Wanting Answers, Finding Pain

The Great Unraveling

Nobody likes a looter. Or those who torch local businesses, destroying livelihoods and lifetime efforts. Except where the reaction to that such destruction serves a useful purpose in the minds of those who have disruption as an end unto itself. “As unrest [over the George Floyd blue on black killing] has spread, the Trump administration has insisted that outsiders using protests as cover for acts of violence were left-wing anarchists, not right-wing extremists, such as white nationalist groups that have been cited as a threat by the Department of Homeland Security… Atty. Gen. William Barr, at a news conference on Saturday [5/30], blamed ‘anarchic and left extremist groups’ who traveled across state lines to take part in protests, without specifying how that conclusion was reached.” Tribune News Service, May 31st.

Indeed, after the street violence continued, Trump tweeted that he would label as a “terrorist organization” the extreme domestic far-left anarchist “anti-fascist” movement (unstructured, not a single entity) – loosely called “antifa.” While this designation would prevent Americans from joining if it were a foreign entity (like ISIS), the “‘United States of America has no legal authority to designate any domestic entities as ‘terrorist organizations,’ ’ said Steve Vladeck, a national security law expert at University of Texas.” Tribune News Service. As will be noted in greater detail later, it seems, however, as if the players on the extreme right represent the largest faction stirring up the violence. Leftists? A distraction from the pandemic? Perfect for the President.

Time for Trump to get tough. At least with the leftists. “When the looting starts, the shooting starts,” said Donald Trump, threatening to call up the regular military to deal with the threat. Even though there is a legal prohibition against using our regular military (vs the National Guard) to function as a civilian police force. Violence in reaction to the police killing of George Floyd may have started in Minneapolis but it rapidly spread across the country, and even to US Embassies overseas.

Asked by a reporter on May 30th if his statements might be stoking racial violence, President Trump responded (suggesting a MAGA rally in front of the White House): “No not at all ... I have no idea if they’re going to be here. By the way, they love African Americans, they love black people. MAGA loves the black people.” If nothing else, his statement underscores how even he sees MAGA followers as clearly distinct from African Americans. I am reminded of the Trump description of the torch-bearing white supremacists in Charlottesville in August of 2017, where a peaceful anti-racism protester was run over and killed: “…you also had people that were very fine people on both sides.” Now about those right-wing agitators all over the United States.

I watched some of the footage of some particularly interesting protesters, lurking in the background. One intrepid camera crew zoomed in on a group of men wearing Hawaiian shirts, carrying assault rifles, in the shadows behind those in the open decrying the police killing. A signature look for a right wing militia known as the Boogaloo Boys. Plants? The real thing? At a press conference, state and city officials confirmed that a significant portion of those protesters arrested weren’t local. Additionally, there was clear evidence that much of the violence was supported by right wing militia. Funny, that wasn’t mentioned in any Justice Department or White House statements. Just that “radical leftist” thing. Also interesting: even those protesters wearing masks, and many were not, were hardly engaged in social distancing.

What is obvious is that the widespread civil unrest has shifted the national consciousness away from the pandemic, despite the rising and even record-breaking infection and mortality rates in California, Virginia, North Carolina, Wisconsin, Alabama, Mississippi, Missouri, South Carolina, Utah, Arkansas, Puerto Rico, Maine, West Virginia, Vermont, Wyoming, Montana and Alaska… or where those rates are pretty much staying level: Texas, Florida, Maryland, Georgia, Indiana, Ohio, Colorado, Minnesota, Tennessee, Washington, Arizona, Iowa, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, New Hampshire, Idaho, Guam and Hawaii. Statistics gathered and reported in the May 30th New York Times. A whole lot of states in primarily rural areas and states where significant “reopening” has begun. Interesting. Signs of building into a second wave? It would seem so. Nobody seems to care.

Americans are not a patient lot. Drawn out pain evokes anger and defiance… even when the villain is a virus that also doesn’t seem to care. So, we have succumbed to, “it’s the economy stupid,” even if tens if not hundreds of thousands must die or face permanent disability. Denial is easier. And then there’s “Operation Warp Speed,” a pedal to the metal effort to deliver a viable COVID-19 vaccine and release it (somehow) in a widespread inoculation campaign as soon as possible… even though normal testing for such vaccine usually takes years.

Michael Hiltzig, writing for the May 31st Los Angeles Times, writes: “If anything is known for sure about the scientific battle against the novel coronavirus, it’s that the quest for a vaccine has been unprecedentedly intense, with rapid development and speedy production the paramount goals.

“But some experts are raising a yellow flag. Given the stakes — the virus has caused more than 100,000 deaths in the U.S., among more than 350,000 worldwide — they’re cautioning that the process of developing a vaccine should be slowed down, not sped up.

