Predatory Sexual Conspiracy Theories Fomenting Hatred & Intolerance

Q-Anon tells us that Democrats are organized within a “deep state” of politically powerful pedophiles aiming to convert our children into their hapless victims. Mainstream Republicans, led by Texas Governor Greg Abbott and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, explain that those supporting Critical Race/Gender Theories (CRT) are trying to layer guilt on White children for slavery, Jim Crow laws and racial discrimination long since purged from our nation – despite massive evidence to the contrary – and are “grooming” young children to become part of our LGBTQ community, particularly to come out as “transgender.”

As with the Big Lie, they cite non-existent statistics and discredited “studies,” fabricate opinions into “facts” to support their cause against CRT, increasingly labeling books and lesson plans that contain what they believe to be distortions – indeed books and lesson plans that have been part of our national educational curricula for decades with no ill results – as corrupting young minds. The undercurrent of White Christian nationalism runs deep, a political belief that has resulted in reversing Roe vs Wade and a flood of anti-democratic Republican rhetoric echoed in CPAC meetings, hosting “races don’t mix” Hungarian autocrat Viktor Orban as a featured speaker.

This amped up rhetoric of exclusionary mantra, “White Christians only,” the notion of non-whites “replacing” the legitimate White powers designed to rule the United States, is reflected in another horrific statistic, enabled by lax gun laws and a plethora of military-grade assault weapons (over 20 million by some estimates) owned by US civilians: political violence. But the hatred is hardly relegated to the radical right. The reversal of Roe vs Wade produced seething hatred from the left as well.

“FBI Director Christopher Wray said the U.S. has seen a rapid increase in political violence and domestic extremism during an appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee, adding such events are now ‘almost a 365-day phenomenon’ across the country… Wray told lawmakers Thursday [8/4] the bureau had opened a number of investigations related to the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade in June, saying there had been a ‘general intensification of violence’ from both sides of the issue after Politico published a draft opinion prior to the ruling.

“‘I think this is part of a larger phenomenon that we are experiencing in this country right now,’ Wray told Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.). ‘I understand that passions run high, especially on an issue like abortion, but there’s just way too many people that seem to think that that justifies engaging in violence and destruction of property and threats of violence… I feel like every day I’m getting briefed on someone throwing a Molotov cocktail at someone over some issue,’ Wray continued. ‘It’s crazy.’

“‘From our perspective, I don’t care what side of the issue you’re on, I don’t care who you’re upset with or what you’re upset about, on abortion or anything else, you don’t get to use violence or threats of violence to act on it,’ Wray said. ‘And we’re going to go after that conduct aggressively. I feel very strongly about that, and I’ve communicated that very strongly to all of our field offices and our workforce.’… Wray made similar comments last year, saying the FBI’s domestic terrorism caseload had ‘exploded’ in just over a year and a half. A large portion of that work was related to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol…

“Axios notes that just hours after Wray’s testimony, the FBI charged a man Thursday [8/4] with arson for setting fire to a Planned Parenthood building in Kalamazoo, Michigan.” Huffington Post, August 5th. So much of this rising hatred is specifically related to personal and private sexual conduct. That many Christians hold life begins at conception, and thus feel the law must likewise define life, are unconcerned that other faiths, like Judaism, believe that life begins at birth. After abortion, nothing fires up hatred like the notion that the left is luring (“grooming”) American children into a world of LGBTQ “perversity.” Particularly the call to “anti-Christian” transgender status, which in the eyes of the religious right is a “choice”, not a biological reality.

As we shall see, this “social contagion” theory gave “proof” to concerned right-wing Christian that their assumptions were justified and “can be traced back to a 2018 paper published in the journal PLOS One [an open access scientific journal published by the Public Library of Science (PLOS) since 2006]. Dr. Lisa Littman, who at the time was a professor of behavioral and social sciences at Brown University, coined the term ‘rapid onset gender dysphoria,’ which she described as adolescents experiencing a conflict between their birth sex and gender identity ‘suddenly during or after puberty.’ These adolescents, she wrote, ‘would not have met the criteria for gender dysphoria in childhood’ and are experiencing dysphoria due to social influence.” Erik McGregor writing for NBC Today, August 3rd.

Unfortunately, Littman’s conclusions were just plain wrong as confirmed in a recently released survey: Sex Assigned at Birth Ratio Among Transgender and Gender Diverse Adolescents in the United States by Jack L. Turban, MD, MHS, Brett Dolotina, BS, Dana King, ALM and Alex S. Keuroghlian, MD, MPH, published August 3rd by the American Academy of Pediatrics in their journal. Their statistical report concluded that “Social contagion” is not driving an increasing number of adolescents to come out as transgender. “The study also found that the proportion of adolescents who were assigned female at birth and have come out as transgender also has not increased, which contradicts claims that adolescents whose birth sex is female are more susceptible to this so-called external influence…

“‘The hypothesis that transgender and gender diverse youth assigned female at birth identify as transgender due to social contagion does not hold up to scrutiny and should not be used to argue against the provision of gender-affirming medical care for adolescents,’ study senior author Dr. Alex S. Keuroghlian, director of the National LGBTQIA+ Health Education Center at the Fenway Institute and the Massachusetts General Hospital Psychiatry Gender Identity Program, said in a statement.” NBC Today.

The level of our passionate intolerance, a willingness to repeal democracy to force “my side as the only right side,” is unraveling the entire fabric that defines the United States of America. Given the constitutional bias favoring rural over urban voters (e.g., two Senators from each state regardless of population), a radical and unchecked Supreme Court plus rampant gerrymandering and voting restrictions, whether American democracy can withstand this onslaught of passionately held conspiracy theories and religious intolerance is very much in question. We hate each enough to kill each other! Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese leader Xi Jinping are smiling, hoping and biding their time.

I’m Peter Dekom, and that replacing democracy with the religious and intolerant world of White Christina Nationalism is so completely accepted by tens of millions of Americans is incredibly disturbing.

Repealing Science, Punishing Those Who Still Believe in It

 

We’ve already witnessed how Florida’s DeSantis-led legislature stripped Disney of its privileged governance and tax status in Florida because it openly supported its LGBTQ employees and opposed the “don’t say gay” law in that state. But we are now witnessing a massive movement to punish corporations that are gravitating away from fossil fuel-based energy and embracing green alternatives. As the August 5th New York Times notes:

“Climate change isn’t a partisan issue in many countries. Both right-leaning and left-leaning parties favor policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, even if they fight over the specifics of those policies. This consensus allowed the European Union to cut emissions sharply over the past few decades, as the threat of global warming became clearer.

“In the United States, of course, climate is a partisan issue. Nearly all elected Democrats favor actions that slow climate change. Almost no Republicans in major policymaking positions — including members of Congress and the Republican appointees on the Supreme Court — support these policies.” You have to wonder if Republicans don’t feel the searing heat, experience the more intensive tornados and hurricanes, face rising wildfire or flooding risks and are exempted from the desertification of once productive farmlands.

