The Art of the No Deal

A Different Game for Trump, and He Doesn’t Get It

Should we take Donald Trump at his word (always a dangerous practice) that he would like to renegotiate the Paris Climate Agreement on terms more favorable to the U.S.—or is he just knowingly making an empty offer to cover his intransigence with a pretense of flexibility?

Sanity would plead the latter—no matter how transparent the pretense, he can say to his base in 2020, “Look, I offered to negotiate but the liberals are still whining. The failed deal is on their heads.”

But let’s just suppose that President Trump has some illusion that he can actually get a new “deal” from 197 other countries. What does that tell us about the world of carnival mirrors he inhabits?

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Who’s Really Laughing at Us? (Hint: he’s a former spy.)

It seems that just about every irony you can invent dogs the Presidency of Donald Trump—the latest being that on the same day Trump was ranting about how the whole world was laughing at us, Vladimir Putin was admitting, in his characteristically oblique fashion, that Russia really was behind the hacking of the DNC and revelation of yet more Hillary Clinton emails.

This after months of Putin allowing Trump, flailing about with indignation, to speculate publicly about how many other possibilities for election tampering there were besides Russians—despite the agreement among several U.S. intelligence agencies that Russia was indeed behind the hacking.

(A Trump realization: Oops! So it was the Russians, after all? You mean, maybe they’re the ones who got me elected?)

So if any foreign country’s leaders are laughing at us, it would be the Russians.

You gotta admit, Vladimir Putin is a master of dissembling, on everything from the invasion of Ukraine to war crimes in Syria to alleging he has no designs on the Baltic states. I watched the video of him identifying the hackers as most likely non-governmental Russian “patriots”—and there was virtually no sign of emotion besides a momentary sly smile.  (That smile was for YOU, Donald, you sucker!)

You don’t need late-night comedians to make a fool of Donald Trump, all you need is another leader with a similarly thuggish mentality who is always a step or two ahead of him. Stay tuned for more of the same in months to come.

 

 

 

It’s Not about Climate Change, It’s about Obama

Last evening (Thursday) Mike Lee—one of the 22 Republican senators who sent a letter to President Trump recommending withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement—was interviewed on PBS.  As you might expect, he asserted with a great show of solemnity that Trump’s decision was “the right thing to do” at least twice during the interview.

But what I didn’t quite expect was that the first thing out of his mouth was not about the Paris accord itself, nor was it about climate or jobs or the economy—no, it was about the way Obama had drawn the U.S. into the agreement without the consent of the Senate (as he, or course, had every right to do).

And there it was. . . another surfacing of the anti-Obama toxin that has steadily dripped through the veins of the Republican Party ever since 2008. If the Paris Agreement had been entered into by a President McCain or President Romney, do you think it would have taken such a pounding from Mike Lee, or any other of the Republican senators who have defied common sense and the will of the rest of the world?

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Mercenaries Track Pipeline Protesters

Darkening Future for Protesters

Thanks to some  dogged sleuthing on the part of investigative journalists at The Intercept, we can hear the pitter-patter of little security-agent feet taking baby steps toward a police state in the good old land of the free and the home of the brave. See:

Police State Rising

As you read the article, you may find yourself wondering, who is better entitled to be paranoid—pipeline builders  and their private police forces or pipeline protestors? OK, that’s rhetorical question, but I say it to underscore the imbalance between the two forces. The language used by security agency “TigerSwan” would be comical if it were not so darkly ominous: protestors are likened to jihadists, and combating the “anti-DAPL [anti-Dakota Access Pipeline] diaspora” calls for “aggressive intelligence preparation of the battlefield.”

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Suicide Bombers and Mental Illness

It’s as Insane as It Looks

Most of us, after we have recovered from the initial shock and horror of a suicide bombing such as the recent atrocity in Manchester, ponder the mystery of the suicide bomber. What could be the motivation for something so horrific?  Here is a person who commits an act that he knows 99.9% of humanity will consider monstrous.  It is an act done for a cause which any rational person will conclude is doomed—if by “cause” we mean the creation of a worldwide caliphate ruled by psychopaths such as the leaders of the Islamic State.

