"My tongue will tell the anger of my heart,
Or else my heart concealing it will break." - The Bard....
“An imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of a Republic.”
- Plutarch....
Need Little. Want Less. Love More.
Just for the record, I feel obliged to remind the Democrats of one of many arguments they might be offering the public in defense of Obamacare and as a reminder to the voters that all this posturing over health insurance by the Republican Party is a load of hooey. That Repeal and Replace is simply a Smoke and Mirrors betrayal of their own party's 1990s Health Insurance program proposal. Apparently this has to be read word by word by the average american, in order for the clarity and truth of it to permeate the Deadened American Brain.
From a sharp minded commenter in the NY Times recently:
It can't be said enough (and isn't said enough for reasons that utterly escape me): Obamacare is Republican health care. It was developed as a concept at the Heritage Institute in the 1990s in response to Hillary Care. It was first implemented in Massachusetts by a Republican governor, Mitt Romney. There is no Republican alternative to Obamacare because Obamacare IS the Republican alternative to Democratic healthcare which is, of course, single payer.
I get why Republicans don't call this out: it exposes the lie that their opposition to Obama was based not on his race but on his supposed fire breathing radicalism. But why don't Democrats hammer this truth?
Why indeed, and thank you, Stephen, for reminding us that there is such a thing as a factual, verifiable history of events. Apparently the Republicans are not the only amnesiacs.
Here'a another bright commenter, clarifying the Republican pitch that their health insurance proposal is what's needed by "consumers". (Sorry, did you miss that moment when we stopped being citizens decades ago, became "consumers" – not people, but mere ka-ching machines for the corporate state). Here's Frank:
Don't Dismiss President Trump's Attacks on the Media as Mere Stupidity
Bret Stephens delivered the Daniel Pearl Memorial Lecture this week at the University of California, Los Angeles. Read the full text of his remarks below:
I’m profoundly honored to have this opportunity to celebrate the legacy of Danny Pearl, my colleague at The Wall Street Journal. My topic this evening is intellectual integrity in the age of Donald Trump. I suspect this is a theme that would have resonated with Danny.
When you work at The Wall Street Journal, the coins of the realm are truth and trust — the latter flowing exclusively from the former. When you read a story in the Journal, you do so with the assurance that immense reportorial and editorial effort has been expended to ensure that what you read is factual. Not probably factual. Not partially factual. Not alternatively factual. I mean fundamentally, comprehensively and exclusively factual. And therefore trustworthy.
This is how we operate. This is how Danny operated. This is how he died, losing his life in an effort to nail down a story. In the 15 years since Danny’s death, the list of murdered journalists has grown long. Paul Klebnikov and Anna Politkovskaya in Russia. Zahra Kazemi and Sattar Behesti in Iran. Jim Foley and Steve Sotloff in Syria. Five journalists in Turkey. Twenty-six in Mexico. More than 100 in Iraq. When we honor Danny, we honor them, too. We do more than that.
Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl disappeared in the Pakistani port city of Karachi on Jan 23, 2002 after telling his wife he was going to interview an Islamic group leader. AFP/Getty Images
We honor the central idea of journalism — the conviction, as my old boss Peter Kann once said, “that facts are facts; that they are ascertainable through honest, open-minded and diligent reporting; that truth is attainable by laying fact upon fact, much like the construction of a cathedral; and that truth is not merely in the eye of the beholder.”
And we honor the responsibility to separate truth from falsehood, which is never more important than when powerful people insist that falsehoods are truths, or that there is no such thing as truth to begin with. So that’s the business we’re in: the business of journalism. Or, as the 45th president of the United States likes to call us, the “disgusting and corrupt media.”
Some of you may have noticed that we’re living through a period in which the executive branch of government is engaged in a systematic effort to create a climate of opinion against the news business. The President routinely describes reporting he dislikes as FAKE NEWS. The Administration calls the press “the opposition party,” ridicules news organizations it doesn’t like as business failures, and calls for journalists to be fired. Mr. Trump has called for rewriting libel laws in order to more easily sue the press. This isn’t unprecedented in U.S. history, though you might have to go back to the Administration of John Adams to see something quite like it. And so far the rhetorical salvos haven’t been matched by legal or regulatory action. Maybe they never will be.