We’ve witnessed the politization of medical science during the struggle against COVID. But the anti-science movement is growing. For example, there has been a significant policy shift among nominal Republicans against physical science when encountering unequivocal proof of the cost of failing to contain climate change. Apparently, because the commonsense response requires big business and long-maintained fossil fuel extraction states to lose money, fighting climate change is “bad.” Notwithstanding trillions of dollars of consequential damages, tens of thousand of lost American lives and a massive degradation of health and quality of life for virtually all Americans.

You hear words like “woke” (but wasn’t Jesus Christ profoundly “woke”?), even as entire forests go up in smoke, taking homes and businesses with them, as farmers simply lose their livelihoods, and as major cities flood (Houston, Miami, etc.) and large swaths of state land (e.g., Kentucky) are underwater. It’s bad enough when Republicans do not vote to solve and contain climate change, but when the reach out to punish corporations willing to take responsibility for the consequences of unbridled climate change, these malign states simply go entirely too far.

As New York Times journalist, David Gelles points out (August 5th edition): “Nearly two dozen Republican state treasurers around the country are working to thwart climate action on state and federal levels, fighting regulations that would make clear the economic risks posed by a warming world, lobbying against climate-minded nominees to key federal posts and using the tax dollars they control to punish companies that want to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

“Over the past year, treasurers in nearly half the United States have been coordinating tactics and talking points, meeting in private and cheering each other in public as part of a well-funded campaign to protect the fossil fuel companies that bolster their local economies.

“Last week [end of July], Riley Moore, the treasurer of West Virginia, announced that several major banks — including Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan and Wells Fargo — would be barred from government contracts with his state because they are reducing their investments in coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel… Mr. Moore and the treasurers of Louisiana and Arkansas have pulled more than $700 million out of BlackRock, the world’s largest investment manager, over objections that the firm is too focused on environmental issues. At the same time, the treasurers of Utah and Idaho are pressuring the private sector to drop climate action and other causes they label as ‘woke.’…

“At the nexus of these efforts is the State Financial Officers Foundation, a little-known nonprofit organization based in Shawnee, Kan., that once focused on cybersecurity, borrowing costs and managing debt loads, among other routine issues… At conferences, on weekly calls, and with a steady stream of emails, the foundation hosted representatives from the oil industry and funneled research and talking points from conservative groups to the state treasurers, who have channeled the private groups’ goals into public policy.

“The Heritage Foundation, the Heartland Institute and the American Petroleum Institute are among the conservative groups with ties to the fossil fuel industry that have been working with the State Financial Officers Foundation and the treasurers to shape their national strategy.

“Many Democratic state treasurers support efforts to combat climate change and want banks and investment firms to be clear about risks posed to returns for retirees and others. Democratic lawmakers in California and New Jersey are working on legislation that would require their state pension systems to divest from fossil fuels. But Democrats have not mounted anything like the national campaign being orchestrated by the State Financial Officers Foundation.

“The Republican treasurers skirt the fact that global warming is an economic menace that is damaging industries like agriculture and causing extreme weather that devastates communities and costs taxpayers billions in recovery and rebuilding. Instead, they frame efforts to reduce emissions as a threat to employment and revenue, and have turned climate science into another front in the culture wars.

“‘This is a departure from their traditional roles,’ said Robert Butkin, the former Oklahoma treasurer and a professor at the University of Tulsa. ‘There used to be a strong nonpartisan and bipartisan ethic among treasurers, but you’ve seen a lot of that erode over the past several years.’”

Just tallying the global “natural disasters” literally caused or intensified by climate change should be enough to convince even the reddest of the red states that failing to contain global warming, particularly encouraging fossil fuel practices that make it profoundly worse, is to ignore the biggest existential threat mankind has ever faced. These fomenters of heat-driven misery need to be removed from office and banned forever from any leadership roles in our nation.

I’m Peter Dekom, and it’s beyond time for us to take steps to make sure that science fiction does not become scientific fact, before it is irreversibly too late.

No Phoenix Envy!

 

It’s a city in the Arizona desert where temperatures hold above 100 degrees for most of the summer. There’s always been a rumor about being able to cook on the sidewalks in Phoenix, but most locals deny that anyone ever does that. The enduring symbol of that searing heat: The seven-acre "Tent City Jail" in Phoenix (pictured above), created by “get-tough” Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio in 1993, closed after he lost the election in 2017… following lawsuits, federal investigations, a conviction for criminal contempt of court followed by a pardon by then-President Donald Trump. Temperatures in that outdoor facility routinely reached 120 degrees and even soared well beyond that threshold. 140 degrees in some tents.

Life in Phoenix and environs slows to a crawl with temperatures soar, but it is a city very familiar with being the hottest in the nation. OK, some might argue that Washington, D.C. is hotter, but that’s political dysfunction, not a thermometer-driven reality (it certainly is more humid in D.C.). The bad news is that global warming is pushing Phoenix from bad to badder to worse. Degree-by-degree, hot is getting steadily hotter. So hot, in fact, that the city has just appointed David Hondula as the city’s first director of its new Office of Heat Response and Mitigation.

“[Creating that office is just] one part of Phoenix’s response to a major challenge: Climate change is making America’s hottest city even hotter. Earlier this month, temperatures rose above 110 degrees for five days in a row; nighttime temperatures also stayed dangerously high. Average temperatures in the city are now 2.5 degrees hotter than they were in the middle of the last century. It isn’t just uncomfortable; it’s deadly. Last year, in Maricopa County, where Phoenix sits, there were 338 deaths associated with extreme heat. One hundred thirty of the people who died were homeless. The problem will get harder to address; by 2050, as climate change progresses, Phoenix could feel more like Baghdad, with some summer days hotter than 120 degrees.

“The heat office, launched last fall to focus both on immediate responses to extreme heat and longer-term solutions to help cool the city down, is bringing together work that was previously happening across departments and didn’t have a single point of accountability. ‘It’s very important to have a citywide look so that we can find solutions, whether it be in the built environment or how we manage open space,’ says Mayor Kate Gallego, who was elected in 2019 after campaigning on a sustainability platform. She also sees the opportunity for the city to become testbed for new technology to help with heat. ‘I want Phoenix to be the place where innovative companies with a solution to climate change come,’ she says.” Adele Peters writing for the June 27th FastCompany.com. As other red states are mired in denying or minimizing the impact of greenhouse gases causing climate change, Arizona is being hit so hard that looking the other way is not an option.

Indeed, as a tractor trailer with undocumented migrants, who paid a coyote for them to cross the border, produced 50 dead bodies cooked to death in late June, unable to open a locked door… That was in San Antonio, Texas… where it’s hot but not as hot as Phoenix. That Arizona city is beginning to implement specific goals to make life there a bit more livable: “The city now has dozens of miles of ‘cool pavement,’ streets treated with a reflective coating that an Arizona State University study found could lower the temperature of the surface by as much as 12 degrees compared to asphalt, and make the air above the ground cooler at night. Another program adds reflective coatings to roofs, which also helps reduce the need for air conditioning. Phoenix is also beginning to plant more trees in neighborhoods that have the least shade now, using a tree equity tool from the nonprofit American Forests to target the places most in need. ‘We’re trying to map ‘cool corridors’ in the locations where they’ll benefit the most people,’ says Gallego. In April, city workers and volunteers planted 259 trees in the first of these corridors, on a route that students use to walk to school. A $6 million allocation from the American Rescue Plan will be used to plant more trees.