“‘History tells us that speed kills,’ says Arthur Caplan, a bioethicist at NYU Langone Medical Center and a co-author of an article in the Journal of the American Medical Assn. warning that missteps under Operation Warp Speed, the vaccine development initiative in the Trump White House, could undermine public confidence in vaccines broadly… There’s strong historical precedent for concern about shortcuts.

“The key lesson about the hazards of rushing a vaccine into production comes to us from Berkeley, where a small pharmaceutical company named Cutter Laboratories was chosen by the government in 1955 as one of five private manufacturers of the Salk polio vaccine.

“The Salk vaccine incorporated a dead polio virus, potent enough in its active guise to produce a strong antibody reaction in humans but inactivated through treatment with formaldehyde so it wouldn’t cause disease… Because of a series of manufacturing errors and poor government oversight, however, some of Cutter’s vaccine lots were contaminated with the live virus. An estimated 40,000 children contracted polio from Cutter’s vaccine. About 200 victims were permanently paralyzed, and 10 died.

“The so-called Cutter incident was ‘one of the worst biological disasters in American history, exploded the myth of the invulnerability of science and destroyed faith in the vaccine enterprise,’ observed Paul Offit, a vaccine expert at the University of Pennsylvania whose 2005 book is the definitive account of the episode.” But this administration is all about shortcuts, unkeepable promises, fake statistics and diving headlong into untested medical solutions… like the President’s misplaced advocacy of hydroxychloroquine, an antimalarial with severe (and possible fatal) side effects.

Federal policies even foster the spread of the virus. “In the past several months, while most Americans have been ordered to shelter at home, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has shuffled hundreds of people in its custody around the country. Immigrants have been transferred from California to Florida, Florida to New Mexico, Arizona to Washington State, Pennsylvania to Texas.

“These transfers, which ICE says were sometimes done to curb the spread of coronavirus, have led to outbreaks in facilities in Texas, Ohio, Florida, Mississippi and Louisiana, according to attorneys, news reports and ICE declarations filed in federal courts… The immigrants began to show symptoms in late April, about a week after arriving at the Rolling Plains Detention Center in Haskell, Texas [pictured above].

“They had been held in dorms with other recent transfers, according to a county official. First three detainees tested positive for COVID-19. Then 20 more. As of Friday [5/29], 41 immigrants detained at Rolling Plains had been infected. Just three county residents have tested positive.

“In Pearsall, Texas, 350 miles south, transfers turned another detention center into a virus hotspot. Frio County had just a single confirmed case of COVID-19 in early April. Then two detainees who had recently been moved to Pearsall's South Texas ICE Processing Facility tested positive, ICE told county officials. Thirty-two immigrants have now been diagnosed, almost 90 percent of the state's official COVID-19 tally in Frio County.” NBC News, May 31st.

But distractions were increasingly valuable to the beleaguered Trump administration. They don’t want us to dwell on CV-19 outbreaks in ICE facilities. They need us to focus on other issues where they can look as if they are in control. Like the Trump-Twitter-social media battle, where the President seeks to rein in an increasingly Web/mobile-driven spreader of “fake news,” oddly enough, with increasing animosity from both sides of the aisle. “Republicans claim Twitter and the other platforms are deliberately targeting conservatives and unfairly applying rules against hate speech, incitement and harassment.

“Democrats have the opposite complaint: They charge that the platforms don’t enforce the rules often enough. They complain that Trump and others have been allowed to get away with flagrant falsehoods and calumnies — which is true.

“Last week’s crisis focused on Twitter, which enforced its internal rules on Trump for the first time. First the company attached warnings, labeled ‘get the facts,’ to two presidential tweets that had called mail-in ballots ‘fraudulent’ and predicted a ‘rigged election’ in November.

“Then Twitter added an anti-violence warning to a Trump tweet about riot-torn Minneapolis… Trump and his allies said those disclaimers amounted to censorship. They didn’t. Twitter still published all the president’s words; now his readers will see the warnings as well.” Doyle McManus for the May 31st Los Angeles Times.

Distractions? We know that Donald Trump cannot appear to be conciliatory to protesters challenging police departments, however justified. That just would not sit well with his base. Building on his “get tough” against the radical left (generally referring to Democrats), he seems to welcome the civil unrest to draw attention away from his abysmal failures to contain the pandemic.

He obviously also relishes the opportunity to assail the press, now even his own platform of choice (Twitter), as yet another way to show his right-wing, populist constituency that he remains the tough, no nonsense problem solver they elected in 2016. Guess what? The public consciousness is indeed distracted. Except the country is actually more polarized, fewer solutions are likely and, as the above numbers suggest, the pandemic is far, far from over. But at least the President can look tough again.

I’m Peter Dekom, and too many Americans are looking for silver bullets and easy buttons to end a seemingly endless and devasting period in American history… one that just might portend the end of a great nation.