But the question of what Mr. Trump might yet do by political methods against the media matters a great deal less than what he is attempting to do by ideological and philosophical methods.
Ideologically, the president is trying to depose so-called mainstream media in favor of the media he likes — Breitbart News and the rest. Another way of making this point is to say that he’s trying to substitute news for propaganda, information for boosterism.
His objection to, say, the New York Times, isn’t that there’s a liberal bias in the paper that gets in the way of its objectivity, which I think would be a fair criticism. His objection is to objectivity itself. He’s perfectly happy for the media to be disgusting and corrupt — so long as it’s on his side.
But again, that’s not all the president is doing. Consider this recent exchange he had with Bill O’Reilly. O’Reilly asks: Is there any validity to the criticism of you that you say things that you can’t back up factually, and as the President you say there are three million illegal aliens who voted and you don’t have the data to back that up, some people are going to say that it’s irresponsible for the President to say that. To which the president replies: Many people have come out and said I’m right.
Now many people also say Jim Morrison faked his own death. Many people say Barack Obama was born in Kenya. “Many people say” is what’s known as an argumentum ad populum. If we were a nation of logicians, we would dismiss the argument as dumb. We are not a nation of logicians.
I think it’s important not to dismiss the president’s reply simply as dumb. We ought to assume that it’s darkly brilliant — if not in intention then certainly in effect. The president is responding to a claim of fact not by denying the fact, but by denying the claim that facts are supposed to have on an argument. He isn’t telling O’Reilly that he’s got his facts wrong. He’s saying that, as far as he is concerned, facts, as most people understand the term, don’t matter; that they are indistinguishable from, and interchangeable with, opinion; and that statements of fact needn’t have any purchase against a man who is either sufficiently powerful to ignore them or sufficiently shameless to deny them — or, in his case, both.
If some of you in this room are students of political philosophy, you know where this argument originates. This is a version of Thrasymachus’s argument in Plato’s Republic that justice is the advantage of the stronger and that injustice “if it is on a large enough scale, is stronger, freer, and more masterly than justice.” Substitute the words “truth” and “falsehood” for “justice” and “injustice,” and there you have the Trumpian view of the world. If I had to sum it up in a single sentence, it would be this: Truth is what you can get away with. If you can sell condos by claiming your building is 90% occupied when it’s only 20% occupied, well, then—it’s 90% occupied. If you can convince a sufficient number of people that you really did win the popular vote, or that your inauguration crowds were the biggest—well then, what do the statistical data and aerial photographs matter?
Now, we could have some interesting conversations about why this is happening—and why it seems to be happening all of a sudden. Today we have “dis-intermediating” technologies such as Twitter, which have cut out the media as the middleman between politicians and the public. Today, just 17% of adults aged 18-24 read a newspaper daily, down from 42% at the turn of the century. Today there are fewer than 33,000 full-time newsroom employees, a drop from 55,000 just 20 years ago. When Trump attacks the news media, he’s kicking a wounded animal.
But the most interesting conversation is not about why Donald Trump lies. Many public figures lie, and he’s only a severe example of a common type.
The interesting conversation concerns how we come to accept those lies. Nearly 25 years ago, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the great scholar and Democratic Senator from New York, coined the phrase, “defining deviancy down.” His topic at the time was crime, and how American society had come to accept ever-increasing rates of violent crime as normal.
“We have been re-defining deviancy so as to exempt much conduct previously stigmatized, and also quietly raising the ‘normal’ level in categories where behavior is now abnormal by any earlier standard,” Moynihan wrote.