“A combination of these changes can have a measurable impact. Climate modeling studies ‘suggest that with widespread deployment of cooling strategies, like cool roofs, and increasing the urban tree canopy, we can have a Phoenix of the future that is cooler than the one we have today, even as global warming continues,’ says Hondula. ‘So the opportunity is very, very significant.’ Some other factors can also help, he says, including a shift to electric cars or bikes, since gas cars generate heat. Everything is interrelated: If streets are shaded and comfortable enough for walking or waiting for public transit, people may also be less likely to drive short distances.

“To deal with blistering heat now, the city has a network of cooling centers that open in May and stay open throughout the summer; as the hot season lengthens, some advocates are pushing to keep them open through October. (In other cities, cooling centers typically only open during heat waves.) If someone walks into a public library, they can get a bottle of water and a cooling towel while they sit in the air conditioning.” Peters.

Tent City may be gone, but it remains a poignant symbol of the cruelty that grows from continuing to treat the symptoms and results of climate change… but doing little more than far-less-than-necessary efforts towards the reduction and elimination of the underlying the causes. Phoenix might seem extreme to many, but death from excessive heat, severe water shortages, crop failure from desertification (we really need to stop calling it “drought,” a temporary condition) are everywhere and increasing. We need to stop politicizing nature and the laws of physics; climate change cannot be a blue or red state choice. Neither nature nor physics care about the will of the people, the outcome of an election or the unpopularity of the pain. They started with nothing… and whether or people or like it or not… they have no particular issue starting over again.

I’m Peter Dekom, and we all need to open our eyes and just look at how the world is changing for the much worse because of unrelenting and expanding death and disaster from man-induced climate change… and act accordingly!

Who Is Tracking You Now?

 

So, you live in a red state with restrictive abortion laws. Your teenaged daughter, after trying to hide her reality from her parents and perhaps herself, finally declares the obvious: she’s pregnant, bewildered and confused, but knows that she is not remotely ready to give birth to a child. She is depressed and miserable… and you lack the resources to take her to a state where abortion procedures are available and fully legal under the pre-Roe v Wade 26-weeks standard… So… “Prosecutors say Jessica Burgess, 41, helped her daughter Celeste Burgess with an abortion earlier this year when medical records indicated she was more than 23 weeks pregnant – beyond the period during which the practice is legal. Celeste was 17 at the time, but is being tried as an adult.

“‘I don’t think I’ve ever had a case like this,’ Madison County Attorney Joseph Smith said Friday [8/5], according to the Lincoln [Nebraska] Journal Star. ‘Usually, abortions are performed in hospitals, and doctors are involved, and it’s not the type of stuff that occurred in this case.’

“Smith's office charged Jessica Burgess with performing or attempting an abortion on a pregnancy at more than 20 weeks (post-fertilization), and performing an abortion without being a licensed doctor. This was the first time in more than three decades in his position that he has charged anyone with those offenses.” Fox News, August 9th. It was Facebook posts that brought them down.

The cases that might be filed in the future may stretch into those working in an abortion-ban state assisting someone, often a family member, to travel to a “right to abortion” state for the procedure. What about folks in abortion-rights states legally mailing “morning after” pills to women in abortion-banned states? Can an abortion-rights state be forced to accord “full faith and credit” to prosecutors in an abortion-ban state against their citizens traveling seeking a legal out-of-state abortion? Or providing abortion information across state lines? The landscape will be littered with prosecutions and appeals that will clog our courts for years to come.

However, perhaps a more disturbing trend that has already developed in the prosecution and conviction of those charged, for example, with hate crimes: Prosecutors using rather easy access to social media as evidence of a crime. When can social media posts be used as evidence in a criminal trial, and, importantly, when can social media platforms be required to disgorge posts and identities of those posting information about abortions, which are legal in some states but not in others?

“Since before the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe vs. Wade in June, Big Tech companies that collect personal details of their users have faced new calls to limit that tracking and surveillance amid fears that law enforcement or vigilantes could use those data troves against people seeking abortions or those who try to help them.

“Meta, which owns Facebook, said Tuesday [8/9] it received warrants requesting messages in the Nebraska case from local law enforcement on June 7, before the Supreme Court decision overriding Roe came down. The warrants, the company added, ‘did not mention abortion at all,’ and court documents at the time showed that police were investigating the ‘alleged illegal burning and burial of a stillborn infant.’… But in early June, the mother and daughter were charged with only a single felony for removing, concealing or abandoning a body, and two misdemeanors: concealing the death of another person and false reporting. It wasn’t until about a month later, after investigators reviewed the private Facebook messages, that prosecutors added the felony abortion-related charges against the mother.

“Whenever people’s personal information is tracked and stored, there’s always a risk that it could be misused or abused. With the Supreme Court’s overruling of the 1973 Roe vs. Wade decision that legalized abortion, collected location data, text messages, search histories, emails and seemingly innocuous period and ovulation-tracking apps could be used to prosecute people who seek an abortion, — or medical care for a miscarriage — as well as those who assist them.

“‘In the digital age, this decision opens the door to law enforcement and private bounty hunters seeking vast amounts of private data from ordinary Americans,’ said Alexandra Reeve Givens, chief of the Center for Democracy and Technology, a Washington-based digital rights nonprofit.

“Meta said it received a legal warrant from law enforcement about the case, which did not mention the word ‘abortion.’ The company has said that company officials ‘always scrutinize every government request we receive to make sure it is legally valid’ and that Meta fights back against requests that it thinks are invalid or too broad… But Meta gave investigators information in about 88% of the 59,996 cases in which the government requested data in the second half of last year, according to its transparency report. It declined to say whether its response would have been different had the warrant mentioned abortion.

“Until this May, anyone could buy a weekly trove of data on clients at more than 600 Planned Parenthood sites around the country for as little as $160, according to a recent Vice investigation. The files included approximate patient addresses, income brackets, time spent at the clinic and the top places people visited before and afterward.

“It’s all possible because federal law — specifically, the 1996 Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA — protects the privacy of medical files at your doctor’s office, but not any information that third-party apps or tech companies collect about you. This is also true if an app that collects your data shares it with a third party that might abuse it.” Associated Press, August 12th. Indeed, but what is “legally valid.” The willingness of big tech to provide information on individual users seems rather unbridled. Different platforms allow consumers to turn off tracking, but identifiers and a lack of digital sophistication make such actions less likely choices. Not to mention pre-Roe-reversal data. As Congress grapples with consumer “privacy” safeguards amidst a hodgepodge of state statutes, zealous prosecutors are working overtime to make sure that such limitations never apply to them.

I’m Peter Dekom, and I suspect even George Orwell could not envision the degree of possible “big brother” intrusion into the hands of an increasingly autocratic United States of America.

