperatures in the northern hemisphere. That includes us. Ocean currents redistribute heat from the warmer regions in the Caribbean all the way north to Prince Edward Island in Canada, but global warming is making those currents unstable. (The link is to an article on CNN’s website, this morning, that explains the problem and reports on a just-published research report that is alarming scientists.)

Simply put, “The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) — which the Gulf Stream is a major part of — helps maintain the energy balance in the Atlantic Ocean. It is often described as a ‘conveyor belt’ that takes warm surface water from the tropics and distributes it to the north Atlantic. The colder, saltier water then sinks and flows south.” The process depends on the fact that salt water is denser than fresh water, but melting ice caps and glaciers have been dumping fresh water into the Arctic Ocean at an increasing rate, part of a normal cycle of climate variation, but one that industrialization has accelerated.

As more fresh water mixes with northern oceans, their salinity decreases. Scientists have long warned that if this continued, the Gulf Stream would eventually become unstable and cease to flow. It’s the kind of esoteric warning that’s easy to dismiss, but the consequences of the loss of the Gulf Stream would be catastrophic to the United States and the world.

The Gulf Stream maintains the temperate climate of all of northeastern North America. If it were to suddenly cease flowing, the entire northeastern United States would be plunged into an endless winter. The result would be the formation of icepacks and glaciers from Maryland to Maine and north into Canada. Every northeastern city north of Richmond, Virginia would become uninhabitable within a few years – some scientists believe it could happen in as few as five.

According to today’s report, a “study, published Thursday in Nature and Climate Change, warned of an almost complete loss of stability of the AMOC over the course of the last century. Researchers say it could be close to a collapse … though the threshold for such a collapse is still uncertain.”

The 2004 film, The Day After Tomorrow exploited this phenomenon. The film was viewed by most people as just another disaster movie, because the specific situation it described, a virtually instantaneous collapse of the forces that warm us, didn’t seem believable. The movie portrayed a highly unlikely (though possible) scenario, but the result it showed, everything north of Washington under ice in just a few years is a very real possibility.

Between 2004 and 2007, Kim Stanley Robinson, a highly respected author of speculative fiction based on hard science, published the trilogy, Science in the Capital (Forty Signs of Rain, Fifty Degrees Below Zero, and Sixty Days and Counting) that chillingly and brilliantly described how the United States would be affected by the loss of the Gulf Stream.

Twenty years ago, scientists were already seriously worried that if the polar icecaps continued to melt, the loss of the Gulf Stream would eventually follow. We’re already close to the tipping point, and there is little reason to believe we won’t cross it. The ice caps are melting faster today than they have since the last ice age.

This is neither a joke or nor a scare story. It’s real, hard science. Take it seriously.

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Reality vs Science Fiction

Posted on August 5, 2021 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, August 5, 2021

Science fiction is a broad genre that examines countless visions of our possible futures. Some are complete nonsense – vampires, zombies, monsters devouring cities, dinosaurs coming back to life – they make for good action films but have little meaning otherwise. Alien invasions and extinction event-causing asteroids are possible, but unlikely, not the sort of things we worry about every day. But the good stuff, based on sound science or scientific theory, offers us windows into future social trends, explorations, discoveries, and human evolution.

As the effects of climate change intensify and we are wracked by pandemics, as automation produces chronic unemployment on a massive scale, and critical resources become scarce and prohibitively expensive, life on Earth will be under increasing pressure. Are those things combined likely to exterminate human life? Probably not, but they could have catastrophic effects on the sustainability of our societies, quality of life, and national economies.

In the worst case, billions of lives could be lost, and civilization could be set back to pre-industrial times. If history is our guide, there will be constant warfare and the loss of governments’ abilities to maintain order and protect their citizens. Life on Earth would be nightmarish.

But science fiction isn’t only about doom, gloom, and disaster. It’s mostly about hope and optimism and challenge and accomplishment. It’s about providing productive arenas for humanity’s restless energy and need to improve and excel, to improve society and sustain economies without resorting to war. It is, in fact precisely what John F. Kennedy meant sixty years ago: “We choose to go to the Moon … and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win …”

Exploration and expansion resulted in some awful things: wars, the destruction of entire civilizations and cultures, and slavery to name a few. But they are also what enabled our industrial and technological development. Human societies must constantly evolve and improve themselves or stagnate. As I wrote in The Billionaires’ Space Race, the search for other places that can sustain human life is more than justified by the near certainty that at some point in the future our survival will depend on them. But the likelihood of some catastrophe in the uncertain future isn’t the only reason to explore space, or even the best one.

