The Next Open Thread - We Are All Londoners

by DemFromCT

While doing some research for the Flu Wiki, I came across this interesting page from the U Pittsburgh Center for Biosecurity written "for mayors, governors and top health officials", entitled How to Lead During Bioattacks. This wan't bioterror, nor an epidemic, but some of the leadership points seem applicable, nonetheless.

What defines "leadership" during an epidemic or biological attack?

Five strategic goals help distinguish successful leadership during an epidemic or bioattack in 21st century America. An informed and involved public, along with guidance and material support from respected leaders, can help achieve these aims:           

• Limit death and suffering through proper preventive, curative, and supportive care; tend to the greater vulnerability of children, the frail elderly, and the physically compromised.
• Defend civil liberties by using the least restrictive interventions to contain an infectious agent that causes communicable disease.
• Preserve economic stability, managing the financial blow to victims as well as the near- and long-term losses of hard-hit industries, cities, and neighborhoods.
• Discourage scapegoating, hate crimes, and the stigmatization of specific people or places as “contaminated” or unhealthy.
• Bolster the ability of individuals and the larger community to rebound from unpredictable and traumatic events; provide mental health support to those who need it.

Many of the principles seem to fit no matter what the source of disaster. And it puts some context to what we see our own officials doing.

Use this as the day's open thread.

[UPDATE]: Watching BBC, the Brits, including the Dean of St. Paul and the Lord Mayor, are living the principle of "discourage scapegoating, hate crimes, and the stigmatization of specific people or places as “contaminated” or unhealthy." Their comments on this topic were extensively covered. Well done. Time will tell as to how they do on the others.

Comments

[DemFromCT]

Andrea Mitchell is beginnng the process of relating London's events to Bush's standing.

She immediately says it helps Bush. As if it's automatic because terrorism = Bush strength.

Short term gain, long term pain for Bush, if that.

[demtom]

There are so many things the press believes that, in Gershwin's indelible phrase, ain't necessarily so, and chief among them is that focus on terror is an infinte well from which Bush can draw. On September 12th, it shot him to 90%. Even if you assume the bin Laden tape days before the election swung the race, it only swung it to the tune of 50.7%. There've been predictions of further Bush upswing from all sorts of moments over the past few months, and I don't recall any panning out. My guess: this will be another.

I think there's a real journalistic disconnect between reality and what they THINK is reality. To them -- bred on the Reagan era -- the average American is a white Republican, and the GOP wins landslide elections over hapless Democrats. They refuse to absorb that Clinton won two elections (or they'll say, it was only because of Perot); they won't accept that Al Gore got the most votes and, really, the electoral college; and they have reprocessed Campaign '04 into Campaign '88 -- viewing it as an overwhelming GOP victory, rather than a "Massachusetts liberal" coming within a hair of knocking off an incumbent president with a fiercely united party and no recession.

In short, I think they continue to believe Republicanism is as much America's civic religion as it was in 1985, and they're eager to find any evidence (say, a 2-point bump for Bush in his dismal polls) to buttress the point.

I'm with you: any gain for Bush is extremely short-lived. Realization that the real work to protect ourselves from terrorism has not been done (evidenced by the rushed show of police presence at all NY/NJ transit stations today) will be of far more lasting significance than the brief opportunity for Bush's fans to rave over how good he looks mouthing off to the terrorists.

[NG]

An informed and involved public, along with guidance and material support from respected leaders,

This is from the Univ of Pittsburgh in PA. Now wasn't it the PA Dept of Health, a barely functioning agency that I used to work for, that has kept its emergency vacinnation plan, or some such plan, secret? So much for the informed and involved public! Doesn't PA listen to the main university in its midst???? What does this say about the whole endeavor?

[NG]

An informed and involved public, along with guidance and material support from respected leaders,

This is from the Univ of Pittsburgh in PA. Now wasn't it the PA Dept of Health, a barely functioning agency that I used to work for, that has kept its emergency vacinnation plan, or some such plan, secret? So much for the informed and involved public! Doesn't PA listen to the main university in its midst???? What does this say about the whole endeavor?