Adding Insult to India, Our Ugly Mirror to Failing Democracy?

Can “democratic” nations built in vastly different eras, slowly facing a dramatic incursion of highly biased religiosity into controlling political elites, sustain true pluralistic representation in national governance? It is a very relevant inquiry on the relevance of secular political systems during periods of hyper-accelerating change. The United States, founded in 1776 and having struggled through a Civil War and its continuing aftermath, is witnessing the virtual total takeover of a mainstream political party (the GOP) by a fundamentalist evangelical movement. India, founded in 1947 (and celebrating her 75th anniversary), has watched the evolution of a virtual takeover of its political governance by a Hindu nationalist party (Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, literally, the “Indian People’s Party”). The answer to the opening question is anything but clear.

We’ve seen parallel movements in Europe (e.g., Hungary’s nationalist Fidesz party and, while only 3% of the nation is in Europe, Turkey’s Cumhur İttifak party). While we have lambasted the Muslim extremism in theocracies like Shiite Iran or Sunni Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan, nations that do not pretend to be democracies, both India and the United States, which still claim to be representative democracies, seem to be veering rapidly away from pluralism towards Hindu nationalism, and White Christian nationalism, respectively.

In the United States, our Founding Father’s antipathy against cities vs the countryside, formulated in 1789 when 94% of the population was primarily engaged in farming, created several constitutional biases favoring rural America: how a constitutional amendment would pass, two US Senators from each state regardless of population, an apparent tolerance for gerrymandering to dilute urban voting, etc. In India, born in 1947 of a violent split between what became a predominantly Muslim Pakistan in the north and a primarily Hindu India in the south, those Muslim minorities (and other non-Hindu religions) that remained in India have faced decades of discrimination, particularly since the 2014 demise of the Congress Party and the ascension of Narendra Modi’s BJP. With Modi as Prime Minister, minorities have suffered terribly. Both nations claim to have successfully separated church and state, but…

Symbolically, “beef eaters” (mostly Muslims but also including Christians and others) have incurred the wrath, often facing beatings and even murder, of faithful Hindus who consider cows to be sacred. Modi and sympathetic regional state governors and local legislatures have slowly crushed these minorities, arresting members of the press who oppose them, shutting down newspapers along the way, and letting Hindu nationalists literally get away with murder.

In an August 15th editorial in the Los Angeles Times, Indian born Akhila L. Ananth, associate professor of criminal justice at Cal State Los Angeles, explains her view of Indian politics: “Modi has waged a political war against poor people, farmers, Indigenous and caste-oppressed groups [particularly those at the bottom of the caste system: Dalits] and Muslims, and because of that, Hindu nationalists now feel free to brutalize those communities. In 2019, he abrogated the semi-sovereign status of Kashmir, the territory trapped between Indian and Pakistani military rule. Thousands of people protested when Modi’s government approved a bill that set religion as a condition for citizenship by granting citizenship to only non-Muslims fleeing neighboring countries.

“In March, a school district in the southern state of Karnataka — where my family’s roots are — banned students from wearing hijab. Every day reports pile up on social media of Muslims being slain or sexually assaulted in India at the hands of Hindu nationalists. Meanwhile, journalists critical of Modi have been silenced, incarcerated and harassed. Human rights groups such as Amnesty International and other nongovernmental organizations have had to halt or limit operations in India.”

Writing for the August 14th Associated Press, Sheikh Saaliq explains India’s fall in the eyes of democracy watchdogs the world over: “[Despite India’s clinging to the notion, it is the world’s largest democracy] experts and critics say the country has been gradually departing from some commitments and argue the backsliding has accelerated since Modi came to power in 2014. They accuse his populist government of using unbridled political power to undermine democratic freedoms and preoccupying itself with pursuing a Hindu nationalist agenda.

“‘The decline seems to continue across several core formal democratic institutions ... such as the freedom of expression and alternative sources of information, and freedom of association,’ said Staffan I. Lindberg, a political scientist and director of the V-Dem Institute, a Sweden-based research center that rates the health of democracies… Modi’s party denies this. A spokesperson, Shehzad Poonawalla, said India has been a ‘thriving democracy’ under Modi’s rule and has witnessed ‘reclamation of the republic.’

“Most democracies are hardly immune to strains… The number of countries experiencing democratic backsliding ‘has never been as high’ as in the last decade, the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance said last year, adding the U.S. to the list along with India and Brazil.” As I watch elected GOP officials and congressional candidates call for defunding the FBI, labeled a “terrorist” organization by some, as lies continue to motivate the grassroots MAGA base to fight pluralism and favor White Christian autocracy, I wonder how long shades of democracy can still hover above the United States. Or are they fading into oblivion?

I’m Peter Dekom, and the fragility of democracy, based on our general trust (misplaced?) in elected officials to protect constitutional democracy, is a facing rising global test of sustainability.

Climate Change’s New Big Blaze Threat

“We don’t get out in front of hurricanes with fans, trying to change their direction. We don’t get out in front of tornadoes, trying to turn them around.” 

Unknown firefighter

“[Traditional weather] models are going to be inadequate to deal with a new climate.”

Weather Underground founder Jeff Masters.

We live in an era where old-world environmental thinking needs a new, ground-up approach. Climate change has rewritten so many rules, but we have been abysmally slow to adapt. I read in recent articles that 1.3 billion tons of California almonds sit unsold, waiting for foreign buyers (who normally only pay on delivery) to absorb massive new shipping costs. Yet, the big question is why water-impaired regions are still growing certain nut trees, which use more than 20+ times the water of average agricultural crops. Water-stressed California produces 82% of the world’s almonds, 98% of the U.S.’s pistachios, and 99% of the U.S.’s walnuts -- the three most water-intensive nuts on the market. Put another way, those 1.3B tons of almonds required 7.5-million-acre feet of water (half the size of Los Angeles County), which, according Heal the Bay chief executive Tracy Quinn, could make up the water shortfall the state is facing for an entire year.

But if you think that’s an archaic practice that should change, think about how we approach wildfires in 2022. Simply put, we still apply turn-of-the-20th-century firefighting technics to a whole new generation of mega-blazes that the world has never faced before. Adriana Petryna, professor of anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, has focused her studies on such old-world approaches to a climate changed world. Writing for the July 10th Los Angeles Times, she explains how futile such firefighting is and how a new reality-check is required. Combine excessive dryness (which is more than just “drought” – “aridification” or “desertification” are more apt) with high winds, and one in six Americans is in areas of high risk for wildfires. Yet we still try and contain the uncontainable.

“Risk factors are together setting the stage for disasters that our present tools are not always able to manage or suppress. The winds that pushed the [recent 300,000 acre] New Mexico fire beyond control reached 80 mph. [Colorado’s recent Marshall fire, which destroyed 1100 homes, pictured above] topped 115 mph. That’s like a Category 3 hurricane… In an interview with NPR, Boulder’s wildland fire chief Brian Oliver likened the futility of fighting some wildfires to ‘trying to fight a hurricane.’ …

“Fire risk has changed, but the public’s expectations about emergency response have not… The idea that fire can be fought, stopped or metaphorically turned around dates to the early 20th century, when practices of fire suppression evolved, in part, to protect the monetary value of large trees. By 1935, all reported forest fires were to be contained, controlled or put out by 10 a.m. the next day (known as ‘the 10 a.m. rule,’ which is no longer in force). After World War II, the war on wildfire was waged, thanks to the availability of military surplus vehicles, firefighting aircraft and improved road access to facilitate suppression efforts.