The best reason is what John Kennedy talked about, the constant renewal of the human spirit, revitalizing the belief that no challenge is too great, and the incomparable feeling we experience from achieving those hard goals. If you’re old enough, you remember how exciting each step of the Kennedy’s challenge was. Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, sitting on the edge of our seats as astronauts (both Russian and American if you’re a pure fan of the science) were launched into space. Especially that day in 1969 when Neil Armstrong stepped onto the surface of the Moon in the midst of the Woodstock festival. The contrast between those events says more than I could ever express here.

What if, in the midst of pandemics and political struggles, with science under attack by the forces of greed and decadence, we attempted something really bold? Michelle Obama might put it, “When they go small, we go BIG!” What if, for all the reasons discussed above, but mostly to prove to ourselves that there’s no limit to what we can do, we decided to explore habitable planets around other stars? The Journal of Astronomy and Astrophysics reported today that astronomers have discovered a star thirty-five light years from Earth orbited by five planets. Three are likely to be habitable, one of which may have an oxygen atmosphere and water oceans. That one might be a new home for humanity.

What if we re-imagined Kennedy’s 1960 vision to reach the Moon as a search for such a new home? Thirty-five light years is a long way – 206 trillion miles – the distance light travels in that time. To get there we would need to build Generation Ships, modern day Noah’s Arks, and supply them with everything colonists will need to establish a new society. They’re called Generation Ships because they’re self-contained worlds that travel for hundreds of years, perhaps dozens of generations before reaching their destination, because they would attain only a fraction of light speed. The only problem with such a goal is that none of us or our great, great, … great grandchildren will be alive when it arrives.

People once thought going to the Moon was a fantasy, but we got there despite Vietnam and the domestic turmoil it created. Maybe what we learn trying to find a new home in the stars will help us preserve the one we have. If the idea captures your imagination, click here for a list of the best Generation Ship fiction written in the last seventy years.

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Is Hungary a Vision of America’s Future?

Posted on August 3, 2021 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, August 3, 2021

The idea is not original with me. I witnessed an important event that supports it, but I am grateful to Boston College historian Heather Richardson for bringing it to light today in her newsletter, Letters from an American. (If you’re interested in an objective view of the day’s events presented in a historical context, I highly recommend it.) Richardson wrote about the erosion of democracy in Hungary. Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who has held that position since 2010, has been systematically dismantling the apparatuses that are vital to a democratic society for eleven years.

According to Richardson, “Orbán has been open about his determination to overthrow the concept of western democracy.” His first target was the media, which he subjected to a reward and punishment loyalty test that had zero tolerance for political opposition. His parliament re-wrote Hungary’s constitution in 2012 to increase Orban’s power, which enabled him to stack the country’s judicial and election systems with loyalists and reward his financial supporters by greatly increasing their wealth. Richardson concluded that “[w]hile Hungary still has elections, state control of the media and the apparatus of voting means that it is impossible for Orbán’s opponents to take power.”

Sound familiar? It should. In case there is any doubt about what this could mean for America, Orban now has a new friend in right wing media star Tucker Carlson. Orban spent a quarter of a million dollars to arrange an appearance on Carlson’s FOX News program, and Carlson recently visited Orban in Hungary. Orban’s transformation of Hungary’s democracy into a one-party system dominated by an autocratic “strong man” in just eleven years fits perfectly with Carlson’s view of how America should evolve. Not incidentally, Donald Trump is in full agreement.

Much has been written about the similarity between Trump’s tactics and the rise of Fascism in 1930s, and Hungary appears to be quietly following the same Fascist playbook. But it’s not only Professor Richardson’s article that convinced me. I was in Hungary in 2015, a few months before Donald Trump was elected president. With all the chaos Trump has generated, it can be difficult to remember the specifics of the outrage he sparked back then with his inflammatory rhetoric about immigrants, refugees, and White Supremacy. Apparently, the rest of the world took notice and greeted his potential election with considerable alarm. Could this actually be the United States of America they were observing?

I happened to arrive in Budapest during the week of the mass exodus of refugees fleeing from war-torn Syria. The status of those refugees dominated international media for months, with several countries, led by Germany, Austria, and Sweden pledging to accept and shelter hundreds of thousands. Giving refugees resident status wasn’t necessarily the humanitarian gesture it seemed to be, as those nations were desperately in need of low-end workers, but it was a workable solution that saved countless families. Countries like France and the UK, where anti-immigrant sentiment had been growing, encountered strong opposition to resettling Syrian refugees within their borders, but even they reached a workable accommodation.

The route taken by the army of Syrian refugees, almost entirely families traveling on foot carrying everything they owned, passed through Budapest. On my second day in Hungary, Prime Minister Orban delivered a scathing, televised address attacking the refugees, calling them criminals and terrorists, and loudly proclaiming that Hungary was a Christian nation that did not want Muslims. The refugees were corralled in Budapest’s main railway terminal, and forced to continue their march along the international highway connecting Hungary to Austria and Germany.