[NG]

An informed and involved public, along with guidance and material support from respected leaders,

This is from the Univ of Pittsburgh in PA. Now wasn't it the PA Dept of Health, a barely functioning agency that I used to work for, that has kept its emergency vacinnation plan, or some such plan, secret? So much for the informed and involved public! Doesn't PA listen to the main university in its midst???? What does this say about the whole endeavor?

[demtom]

Gee, I'm starting to feel like I'm a lucky guy because my post only showed up once.

[DemFromCT]

Heh. A li'l glitch today, demtom.

I must say, I never expected to use the link I came across quite so quickly.

[Mimikatz]

What I don't understand about the press CW is that so many of them live in NYC and DC, which were and remain the prime terrorist attack points. Shouldn't they be a little more worried about BushCo's lack of preparedness and PR-focused policies? It isn't the people in the hinterlands who are most likely going to suffer if BushCo has not, in fact, succeeded in isolating the terrorists in Iraq. Are they just like teenagers who think they are invincible? That is hard for me to believe. Maybe the platitudes are to soothe themsleves.

[DemFromCT]

NYCers and DCers are not necessarily of the same mind.

Of course, NYC voted overwhelmingly against Bush despite 9/11.

Tells you something about their confidence levels in the man.

[Mimikatz]

But a great many journos live in NYC, especially conservative ones, and they seem impervious to the defects in Bush's counterterrorism polcies. that's who I meant, not ordinary New Yawkers, who seem to have a better collective grasp of things.

[DemFromCT]

Well, they're paid to... I'm not sure what, anymore.

I quit trying to explain the NY Times long ago.

[TenThousandThings]

Call me naive, but I don't think Bush will get any bounce from this, short-lived or otherwise. Blair, yes. But Bush? No. Americans will see this as just another example of what is becoming increasingly obvious, that Bush's approach to the "war on terror" has been a disaster. No follow through. What little success he has had has not been consolidated, and remains at risk of reversal.

[emptypockets]

Speaking of New York, no one has cleared up those twin makeshift grenade blasts near the British consulate in Manhattan on the morning of the British elections.

I would like to know if that was related to today's attacks, indicating the London bombing group is active in New York today.

Any thoughts on timing of this relative to Olympics announcement? Motivation of that doesn't make sense to me, but it also seems like unlikely coincidence.

[al-Fubar]

Mimikatz - Trying to figure out the thought process of MSM journos is a somewhat futile task - except, perhaps to note, that there's frequently an undertone of menace to right-wing whining that makes people with a public megaphone feel they have to be coddled.

On a wholly different note, I just came over from DKos, where I was a bit jarred by the tone of a good many posts. The theme, in various forms, was anger at expressions of solidarity with Londoners, coupled with the point that people get blown up in Baghdad every day, and we pretty much say ho-hum.

There's an element of moral truth to this, but it rubs me the wrong way, and the question is why?

Partly, to be sure, it's an element of tribalism. London is a very multicultural and multiracial city, but it's a Western city. It's a far smaller imaginative leap, for most of us, to imagine being Londoners than to imagine being Baghdadis.

Partly it's sheer numbing effect. If terrorist bombings in London happened two or three times a week, it would cease to be news after a while. (Bombings in London got a lot less attention here a couple of decades ago, when the IRA was doing them fairly regularly.)

Partly, though, it's because the violence in Iraq is, in considerable degree, not so much something we caused as something we have "merely" enabled. We blundered into Iraq and knocked over a (thoroughly odious) power structure, without putting any other power structure in its place, or even - so far as I can tell - having the faintest clue that doing so might cause a problem.

That was criminal folly on Bush's part, but much of what is going on in Iraq now is essentially an Iraqi civil war, in which US troops are heavily-armed but bewildered bystanders. It is a civil war over issues that are wholly alien to Americans and our experience. We can't solve Iraq's fundamental political problems, and Bush was an idiot to think he could, but in some fundamental sense they are Iraq's problems, not ours, save that Bush blundered us into them.

-- Rick Robinson

[DemFromCT]

Rick, if any parent expresses love and afection for one child, must that mean lessened affection for another?

What an odd concept, particularly with those who have spent more time than most expressing outrage at the Iraq debacle.