“Early models of fire behavior focused on controllable wildfires; suppression practices took root before fire spread behaviors were sufficiently understood. For a while, such practices worked. The U.S. Forest Service, the largest employer of wildland firefighters, touts a 98% initial-attack success rate. Yet the initial-attack success rate in the early 20th century, before the introduction of aggressive suppression technologies, was roughly the same (around 97%). The success rate back then was largely because fuel had not accumulated, thanks to ‘millennia of active burning by Native Americans and natural fires,’ in the words of wildfire scientist Mark Finney. As a result, flames were low-intensity and burned low to the ground, ‘making it easy to achieve a 97% initial-attack success rate’ and safer to manage.

“Over time, the war on wildfire strengthened the enemy, because successful suppression leaves more and more fuel for larger fires. Success created other risks: As one fire manager told me, ‘Now we’re chasing suppression fires.’… This raises the question: Which fires should actually be fought?” Petryna. We build in vulnerable areas. We have allowed dried brush and dead trees to accumulate. And we still believe that we can knock down and contain the massive wildfires… applying the same practices that we use on smaller forest blazes. So, what is the answer?

“Wildfires affecting more than 100,000 acres (megafires) are now so common that the National Interagency Fire Center ‘has stopped tracking them as exceptional events.’… Their roving nature, in forested or suburban enclaves, upends preconceptions of which places in the U.S. are vulnerable to fire. Many Americans still want to imagine clear boundaries between fire-safe and fire-prone areas and fund more suppression resources to keep fire out, but fires routinely overrun the fuel breaks meant to control them and firebrands cross over highways, finding their way to and sparking new fires in distant communities. As the Marshall fire showed, any community ‘downwind of a grassy area on a windy day ... could be vulnerable,’ in the words of the mayor of the leveled town of Superior, Colo.

“Our mental models of fire are no longer ‘relevant to the physics of what is actually happening ,’ in the words of retired U.S. Forest Service fire research scientist Jack Cohen. Fires are best seen not as apocalyptic or inevitable, so much as opportunistic: They burn where they can. Unabated fossil-fuel burning and wishful thinking are opening more pathways for fire. We should own up to these physics while supporting risk mitigation in communities that are most vulnerable to catastrophic loss…

“If we understood wildfires to be like hurricanes, we would evacuate as a fire approaches and then return to clean up and maybe rebuild. But we are stuck in the old expectation of fighting fire wherever it ‘wants’ to go, be it in wildlands or densely packed suburbs. Though protecting homes was not supposed to be part of the U.S. Forest Service’s mission. As one former wildland firefighter reminded me, ‘Fire control people have increasingly become protectors of private properties, infuriating the firefighters and their agencies.’

“The fury seems justified. In the world we have created, a wildfire will go wherever we have allowed fuel to accumulate, whether that fuel is underbrush, logging debris or a vacation home. No army of fire control workers can turn it around, and they shouldn’t have to sacrifice themselves trying.” Petryna. Repeating the same behavior but expecting different results… well, you know, that is one definition of insanity.

I’m Peter Dekom, and as mother nature snarls at our archaic approach to climate change, we all seem to forget that massive change requires massive rethinking.

 

Landmines, the Gifts that Keep on Taking

   

They are everywhere. A global menace. “Landmines, as Major General Michael Beary of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon aptly describes them, are an ‘insidious menace’ that disproportionately kill civilians. In recent decades, one of the most successful international agreements in recent decades has resulted in significant steps towards their elimination in warfare. The Convention on the Prohibition of the Use, Stockpiling, Production and Transfer of Anti-Personnel Mines and on their Destruction, better known as the Ottawa Treaty, was signed in 1997. The treaty aims for the complete elimination of anti-personnel landmines in warfare and has to a significant extent accomplished that aim. To date, 162 countries have signed onto the treaty, signaling their actionable intention to never develop, produce, use, stockpile, transfer, or retain landmines. The United States, notably, has not acceded to the treaty.” Will Schrepferman writing for the December 30, 2019, Harvard International Review.

Old “legacy” mines, leftover from WWII, Korea, Vietnam, Syria, Iraq and just about every other modern military conflict, kill an average of 11 innocents a day. They sit in fields, forests, farms and even urban centers, unfound, lurking, waiting for an inadvertent movement to set them off… long after the peace treaties, armistices, ceasefires have passed, the fighting ended. For those not killed, blasts from these old unexploded and very indiscriminate killers can maim, disfigure and destroy lives.

The danger is rising once again in Ukraine as the war brings a vast array of landmines by both sides, neither a signatory to the Ottawa Treaty. Russia deploys these devices particularly where its forces have been pushed out of conquered territory to punish the Ukrainian victors… and weapon-impaired Ukraine has relied on these devices to take out Russian tanks and defend its home territory from Russian advances. But long after the conflict, these mines and IEDs will keep killing and maiming. John Leicester and Yuras Karmanau, writing for the June 17th Associated Press, detail this current and prospective carnage:

“Russia’s war in Ukraine is spreading a deadly litter of mines, bombs and other explosives that are killing civilians, disrupting planting and complicating the rebuilding of homes and villages, and that will continue taking lives and limbs long after the fighting stops… Often, blast victims are farmers and other rural workers with little choice but to use mined roads and plow mined fields, in a country relied on for grain and other crops that feed the world…

“Ukraine is now one of the most mined countries in Europe. The east of the country, fought over with Russia-backed separatists since 2014, was already contaminated by mines even before the Feb. 24 invasion multiplied the scale and complexity of the dangers both there and elsewhere… Ukraine’s State Emergency Service said last week that 115,000 square miles — the size of Arizona — need to be cleared. The ongoing fighting will only expand the area.

“The war’s deadly remnants will ‘continue to be a hidden threat for many years to come,’ said Mairi Cunningham, who leads clearance efforts in Ukraine for the Halo Trust, a de-mining nongovernmental organization that got $4 million in U.S. government funding in May for its work in the country.

“There’s no complete government count of mine deaths since the invasion, but every week authorities have reported cases of civilians killed and wounded. Cunningham said her group has counted 52 civilian deaths and 65 injuries since February and ‘that’s likely underreported.’ The majority were from antitank mines in agricultural areas, she said… On a mobile app called De-mining Ukraine that officials launched last month, people can send photos, video and the geolocation of explosive objects they come across, for subsequent removal. The app got more than 2,000 tips in its first week.”

It’s not just the obvious military targets and real estate that have landmine issues. For example, Russia has planted landmines simply on agricultural land to decimate Ukraine’s vast and massively fertile fields of grain, among the most productive on earth. Further threatening global food supplies – Ukraine is a mainstay of food production for much of the third world – Ukrainian farmers venturing out to till their fields are all too frequently blown to smithereens.