Nobody likes a looter. Or those who torch local businesses, destroying livelihoods and lifetime efforts. Except where the reaction to that such destruction serves a useful purpose in the minds of those who have disruption as an end unto itself. “As unrest [over the George Floyd blue on black killing] has spread, the Trump administration has insisted that outsiders using protests as cover for acts of violence were left-wing anarchists, not right-wing extremists, such as white nationalist groups that have been cited as a threat by the Department of Homeland Security… Atty. Gen. William Barr, at a news conference on Saturday [5/30], blamed ‘anarchic and left extremist groups’ who traveled across state lines to take part in protests, without specifying how that conclusion was reached.” Tribune News Service, May 31st.

Indeed, after the street violence continued, Trump tweeted that he would label as a “terrorist organization” the extreme domestic far-left anarchist “anti-fascist” movement (unstructured, not a single entity) – loosely called “antifa.” While this designation would prevent Americans from joining if it were a foreign entity (like ISIS), the “‘United States of America has no legal authority to designate any domestic entities as ‘terrorist organizations,’ ’ said Steve Vladeck, a national security law expert at University of Texas.” Tribune News Service. As will be noted in greater detail later, it seems, however, as if the players on the extreme right represent the largest faction stirring up the violence. Leftists? A distraction from the pandemic? Perfect for the President.

Time for Trump to get tough. At least with the leftists. “When the looting starts, the shooting starts,” said Donald Trump, threatening to call up the regular military to deal with the threat. Even though there is a legal prohibition against using our regular military (vs the National Guard) to function as a civilian police force. Violence in reaction to the police killing of George Floyd may have started in Minneapolis but it rapidly spread across the country, and even to US Embassies overseas.

Asked by a reporter on May 30th if his statements might be stoking racial violence, President Trump responded (suggesting a MAGA rally in front of the White House): “No not at all ... I have no idea if they’re going to be here. By the way, they love African Americans, they love black people. MAGA loves the black people.” If nothing else, his statement underscores how even he sees MAGA followers as clearly distinct from African Americans. I am reminded of the Trump description of the torch-bearing white supremacists in Charlottesville in August of 2017, where a peaceful anti-racism protester was run over and killed: “…you also had people that were very fine people on both sides.” Now about those right-wing agitators all over the United States.

I watched some of the footage of some particularly interesting protesters, lurking in the background. One intrepid camera crew zoomed in on a group of men wearing Hawaiian shirts, carrying assault rifles, in the shadows behind those in the open decrying the police killing. A signature look for a right wing militia known as the Boogaloo Boys. Plants? The real thing? At a press conference, state and city officials confirmed that a significant portion of those protesters arrested weren’t local. Additionally, there was clear evidence that much of the violence was supported by right wing militia. Funny, that wasn’t mentioned in any Justice Department or White House statements. Just that “radical leftist” thing. Also interesting: even those protesters wearing masks, and many were not, were hardly engaged in social distancing.

What is obvious is that the widespread civil unrest has shifted the national consciousness away from the pandemic, despite the rising and even record-breaking infection and mortality rates in California, Virginia, North Carolina, Wisconsin, Alabama, Mississippi, Missouri, South Carolina, Utah, Arkansas, Puerto Rico, Maine, West Virginia, Vermont, Wyoming, Montana and Alaska… or where those rates are pretty much staying level: Texas, Florida, Maryland, Georgia, Indiana, Ohio, Colorado, Minnesota, Tennessee, Washington, Arizona, Iowa, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, New Hampshire, Idaho, Guam and Hawaii. Statistics gathered and reported in the May 30th New York Times. A whole lot of states in primarily rural areas and states where significant “reopening” has begun. Interesting. Signs of building into a second wave? It would seem so. Nobody seems to care.

Americans are not a patient lot. Drawn out pain evokes anger and defiance… even when the villain is a virus that also doesn’t seem to care. So, we have succumbed to, “it’s the economy stupid,” even if tens if not hundreds of thousands must die or face permanent disability. Denial is easier. And then there’s “Operation Warp Speed,” a pedal to the metal effort to deliver a viable COVID-19 vaccine and release it (somehow) in a widespread inoculation campaign as soon as possible… even though normal testing for such vaccine usually takes years.

Michael Hiltzig, writing for the May 31st Los Angeles Times, writes: “If anything is known for sure about the scientific battle against the novel coronavirus, it’s that the quest for a vaccine has been unprecedentedly intense, with rapid development and speedy production the paramount goals.

“But some experts are raising a yellow flag. Given the stakes — the virus has caused more than 100,000 deaths in the U.S., among more than 350,000 worldwide — they’re cautioning that the process of developing a vaccine should be slowed down, not sped up.

