Politics – Page 11 – Forecast: partly sunny with a chance of cataclysms

Best Read on Trump Appeal in The Guardian

Tom McCarthy writes an insightful article on Trump’s appeal to the working class in The Guardian here. (BTW, Those who do not subscribe to The Guardian may find themselves blocked if they have read too many articles in a given month.)

McCarthy writes with great deftness but without showing off. I especially like his metaphor, that Trump’s victory felt to many people “as if a trapdoor in history had clumsily sprung open and the country fallen through.”

His piece speaks for itself, but there’s one note that I’ve heard rung not only in Northampton County, PA, but elsewhere in the U.S.: that the expression ‘Merry Christmas’ had, while recently under a cloud, had made a welcome comeback. Despite the number of times Obama said ‘Merry Christmas’ (MSNBC played a collage of about ten instances of Obama wishing ‘Merry Christmas’ in various settings), during the last few decades a sense of shame had gotten attached to the expression among Christians who have felt themselves under siege. People got used to saying ‘Happy Holidays,’ but all along have been feeling a loss as well as resentment against the ‘Political Correctness’ that had taken the away the merriment.

Galvanizing Trump Effect

Freeman Allan sent me a link to a “wake up and smell the crisis” video, to the effect we should be grateful for Trump phenomenon here.

Two-and-a-Half Reasons Not to Confirm Rex Tillerson That Will Not Work

Rex Tillerson: the Man and the Phenomenon

FIRST: Rex Tillerson, most obviously, represents the interests of Big Fossil. No matter how much he divests financial holdings, the social proclivities of human nature ensure his bias toward his longstanding friends, and thereby a tilting of the international energy field toward fossil fuel. No one, not even the Pope, is immune to the psychological influences of friends. It’s not just Tillerson’s personal bias, it’s the fact of his being in the position itself that declares to the world: We Like Fossil Fuels.

SECOND: Not quite so obvious is the signal of the nomination of Tillerson not as a person, but as a phenomenon. It’s the tacit agreement that a captain of a key international industry naturally belongs as chief diplomat of the world’s most powerful nation, no matter what industry s/he is connected with. The nomination of Satya Nadella (current CEO of Microsoft) would send the same signal. It’s the signal that we’re now unquestionably in the era of what David Korten wrote in When Corporations Rule the World, first published two decades ago.*

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Secession: Has Its Time Come?

Tell me you haven’t been thinking about it.

Secession.

I.e. a “Blue” withdrawal from the paradoxically named “United” States.

[sorry Barack, your farewell speech was laudable, but as your mom said, Reality has a Way of Catching Up with You.]

I realize there are many practical obstacles to this split, of which the two biggest are:

(A) Geographic. North Dakota, Montana, and a finger of Idaho break up a Blue Northern Arc extending from Virginia to California. Boundaries could be especially problematic there. If the other side started building walls, access between regions might be managed through Canada.

(B) Asymmetry of Resources & Money:

The non-Blue portion of What Was the United States (WUSS) has most of the physical resources: oil, coal, natural gas, solar, and land-based wind energy, and most important—if push came to shove—most of the armaments, from handguns to ICBMs.
The Blue Arc has most of the financial wealth, intellectual property, and potential for innovation. You can see where the above-mentioned asymmetry would interact with this one. But, with enough tribute paid to the non-Blue states—continuing an existing de facto practice—the Blue Arc could minimize the use of force. The Blue Arc, if it joined NATO, would shine among the other NATO countries, in actually paying its way.

Think I’m joking? I’m not sure. I actually don’t believe Secession’s time has come. Yet. But it is time to start thinking about it so that future generations might not have to endure the charade of creating a More Perfect Union from the schizophrenic nation that exists now.

World Order 2.0 and National Debt

Richard Haass Stumps for a Reset of World Order, Targets National Debt

Centrist Big Thinker and President of the Council on Foreign Relations Richard Haass has a new book out, The World in Disarray: American Foreign Policy and the Crisis of the Old Order. As I gleaned from an interview on NPR’s Morning Edition today, and from the summary offered on Amazon, he’s looking for a reset (my word) of our foreign policy that recognizes our limitations but still projects our strength—reflecting “the reality that power is widely distributed and that borders count for less.”