“Even with the Russian soldiers gone, danger lurks amid the surrounding poppy meadows, fields and woodlands… Mines are still being laid on the battlefields, now concentrated to the east and south, where Russia has focused its offensive since its soldiers withdrew from around Kyiv and the north, badly bloodied… A Ukrainian unit that buried TM-62 mines on a forest track in the eastern Donbas region this week, in holes scooped out with spades, told the Associated Press that the aim was to prevent Russian troops from advancing toward their trenches… Russian booby-trapping has sometimes had no clear military rhyme or reason, Ukrainian officials say. In towns around Kyiv, explosive experts found devices in unpredictable places.” AP

Perhaps in the future, “smart” mines can save lives. “Smart” antitank mines should tell the difference between a heavy tank and a passing individual. Ideally, they can be turned off remotely, but their explosive power still remains underground, hidden. And their “smartness” is hardly reliable as yet. According to the he Arms Control Association, a Washington-based research and advocacy group, "smart" landmines have failed to work and been rejected by all NATO allies of the United States. The number of innocents killed by landmines, during and after a conflict, is always a vast multiple of military casualties.

I’m Peter Dekom, and the vestiges of war-caused death, maiming and destruction often last many decades past the conflicts that planted these indiscriminate killers.

Are We Living in a Post-American World

                       Weapons from the Peoples’ Liberation Army

Is the war in Ukraine a proxy war? Is NATO (and even the UN) refusing to commit its own forces but still battling with its traditional enemies? Can the world, facing a need for international coordination to stem the obvious increasingly horrible impacts of climate change, continue to fight military campaigns that make such cooperation exceptionally difficult?

Up until now, it has been the United States as the prime mover in post-WWII superpower military confrontation beginning in the 1950s but ending badly in virtually all its major direct military engagements since. But Ukraine is different. The US military (hence NATO) is relegated to a supply role, unwilling to risk a direct shooting war with Russia for fear of a nuclear escalation. But what does this say for the future of global power, alignment and conflict? Who are the winners? Are we being “replaced” (a new mantra in so many ways)? And how does the rest of the world perceive our future power and influence?

Despite Russian efforts to regain superpower status once accorded to the Soviet Union, today’s superpowers seem to be limited to two nations: the United States and the Peoples’ Republic of China. The struggle for global influence is massive, and while the United States has the edge on military power, that rippling mega-might is strewn all over the world in military bases and fleets, ultimately allowing China to secure its influence in Asia with supreme military power in that more limited quadrant. What China cannot control via her Peoples’ Liberation Army directly, her checkbook seems to be able to accomplish via long-term agricultural, fossil fuel and mineral leases and treaties plus her Belt and Road initiative to dominate shipping within Asia, Africa and even Latin America.

American prestige was already showing a downward trend before the body-blow from Donald Trump’s efforts towards go-it-alone isolationism, thinly disguised “America First” nationalism. He undermined treaty commitments, NATO and seemed disinclined to use foreign aid as at carrot to protect and enhance US interests. Even traditional and trusted allies watched as American promises and treaties, upon which they had relied, were often tossed aside. And China watched. After a brief “courtship” with China’s President Xi Jinping, even ignoring China’s repression of Uighurs in Western China and her reneging on Hong Kong’s treaty-built independence, Trump understood that a tariff war was his apparent best option to contain China’s growing aggression. That aggressive behavior was evidenced by China’s militarization of a manmade island in the South China Sea and escalating saber-rattling against Taiwan as properly belonging to the PRC.

Like many in the world, China believes that, notwithstanding climate change, the 21st century belongs to her. Xi sees the United States, hopelessly politically polarized, as a country plunging in global power and influence. It is a feeling shared by many nations, clearly an assumption that egged Putin into aggressive annexation efforts, even a war with a neighboring (and former Soviet) land. Thus, it is interesting to look at America’s global position from China’s perspective. Writing from Beijing for the July 29th Los Angeles Times, Mark Leonard, director of the European Council on Foreign Relations and author of “The Age of Unpeace: How Connectivity Causes Conflict,” takes shot at describing this PRC perspective:

“In speaking with Chinese academics to understand how they view the world, I have found that they start from a fundamentally different position than many in the West do. It’s not just that they are more likely to blame the Ukraine war on NATO enlargement than on the Kremlin; it’s that many of their core strategic assumptions are also the opposite of our own.

“While Europeans and Americans see the conflict as a turning point in global history, the Chinese see it as just another war of intervention — one that is even less significant than those launched in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan over the last 75 years. To them, the only material difference this time is that it is not the West that is intervening… Moreover, while many in Europe think that the war has marked America’s return to the global stage, Chinese intellectuals see it as further confirmation of the incoming post-American world. To them, the end of American hegemony created a vacuum that is now being filled by Russia.

“Whereas Westerners see an attack on the rules-based order , my Chinese friends see the emergence of a more pluralistic world — one in which the end of American hegemony permits different regional and sub-regional projects. They argue that the rules-based order has always lacked legitimacy; Western powers created the rules, and they have never shown much compunction about changing them when it suits their purposes (as in Kosovo and Iraq).

“These are the arguments that lead to the Middle East analogy. My Chinese interlocutor sees the situation in Ukraine not as a war of aggression between sovereign countries but, rather, as a revision of post-colonial borders following the end of Western hegemony. Likewise, in the Middle East, states are questioning the borders that the West drew after World War I.

“But the most striking parallel is that the Ukraine conflict is widely regarded as a proxy war. Just as the wars in Syria, Yemen and Lebanon have been fueled and exploited by great powers, so too has the war in Ukraine. Who are the main beneficiaries? My Chinese friend argues that it certainly is not Russia, Ukraine or Europe. Rather, the United States and China ultimately stand to gain the most, and both have been approaching the conflict as a proxy war in their larger rivalry.

“The Americans have benefited by locking Europeans, Japanese and Koreans into a new alignment of U.S.-dictated priorities, and by isolating Russia and forcing China to clarify where it stands on issues such as territorial integrity. At the same time, China has benefited by cementing Russia’s subordinate position, and by prodding more countries in the global south to embrace non-alignment.” Europe’s dependence on Russian oil and gas may lead to its undoing, a factor that does not plague the United States… directly. But if we are rising, it may just be temporary and a desperate reaction to global realignment. The one clear winner in all of this is China. That long telephone call between Biden and Xi isn’t going to change that reality.

I’m Peter Dekom, and most of the damage the United States is experiencing in 2022 is self-inflicted.

When the Perp Plays the Victim

 

I once asked, "If you’re innocent, why are you taking the Fifth Amendment?" Now I know the answer to that question. When your family, your company, and all the people in your orbit have become the targets of an unfounded, politically motivated Witch Hunt supported by lawyers, prosecutors, and the Fake News Media, you have no choice. 

 Donald Trump, August 10th after taking the 5th in a NY State Investigatory Deposition

When Republicans take back the House, we will conduct immediate oversight of this department [DOJ/FBI], follow the facts, and leave no stone unturned… Attorney General Garland, preserve your documents and clear your calendar. 