You can point to all sorts of ways in which this redefinition of deviancy has also been the story of our politics over the past 30 years, a story with a fully bipartisan set of villains. I personally think we crossed a rubicon in the Clinton years, when three things happened: we decided that some types of presidential lies didn’t matter; we concluded that “character” was an over-rated consideration when it came to judging a president; and we allowed the lines between political culture and celebrity culture to become hopelessly blurred. But whatever else one might say about President Clinton, what we have now is the crack-cocaine version of that. If a public figure tells a whopping lie once in his life, it’ll haunt him into his grave. If he lies morning, noon and night, it will become almost impossible to remember any one particular lie. Outrage will fall victim to its own ubiquity. It’s the same truth contained in Stalin’s famous remark that the death of one man is a tragedy but the death of a million is a statistic.
One of the most interesting phenomena during the presidential campaign was waiting for Trump to say that one thing that would surely break the back of his candidacy. Would it be his slander against Mexican immigrants? Or his slur about John McCain’s record as a POW? Or his lie about New Jersey Muslims celebrating 9/11? Or his attacks on Megyn Kelly, on a disabled New York Times reporter, on a Mexican-American judge? Would it be him tweeting quotations from Benito Mussolini, or his sly overtures to David Duke and the alt-right? Would it be his unwavering praise of Vladimir Putin? Would it be his refusal to release his tax returns, or the sham that seems to been perpetrated on the saps who signed up for his Trump U courses? Would it be the tape of him with Billy Bush? None of this made the slightest difference. On the contrary, it helped him. Some people became desensitized by the never-ending assaults on what was once quaintly known as “human decency.” Others seemed to positively admire the comments as refreshing examples of personal authenticity and political incorrectness.
Shameless rhetoric will always find a receptive audience with shameless people. Donald Trump’s was the greatest political strip-tease act in U.S. political history: the dirtier he got, the more skin he showed, the more his core supporters liked it. Abraham Lincoln, in his first inaugural address, called on Americans to summon “the better angels of our nature.” Donald Trump’s candidacy, and so far his presidency, has been Lincoln’s exhortation in reverse.
Here’s a simple truth about a politics of dishonesty, insult and scandal: It’s entertaining. Politics as we’ve had it for most of my life has, with just a few exceptions, been distant and dull. Now it’s all we can talk about. If you like Trump, his presence in the White House is a daily extravaganza of sticking it to pompous elites and querulous reporters. If you hate Trump, you wake up every day with some fresh outrage to turn over in your head and text your friends about. Whichever way, it’s exhilarating. Haven’t all of us noticed that everything feels speeded up, more vivid, more intense and consequential? One of the benefits of an alternative-facts administration is that fiction can take you anywhere.
Earlier today, at his press conference, the president claimed his administration is running like a “fine-tuned machine.” In actual fact, he just lost his Labor Secretary nominee, his National Security Adviser was forced out in disgrace, and the Intelligence Community is refusing to fully brief the president for fear he might compromise sources and methods. But who cares? Since when in Washington has there been a presidential press conference like that? Since when has the denial of reality been taken to such a bald-faced extreme? At some point, it becomes increasingly easy for people to mistake the reality of the performance for reality itself. If Trump can get through a press conference like that without showing a hint of embarrassment, remorse or misgiving—well, then, that becomes a new basis on which the president can now be judged.
To tell a lie is wrong. But to tell a lie with brass takes skill. Ultimately, Trump’s press conference will be judged not on some kind of Olympic point system, but on whether he “won”—which is to say, whether he brazened his way through it. And the answer to that is almost certainly yes.
So far, I’ve offered you three ideas about how it is that we have come to accept the president’s behavior.
The first is that we normalize it, simply by becoming inured to constant repetition of the same bad behavior. The second is that at some level it excites and entertains us. By putting aside our usual moral filters—the ones that tell us that truth matters, that upright conduct matters, that things ought to be done in a certain way—we have been given tickets to a spectacle, in which all you want to do is watch. And the third is that we adopt new metrics of judgment, in which politics becomes more about perceptions than performance—of how a given action is perceived as being perceived. If a reporter for the New York Times says that Trump’s press conference probably plays well in Peoria, then that increases the chances that it will play well in Peoria.