European media described Orban as the Hungarian Donald Trump, which in 2016, really got my attention. It meant fear of Trump’s values and ambitions for America had already spread to Europe and dominated its news media. Perhaps I was naïve to be shocked, but it made me see the danger Trump posed at home in a new light. Thus, this blog.

If the prospect of Tucker Carlson and FOX News partnering with Orban, the way they have with Trump for six years doesn’t horrify you, it should. It’s one thing to compare Trump to Mussolini and Hitler, but most Americans are ambivalent about Hungary if they feel anything at all. The idea of an unabashedly biased right wing media outlet with tens of millions of viewers posturing Hungary as the future of Europe scares me. With their lack of respect for facts, holding up Orban’s transformation of Hungary as the nation-state of the future can only strengthen the trend toward one-party autocracy in America.

Is that the future we want?

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America at a Critical Turning Point

Posted on July 30, 2021 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, July 30, 2021

Political processes and the evolution of nations occur at a snail’s pace. Like observing a receding glacier, we only realize how significantly things have changed when we look back and compare today’s reality with that of years or decades ago. But the frustrating rate at which things change is merely the inertia of an entity of 350 million people, and a dangerous illusion that can blind us to potentially disastrous trends until it’s too late to do anything about them. The situation is even more perilous when we approach a confluence of multiple trends all pushing us in the same wrong direction.

We’re approaching one of those critical nexuses now, as the forces of division, false narrative, and a fascist-like cabal of wrong-headed, power mad politicians work to undermine our democracy. History has proved time and again that burying our heads in the sand only encourages and enables them. We can either control the future of our country or willingly cede it to forces of anarchy or autocracy.

It’s important to remember that people who want to change America from the world’s beacon of hope and freedom into an isolated, racist, xenophobic wasteland are in the minority. They do not represent the values of most Americans, but if we don’t all wake up to the dangers they pose, they will have no trouble imposing their will on the rest of us, because our system is flawed in ways that make it vulnerable. We only exist as a nation because revolutionary elements prevailed two hundred and fifty years ago. Anyone who thinks it can’t happen again, either through armed insurrection or a bloodless political coup is naïve.

Donald Trump seized on the divisiveness and partisanship that had been a growing menace for decades and nurtured it with a toxic mix of racist fear-mongering and the false patriotism of White Supremacy. They added a badly distorted view of the Second Amendment that encourages people to think they have the right to take the law into their own hands using automatic weapons to reverse political decisions they dislike. But the most egregious tactic used by those who would undermine our Constitution is the erosion of truth, which has always been the most powerful force wielded by would-be dictators. Visionaries like Friedrich Nietzsche and George Orwell understood the power of false narrative and language that distorts reality. The disease that is Trumpism is attempting to use that entire arsenal to achieve the goal of one-party government under their control.

In the brief time Joe Biden has been president, Trump loyalists have triggered a movement to restrict the voting rights of entire populations whose views oppose them, while intimidating most Republicans in Congress to fight against the national voting rights bills that would end gerrymandering and guarantee equal access to voting to all Americans. In true Orwellian style, they have redefined bipartisan government as a sellout to radical socialism and have adopted obstructionism as their principal mode of operation. Trump is waging a cynical campaign of threatening any Republican lawmaker who supports bipartisan legislation with defeat by mobilizing his base against them in primary elections.

But those are far from the most cynical tactics Trumpers are using. Trump would perpetuate the horrendous death toll from COVID, for which his own political agenda is largely responsible, by undermining the efforts of the Biden administration and the entire community of public health officials and medical professionals to vaccinate our population. If that’s not bad enough they want to re-write history and whitewash the January 6th insurrection. Rest assured that they will fight to the bitter end to prevent those who planned and executed the attack on the Capitol from being held accountable and prosecuted. If that is allowed to happen, they will feel empowered to even more violence and to believe that our Constitution is no longer valid.

We cannot wait any longer. Americans who believe in the values of our founders, no matter how flawed their implementation may have been, must wake up. As we rapidly approach election season, 2022, both Trump loyalists and traditional Republicans are becoming desperate about the possibility of losing power for years to come. The senatorial races in Georgia and the flipping of the four critical states that gave the 2016 election to Trump have them terrified that they cannot win with policies and moral values. The only things left to them are undermining the efforts of the current administration to rebuild the country and stealing future elections by assuring that only the “right people” vote.

2020 exhausted all of us, but if we care about the future, we have no choice but to fight for it, starting now.

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Re-writing the History of the January 6th Insurrection

Posted on July 27, 2021 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, July 27, 2021

As the House Special Committee begins to receive testimony in its investigation of the January 6th insurrection at the Capitol, we are hearing gut-wrenching testimony from the police officers who were most directly involved in facing off against the White Supremacist MAGA mob. Not incidentally, they were also the officers who suffered the worst physical and emotional trauma from the event.