 House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, August 8th, after FBI Mar-a-Lago search

Early August produced several legal investigations into the machinations of Donald Trump: An August 8th search warrant initiated a search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home looking for missing classified documents. An August 9th Trump deposition that was part of a New York State civil investigation into Trump’s conflicting valuations of the same parcel of real estate, one (high) to secure bank loans, and one (low) to avoid taxes. What is strange, given the reactions of right-wing media and MAGA supporters, is that neither of the foregoing has yet resulted in any criminal charges filed against Trump. His supporters, including Fox “News” hosts, suggest that the FBI is in the process of planting evidence at Trump’s home (or at least “finding” non-existent documents). They must expect Trump is approaching a criminal fall.

Even forgetting about whether or not Trump knowingly fomented the January 6, 2021 vicious assault on the Capitol, there is a great deal of hard evidence of other seeming criminal violations by the ex-President: videos of his flushing documents down the toilet, a recorded telephone conversation in which Trump demanded that the GOP Secretary of State “find” thousands of votes to flip the ballots in Trump’s favor as well as the above noted conflicting valuations (which were filed under penalty of perjury).

It is an interesting transition from the GOP’s stance as the “law and order” party to an organization that describes the above January 6 event as “ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse” – in which people died and from which over 900 insurrectionists arrested – and one that seeks to defund the FBI (see the above tweet). The FBI head, Christopher Wray, a Republican who was appointed by Trump himself, now stands accused by Republican leaders of being a lacky for the Democratic Party.

There are more than a few inconsistencies in Trump’s historical messaging. The former President has suggested on many occasions that people who invoke their right against self-incrimination are guilty. “You see the mob takes the 5th,” Trump said during a 2016 rally in Iowa. “If you’re innocent, why are you taking the 5th Amendment?” The line was directed at his opponent, Hillary Clinton, whose aides had invoked the Fifth in a congressional investigation. There are a lot of compilation videos floating around where he continued to assault those taking the 5th. But when it came to his taking the 5th, the above quote shows how the winds blow when Trump is down.

Donald Trump is a master of taking truly bad news and turning it into a rallying point for his misguided followers. Without doubt, he is the leader of the majority of the GOP, even the same elected members of Congress who hid under desks during the insurrection and immediately demanded that Trump be held accountable. Trump loves to decry even the most obviously substantiated accusations and investigations of his actions as “witch hunts.” Fake News generated by an evil cadre of “deep state” federal officials.

As shown in the above picture, Trump’s raising campaign money and selling T-shirts based on this conspiracy theory… a lot of money. And he is getting very close to a formal announcement of his candidacy for the 2024 presidential race, expecting to leverage his campaign by all this bad news. Notwithstanding the vituperative political rhetoric from the above investigation/deposition, the expected “uprising” from the above FBI search produced more reporters with camera support than protestors. Yet the recent primaries showed that MAGA election deniers still hold sway over the GOP. While on average, from 1934 -2014, the incumbent president's party has lost 27 House seats and 4 Senate seats at midterm elections, the recent explosive Roe v Wade reversal suggests that string might just be broken this November. Republicans, fearing Trump’s wrath, are stumbling all over themselves to show support. And there are other strange notions flowing from GOP mouths.

For example, on Alex Jones’ Infowars program Trump lacky, Steve Bannon, went so far as to “warn” Trump that he was now a target of an assassination effort. Assuming that conspiracy theory were real, one would have to ask which side of the aisle would benefit most by such an event? As Trump continues to dig himself deeper into his dark vision of this witch hunt conspiracy, he becomes decreasingly electable by the general population. The GOP, on the other hand, would seem to generate a new rallying point to topple any Democratic opponent by such a killing.

Which brings me to the BIG question: notwithstanding rather obvious proof of Trump’s very likely criminal action, can any state or federal agency actually implement a viable criminal action against the ex-President? Where will they find 12 unbiased jurors, particularly given the threats of violence they would face if Trump were convicted, to hear the case? Would that provoke a civil war? And if convicted, where would Trump be safely incarcerated? Any Republican president would almost certainly pardon Trump, but that would not impact state prosecutions. As Trump’s inner circle, particularly his former legal team and counsel, distances themselves from him, Trump still seems confident that he cannot be properly prosecuted.

I’m Peter Dekom, and we are about to discover whether a privileged autocrat, a former president with a zealous following, is perhaps genuinely above the law.

Anatomy of a Mega-Wildfire

  

“It’s horrible, but we have to learn to live with it.”

Mike Flannigan, a fire scientist at Thompson Rivers University in western Canada

The pictures above include a view from space and on the ground of a mega-wildfire which, between July 29th and August 3rd, had consumed over 55,000 acres in California’s Kamath National Forest. The horrific McKinney wildfire, the largest mega-blaze in the United States so far this year. As my recent Burning, Denial and Demoralized Fire Crews and Climate Change’s New Big Blaze Threat blogs have pointed out, insufficient and demoralized fire crews are quite literally trying to extinguish massive mega-fires that pack the power of hurricane or tornado-level winds in heat that can sap human strength… even as a misstep can incinerate a firefighter in an instant. If we cannot stop hurricanes and tornados – and we do not even try – the notion of containing this new amped-up power of forest fires seems almost futile.

Still, people rebuild and knowingly expand housing into fire prone areas and expect affordable fire insurance to cover them. To put it mildly, we still do not understand these new mega-blazes, fires that are so intense, so powerful, that they now deposit their soot directly into the stratosphere while creating their own independent weather patterns. Replete with their own lightening strikes and cloud formations, which are no longer rare and isolated phenomena. The most relevant weather precedents to date come from the centuries of data and observations we have been able to aggregate… from massive volcanic eruptions. Not from previous wildfires!

Writing for the August 3rd Los Angeles Times, Corinne Purtill examines this unprecedented new intensity that just may be becoming the new-normal: “Four times, columns of smoke rose from the flames beyond the altitude at which a typical jet flies, penetrating the stratosphere and injecting a plume of soot and ash miles above the Earth’s surface. It’s a phenomenon known as a pyrocumulonimbus cloud, a byproduct of fire that NASA once memorably described as ‘the fire-breathing dragon of clouds.’

“In Siskiyou County [California], the water in these clouds returned to Earth as rain, accompanied by thunder, wind and lightning, in a classic example of a wildfire producing its own weather,’ said David Peterson, a meteorologist at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, which has developed an algorithm to distinguish fire-induced thunderstorms from traditional ones.

“Investigators have yet to determine the cause of the McKinney fire, which grew rapidly in hilly, challenging terrain and was uncontained as of Tuesday [8/2]… Mike Flannigan, a fire scientist at Thompson Rivers University in western Canada, said he isn’t shocked to see fires this powerful. The data have been pointing in this direction for years. He just didn’t think they’d be happening this soon…

“It isn’t just that wildfires are more powerful, more frequent and burning more acreage each year than ever before, he said. The energy generated by these conflagrations is also creating columns of smoke so big that they leave the troposphere, the bottom layer of the atmosphere that wraps the Earth ‘like an apple skin,’ as Flannigan put it.