Let me add a fourth point here: our tendency to rationalize. One of the more fascinating aspects of last year’s presidential campaign was the rise of a class of pundits I call the “TrumpXplainers.” For instance, Trump would give a speech or offer an answer in a debate that amounted to little more than a word jumble. But rather than quote Trump, or point out that what he had said was grammatically and logically nonsensical, the TrumpXplainers would tell us what he had allegedly meant to say. They became our political semioticians, ascribing pattern and meaning to the rune-stones of Trump’s mind. If Trump said he’d get Mexico to pay for his wall, you could count on someone to provide a complex tariff scheme to make good on the promise. If Trump said that we should not have gone into Iraq but that, once there, we should have “taken the oil,” we’d have a similarly high-flown explanation as to how we could engineer this theft.
A year ago, when he was trying to explain his idea of a foreign policy to the New York Times’s David Sanger, the reporter asked him whether it didn’t amount to a kind of “America First policy”—a reference to the isolationist and anti-Semitic America First Committee that tried to prevent U.S. entry into World War II. Trump clearly had never heard of the group, but he liked the phrase and made it his own. And that’s how we got the return of America First.
More recently, I came across this headline in the conservative Washington Times: “How Trump’s ‘disarray’ may be merely a strategy,” by Wesley Pruden, the paper’s former editor-in-chief. In his view, the president’s first disastrous month in office is, in fact, evidence of a refreshing openness to dissent, reminiscent of Washington and Lincoln’s cabinet of rivals. Sure. Overall, the process is one in which explanation becomes rationalization, which in turn becomes justification. Trump says X. What he really means is Y. And while you might not like it, he’s giving voice to the angers and anxieties of Z. Who, by the way, you’re not allowed to question or criticize, because anxiety and anger are their own justifications these days.
Watching this process unfold has been particularly painful for me as a conservative columnist. I find myself in the awkward position of having recently become popular among some of my liberal peers—precisely because I haven’tchanged my opinions about anything. By contrast, I’ve become suddenly unpopular among some of my former fans on the right—again, because I’ve stuck to my views. It is almost amusing to be accused of suffering from something called “Trump Derangement Syndrome” simply because I feel an obligation to raise my voice against, say, the president suggesting a moral equivalency between the U.S. and Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
The most painful aspect of this has been to watch people I previously considered thoughtful and principled conservatives give themselves over to a species of illiberal politics from which I once thought they were immune. In his 1953 masterpiece, “The Captive Mind,” the Polish poet and dissident Czeslaw Milosz analyzed the psychological and intellectual pathways through which some of his former colleagues in Poland’s post-war Communist regime allowed themselves to be converted into ardent Stalinists. In none of the cases that Milosz analyzed was coercion the main reason for the conversion. They wanted to believe. They were willing to adapt. They thought they could do more good from the inside. They convinced themselves that their former principles didn’t fit with the march of history, or that to hold fast to one’s beliefs was a sign of priggishness and pig-headedness. They felt that to reject the new order of things was to relegate themselves to irrelevance and oblivion. They mocked their former friends who refused to join the new order as morally vain reactionaries. They convinced themselves that, brutal and capricious as Stalinism might be, it couldn’t possibly be worse than the exploitative capitalism of the West.
I fear we are witnessing a similar process unfold among many conservative intellectuals on the right. It has been stunning to watch a movement that once believed in the benefits of free trade and free enterprise merrily give itself over to a champion of protectionism whose economic instincts recall the corporatism of 1930s Italy or 1950s Argentina. It is no less stunning to watch people who once mocked Obama for being too soft on Russia suddenly discover the virtues of Trump’s “pragmatism” on the subject.