[emptypockets]

Rick, is it possible there is a sense that Baghdadis (?) have in a sense implicitly 'signed on' to the possibility of violent death by deciding to live there, while Londoners did not?

I am not endorsing that view, but - if I am brutally honest with myself - there is that reaction in my gut that my brain needs to recognize and temper (or quash).

I detected a similar view among native Californians when I was living there during Sept. 11. They seemed to me to understand it was a terrible thing to happen, but that New Yorkers had taken on a certain risk by choosing to live there and it would have been much scarier if it had happened in, say, San Francisco.

(I'm suggesting some of us, myself unwillingly included, may see Baghdad and London as the global-scale equivalents of New York and San Francisco, respectively.)

[al-Fubar]

DemFromCT - It is an "odd concept," isn't it? But I can detect in my own reactions an equally odd tendency to blame the Iraqis for the whole mess. (After all, if Iraq did not exist, we couldn't have invaded it!) And there is a grain of truth, because the primary sources of Iraq's sorrows are from within Iraq.

For people who opposed this war, the whole moral question is even more complicated. What DO we owe the Iraqi people? If we were to bail out of there forthwith, and the violence gets even worse - which is more likely than not - do we then just wash our hands of it? And if so, what drain do we pour the dirty water down?

emptypockets - I do think that "signed on" is part of it. Suppose that the invasion aftermath had gone the way it was supposed to in neocon fantasyland - Baghdad a thriving city in a peaceful Iraq - and suddenly there'd been a bombing. It wouldn't get the reaction that London has, simply because a lot more Americans have visited London, or know people from London. Still, it wouldn't be a ho-hum.

And yeah, I live in CA, and I'd have been more shaken up if San Francisco or LA had been hit instead of NYC and DC - it would have been both literally and figuratively closer to home.

-- Rick Robinson

[donkeytale]

Since having been banned from posting at DKOS, Donkeytale has been searching for a new home on the web, one that will not necessarily force him into a Liberal Strait Jacket in order to pass off his brand of subversiveness. Subversiveness, it seems, is out of favor with the SLTC (soft left typing crowd). The SLTC is the answer (unfortunately, for those of us who really see) to Rush and Sean and FNC. It is the liberal anecdote to the conservative echo chamber, but clearly with a weaker signal and a persistent ineffectuality in real world matters.

Oddly, my review of some sites, like this one, has led me to only two conclusions:

1. Kos alumni websites are not very popular, and seem only to be read only by current and former kossmonkeys, so what is the point? Give it up and go back to Koss, IMHO. You need readers. You cant build upon Koss mojo here. It wasnt you who built the mojo, it was a pure expression of what I call Beatlemania, IE not the talents who made the phenomenon, but the phenomenon who made the talents.

The liberal echo chamber needs to be centralized in one location to have any impact. Splintering it (for ego reasons, DH?)only wastes more disk space.

2. Donkeytale, who already runs a marketing consulting firm that he established two years ago, has just been offered to run another company in a similar field. He has decided to take on this second fulltime gig in the real world and can no longer afford much time contributing to the Liberal Strait Jackets, like DKOS or whatever.

Lots o Luck.

And no, we are not all Londoners now. I am still a Parisian.

Oh well, he will just have to go on with his real life, teaching, training and promoting minorities and women to have success in the real world, and leave the soon to be forgotten fantasy world of DH, who does not do her namesake proud. The "real" DH was unafraid and refused to be placed into a Literary Strait Jacket. Hence, his name has lived on for nearly 100 years after his death. Where will you be in 100 years, cyber DH? For that matter, where will Kos and Rush be?

Go back to Kos, if you can't make it on your own. Go back to reality, if you have any real balls.

Now THAT was amazing writing.

[DemFromCT]

Different POV, donkeytale. The site is what it is. We're comfortable with it. We don't try to duplicate Daily Kos. Things we write here are picked up by others far more frequently than you assume. Nor is our purpose to satisfy you, it's to satisfy ourselves and our readers.

We define success differently, apparently.

Be well, and try not to get banned anywhere.

[donkeytale]

Donkeytale defines success as succeeding. So, yes, apparently you do define it differently...Interestingly enough, I just backed into a diary at DKOS called "Who killed Arthur Gilroy?" by Apian.