“The troposphere is where weather happens, and where eye-searing clouds of smoke and soot circulate even from moderately sized fires. But when a smoke column such as those emanating from the McKinney fire shoots through that layer and enters the stratosphere — the higher, more stable layer above — it creates havoc with local weather and seeds the Earth’s atmosphere with aerosol pollutants whose consequence science is still sorting out.”

The hotter, water-parched forest regions around the world are gigantic tinderboxes waiting for a spark… before they explode with their rising ferocity. Climate change has set the stage. Mankind’s seeming indifference and marginalization of the risk – notwithstanding recent efforts to “do something” about our hot new reality – have created a platform for disaster that is exceptionally difficult, at this stage, to reverse. By the end of the decade, estimates suggest that the number and intensity of these mega-fires will almost double.

Maybe those who suffered from the massive flooding in Kentucky might miss the connection with these wildfires in the Western states, but they are inexorably linked. Even with recent, one-sided legislation adding new support to combat climate change, half of our political system seems to be hellbent on resisting the obviously necessary changes in our energy use from fossil fuels to alternative sources. As you watch ads from Big Oil about all they are doing to combat climate change, realize that they are simultaneously doing everything in their power to extend our dependence on fossil fuels. Lips flapping in a searingly hot breeze.

I'm Peter Dekom, and Mother Nature does not care how much money special interests are spending to resist alternative energy or how politically unpopular such efforts are in red states, she will continue to flood, burn, decimate and desertify our lands in accordance with the immutable laws of physics.

A Conscious Choice for Forceful Disengagement, a Dearth of Communication

 

There is no meaningful difference between Donald Trump’s and Joe Biden’s approach to China. Hostile disengagement, maintaining the “strategic ambiguity” of America’s policy towards Taiwan, sanctions, tariffs and mutual lambasting with no routinized private levels toward diplomatic de-escalation. Remember, every public statement by high-ranking officials of either nation is always intended for a domestic audience, not the other side. If there are members of the press and cameras present, absent announcing a new détente or treaty, you can bet that nothing positive will come of it. Successful diplomacy is seldom conducted in public.

When the Peoples’ Republic demonstrated its potential control over the Taiwanese straits (1995-95), when China fired a series of saber-rattling missiles into that sea, the US sent a major naval force in response. Ouch! There was nothing China could do about it. Since then, corrected for inflation, China has upped its military budget sevenfold, constructed a strategic manmade island military base in the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea, and built its offensive and defensive military capability to be the second most powerful country on earth. She has nuclear submarines with underwater missile launching capability, and while neither of its two aircraft carriers are nuclear, a third carrier is expected to be atomically powered. It’s aircraft and missiles are state of the art, abundant and manned by experienced officers.

For those who fear that the latest massive live-fire show of force in the waters surrounding Taiwan represents an immediate threat of invasion, rather dramatic evidence that as military defenses stand now, China most probably could overwhelm Taiwan in short order, the reality is that result is not imminent. Even if China has near-term ambitions of taking that island nation, she would be totally stupid to give up the element of surprise amidst her show of force. That said, the rest of Asia is watching. Is the United States willing to make its intentions to protect Taiwan clear… or are we going to continue to tease China with our mouthing acceptance of the “one China, two systems” goal for Taiwan while we continue to arm what China calls a breakaway province of the PRC? The China of today is not remotely the weak China of 1995/6. Their forces are clearly dominant in the region; our forces are spread thinly around the world.

For Taiwan, China’s “one China, two systems” Hong Kong handover treaty with the UK has been abrogated at every level. Hong Kong has long since lost its autonomy, its separate legal system and democratic institutions decimated. Halfway through its 50-year treaty to preserve an independent HK, Hong Kong is now a crushed part within China’s repressive and authoritarian grip. To Taiwan, this is convincing evidence that the PRC is incapable of living with two systems, regardless of her pledges and configurations. China does not care. Taiwan is a most essential part of even our own modern supply chain; its TSMC is the only high-end chip maker capable of meeting global demand. Even as TSMC is building a comparable facility in Arizona, the global economy, very much including the United States and China, is totally dependent on TSMC’s ability to continue its operations at full tilt. It takes three years to build a comparable manufacturing plant and then 6 months to grow the underlying super-chips.

Both China and the United States have been playing up their power and strengths for their own domestic agendas. China President Xi faces an economy that is underperforming, his open hostility to local capitalists has cost jobs, and his zero-tolerance COVID policy has slammed on the economic brakes every time the nation signals it might be able to move on. The United States faces major China ownership interests in major American companies, from movie theaters to computer manufacturing, from hotels to office towers.

For Biden, the subtext of China’s manufacturing taking away American jobs – even in the current era where there two job openings for every jobseeker – and threatening global peace, particularly with her continuing to be Russia’s major buyer of oil and gas, are tempting “side issues,” dangerous to say the least. That China could dictate US policy, demand that the US forswear any official visits to Taipei (a la House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s recent foray) and simply demand that the United States accept the inevitable, is unacceptable. It’s no secret that President Xi believes that the current level of polarization in the United States will eventually render the United States unable to maintain its level of military and economic power in the world. For both nations, being tough over Taiwan is a distraction meant to instill “patriotism” in the domestic marketplace and shove more obvious local issues into the background.

The United States seems to be committed to maintaining the status quo, living with that “strategic ambiguity,” hoping to drag out a more aggressive China’s lustful ambitions to force Taiwan into the PRC. Is American support for Taiwan a litmus test for the rest of Asia, wary of China’s aggressive push into the South China Sea and beyond? At the very least, the United States needs to up its supply of defensive weapons to Taiwan, implementing a so-called “defensive porcupine strategy.” There is little doubt that China could take Taiwan, perhaps very quickly if it chose… but at what cost? With the Sino-Russian alliance being tested, is China running out of time to make her military move against Taiwan? But how much is the United States willing to risk incenting a PRC blitzkrieg attack that could take Taiwan, perhaps in a matter of days? And if the US does not rise to the occasion, what is the message for the rest of Asia?

Meanwhile, China has pulled out of all levels of diplomatic communications with the United States, including a very necessary combined effort regarding addressing escalating climate change damage. Even during the height of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, there were serious ongoing conversations at the top… even a red phone for emergency discussion between heads of state. But with China today, there is nothing. And nothing could easily explode into a war that no one can win, especially where nuclear weapons can end life as we know it. We can expect cyberattacks to rise in frequency and intensity, and China’s unending level of industrial espionage can only escalate.

The recent massive PRC military exercises around Taiwan went on without a hitch. Everything they wanted to happen did. To China, it was magnificent. It was also a confidence builder that China could, if it wanted, take Taiwan very quickly. To the United States, it just might have been an indicator that: 1. We need to reestablish communication with China, while at the same time, 2. Find a way to enhance Taiwan’s capacity to defend itself much, much better.

I’m Peter Dekom, and neither American political party seems to know how to position the United States against this most troubling foe, even as China itself stumbles in the face of new political elections.