In case you were wondering, Haass was pretty satisfied with the world order from the Cold War up through September 11, 2001. It may have been a tense world order, but at least it was orderly. Sort of.

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Donald Dishes Out Nuclear Trash Talk

Yes, you’ve all heard it, thanks to Joe Scarborough, that not only will we have an arms race, but WE the USA will crush the opposition! Hooray! The fun begins January 21st. Courtesy of Donald Trump.

Esquire on 2017 Detonation Device

So, that’s not news. What’s most newsworthy about this, for those seeking to “read between the lines,” is the spin (not so much spin as cartwheel) from Trump spokesman Sean Spicer:

“He’s going to ensure that other countries get the message that he’s not going to sit back and allow” them to engage in nuclear proliferation, Trump spokesman Sean Spicer told NBC. “And what’s going to happen is they will come to their senses, and we will all be just fine.”

Fortune cites “loose cannon.”

We will all be just fine.

Per Sean Spicer, who, if you have actually seen him speak, exudes all the charm of a badger in a leg-hold trap, assures us that his boss is just sending a message. As in, trash talk, “Listen up, MoFos, we gonna whup yo’ MoFo-ing nuclear ass,” which everyone understands is just showmanship to boost ratings, no one to take it that seriously, once “they have come to their senses.” (Doesn’t this sound like something like Don Corleone might have said?)

For his part, Russian leader Vladimir Putin kept his pragmatic head, pointing out that a nuclear arms race was unaffordable. Vlad, bless his cold cold heart, was not about to take the bait—and I, for maybe the first time, was grateful for the wisdom of a tyrant with a long memory and a long projection into the future.

37%!?! The Trumputin Effect, Tribalism, and Strongmen

A recent poll by The Economist and YouGov found that 37% of Republicans have a “favorable view” of Russian leader Vladimir Putin. (It’s 10% of Democrats also!; I don’t know who these Democrats are and I don’t want to know.)

That’s a “favorable view” of someone who is responsible for the deaths of Syrian civilians in the tens, if not hundreds, of thousands. That’s in addition to thousands of casualties resulting from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and annexation of Crimea, plus the bloody invasion of Georgia in 2008, not to mention cyberwarfare against Baltic states, and, within Russia itself, continuing violent repression of critical investigative media and opposition voices in general. In other words, a “favorable view” of someone for whom there’s a compelling case to charge as a war criminal several times over.

Oh, and we might mention that he lies about absolutely everything that sheds a bad light on Russia (last I heard he was still denying that Russian troops had entered eastern Ukraine, except to protect Ukrainian rebels. Why does this sound like Saturday Night Live?).

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Fake News Ain’t the Half of It

“Fake News” is getting a lot of heat these days from some of us who actually believe that truth is better than untruth—those of us who are being forcibly dragged into the “post-truth” era.

As if “post-truth” were something new. Actually, we’ve been drifting into the post-truth fog for quite some time now. In Virtual Unreality, Charles Seife (2014) chronicles the many ways in which the digital revolution and its star attraction, the Internet, have been masking, warping, and turning upside-down our perceptions of the world and even each other. A pedestrian example is how easily one can manipulate one’s Facebook persona into one loosely based on, and more attractive than, the original—more good-looking, more cool, more talented, more sociable, more with it. As the joke goes, “on the Internet no one knows you’re a dog,” and no one knows whether what you’re feeding them is bullshit.

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Environmental Wrecking Ball to Head EPA, Continue War on Science – Why??

It seems that every sentient being on the planet has felt obliged to weigh in on the U.S. Presidential election and what it spat out: Donald Trump. I have kept quiet on this matter on this blog up to now, because (1) I’m “partisan,” so what is my biased opinion worth? (2) every insightful thing that can be said has already been said by others.

But Donald Trump’s nominating Scott Pruitt to head the EPA is a call to arms. If you don’t know the scope of the damage Pruitt can do, check out this in The Guardian: Pruitt Nomination Implications

Most of what you need to know about the policy issues can be gleaned from The Guardian piece and elsewhere on the Web. But there’s a more sweeping issue represented by the nomination of a climate “skeptic” (in actuality, a denier) to this critical post. That of course is the War on Science. From whence does it spring?

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Rex Tillerson: the Man and the Phenomenon

Richard Haass Stumps for a Reset of World Order, Targets National Debt

Are Crowds Looking Better These Days?