It’s irrational, and a lot more irrational than the common wisdom supposes. We generally conceive of the suicide bomber as a self-identified martyr—s/he is not crazed any more than the first wave of soldiers to hit Omaha Beach on D-Day.

Are suicide bombers “sane?” Some say that self-destructive zealots are sane if their acts are based on a belief system made legitimate by authorities who purport to translate the Mind of God.

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Goodby, Autonomy – Not That You’d Notice

Beyond Fake News: Hidden Persuaders Shifting the Ground beneath Our Feet

Fifty years ago, Vance Packard’s The Hidden Persuaders drew attention to the methods by which advertisers manipulated the psyches of consumers to desire certain things—in part to gain advantage over competitors selling things people needed (food, medicine, soap), and in part to get people to desire what they did not desire until the advertiser influenced them to (Caribbean vacations, cars with enormous fins, hula-hoops).

The advertising game has not changed a lot since then, and many of the devices used to influence consumers have become so transparent you’d think most of us would simply laugh—making an association between a car and an ocean wave, a candy bar and a seduction.  But somebody’s not laughing, otherwise sponsors would not be dishing out humongous gobs of money to keep the games going. (For now we leave aside the question of sponsors themselves  being duped, forking zillions over to ad agencies  for advertisements that don’t get proportional results.)

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Cross Me, and I’ll Cut You Off at the Knees

Susan Collins, of All People, Engages in Double Speak: A Manifestation of Fear?

Maine Senator Susan Collins’s defense of the firing of James Comey was a very peculiar move—Collins being someone who is known for her willingness to buck the party line, in particular supporting the funding of Planned Parenthood (successfully), and voted (successfully! joined by McCain and Graham) against repeal of Obama administration regulations restricting methane emissions. (Whether Pruitt will enforce the regulation is, unfortunately another matter.)

So. . . what calls for explanation:

What’s most troubling is that an independent-minded Republican would resort to specious public statements in defense of Trump.

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War on Women Grinds On

Trump Gang Pulls Plug on Women’s Empowerment

In addition to slashing the U.S. contribution to the United Nations, the Trump administration plans to take the axe to a State Department program promoting women’s rights around the world: The Latest Blow to Women Worldwide

It’s another measure to find funds to increase the Defense Department’s budget by $54 billion.

It’s also another slab dumped on the mounting pile of wrongs meant to overwhelm the opposition.  The Trump administration is waging war on many fronts: Women, the Poor, the Sick, Immigrants fleeing war and rule by street gangs, Science, Climate Change Resistance, Habitat Protection, Oceans, Lakes, and Waterways Protections, Renewable Energy, Voting Rights, the National Parks and Monuments, Native American Rights, Black Lives Matter. . . the list goes on.

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Just When You Thought It Couldn’t Get Worse. . .

Science Takes Another Hit from Trump Administration

In case you didn’t catch this, Trump has appointed, for assistant secretary for public affairs at HHS  a woman who believes that abortion can cause breast cancer.  When challenged by the New York Times, instead of citing studies, Charmaine Yoest argued that scientists are “under the control of the abortion lobby.”

There may be more than one reason for opposing abortion, but making claims about a connection unknown to scientists at the CDC is a long leap into the Alternative Facts Universe (AFU).  Forgive me for playing another of my hunches as to the AFU mindset, but I imagine that Yoest’s claim is based on the fact that some women who have had abortions later get breast cancer.  Undoubtedly. I’m sure Charmaine Yoest has heard of more than one. The question then to ask is, how many women who never had an abortion also get breast cancer? That is, does the rate of women getting breast cancer after an abortion exceed the background breast cancer rate?

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