Category: Politics

Twofold Dangers from John Kelly

John Kelly Exceeds His Station

Many of us breathed a sigh of relief when John Kelly became Trump’s chief of staff—at last, we thought, someone who could contain Trump’s most egregious outbursts, throttle down volatility in the White House, and act as gatekeeper, in particular minimizing the casual comings and goings of  members of the quasi-Royal Family in and out of the Oval Office.

Kelly has managed to limit access to the President, but has largely failed in containing Trump’s emotional outbursts  on Twitter and suppressing volatility in the White House.  But, perhaps in frustration from his own ineffectiveness, Kelly overstepped his station when he got into a feud with Representative Frederica Wilson over the notorious phone call the President made to a Gold Star family. Actually, I understood Kelly’s point about Wilson’s grandstanding, even though he made a factual error (a natural symptom of the misinformation disease caught by anyone who associates with Trump).

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The Ultimate Externalized Cost

They conned the public, and will never pay for it

I know this is obvious, but not to take it off our radar screens for a second: climate chickens coming home to roost, and who’s going to take care of them? Not the fossil fuel companies.

The U.S. Congress is presently debating, how much should the government provide for disaster relief and recovery due to hurricanes—around Houston, in Florida, in the Virgin Islands, and most disastrously, Puerto Rico.  The Congress is reluctant, because a precedent for paying now points the way to astronomical payments to come. They know that named hurricanes are just the tip of the climatic disaster iceberg (sorry for the incongruous metaphor) .

Anyone who has, with an open and analytical mind, paid attention to   Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) and Climate Change, has connected the dots between profligate burning of fossil fuels and catastrophic weather events.

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Franken Scandal Revisited

Pro-Franken pushback

It’s no surprise that I’ve gotten some pushback on my Franken Should Resign post (mostly via messages sent to my private email).  Three people took me to task for being unnecessarily harsh. In case you missed it, here’s my previous borderline-harsh post:

Franken: Should He or Shouldn’t He? The Bigger Issue

I get what they’re saying, although I’m not in complete agreement.  Let me make as crystal clear as I can, I am not denouncing Al Franken the person.  As I said, I like him, I admire him, and I’m very grateful for his service in the Senate.  He made a few mistakes, but the mistakes didn’t cross more than a centimeter into the dark zone of exploitation of women. Whereas Roy Moore has gone so far into the dark zone he has become invisible to anyone seeking decency.. He has shown no contrition; on the contrary, he has attacked and gotten surrogates to humiliate his accusers, of whom there’s little doubt that they are telling the truth.  You can’t get a lot less Christian than that.  (That Donald Trump has failed to denounce him speaks still more volumes about the fundamental indecency of our so-called national leader.)

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Public Interest Algorithms and the Jungle of Earth Two

Public Interest Algorithms: An idea whose time has come, and  will quickly be shelved by free-market ideology

Former FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler has proposed a technical measure to defend against the trend of social media to divide us: Public Interest Algorithms.  See this in the Brookings Institution website: Wheeler on Public Interest Algorithms

Tom Wheeler is a very smart guy, so why has he poisoned his concept by branding it as a public interest initiative?  In an era when free-market ideologues hold sway over the intransigent core of Republicans in Congress, and Silicon Valley is jam-packed with libertarians, anything that smacks of public interest is derided as an instrument of the Nanny State.  If you can’t legislate restaurants to stop providing super-sized soft drinks to their customers (a clear public health hazard), how are you going to keep at bay the Sultans of Social Media who will fight tooth and nail against public interest algorithms tampering with their business models?

A current Senate hearing on Russian meddling with U.S. elections via social media finds Facebook and Twitter PR spinners making conciliatory noises while at the same time holding fast to their narrative of social media as the best outlets for the freest flow of information ever conceived of by the human race.  The problem with this narrative is the unbounded nature of the “flow.”  It’s not like a stream that gathers the contributions of multiple tributaries and flows in a direction (toward the truth or at least a wide consensus). It’s not even like a river that has overleapt its banks in a flood, since a flood, too, still has a recognizable shape and direction.  It is a deluge pounding down anywhere and everywhere, a Hurricane Harvey hovering over continents. The “public interest” is a drowning victim.

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The Other Addiction: Is Democracy Sunk?

Chemical Addiction: Unsolved although Obvious

Addiction to painkillers has been killing a lot of people. For years.  Just why it has been getting so much media attention recently may have to do with (1) criticality, analogous to the point at which a nuclear chain reaction becomes self-sustaining, has been reached; (2) liberal alarm over the surge in “Trump voters,” many of whom, rural and white, are now suffering from addictions on a par with that of urban blacks whose votes have long been taken (and are still taken) for granted by Democrats.   PBS recently ran a series on the subject. It appears that bright spotlights being trained on the opiate epidemic are giving rise to promising local and state programs to save addicts’ lives and then turn them around.  The former is easier than the latter; instances abound of addicts having their lives saved one day only to overdose the next (and the next and the next), and the burden that puts on emergency services has led to a debate of whether there should be quotas, as in Three Strikes and You’re Out (for eternity).

Noises are being made at the national administrative and legislative levels to address the countrywide epidemic, but there’s little real movement, despite candidate Trump’s promise to do something. That was to be expected, since he was unclear from the start as to what, and seems to have forgotten his pledge while chaos erupts on every issue that he touches.  In the legislature, there is much public hand-wringing but not much legislating. Even if laws are passed to mitigate the opioid epidemic, who in a government drifting toward self-destruction will carry them out?