Many were asking in the threads what happened? I know because I was killed off in the same threads by your little brown shirt colleague, DHinMI (not THAT DH).

If anyone wants to know the truth, they never will, because the best killing comments were hidden.

Why is the SLTC always trying to emulate the worst aspects of the former Soviet Union (cyberly speaking that is)?

Sorry Demfromct, DT takes no BS from anyone, even the "Saints," like the contributors to this site.

DHinMI banned AG and DT in a massacre of unprecendented inconsequentiality. (inconsequentiality being the chief hallmark of weblogs in general)However, DT is nothing if not a consistently rude asshole (unlike AG, who did try to fit in...I probably just ruined him).

So please DHinMI, open up your politburo heart. Donkeytale is OK with his banning, but let up and kiss Kosses ass a bit more than normally and get AG reborn at DKOS!It was clearly my fault not his.

Or offer him a spot here. This place needs some serious livening up, even tho you all profess not to want it that way...

[emptypockets]

Both www.donkeytale.com and donkeytale.typepad.com. One would suggest you use them.

(Your own words suggest a cleverer site name, also available: www.politburro.com)

[emptypockets]

Both www.donkeytale.com and donkeytale.typepad.com are available. One would suggest you use them.

(Your own words suggest a cleverer site name, also available: www.politburro.com)

[donkeytale]

how about www.politburrito.com? Is that one taken?

See my post above. I aint got time for that now....starting Monday. My point: I was happy at DKOS. My crime: calling someone an idiot for dissing postal workers (who are generally unionized Dems and fairly represented by minorities) and then stating she ENJOYS standing in lines.

This was a response to my call for VOBM as in Oregon, which clearly leads to Democratic victories. So lets see, I called this person an idiot and worse, accused her of being "white!" since no self respecting African American would diss postal workers and treat the issue of voter disenfranchisement so flippantly.

MSOC would have earned a gazillion 4s for saying the same thing. I think she was a fan of mine, too, although like Apian, she would never admit it in that crowd.

I guess its just a matter of who you are, not what you say or think. Sort of like the former Soviet Union again (cyberally speaking again).

DHinMI came charging in name calling ME, (which I am totally ok with but I believe she was taken aback because DT refuses to be cowed unlike most of the others she bullies into selfcensored liberalism), signalling to the ever present regiment of kossbrownshirts to come in and troll rate me into oblivion. She even warned me that I was about to be banned and that I should "step away from my computer now". I expected to be read my Miranda rights next. Trying to get me back into "line" bwith a premeditated attack, in other words.

Donkeytale backs down from no one, even an exulted, former Kosshack like DHinMI. AG, who apparently was a fan of mine, jumped in to help me combat this obvious cybernazism, and we both went down rhetorical guns blazing in a losing battle to the kossbrownshirts. RIP.

PS --NO interest in satisfying my few readers AND my ego by starting my own website. I prefer to satisfy my ego in the real world.

And there should we all be seen and heard, lest the Rebumblicans continue to keep control forever...VOBM will solve that little pickle, but its so REAL and not worthy of endless diarizing like the handwringing over stolen elections that are so prominent in SLTC.

Splintering into a billion different unread and uncommented upon websites like this one will not help the SLTC ever catch up with the hard right talk radio crowd.

But thanks for the suggestion.

Bring back Arthur Gilroy!

[NG]

Well I hope this post will only show up one time, and no matter what, I will only press the "post" button once, so help me??? Now I do have something to say here on the below subject.

Splintering into a billion different unread and uncommented upon websites like this one will not help the SLTC ever catch up with the hard right talk radio crowd.

I do think this guy has a point in that blogs are not going to be the reason why voters casts-out these conservative zealots. Let me give you a simple example. If a conservative Repub came to my door to ask for support, I would immediately see dark red, and I would have a very hard time keeping the rest of that encounter civil in any way! There would be nothing, absolutely nothing, that that clown could say to me to make me listen. That pretty well sums up America these days in terms of making people change their minds with the spoken or written word.

What will make people change their minds is their personal Maslow's needs situation in the world. If people become less secure in their basic survival needs for themselves and their families, they will blame the party in power and vote them out. The active side is with the party in power, not what the opposition says on blogs!

