Stories of ThinkTech

NAKA DO - RENEWING OUR MARITAL VOWS Trump is many things to many people, but mostly he is a distraction, distracting us from the national democracy and the national business. Regrettably, we haven’t paid enough attention to those things, and we’ve lost focus on the national democracy and the national business.   Thanks to Trump, we are in a profound national decline. It’s time to ignore him and the narcissistic distractions he creates.   It’s time for us to pay attention to what we learned or should shade learned in social studies. It’s time for us to recognize that we are all part of a fundamental social compact that has kept us together, kept us productive and kept us safe over these 230 years. It’s time, past time, for us to restate and renew our marital vows to the country, to the Constitution and to the rule of law, just like married couples reaffirm their vows in Japan. We need to reestablish the social compact that has bound us, the fundamental promise to care for and t...

THEY’RE ONLY A BUNCH OF CLOWNS - PEOPLE LAUGH AT THEM, BUT ONLY OUT OF NERVOUSNESS We assume our beloved democracy will be resilient.   They felt the same way in Europe.   At first, the middle class thought Hitler and Mussolini were clowns, ephemeral, even pathetic.   This was a theme in the Ken Burns U.S. and the Holocaust series on PBS.   It was also a theme in the 1972 Garden of the Finzi-Continia film on Amazon Prime. But after a while, not very long, we find they are not clowns at all.   By then it’s too late and we’ve been ambushed by your own wishful optimism that they would go away.   We humor ourselves with hopeful points of light - but hope is not enough, end not soon enough. If Trump gets investigated or loses a motion or says something stupid, that’s not enough. His acolytes are deadly serious, working hard around the country to advance his conspiracy every day, investing tons of time and millions in money. It’s a deadly sport.   For many o...

COVID IS NOT THE ONLY INFECTION TRUMP GAVE US He gave us a whole phenomenon of infection; a package of sick positions.   He built this base out of disaffected people, tens of millions.   We saw COVID grow to a Pandemic under him; it was part of his search for chaos.   History shows that autocrats need chaos to enhance their power.   He gave us a country divided on covid, on medicine, on science, where millions acted against their own interest, refused masks and medicines that would have saved their lives.   His legacy is a whole package of sick positions like that. He fomented racism and hatred, bigotry and violence, Immigration politics that separate children, inhumane bans on abortion, fighting like hell against gun control that would protect us against massacres, ignoring climate change, undermining voting rights and representative government, calling for people to deny the rule of law, even though that makes their lives worse. Is it that Trump’s base all agr...

THE SIGNALS ARE CLEAR, BUT HISTORY IS NOT HERE TO HELP Trump has unloosed a torrent of destructive time bombs into our society, and has given us a legacy of chaos operating not for our interest or to improve our lives, but only his. Congress is dysfunctional, and will be a basket case after the mid-terms.  The judiciary has lost it, not only the train wreck at the Supreme Court but many of the lower courts, including our favorite compromised judge Aileen Cannon, who doesn’t know up from down.  How can we have confidence in these people and thus in our government.   Rights are being taken away from us, like abortion, and so are national security documents, like Mar-a-Lago. You don’t have to be a genius to know that our legal and governmental system are disintegrating.  At some cortical level, even the walking dead cult people know it.  They don’t admit it, they can’t admit it, but certainly they must know it. “The true administration of justice is the firmes...

YOU ONLY HAVE TO BURN THE REICHSTAG ONCE The burning of the Reichstag in 1933 gave Hitler a path to power.   He did it and got away with it.   Did the Jan 6 insurrection fail?   No, actually it succeeded.   Trump’s army came together, largely because he asked them to and they could and did.   The conspiracy was not so much to stop the count as it was a real, actual and unmistakable coup d’etat organized   to overthrow our government.   Think about it. Those TV pictures are indelibly stamped on our minds and memories - an open, armed, hostile and lethal breach of our Capitol, the center and sanctum of our democracy.   The undeniable thing about it is that it was a traumatic inflection in the history of our precious republic.   It was our burning of the Reichstag, one that can never be walked back. Just as it was demoralizing for us, it was a huge boost in morale for them.   Can Jan 6 happen again? I suppose in some sense we learned to def...

REFLECTIONS ON THE INSURRECTION ThinkTech presented its Burning National Issues webinar, entitled Legal Chicken, Legal Egg on  Friday, September 30, 2022. Our moderator was Avi Soifer, and our panelists were Kimi Ide-Foster, Chris Marvin, Richard Wallsgrove, Sylvia Albert and Jay Fidell.  See the program at these links:  YouTube https://youtu.be/dxPrAye_G68   Vimeo https://vimeo.com/755839884 . The last segments of the panel was "Insurrection and Beyond."  Jay Fidell spoke on that segment.  Here are some points from the discussion, where he asked us to recognize some of the phenomena that revealed themselves on Jan 6.  WHAT IF IT WAS ME - THE "SUBTRACTION" PHENOMENON If you subtract the fact that the organizer and leader of the insurrection was a former president and the participants were his acolytes, and just assume that we were there and did the very same things with our friends and weapons, you get a different result.  You would be in the clin...