“‘History tells us that speed kills,’ says Arthur Caplan, a bioethicist at NYU Langone Medical Center and a co-author of an article in the Journal of the American Medical Assn. warning that missteps under Operation Warp Speed, the vaccine development initiative in the Trump White House, could undermine public confidence in vaccines broadly… There’s strong historical precedent for concern about shortcuts.

“The key lesson about the hazards of rushing a vaccine into production comes to us from Berkeley, where a small pharmaceutical company named Cutter Laboratories was chosen by the government in 1955 as one of five private manufacturers of the Salk polio vaccine.

“The Salk vaccine incorporated a dead polio virus, potent enough in its active guise to produce a strong antibody reaction in humans but inactivated through treatment with formaldehyde so it wouldn’t cause disease… Because of a series of manufacturing errors and poor government oversight, however, some of Cutter’s vaccine lots were contaminated with the live virus. An estimated 40,000 children contracted polio from Cutter’s vaccine. About 200 victims were permanently paralyzed, and 10 died.

“The so-called Cutter incident was ‘one of the worst biological disasters in American history, exploded the myth of the invulnerability of science and destroyed faith in the vaccine enterprise,’ observed Paul Offit, a vaccine expert at the University of Pennsylvania whose 2005 book is the definitive account of the episode.” But this administration is all about shortcuts, unkeepable promises, fake statistics and diving headlong into untested medical solutions… like the President’s misplaced advocacy of hydroxychloroquine, an antimalarial with severe (and possible fatal) side effects.

Federal policies even foster the spread of the virus. “In the past several months, while most Americans have been ordered to shelter at home, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has shuffled hundreds of people in its custody around the country. Immigrants have been transferred from California to Florida, Florida to New Mexico, Arizona to Washington State, Pennsylvania to Texas.

“These transfers, which ICE says were sometimes done to curb the spread of coronavirus, have led to outbreaks in facilities in Texas, Ohio, Florida, Mississippi and Louisiana, according to attorneys, news reports and ICE declarations filed in federal courts… The immigrants began to show symptoms in late April, about a week after arriving at the Rolling Plains Detention Center in Haskell, Texas [pictured above].

“They had been held in dorms with other recent transfers, according to a county official. First three detainees tested positive for COVID-19. Then 20 more. As of Friday [5/29], 41 immigrants detained at Rolling Plains had been infected. Just three county residents have tested positive.

“In Pearsall, Texas, 350 miles south, transfers turned another detention center into a virus hotspot. Frio County had just a single confirmed case of COVID-19 in early April. Then two detainees who had recently been moved to Pearsall's South Texas ICE Processing Facility tested positive, ICE told county officials. Thirty-two immigrants have now been diagnosed, almost 90 percent of the state's official COVID-19 tally in Frio County.” NBC News, May 31st.

But distractions were increasingly valuable to the beleaguered Trump administration. They don’t want us to dwell on CV-19 outbreaks in ICE facilities. They need us to focus on other issues where they can look as if they are in control. Like the Trump-Twitter-social media battle, where the President seeks to rein in an increasingly Web/mobile-driven spreader of “fake news,” oddly enough, with increasing animosity from both sides of the aisle. “Republicans claim Twitter and the other platforms are deliberately targeting conservatives and unfairly applying rules against hate speech, incitement and harassment.

“Democrats have the opposite complaint: They charge that the platforms don’t enforce the rules often enough. They complain that Trump and others have been allowed to get away with flagrant falsehoods and calumnies — which is true.

“Last week’s crisis focused on Twitter, which enforced its internal rules on Trump for the first time. First the company attached warnings, labeled ‘get the facts,’ to two presidential tweets that had called mail-in ballots ‘fraudulent’ and predicted a ‘rigged election’ in November.

“Then Twitter added an anti-violence warning to a Trump tweet about riot-torn Minneapolis… Trump and his allies said those disclaimers amounted to censorship. They didn’t. Twitter still published all the president’s words; now his readers will see the warnings as well.” Doyle McManus for the May 31st Los Angeles Times.

Distractions? We know that Donald Trump cannot appear to be conciliatory to protesters challenging police departments, however justified. That just would not sit well with his base. Building on his “get tough” against the radical left (generally referring to Democrats), he seems to welcome the civil unrest to draw attention away from his abysmal failures to contain the pandemic.

He obviously also relishes the opportunity to assail the press, now even his own platform of choice (Twitter), as yet another way to show his right-wing, populist constituency that he remains the tough, no nonsense problem solver they elected in 2016. Guess what? The public consciousness is indeed distracted. Except the country is actually more polarized, fewer solutions are likely and, as the above numbers suggest, the pandemic is far, far from over. But at least the President can look tough again.

I’m Peter Dekom, and too many Americans are looking for silver bullets and easy buttons to end a seemingly endless and devastating period in American history… one that just might portend the end of a great nation.