As we review the testimony of Capitol Police and DC Metropolitan Police officers, illustrated by videos from police body cams, Capitol security surveillance cameras, and videos taken by insurrectionists brazen enough to document what they were doing, we should first take a step back and review what some House members said about the attack. In May, some of Donald Trump’s most ardent supporters in the House Republican Caucus spoke out against what they called misrepresenting a few thousand tourists as an armed insurrectionist mob.

By now, every American has either seen hours of videos of what happened on January 6th or watched it live on TV while it was occurring. The mob had guns, knives, lead pipes, baseball bats, fire extinguishers – even flagpoles wrapped in American flags – all used as weapons to bludgeon and torture law enforcement officers who were protecting the very Republicans (as well as the entire Congress) who now dispute that what we all saw really happened.

Representative Andrew Clyde (R, GA) said the mob was just people moving “in an orderly fashion in between the stanchions and ropes taking pictures … you would actually think it was a normal tourist visit.” Is that what you saw? Representative Pat Fallon (R, TX), calling reports about the insurrection overblown, said, “Our friends in the mainstream media are quite fond of labeling January 6 as an insurrection or even a rebellion,” as if our own eyes weren’t witness enough.

Representatives Paul Gosar (R, AZ) and Jody Hice (R, GA) both addressed the single casualty among the rioters. A rioter named Ashli Babbitt who had wrapped herself in an American flag was shot by a Capitol police officer attempting to break into the House chamber, as many in the mob were chanting that the Representatives should be captured and killed. Gosar and Hice claimed that only Trump supporters lost their lives that day and wanted the police officer prosecuted. The Justice Department exonerated the officer. More to the point, four police officers died defending the Capitol against the mob, and many more were seriously injured.

The nation watched then President Trump egg the mob on and tell them to march on the Capitol. We also saw Trump’s lawyer, Rudi Guiliani, Senator Josh Hawley (R, MO) and Representative Mo Brooks (R, AL) encourage the crowd to violence if the Congress failed to reverse Joe Biden’s defeat of Trump in the 2020 election. It is clear to any objective viewer that the mob was there at Trump’s bequest, supporting his attempt to overturn the election, despite his claims of fraud having been rejected in more than sixty lawsuits, by mostly Conservative judges. It is also clear that Trump was willing to undermine the Constitution and threaten the existence of our republic to retain power, in the style of twentieth century fascists.

If anyone doubts that Trump cares more about himself than the good of the nation, consider that his sole pre-occupation since Biden’s inauguration has been to discredit the leadership of the Republican party and attempt to purge anyone disloyal to him personally from its ranks. As Representative Adam Kinzinger (R, IL) said during this morning’s hearings, Trump’s actions threaten our democracy, and trying to cover up the insurrection or repaint it as a peaceful protest is an insult to the American people.

Kinzinger and fellow Republican Liz Cheney (WY) have been ostracized by House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy and called “Pelosi Republicans” because they support the Speaker’s attempt to get at the truth, all at the direction of Trump, whose only remaining weapon is the divisiveness he nurtured and fostered. He continues to work behind the scenes to scuttle all efforts at bipartisan governing in the Congress. Despite the overwhelming popularity of the COVID relief act that sustained millions of people who lost their income because of the pandemic, and the 83% popularity of the bipartisan infrastructure bill worked out by twenty Senators, (10 Democrats and 10 Republicans,) Trump calls every Republican who supports bipartisan government a traitor and a sellout to socialist radicals.

He has also quietly been the leading voice of the anti-vaccine movement which is now responsible for COVID caseload spikes in five states, all Republican-led with the lowest percentage of vaccinated citizens. For Trump, it still is and always will be all about him. So what if 500,000 of the 600,000 COVID deaths in our country are already on his hands? The CDC predicted today that we will soon see 200,000 new cases per day, but Trump couldn’t care less about those, either.

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The Billionaires’ Space Race

Posted on July 20, 2021 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, July 20, 2021

This morning’s Blue Horizon launch of four people into “near space,” was perfect by every standard. It went off precisely on time, going straight up, as advertised, to a maximum altitude of seventy miles, flying a perfect parabola after the engines shut down. The booster made a vertical landing exactly where it was intended to, two miles from where it took off. The occupants in the mostly glass capsule, designed for optimum viewing, got to experience three minutes of weightlessness, floating around and whooping with joy before they strapped in for the descent back to Earth.

Coming down, the capsule and its passengers were in free fall until it reached the altitude at which an airliner would be in its final landing approach, when its main parachutes deployed (perfectly.) The numbers displayed on our television screens said it touched down in the west Texas desert at a vertical speed of 15 mph, about as fast as you’d hit the water from an eight-foot diving board. Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the event was that the whole thing took less than fifteen minutes – an entire space mission viewed on live TV in a quarter of an hour without commercials.

