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Morning, Comrades! This was a week of jitters and twitters wasn’t it? There were a few pivot points in our continuing anxious state of affairs. They are all twined, loosely, in an intricate web that includes the complete span of human emotion, from panic and hysteria to cold and calculating plans to incite both. McLuhan told us it was coming in 1964, but now we are integrated in it.
So, a stimulating week from a messaging standpoint. It is sort of a bridge from the foreign affairs chunk that ended September- with two wars in progress and the rising tensions around China’s expanse- all portrayed in dramatic personal appearances by leaders in New York.
It is too soon to see the full results of that, though the dramatic events in what is now a sort of general war with weapons from at least five participants in flight, one way or the other.
Here, the big domestic ones have passed sequentially for impact and coverage.
The change in Fiscal Year passed without the drama of a government shut-down due to a budget extension. The shut-down wasn’t convenient to either party, so the can was kicked down the road two months a few days before Christmas. For increased interest then.
Same deal with the Longshoremen, who have been on strike for three days and whose imposed disruption to supply chains would have caused chaos in daily life at the time the bid deal is being decided. So, they took an interim 62% hike and went back to work. The details will be finalized by detail and ratification in late January next year, so like the budget, we could have both of these as returning episodes in the national prime-time.
This morning’s streams reflect the sensation. In a Dublin pub (or someplace) in 1954 the first Guinness Book of World Records was issued. Four years later, same week, the Russians launched Sputnik I from Baikonur, Kazakhstan, beginning the Space Age
So, this week there rockets and the same neighborhood in the messaging. Israel hit another hard target in Beirut and may have killed the Hezbollah commander who just succeeded the last commander who was killed while talking to a dozen of his immediate subordinates. Who also perished. So, Hezbollah is an organization with challenges as some units still attempt to engage the IDF in south Lebanon. Seems a bit like the reduction of Gaza. Food of thought in Tehran.
Which brings up the fascinating twined issues in domestic messaging. The Campaign is everything. All the messaging has something to do with it, any angle that can be exploited to support the desired narrative, from Global Warming to the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. In the VP debate, the beard was raised as an issue. There are apparently others.
Like, the Feds just announced the fertility rate for 2023. It was down, which produced the fairly dramatic claim that the US birth rate had fallen to the lowest level in thirty years. Without immigration, the population would start to shrink by 2054.
That has so many swirling factors it is worth an extended discussion. Like the ones we should be talking about in all the campaigning. Instead, we have a demonstration that there is no working oversight of the traditional government affairs. The LawFare circus in politics and society reflects an institution in transformation
from law to policy implementation. And another demonstration of the loss of oversight for the spending of government funds.
Current affairs regarding that include FEMA funds appropriated by Congress for things like the hurricane relief. Those funds should be flowing to North Carolina and Tennessee after bad storm Helene dumped feet of rain and killed hundreds. There is a shortfall in funds, since the ones for storms had gone without discussion into providing services for the storm of undocumented aliens in our cities.
See? A longer discussion and one useful to determine what should be done before we blunder into something none of us will like. Anyway, that is a week of transition. We will see if we are at general war this weekend, right?
Copyright 2024 Vic Socotra
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