And it is nothing short of amazing to watch the party of onetime moral majoritarians, who spent a decade fulminating about Bill Clinton’s sexual habits, suddenly find complete comfort with the idea that character and temperament are irrelevant qualifications for high office. The mental pathways by which the new Trumpian conservatives have made their peace with their new political master aren’t so different from Milosz’s former colleagues. There’s the same desperate desire for political influence; the same belief that Trump represents a historical force to which they ought to belong; the same willingness to bend or discard principles they once considered sacred; the same fear of seeming out-of-touch with the mood of the public; the same tendency to look the other way at comments or actions that they cannot possibly justify; the same belief that you do more good by joining than by opposing; the same Manichean belief that, if Hillary Clinton had been elected, the United States would have all-but ended as a country.
This is supposed to be the road of pragmatism, of turning lemons into lemonade. I would counter that it’s the road of ignominy, of hitching a ride with a drunk driver.
So, then, to the subject that brings me here today: Maintaining intellectual integrity in the age of Trump. When Judea wrote me last summer to ask if I’d be this year’s speaker, I got my copy of Danny’s collected writings, “At Home in the World,” and began to read him all over again. It brought back to me the fact that, the reason we honor Danny’s memory isn’t that he’s a martyred journalist. It’s that he was a great journalist. Let me show you what I mean. Here’s something Danny wrote in February 2001, almost exactly a year before his death, from the site of an earthquake disaster in the Indian town of Anjar. What is India’s earthquake zone really like? It smells. It reeks. You can’t imagine the odor of several hundred bodies decaying for five days as search teams pick away at slabs of crumbled buildings in this town. Even if you’ve never smelled it before, the brain knows what it is, and orders you to get away. After a day, the nose gets stuffed up in self-defense. But the brain has registered the scent, and picks it up in innocent places: lip balm, sweet candy, stale breath, an airplane seat.
What stands out for me in this passage is that it shows that Danny was a writer who observed with all his senses. He saw. He listened. He smelled. He bore down. He reflected. He understood that what the reader had to know about Anjar wasn’t a collection of statistics; it was the visceral reality of a massive human tragedy. And he was able to express all this in language that was compact, unadorned, compelling and deeply true. George Orwell wrote, “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.” Danny saw what was in front of his nose.
We each have our obligations to see what’s in front of one’s nose, whether we’re reporters, columnists, or anything else. This is the essence of intellectual integrity. Not to look around, or beyond, or away from the facts, but to look straight at them, to recognize and call them for what they are, nothing more or less. To see things as they are before we re-interpret them into what we’d like them to be. To believe in an epistemology that can distinguish between truth and falsity, facts and opinions, evidence and wishes. To defend habits of mind and institutions of society, above all a free press, which preserve that epistemology. To hold fast to a set of intellectual standards and moral convictions that won’t waver amid changes of political fashion or tides of unfavorable opinion. To speak the truth irrespective of what it means for our popularity or influence.
The legacy of Danny Pearl is that he died for this. We are being asked to do much less. We have no excuse not to do it.
Thank you.
(The author of this speech is a conservative journalist; many thanks to Tom and Gill for calling this wonderful speech to my attention.)
Who'd a thunk I'd miss this guy so much? Who'd a thunk we'd sink so far as to have the clown car debarking to occupy 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue? Well, some of us actually did... but no one wanted to hear it.
Apologiesto anyone who cares – for the long delay in communication from this quarter. I have no excuse: prolonged illness, yes, now on the mend; general ennui, not to say flattening malaise. As remedy I've been delving into genealogy, a pastime that manages to constructively take me out of the present without the use of narcotics of any kind. How do you spell relief? For who isn't suffering these days given that, to anyone with eyes to see, horrified ears to hear, a bunch of proto-fascists have taken over what was once our government, and this cadre of mad folk operating by their own set of anti-humanitarian, unconstitutional rules is hell- for -leather bent on fashioning the neo-fascist Riven States of America.