The passengers were the world’s wealthiest human, Jeff Bezos, his brother, Mark, eighty-two-year-old Wally Funk, an early female aviator whose dream to become an astronaut was derailed by her gender, and eighteen-year-old Oliver Daemen. Bezos’ launch followed on the heels of Richard Branson’s rocket plane flight to much nearer space, and not to be outdone, Space X’s Elon Musk, a much wealthier billionaire than Branson will soon make his own visit to suborbital space.

The billionaires’ space race raises questions, chief among them, “Why?” We hear a lot about ego trips, the privileges of wealth, and importantly, whether it has value for average people or is just a publicity stunt to market a space tourism industry. A brief ride like the one Bezos took this morning currently costs $250,000, and the Washington Post reports 600 people have already reserved tickets. Imagine what trips to orbiting resorts will cost and who will be able to afford them.

What does all this mean to you and me? First, it’s fun. This morning’s brief flight was great entertainment, in part because of its brevity; no tense waits for a ship to achieve orbit or re-establish communication, no long days in orbit or traveling to the vicinity of the moon. Everything happened so quickly, there wasn’t time for worrying or nail biting. And who, watching, didn’t ask, “Would I have the courage to climb into that capsule?”

In case we didn’t notice, (I’m sure most people watching didn’t,) an astrophysicist who was assisting Anderson Cooper on CNN’s coverage, said the real significance of the test flight was to showcase the astounding level of scientific and engineering expertise America possesses. Bezos, Branson, and Musk are all investing their own money, but they capitalized on the billions of dollars of investment by the government to get our space program where it is today. The question of whether to invest more, even private funds, is a valid one that has a complex answer.

This morning’s launch was done in total transparency with the entire world watching, a huge risk that reflected Bezos’ confidence in his people. It did a lot to enhance our prestige internationally, and there were some notable subtleties. Ground control was just a moderate-size room staffed by four people, and the whole Texas launch complex could fit into a small corner of the one at Cape Canaveral. That, combined with the re-usability factor foreshadows a new generation of space exploration that won’t bankrupt any treasuries.

Still, millions of people ask why do it at all. There are traditional answers, all valid, like building industries in orbit that can benefit from the lack of atmosphere and weightlessness. Like the early space program, technology spinoffs will quickly find their way into consumers’ shopping carts. Remember the world before Tang and styrofoam? We don’t even know what we’re missing.

But the most compelling reason to make space travel and exploration routine and cost-effective is the long-term survival of humanity. We’ve all thrilled to disaster movies and novels that depicted the end of life on Earth: nuclear war, out-of-control pandemics, monsters unleashed from the thawing permafrost. They’re all science fiction, but some, like possible asteroid impacts are based on solid science. Astronomers and astrophysicists are nearly unanimous that such a catastrophic event is inevitable, whether it occurs tomorrow or ten thousand years from now. When it does, humanity will need somewhere else to live.

This is not a new idea. Almost ninety years ago Edwin Balmer and Phillip Wylie published the novel, When Worlds Collide. In 1950, Immanuel Velikovsky published Worlds in Collision, which despite the similar title was a scholarly study of ancient history and archaeology. Velikovsky effectively argued that the dinosaurs were wiped out by a near collision between Earth and another planet-sized body that shifted Earth’s axis of rotation by sixty degrees; that is, much of what used to be near the equator suddenly found itself in Siberia.

We know these things happen; we also know most asteroids capable of such devastation are discovered accidentally when they come close to Earth’s orbit. We could wake up any morning to the news that we’ll all be dead by Thursday. That sounds like a damn good reason to establish self-sustaining habitable colonies off Earth ASAP.

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A Fascist America?

Posted on July 16, 2021 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, July 16, 2021

Back in 2017, when I first broached the subject of Donald Trump’s apparent infatuation with the tactics Adolf Hitler used to solidify and expand his power, some readers nodded sadly in agreement, some scoffed, and some got really angry – not at Trump, but at me for daring to compare him to the monster responsible for the Holocaust. To be fair, they had a point. Trump’s concentration camps contained Mexican “rapists and drug dealers,” not Jews and Gypsies, and the death toll in Trump’s camps (including children) was less than sixty. Hitler murdered 100,000 times as many.

When, last evening, Stephen Colbert called Trump a Fascist, his New York audience cheered as if Colbert had announced that the Yankees had just defeated the Red Sox. (Alas, the game had been rained out.) Colbert was paraphrasing the remarks of Joint Chiefs Chairman, General Mark Milley, who had been interviewed by Pulitzer Prize-winning authors Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker for their just-released book: “I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump’s Catastrophic Final Year.” Milley, a graduate of Princeton, Columbia, and the Naval War College, was appointed to serve as Chairman by Trump in 2018 and was kept on by President Biden.