So what do blogs provide? Well, misery loves company, so blogs provide mental outlets for people in pain or people in need of a personal outlet for some reason. Even this fellow donkeywhatever?? is in need of an outlet somewhere for his needs. I guess the question is what are his needs?

[donkeytale]

No interest in even just changing to a new alter ego, like Apian/Arthur Gilroy.

[DemFromCT]

DT, you hang out a lot with little to no interest. 'Sokay, but just saying.

[donkeytale]

"need" to save the world, just like you, NG.

But I dont see how kissing fellow liberal ass when they are mediocre, or worse, will help us to do so.

The problem with Blogs, here and Koss, etc., is that the tendency is always to find fault with the other side, instead of with ourselves.

We cant change them. They must change themselves. we can change ourselves, but we have to HONESTLY confront our own BS...trust me on that, NG.

[donkeytale]

DFCT---not sure I understand your comment. Please be more specific, even if it requires your dropping the politesse for a moment....I've been hanging here to add some "heft" to this site. At least you are getting more comments than usual...

You can ban me too if you want. Who cares?...and no, I have not been paid by the Republicans to trash your site, if thats where you are going.

I am independent and fearless. A loner, in other words....

[NG]

We cant change them. They must change themselves. we can change ourselves, but we have to HONESTLY confront our own BS...trust me on that, NG.

Very, very true, and basically saying what I did in my above post, IMO! However, why do you get so angry and confrontational if this is the cast-in-stone case?? There must be something else you are in need of!

BTW, I did try to save a small realm of the world during my 26 years of various government service, and was consistently trumped by entrenched power and money. I have always had good logic and have been able to visualize logical endpoints ahead of time, but this does not seem to matter to people. It is, as you say, a matter that they have to learn for thmeselves. So I guess we are in a race to the bottom before we maybe head up again. Meanwhile, I will try to enjoy myself with this blog thingy! How about you?

[DemFromCT]

DT, if you want to show the community why you were banned elsewhere, you've already succeeded, alas.

Why not try Democratic Underground? Their style may suit you better than here.

[donkeytale]

Donkeytale's wife grew up in a strict Korean Buddhist tradition. She has talked me down out of my excited state, mainly by whacking me on the side of the head, saying "shut the fuck up," and "get back to work." Instructive and inspirational things like that.

She reminds me that Buddhist tradition teaches that we all should live completely for others. This was taught to her at age 3 when she became enslaved, basicaly for life, as a kitchen helper all day every day, except for school time. So, everything, even the wisest, most revered of written knowledge, she says, is nothing but the illusion of magicians.

She reminds me that I am no magician. And then another whack on the head.

Thanks for the advice, DEMFROMCT. You and my wife are the only ones who can talk me down. Sometimes MSOC too.

RE: NGs continuing to question my "needs". Need you?

I dont know why I get that way. Luckily, in cyberspace, nobody really gets hurt. Nobody is responding anyway, as DFCT says, so whats the big deal?

Somehow, I come out ahead in the real world. I dont know. Its a good trade off.

Thanks again. Ciao.

[Keith Barratt]

I am guilty of repeating something I wrote elsewhere:

I hope one certainty will prevail in London over the next few weeks amongst all the ambiguities with which it is having to cope. It was spoken by a mild little man who was a member of one of the London Inns of Court, the Middle Temple, of which I was a member. His name was Gandhi:

"It is the law of love that rules mankind. Had violence, i.e. hate, ruled us we should have become extinct long ago. And yet, the tragedy of it is that the so-called civilized men and nations conduct themselves as if the basis of society was violence."

But this diary is on a thread that has moved some way from its original purpose. So if I may I will comment on the existence of this, what is to me, a new blog.

I immediately liked this place because I recognisd the contributors. They represent to me what was so good about DKos, and which you can still find on there, despite the noise. And that noise seems ever louder and a little lost in focus since the 2004 presidential election.

The creation of a new liberal blog is not breaking away from anything but adding to it. The time to come together is when the issues demand it, not for the sake of conformity.

Can I wish you every success - which your site meter says you are justifiably getting.

[DemFromCT]

Keith Barratt, thank you. Success is measured one reader at a time.