The Man Who Would Be King, and His Conscience
The news daily and consistently affirms this so that one is continually gobsmacked at their daring. I've stopped reading media for the most part, relying almost exclusively on Trevor Noah and Vice News (excellent!) on HBO each night to keep me informed re the important stuff (and provide much needed moments of levity). The sense of outrage and trespass never leaves me, is incessantly reconfirmed; the insult to propriety in the world so extreme, I can't possibly recover unless I just STOP watching/reading. Catch a breath. Still, I came across the following piece saved from the last time I waded deeply into the waters of Internet news (this one from the NY Times). It's by an American ex-pat responding to a Times piece (by some Federalist wanker) about how we should all be grateful to the lofty Federalist thinkers from which our present condition arose. I don't know this guy in Germany, but I wish I did. Here's what he had to say:
"As an expat American living in Germany, I feel it is my duty to reply to this, not only because I witness daily a German society that is not just peaceful, but remarkably diverse; so it is possible. One does not see people begging in the streets, and not a single place where one can go in and buy a handgun or an automatic weapon out of some twisted homage to an 18th century device for creating a “well-ordered militia.” Obviously, this is the result of enlightened government, one attuned to the needs of the people and keen to make rules that serve everyone’s interests, not just the wealthy, and generally untainted by the contamination of lobbyists and special interest money.
Mr. Davidson’s publication, “The Federalist,” should itself raise red flags, evoking images of Antonin Scalia, Samuel Alito, and Clarence Thomas: good “Federalists” all. One has only to take a long look at their SCOTUS voting record – far from being in the interests of the everyday, dispossessed (let’s face it, he means white people; just look at the picture - there are only 3 black faces) whose plight Davidson is bemoaning, the Federalist doctrine is by definition anti-government, pro-business, and pro-religion in the most misogynistic sense. Just look at their views on abortion, birth control, and workers’ rights. Furthermore, as sociologist Wilhelm Reich pointed out in 1934, suppression of the female is one of the cornerstones of fascist ideology and was a central feature in Nazi propaganda. The rejuvenation of the women's movement is therefore no accident.
"While Mr. Davidson would like to misrepresent the conflict as an epic struggle between the wise, simple folk just living the straight and narrow in fly-over country and the deaf politicians who just won’t listen, the tragic fact is that those very same people are indeed victims in a much subtler and insidious way than their loss of jobs to globalism (a legitimate grievance). First of all, they are the collateral damage of Reaganism and supply-side economics whose proponents have stubbornly clung to the deluded notion that if you just make a rich person a little richer, they’ll create a job with the extra money rather than hiding it in the Caymans or buying that yacht. Second of all – and this is a great tribute to Roger Ailes – their minds have been turned into mush by decades of Fox News and Rush Limbaugh who even as they were cleverly saying that low wages and horrid work conditions were good for them, blamed it on Obama and the Democrats whose every effort to craft effective social policy was stymied at every turn....down is up, war is peace, etc.
"Davidson and his ilk are desperate for us to forget that President Obama took office at a time, like Franklin Roosevelt, when the economy was on the verge of collapse, hemorrhaging hundreds of thousands of jobs each month not because, as they would like you to believe, of a maleficent, self-interested, and bloated Democratic government, but by a maleficent and sociopathic Wall Street that wanted only to turn America back to the wild-west permissiveness of the Gilded Age. It’s easy to lump the Democrats into the wad of obstructionism the average folk perceive in Washington, but let us not forget Mitch McConnell and the tiny cabal of Republican lawmakers who, even as Obama was raising his hand for the oath of office, committed themselves secretly to block everything the Democrats did by any means possible. Even in the face of this – much as the right would have us forget – Obama DID turn the economy around, he DID save the auto industry from destruction, and yes, he shepherded the Affordable Care Act into law which, as much as Republicans are loathe to admit, actually provided insurance to people who never had it before, people who are not now anxious to lose it. (Good luck with undoing that, guys. Not going so well I see.)