There have been many tell-all books about the former president, none of them complimentary, and there will be more coming out. The unanimity with which well-respected journalists and historians have trashed Trump’s performance in office raises some important questions. Why hasn’t there been a single book written praising him? Do only angry, disgruntled people write books, as Trump would have us believe? And there’s the ultimate question: what will it take to get through to people who are still mesmerized by Trump’s message of hate and right-wing extremism? I don’t expect the Proud Boys to change their minds, although a few expressed disillusionment after being convicted of various crimes related to the January 6th Insurrection. What about the millions of people who voted for Trump who are not racists and hate-mongers? When will enough be enough?

I understand that people on the right have no use for the discredited Michael Cohen, no matter that everything he has said or written proved accurate. I also understand their negative reaction to left-leaning journalists, even famous ones like Carl Bernstein who is best known for his writings on Watergate. But no one would ever call Bernstein’s partner, Bob Woodward, a lefty, and Woodward’s books and articles about every president since Nixon have always been viewed as fair and objective. His view of Trump is like all the others’.

Similarly, the comments of prominent members of Trump’s administration, H. R. McMaster, James Mathis, John Kelly, Rex Tillerson, to name a few, painted Trump as angry, vengeful, ignorant, and very often deranged. Even loyalist Steve Mnuchin announced that he couldn’t take being around Trump after the Insurrection.

When General Milley, who subscribes to the protocol of never publicly criticizing a superior officer speaks out, every American who cares about the future of our country should pay attention. What Milley said about Trump should terrify them. His allusions to Nazi tactics and specifically to Hitler leave no doubt about how he feels. Milley says Trump’s behavior in the months after he lost the 2020 election brought America to “a Reichstag moment.” He likened The Big Lie, Trump’s attempts to subvert state election officials, and his attempts to influence judges he felt owed him favors to the things Hitler did to consolidate his power. He called Trump supporters marching in the streets of Washington and several state capitals Brownshirts and said Trump was a threat to our democracy.

Milley had feared that Trump might try to overthrow the government, but was confident he would fail because the military would never support such an action. Nor would the CIA, the NSA, or law enforcement agencies. Milley has no doubt that if he could have gotten away with it, Trump would have transformed America into a Fascist state. Lest anyone doubt his meaning, a week after the Insurrection Milley said of Trump’s extremist supporters, “These guys are Nazis, they’re boogaloo boys, they’re Proud Boys. These are the same people we fought in World War II.”

That’s what the general in charge of our entire military thinks of Trump. Like the others who spoke out before him, he describes Trump as a dangerous, wannabe tyrant. Parties and ideologies aside, if you’re a patriotic American who supports the Constitution, isn’t that enough to convince you that our first priority must be making sure Trump is never in a position of power again?

This isn’t the first time people have feared the rise of Fascism in America. In 1935, as Hitler was dismantling the Weimar Republic and replacinig it with a Nazi police state, Sinclair Lewis published, It Can’t Happen Here. Can’t it?

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Getting at the Truth

Posted on July 15, 2021 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, July 5, 2021

The next few weeks should be fascinating if you don’t mind sitting on the edge of your seat waiting to see if your elected leaders do their jobs or continue to trash the Constitution. The issue, of course, is which version of truth will be recorded as history, the one being propagated by Trump or the one supported and thoroughly documented by 100 million witnesses who watched everything live on television, nearly six months of law enforcement investigations, and judges who looked at more than sixty law suits and ruled that Trump’s claims of a rigged election were without merit.

Part of the problem we face is the evolution of both social media and more traditional journalistic media. The development of nuclear technology gifted the world with the ability to destroy itself virtually instantaneously with no prior diplomatic or ethical discussions of its use. In like manner, the various information outlets have grown in every direction that could find a wealthy sponsor, but that growth is more like a malignant tumor’s than a healthy expansion of knowledge and information.

Futuristic writers anticipated this situation decades ago. Several prominent authors predicted that the unregulated expansion of the Internet would result in the demise of verifiable truth, replaced by noise from every political and extremist quarter stretching the limits of First Amendment-protected free speech. Unfortunately, those who predicted that chaos would replace honest journalism proved to be prescient. Tens of millions of Americans get their “facts” from media outlets and social media manipulators who are more interested in promoting radical agendas than dealing with reality.

There have always been fringe groups who made absurd, unprovable claims. But this is the first time the leader of the movement to undermine our moral and ethical values as well as the basic ideas our Founders wrote into the Constitution was a former president. A president who has no regard for truth, is motivated solely by increasing his own power and wealth, and is supported by a heavily armed extremist fringe of the population is the most serious threat our nation has ever faced.

