Beltway Mafia

We're used to "Beltway Bandits" as a journalistic cliche, referring to the ring road around Washington, DC, which is lined with DC's favorite contractors, such as Unisys, Honeywell, and Booz Allen Hamilton.  However "bandits" may not be obvious enough in some circles.  Too cartoony.  How about the "Beltway Mafia" instead?

The Beltway Mafia is heavily into matters military and needs to keep the flow of weaponry going.  The front keeps shifting, from Iraq, to Afghanistan, to Ukraine.  The goal is not to fight these countries, but to arm them against their foreign enemies and their internal insurgents.  That's called the protection racket, which the Mafia is good at playing.  Accept our protection, or else.

Ukraine is especially dependent on the Beltway Mafia for operational support, while the BM is in turn dependent on the US (Uncle Sam).  The defense of Ukraine against its internal and external enemies is a high priority of these subcultural icons.

Some Ukrainians at first may have wanted peace with mother Russia, another homeland for many of them.  The Beltway Mafia put an end to those pipe dreams early on. A new raison d'être had been found.  A goldmine.  The new big business inside the beltway would be to "fight to the last Ukrainian".

Old World Order

People like to talk about some New World Order, as if we know what that means.  It means we're invited to take a Rorschach Test and to project an imaginary dystopian or relatively utopian future for ourselves.

There's some disagreement on whether we're already in the NWO or if it's still on ahead.  

Assuming it's still on ahead, that would mean we're in the OWO (Old World Order) right now.  

How shall we characterize such a thing.  Is it "rules based" in some way?

Before giving vent to your inner cynic, lets be clear:  rules exist.  Some people like to write about "laws" as in "natural laws" but I'm more into "rules" myself, as a matter of taste.

Some rules we follow come from an exceptionless side of things we don't have much control over.  We haven't the luxury of not obeying eternal principles, whatever those may be. We sense their applicability, whether or not we know how to codify them into words.

Sometimes we might acknowledge "miracles" wherein events seem to go against what we considered possible.  The reason we consider them "exceptional" in nature is that they're "the exceptions that prove the rule" (an idiom worthy of focus, if you get the time).  By updating our sense of the rules, we may need less room for these "impossibilities".

Last night, Everything Everywhere All at Once won a bunch of Oscars. I was too busy studying the Blood Simple special features to feel like breaking off, knowing I could get it in the dailies the next day (or later -- I mean in the reviews, say on YouTube).  

This movie (EEAAO, winning sevens statues), not unlike The Dawn of Everything, reminds us to stay away from false dichotomies, such as Manichean polarities, or such as "democratic" versus "authoritarian" or "globalist" versus "nationalist".  Why fall for an either/or mindset?  Remember neither.  Remember both.

My idea of a NWO is somewhat typified by EPCOT (all caps version), wherein a global Refugee Services keeps rescuing people from dead end circumstances.  We have two sides of the same coin (symbolized by the lake) with Tomorrow Land on one side, and Remember Land on the other.  

Then there's Fantasy Land, somewhat independent of any specific past-to-future axis (= scenario = narrative).  Tomorrow Land needs to be actively dreamed up, not treated like a place we stumble into.

So is all that Remember-Imagine-Tomorrow stuff the NWO or the OWO?  

Haven't we been dreaming ourselves into the future for some time now?  Of course we have.  

But in some complexes, or mindsets, the old seems at war with the new.  These "two sides of the same coin" fight one another.  People get locked into those mindsets pretty squarely sometimes, and even lose the key.  

Sometimes the best strategy is to show them the fire escape.

I'm indulgent of the nation-states model, and encourage more virtual versions of same, offering dual and triple citizenship or more, and having few restrictions on where you actually live.  

I could be a citizen of a virtual nation (VN) even if I live in Peru per this order.  Lasting VNs would actually take more work to create and maintain than blowing bubbles in the quantum foam.  I'm just sketching on the back of a napkin here at this moment.

Although it might sound like I'm talking to myself in a vacuum, regarding ideas that will never see the light of day, from my angle I see myself more as descriptive, keeping pace, updating my language to keep it synchronized with real world developments.  

Whether that makes me an advocate for the old or the new, in terms of what world order I favor, I'd say that's indeterminate.  I am always between what has been (the old) and what is to be (the new).  

That's what we mean by "living emergently" am I right?  And it's not just me who is doing it.

Quaker Doings

:: stark street meetinghouse ::

I've been out of the loop on a lot of activities, including memorial services, as I was busy care taking for my own mom.  

I haven't exactly been a hermit, but lets just say my inner circle has been tiny, but that's interpreting "inner" strictly, as in "could get covid from".  No one wanted to hear that Kirby had transmitted covid to his 90+ year old mother, least of all me.  She died of other things, such as we used to call old age.

I'm still not frequenting the meetinghouse, although I'm in compliance with their covid policies.  A Quaker Meetinghouse in the 2020s is quite frequently an eldercare facility, meaning the majority of attenders, including members, are of relatively advanced age.  Most would not have comorbidities, but some would, and that's enough to suggest a fairly stringent "lock down" protocol.

In our neck of the woods "lock down" was always a misnomer.  We had protocols, and businesses were forced to close.  I'm not saying it wasn't intense.  But we didn't weld people into their homes, the way we were seeing on social media, closer to ground zero (i.e. Wuhan in most narratives).  The Trump & Fauci policy that fit us best was: "no central government should be telling you what to do, ask your local governor for guidance".  Put another way:  it's a very varied country and no one size fits all.  Duh, right?

So was I scandalized that Florida stayed relatively open?  As an Oregonian, I was free to walk the dog outside, go to the beach, visit public parks...  I didn't get to Florida in that period, but I'm not about to throw stones.  Again, because I'm an aging Boomer and mom was even older, I went the Instacart route and holed up.  We got our boosters.  But I was never one to shout in any megaphone about how everyone should do as I do.  On the contrary, I'm accepting of my minority status, of full time care taker.

So, George Lakey, author of Dancing with History is passing through.  Our activists bestirred themselves without needing to be cued.  The Peace and Social Concerns Committee went through a crisis period, especially when our meeting turned into a battlefield in the Gender Wars.  

I was one of those diehards who did not want to see said committee "shelved" or "put on ice".  The key was to clarify the committee's role:  it's a place where activists come together to compare notes and tactics, but is not about "expressing the conscience of the meeting" i.e. it does not presume to represent "Quakers", nor even "Multnomah Friends" to the world.  We each have a calling to do that, individually.

My mother was at a nexus between AFSC (American Friends Service Committee), FCNL (Friends Committee on National Legislation), WILPF (Women's International League for Peace and Freedom) and RSoF (the Religious Society of Friends itself, i.e. bare bones Quakers).  That's not the full extent of her network, but it's enough to keep the switchboards busy.