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“Dear NFL: We will not support millionaire ingrates who hate America and disrespect our Armed Forces and Veterans. Who wins a football game has ZERO impact on our lives. Who fights for and defends our nation has every impact on our lives. We stand with the Heroes, not a bunch of rich, entitled, arrogant, ungrateful, anti-American, degenerates. Signed, We the people.”

In The Secure and the Dispossessed, Nick Buxton and Ben Hayes have collected an unflinching survey of a species gone mad. The book’s subtitle is “How the Military and Corporations Are Shaping a Climate-Changed World.” In short, the Authoritarian Exceptionalist Military Corporate Complex is flamboyantly recognizing the hole it is in, and exponentially increasing the rate of digging, while hiring PR firms to redefine “digging” as “robust engagement in advanced resilient green initiatives that save us all by further enriching the rich, militarizing the world, and rendering the earth uninhabitable.”

After reading and hearing wildly contradictory accounts of Ken Burns & Lynn Novick’s Vietnam War documentary on PBS, I decided I had to watch the thing. I agree with some of the criticism and some of the praise.

In Las Vegas on 1 October 2017, it appears that one man (although it might have been more) killed 59 people and shot and injured another 241 (with almost 300 more injured while fleeing). The incident got a lot of publicity, partly because the man managed to kill more people than most mass killers. However, because the killer was a white American and had a Christian name, he was not immediately labeled a terrorist, even though his death toll considerably exceeded that achieved in many ‘terrorist attacks’, including those that occur in war zones (such as US drone murders of innocent people attending weddings).

According to the Gun Violence Archive, there is now an average of one mass shooting (arbitrarily defined by the FBI as a shooting in which at least four victims are shot) each day in the USA. By any measure, this is a national crisis.

The Afghanistan War documentary by Ken Burns III may someday be set for release in Spring 2074.

Or maybe not. The peace movement in the U.S. made Vietnam, rather than Korea, a topic for Burns. The peace movement is struggling to make people in the United States aware that the war on Afghanistan even exists, much less that it is entering its 17th year — making it something that people who still don’t recognize Native Americans as full humans call “the longest U.S. war.”

If there ever is such a PBS account of Vietghanistan, it will no doubt steer clear of the illegality, the lasting damage, and the wisdom of those who rightly opposed the crime before it began and all the way through. Yet such a film’s content will likely be so awful, and depict such evil madness, clearly counterproductive on its own terms, that some people will finally catch on.

Or we could skip to the future and just watch War Machine with Brad Pitt right now, which gets a lot of it right.

Ok, let’s dismiss the continuing fantasy that Donald Trump is the president of all Americans. He’s not. And he’s never going to be. He is the president of the United Base of America.

The conventional wisdom is that during the primaries candidates appeal to the extreme wing of their party and then move to the center in the general election campaign. Trump re-wrote that playbook. He was elected by his base, he continues to play to his base and the only Americans he gives a shit about are his core Trumpsters. The base. The 30% who, as Trump himself bragged, would still support him even if he shot someone in the middle of New York’s 5th Avenue.

So we should stop expecting the Trump pivot. It’s never coming. He’s never going to become “presidential.” He’s never going to be the president of all Americans. He’s never going to unite. He will continue to divide. To pit his rabid, vapid hate-filled base against everyone else. Against logic, facts and rational thinking.

My wife and I recently ventured from our home in Montana on a two-week road trip to the Southwest. The excursion took us deep into Utah’s majestic canyon country and the West’s ongoing clash over our federal public lands, a conflict most recently inflamed by Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke’s recommendation to shrink a number of our National Monuments. While the environmental, social, and political issues around these fights remain contentious, one thing has become clear: Strong public lands protections fuel thriving economies.

Yes, of course, every day that Congress goes on refusing to ban guns is more blood on the steps of the U.S. Capitol. It’s immoral, disgraceful, embarrassing, and in large part a function of financial corruption. But it’s also in part a government operating within a culture of violence — albeit one that the same government plays a huge role in creating.

U.S. movies, tv shows, video games, music, news, and schools are uniquely and increasingly violent. Primates’ chief form of behavior is imitation. Humans are no exception to that rule. Human cultures that have not known stories of mass-murder have also not known mass-murder. Anthropologists have studied cultures in which people have had an absolute taboo on taking human life.

U.S. culture floods us with the acceptability of violence. Check out Heidi Tilney Kramer’s Media Monsters: Militarism, Violence, and Cruelty in Children’s Culture for a catalogue of horrors that extends from the normalization of torture in G-rated movies to the celebration of war in song lyrics. Kramer quotes some experts:

In the wake of the Las Vegas massacre, as in the wake of all the high-profile mass shootings that preceded it, the big question looms: Why?

John Whitehead puts the question this way: “What is it about America that makes violence our nation’s calling card?”

This is the enormous question — you might call it the $700 billion question, which is the size of the 2018 military budget recently approved by the Senate — that most media and law enforcement personnel do not ask or acknowledge, as they search for clues about the motive behind Stephen Paddock’s rampage on the night of Oct. 1 amid the scattered wreckage of the killer’s life.

He was a “lone wolf.” He was a “psychopath.”

BANGKOK, Thailand -- President Donald Trump's White House invitation to meet Thailand's Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha on October 2 allowed Bangkok's coup-installed military government to gain prestige and legitimacy while the junta's political opponents are fearful, muzzled and without a strong leader.

"Prayuth and the generals crave legitimacy, particularly from the U.S. and E.U. who have criticized revolving-door coups and governments in Thailand over the past 10 years," Paul Quaglia, a former C.I.A. officer in Bangkok, said in an interview.

"The U.S. press corps, unrestrained by Thai military censorship and hostile to a Trump administration, is likely to raise embarrassing questions about...palling around with coup-sponsoring generals," said Mr. Quaglia, 68, who is now the Bangkok-based director of PQA Associates, a private security concern in Hong Kong.

"President Trump looks forward to reaffirming the relationship between the United States and a key partner and longstanding ally in Asia, the Kingdom of Thailand," the White House said September 25.