Many would add, “since the Civil War,” but I contend that the current threat is worse. In the 1850s, the antagonists who disagreed about slavery and the universality of human rights never pulled any punches about what they believed. Today, we are dealing with a seething underground movement that perpetuates destructive lies. That movement is driven by anger, bigotry, greed, and misogyny. To date, no amount of objective reporting and fact-checking has made a dent in their crazy theories.

If the Trumper movement is allowed to take over the Congress, America will pay a back-breaking price. We will be hopelessly divided, almost as if the Civil War never ended, and our standing in the world will be degraded as claims by adversaries like Vladimir Putin that our professed values are nothing but hypocrisy will be shown to be true. Although it is almost trite to say it, this is a potentially catastrophic existential threat our grandchildren will have to face.

Trump’s lies brought us a half million unnecessary deaths from COVID and resulted in the bulk of the anti-vax movement that threatens countless more. They brought us the insurrection on January 6th, and have set up a critical confrontation in the House of Representatives. At the center of this battle is Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who, after blaming the attack on the Capitol on Trump, realized he needed the votes from Trump’s loyal base to maintain his leadership position and possibly his seat. Poor Kevin boxed himself into a very uncomfortable corner, having told the truth under the stress of the moment, and then having had to bow and scrape to his maniacal leader ever since.

We see this coming to a head today. McCarthy has no choice but to appoint five members to the House Committee investigating the insurrection. As a result, yesterday, he actually told the truth again, denying Trump’s Big Lie and acknowledging that Joe Biden won the presidency in 2020 fairly and overwhelmingly. Today Trump announced that his lackey, McCarthy, had been summoned to New Jersey where he will be read the riot act and informed in no uncertain terms of exactly how Trump wants the House hearings to go.

Combined with extremist media predictions that Trump will be reinstated as president (whatever that means) next month, McCarthy is very much between a rock and a hard place. The outcome could be something quite radical – the House Minority Leader might even show some balls and integrity, and stand up to a deranged demigod who is trying to destroy America, but don’t bet on it.

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Leaving Afghanistan, Triage on a Global Scale

Posted on July 9, 2021 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, July 9. 2021

Triage is an unpleasant but necessary concept. Sometimes, we can’t save everyone no matter how deserving or worthy they are. It happens on battlefields, during epidemics, and in routine hospital settings, as when there are more patients who need transplants than available organs. While we rarely refer to them that way, we instinctively make triage decisions every day. It could be canceling a vacation because replacing a broken-down car is more important, or sadly for many, having to choose between food and health care.

The unilateral decision to end the forever war in Afghanistan is precisely that kind of decision. Setting aside all the diplomatic and intelligence mishaps that have kept us mired there for twenty years, the decision to leave is rooted in present-day realities. We sent troops to Afghanistan as part of our misguided invasion of Iraq in reaction to nine-eleven. President George W. Bush authorized the mission to root out Al Qaeda and kill Osama bin Laden.

The decision was allegedly based on national security concerns, but if we’re being honest, the national mood after terrorists hijacked four commercial airliners in a devilish plan to take down the World Trade Center Towers, the Pentagon, and either the White House or the Capitol demanded revenge. Our national psyche still hadn’t recovered from the humiliation of Vietnam and our political leaders succumbed to the need to show both Americans and the world that we weren’t going to pushed around by primitive warlords on a quest for Jihad.

Worse, the missions in Iraq and Afghanistan evolved into nation-building, which experts correctly predicted would be a disaster. It was partially successful in Iraq, which was more secular and industrially developed, but a complete failure in Afghanistan, which outside of the capital is a nation dominated by petty chieftans and religious zealots.

Should we have known better? In 1979, Russia invaded Afghanistan and attempted to occupy and remake it in its own image. Even with massive resources and relatively easy supply lines, they were stuck there for ten years, and the debacle bankrupted and ultimately caused the collapse of the Soviet Union. Yes, we should have known better.

Our twenty years in Afghanistan has cost more than 2,400 deaths and nearly 30,000 injuries among American military personnel. 40,000 Afghans were killed on our watch and the country is in the midst of a civil war that is far beyond our ability to influence. Afghanistan was broken when we got there, and we are leaving it in chaos. History will look back on our twenty years there as the worst series of political, diplomatic and military blunders in our history.

Our government claims we’re leaving because we accomplished our mission of killing Osama bin Laden, which was more of a symbolic victory than a substantive one. It cost American taxpayers more than a trillion dollars, the same amount President Biden wants to spend to rebuild our infrastructure. We can’t sugar coat this mess, and we can’t afford to lose any more lives or waste any more resources desperately needed to recover from COVID. Leaving Afghanistan is an obvious triage decision, plain and simple.