"Populism is, historically, more a symptom than an organized, free standing political entity. It is not grounded in dogma or political theory, but on reactionary fear. For this reason, it is easy to manipulate by people like Andrew Jackson, William Jennings Bryant, Huey Long, George Wallace, and yes, Donald Trump who want to short-circuit the painfully established legal routes to social change and lead them to the promised land by sheer force of personality. Sorry Donald and sorry Mr. Davidson, but this IS one of the central features of fascism. Here, in the U.S., we are creeping toward it at an alarming rate and you, Mr. Davidson, and your fellow Federalists are abetting the process."
Douglas Jamiel
Hauptstuhl, Germany
And below....
the "patriotic" happy volk who opted for fascism
(Trump Rally)
WTF?? So what a shocker to find legislation has been introduced to with hold funds from the White House until they "restore the White House Call-in line". I presume it refers to the line citizens have traditionally used to express their opinions to the President. Does Donald know the line's gone dead?
Is that why he's so oblivious to public opinion? Who cut it off?
All Bill Information (Except Text) for H.R.841 - To prohibit the appropriation of funds to the Executive Office of the President until the restoration of the White House phone-in comment line.
Hello?? ..... Is anybody there?? Could they be any more clear they're not interested in the public's opinion of how they're doing? AND taking down the Spanish White House page is just soo low, even for them. SO low. Ai, pendejos.
More info here, actually loads of info here as these MFs are moving faster than the speed of light to change the rules.
More than one bill has been introduced to RELOCATE EACH EXECUTIVE AGENCY HEAD OFFICE OUTSIDE DC.AND FOR OTHER PURPOSES? I said, QUOI?
I mean, who can keep up? Where's the media? Does anyone think this is business as usual? MOVE THE GOVERNMENT OUTSIDE THE DC METRO AREA? WHY on earth would someone want to do that??
17. H.R.826 — 115th Congress (2017-2018)To require the head of each executive agency to relocate such agency outside of the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area, and for other purposes. The Washington Power Elite is none too happy about the new "administration" either, from today's Alternet : "The opposition to Trump is spilling across partisan and ideological boundaries as the realization grows that the awesome power of the U.S. government, its mass surveillance and law enforcement agencies and its nuclear arsenal, is now controlled by a band of amateur renegades who are out to dismantle the American state." Wull ... yeah. Reading further:“Lenin wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal too,” Bannon told historian Ron Radosh. “I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment." This isn't just about the right-wing Christian ideological keep- women- in- their- place agenda. Those "old reliable" Republicans, not Tea Partiers, like McCain and Graham, who might have stood up for something over the last two weeks, have all decided it's time to cash in, to help these nihilists don the masks of doublespeak as though butter wouldn't melt in their mouths and rob the US Treasury with the help of their corporate owners and high-tail it to Bali-Hai with their bags of loot and some underage Slovenian runaways. Trump may be a blowhard, but does anyone still doubt Bannon is serious? The entire Republican party has been dog whistling this tune since Reagan. Now it's a full-fledged opera. 4 out of 10 Americans polled believe Trump should be impeached. I guess that's fine, but Bannon isn't going anywhere, and if Mike Pence, Paul Ryan and the rest of them are too cowardly and self-serving to stand up to this hijacking now, there's no chance their being in charge would make an iota of difference. People like to say that we can vote him out in four years. I wish I could believe that, but it doesn't seem likely. We'll be lucky if there's anything to salvage in two.
Read The Russian Buddhist versus the Billionaire. A sad tale indeed, but here's the part I love – they keep on building the monastery as though the threat of demolition was not upon them. Now that's what I call living in the moment.
Still, here's yet another example of the insanely shortsighted thinking that rules the globe today, including Trump's pals, Russia's New Capitalists.
How could any sane person turn this
into this, for the sake of a buck?
I just don't know anymore.
And it occurs to me as i study this last photo, the many pits dug and abandoned to their barren future, that our western states may look like this before long. Just ringed pits of scarred earth.
It's enough to make you call a senator or something.
And yet, just when you feel like it could get no worse, a wee bit o' sunshine peeks out from behind the interminable cloud and announces this phenomenal bit o good news!