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McCain and Corker: Poster Boys for Term Limits

After Senator Bob Corker uncorked his imperishable quip, “It’s a shame the White House has become an adult day care center,” it became abundantly clear that he and John McCain have, by example, made a most persuasive case for term limits.  McCain stood up against the Republican legislative steamroller on health care, and Corker has stood up to the dysfunctional and dangerous White House with ever sharper criticism during the last several weeks.

What the two senators have in common—besides being moderate members of an increasingly immoderate political party—is the extreme unlikelihood that either of them will run for office again.  In Corker’s case, he has already declared he is retiring, and in McCain’s case, sadly, the glioblastoma ravaging his brain will almost certainly kill him before is he up for reelection seven years hence.

They also have in common the fact that both supported the Donald Trump presidential campaign. McCain, whose personal detestation of Trump was obvious, did so largely out of party loyalty, whereas Corker was an early Trump booster.

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The Nuclear War Threat: Way Beyond North Korea

If you think you’re worried about nuclear conflict now . . .

THINK SOME MORE. 

Sure we’re deeply troubled by the prospect of a nuclear war between an American Narcissist Who Would Be King and a North Korean Dictator Who Would Be a God.  But—trying not to diminish the horrific losses such a conflict would entail—at least it would not lead to global Armageddon.  The leaders of Russia and China would keep cooler heads than either of these madmen, and avoid a widespread holocaust, although the damage to North Korea and perhaps the U.S. would be immense and long-lasting.  I trust those other leaders to be rational: however cruel, repressive, and callous they may be, they are not suicidal, neither are they unpatriotic enough to risk the destruction of their nations over North Korea.

So that you can worry about the potential for  a nuclear exchange far more consequential than Korea’s, I call attention to a piece in the September 23-29 New Scientist by Debora MacKenzie, entitled “Accidental Armageddon” —that’s the title within the pages; on the cover the headline reads “End Game: You’re right to worry about nuclear war – but not for the reason you think.” If these headlines make your blood run cold, you may find it run colder once you read MacKenzie’s article. Unfortunately, at this moment I can’t give you a link to the story, but you can find the magazine in material form at most libraries.

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Gun Culture, Liberty, and the Appeal to Agency

Mass Shootings: The Price to Pay for Liberty?

What has once again been largely left out of the public debate on gun control prompted by the Las Vegas massacre, is how tightly gun rights are bound to right-wing ideology, at the core of which is the fear of a tyrannical government.  The shadows of the Revolutionary War and the Civil War fall over the darkest corners of the gun culture: Should tyranny come, our freedoms can only be defended by taking up arms—so goes the narrative. That these guns will inevitably be misused by sociopaths to slaughter innocents is the price we have to pay for the capability to defend ourselves against a totalitarian government.

They have a point. The revelations by Edward Snowden of the scope of national security agencies spying on U.S. citizens were chilling.  Whatever nominal limitations were put on mass surveillance in the Obama administration may well be mere window dressing, as far as the NSA and CIA are concerned. Those operators are secretive by nature, and the only way we can feel safe from surveillance is by trusting the people whose mission is to monitor, capture and kill enemies of the state—trusting them to be motivated by true democratic principles.  For now, their focus is on terrorism and hostile foreign governments, but if the government were to be taken over by a strongman (such as Donald Trump would like to be but is too scatterbrained and undisciplined to emulate),* the tools of these agencies could readily be turned on American civilians—in particular on what we like to think of as the free press (the irony of right-wingers’ beliefs that “the media” are dominated by socialists is particularly rich; do they really believe that these news organizations are arms of the “Deep State?”).

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Just Say NO to Bridenstine – and Slow the “Lunar Gold Rush”

Bridenstine Edges toward Confirmation as NASA Head

Recently I circulated an email warning of the potential for non-scientist, non-engineer Congressman Jim Bridenstine to be confirmed as NASA chief administrator. This is yet another Trumpian poke in the eye of the science community, and more seriously it would put a tool of the mining industry in a position to prioritize NASA’s missions.

Now, the Washington Post (September 12) reports that Bridenstine’s route to confirmation is being eagerly groomed by industry groups and key members of Congress. See: Bridenstine Advancing, Science in Retreat  I recommend you let your Senators know it matters to you that this man not only is lacking in scientific and engineering credentials, but also has an agenda to shift NASA’s priorities away from space exploration and toward space exploitation. To wit:

What Bridenstine Wants: New Kinds of Craters on the Moon

The Post reports Bridenstine as saying, “From the discovery of water ice until this day, the American objective should have been a permanent outpost of rovers and machines. . . .” To what end, pray tell, Congressman? We can get some clues from a report under the aegis of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory on “The Lunar Gold Rush: How Moon Mining Could Work.” See: JPL on Mining the Moon

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Poll Found Americans Undecided on What?!?

Via NPR I heard a few weeks ago that 52% of Americans felt that Trump’s response to the Charlottesvile domestic terrorism did not go far enough in denouncing White Supremacists and Nazis in our midst. That’s according to an NPR/PBS poll in mid-August.

27% feel that his response was appropriate. No surprises there. We know who they are.

Here’s the baffling part: 21% were  undecided!  A number which is astonishing, disturbing, and . . . evidence that at least a fifth of Americans are either (1) deaf dumb and blind; (2) so addicted to sports or Game of Thrones that they don’t know anything besides; (3) appallingly apathetic; (4)  ignorant of the most basic facts of American (not to mention world) history; (5) so influenced by right-wing propaganda that THEY DON’T KNOW WHAT TO THINK.   The cultivated doubt that has infected attitudes to climate change, health care, medical science, ecological science, has even spread to what you’d think would be clear moral understanding.