Republicans will continue to snipe at Biden, claiming he is conceding Afghanistan to the Taliban and the terrorists they harbor. But the Trump-dominated party can’t say that too loudly, because Biden’s decision to end the war simply fulfills the provisions of a deal then President Trump made with the Taliban in an attempt to shore up his re-election prospects.

President Biden, who chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee during most of the Cold War, understands how Afghanistan wrecked the Soviet Union as well as anyone. He could have rolled over and extended the deadline to withdraw, but he refused to sacrifice any more American lives and throw good money after bad. And reacting to the diplomatic chaos his predecessor caused, he needed to assert that a commitment made by the American government means something, even one made by a self-serving president.

As President Biden attempts to heal our nation from COVID and end the reign of right-wing domestic terror unleashed by Trump, he understands that all of our resources must be focused here at home. As he fights for legislation to help Americans recover against Republicans who are suddenly budget conscious after passing a tax bill that spent a trillion dollars to further enrich the already wealthy, he is ending the financial drain of a tragic and meaningless war, that has averaged $50 billion per year. That should help keep a lot of bridges and buildings from collapsing.

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Comparing Then and Now

Posted on July 6, 2021 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, July 6, 2021

Running for re-election in 1984, Ronald Reagan asked Americans if they were better off than they were when he took office. Yesterday, President Biden delivered an Independence Day speech that asked Americans to compare where we were a year ago with how things are today. It was an uplifting speech, reminding us how far we’ve come in combating the pandemic, emerging from our darkest days and being able to hug each other again. No more visiting our friends and loved ones virtually or with a pane of glass separating us from them, hands pretending to touch on either side of the glass.

Biden talked about government as a tool for helping people, that during his five-and-a-half months in office, government resources were mobilized to assure that vaccines were available to everyone who wanted them, that millions who lost jobs as a result of COVID were kept afloat by stimulus checks while our economy re-opened. Republicans since Ronald Reagan have postured the government as the enemy; Biden re-asserted the notion that the government has a responsibility to protect the health and welfare of all Americans in the mold of Franklin Roosevelt, John Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson.

He didn’t brag about the size of the crowd cheering him or the booming stock market. Rather than boasting about increasing the wealth of the richest Americans and sustaining a tax code that places the burden of paying America’s bills on the middle class, he repeated his consistent theme that we’re all in this together. Maximizing the use of government resources moved America from the nation whose response to the pandemic was one of the worst and deadliest in the world to one whose recovery and use of vaccines outstrips every other developed nation’s. Rather than suggesting that he knew more than all of his advisors and Cabinet officers and claiming personal credit for our success, he shared it with every American.

Biden’s nature is to focus on the positive while reminding us that recovery is a long process that cannot be taken for granted. But it’s also important to remember how much we’ve lost, how much damage his predecessor did to our country. Biden won’t ever directly attack Donald Trump. It’s not his style. But with Trump in the wings attempting to disrupt and obstruct everything Biden does, the rest of us don’t have that luxury. Biden asked us to compare this Independence Day with a year ago. I would expand the question.

If Americans continue to be vaccinated, COVID should just be a bad memory a year or two from now. The more serious threat to our country is the internal divisions that have come to dominate our politics and personal lives. They weren’t created by Donald Trump, but his political movement thrives on them the way a vampire survives by draining the lifeblood from its victims.

America has never fully realized the fruition of its founding ideals, but each of the generations since slavery was abolished has been better than the one before it. We have a long way to go, but let’s give ourselves some credit for how far we had come, at least until 2015. The clearest measure of how little Trump cares about America is that virtually everything he said and did in the past six years has been part of an attempt to turn back the clock on the progress we’ve made at realizing the dream of universal equality and opportunity. That means reversing progress in equality before the law, learning to treasure diversity rather than suppress it. It means widening rather than narrowing the income gap between gender and racial groups. It means abandoning our decades-long attempt to balance capitalism against the need to support the health and welfare of every American.

But that’s not the worst harm Trumpism has done and continues to do. Trump attempted to redefine truth and distort our notion of greatness. Greatness is not isolation and separation or a society defined by hatred and bigotry. We don’t get to be a great nation simply by claiming to be one. The divisiveness and anger unleashed and nurtured by Trump has affected our personal lives, too. Do you know anyone who hasn’t had long-standing friendships destroyed by Trumpism or experienced the same disaffection within families, parents and children, siblings, cousins, people they once valued and loved who we barely speak to each other any more?

That’s the sad legacy of the Trump administration and the thing Joe Biden most desperately wants to help us heal from. He does it by positive example, but it’s up to us to heal ourselves. Those who continue to spout lies and hate cannot be allowed to have a dominant voice. We know who they are. We can rid ourselves of them when we next cast our votes.

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