From The Pleiades Mailbag - 06/Jan/2017

Standing Rock

Here's a little essay about Standing Rock. The writer likens the stand off to a moment from an imagined Zombie Apocalypse. You can just see that analogy right? Of course, how could those officers lined up to intimidate the Native Americans be so impervious to their own inhumanity? They must be some kind of cultural zombie, right?

At the head of the gathering army of the dead will be a man who brags about his lack of compassion and is so hollowed out by his punishing narcissism that he must compulsively eat our minds with tweets and outrageous behavior so as to fill his emptiness with our attention. His appetite for selfish self-regard seems immense enough to swallow the planet. It’s the appetite the Native-Americans witnessed as the European invasion crossed the continent. Hoisting the false flag of energy independence, our new zombie-in-chief promises a nationwide effort to extract coal, oil and gas offshore and in every natural environment. More pipelines, more strip mines, more deadly warming, more sacrifice zones. 

With Donald Trump a zombie apocalypse arrives, and the Indians at Standing Rock are on the front lines. 

The true origin of this zombie pandemic is of course us, we and the darker angels of our American culture. We are the culture that inspired the world with the ideal of human equality and self-governance. But we are also a culture motivated by fear. It is at work everywhere: in workplace competition, in our paranoia about immigrants, terrorists, ‘liberals,’ the ‘alt-right,’ even and perhaps especially in the pop up ads and blaring commercials that compel us to buy products by making us afraid that we’re lacking something, missing out, not part of the ‘winners.’ Our culture extols the supreme value of the self and is spellbound by narcissists and celebrities, justifies greed as good. Our consumerism, our sense of entitlement and exceptionalism have become part and parcel of the American dream, which in its grossest but most popular form is the dream of a better life filled with ever more comforts, conveniences, frivolous distractions, ersatz privilege (extra legroom on the airplane) and mountainous material possessions, most of them headed for the nearest landfill, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, or entangled in a sea bird’s stomach.

Like it or not, American culture in its current form destines our spirits to a disconnection from the Earth. Nature has become something we work to own a piece of in the middle class suburbs, or enjoy on our vacations. Many of us, possibly even most of us, feel helpless pangs when we see evidence of the ecological devastation our ravenous culture is wreaking, but even at our most pained we don’t feel wounds inflicted on the Earth as the Indigenous peoples do. During the three presidential debates no question was asked the candidates about environmental issues, and we Americans accepted that as okay. We have become deadened, zombie-fied. Now, as a country, we have chosen to elect a president pledged to perpetrate a conspiracy theory, a grand delusion reality show denying that any environmental crisis even exists. Whisked from their busy human bodies, more spirits will go missing, “lost.” The zombie apocalypse will spread.

Standing Rock, together with the Adani mine in Australia are the two big fossil fuel projects that need to be stopped.

Venezuela Is About To Blow

Venezuela is a troubling nation. Under Hugo Chavez, it was one part populist bullshit as politics, one part military junta-ism, and one part incoherent cult of personality around Hugo Chavez. And while Hugo Chavez himself was kind funky in some small, personal ways - he played a Stratocaster, - as head of government of Venzuela, he sort of ran the country right at financial ruin, a bit like driving the Titanic right at the ice berg. Now, it's looking like crunch time is upon them.

There are, I might add, shades of Gough Whitlam too in what Chavez was able to join his lifetime:

Chavez was intent on utilizing Venezuela’s oil wealth to transform the lives of the masses of the people, instead of allowing it to remain in the hands of the nation’s oligarchs, who used it to fund exorbitant lifestyles redolent of Miami Beach, Monaco, and Beverly Hills. The Venezuelan president undoubtedly kept his word, as over the next decade a social transformation took place in the country, measured in vast improvements in literacy, healthcare, housing, and the overall share of the nation’s wealth redistributed to the poor. Social spending doubled under Chavez from 11.3 percent of GDP in 1998 to 22.8 percent of GDP in 2011. The Gini coefficient, measuring income inequality, improved from one of the highest to one of the lowest in the region.

These achievements should be considered in the context of a relentless attempt by the forces of the right in Venezuela – the oligarchs in control of the private media, big business, and other economic interests – to block, derail, and even overturn the country’s democracy with an attempted coup in 2002, followed by a politically orchestrated strike within the oil industry in 2002-03.

Of course, this was all well and good when oil was fetching US$100 a barrel. What has made Venezuela come unstuck was how the oil prices plunged in the last 18months - pretty much because the Saudi Arabians wanted to kill off the shale oil industry in America.

And that brings us sort of to today.

For good or bad, oil was the economic foundations of the Bolivarian Revolution inspired and led by Hugo Chavez. It is a commodity whose price is so volatile that it can only leave economies dependent on it vulnerable to global factors outwith their control. But this oil dependency cannot be laid at the door of either Chavez or his successor Nicolas Maduro. The country’s underdevelopment had taken root long before they arrived on the scene, a consequence of generations of Venezuela’s unofficial status as US neo colony controlled by a small clique of oligarchs who benefited from this state of affairs. 

Those oligarchs and vested interests never went away. On the contrary, exploiting Chavez’s determination to uphold the most advanced example of mass participatory democracy Latin America has seen, the right in Venezuela has been hyperactive over many years in its efforts to undermine, oppose, and ultimately end everything to do with Chavez and Chavism. In this they have enjoyed Washington’s unflinching support.

It is capitalism not socialism that has failed the people of Venezuela. However it is socialism that is carrying the can. Consequently, as things now stand, the Bolivarian Revolution is teetering on the brink.

It reminds us of Australia and its economic fortunes being tied so closely to coal. The rest of the world is moving on to renewable energy and here we are peddling our fossil fuels to keep our housing bubble going (and really, that's what it's come down to). We might go on about the integrity of our democracy, but structurally speaking, we're not that different to Venezuela. One of these days we might even vote in a hard left leader akin to Gough and you watch how quickly the vested interests and the 1% will manoeuvre to rid us of such a leader. You really can't discount the dynamics of the people who want to keep our country on a losing wicket.

Still, keep thatVenezuela thing in mind...

The Veil Of Niceties Fails Big

How awful were the 2016 US elections? Here's the explanation of the double-bind by which many sensible voters found themselves trapped:

Bernie Sanders put his 12 million primary voters and other supporters in a double-bind. For Sanders supporters, Hillary Clinton epitomized what they despised. Clinton has been: heavily supported by Wall Street and arms dealers; repeatedly pro-war from Iraq to Libya; a friend and admirer of Henry Kissinger, who for Sanders supporters is one of the greatest war criminals in world history; a former board member of the anti-labor union Wal-Mart Board of Directors; a co-sponsor of the Flag-Protection Act of 2005, which included prison terms for those who destroy the flag; and has had an otherwise despicable and untrustworthy history for progressives. 

Bernie Sanders’ choice was to either support someone that his supporters despise and distrust or don’t support Clinton and Trump wins, and the Democratic Party and its media operatives politically assassinate Sanders as was done with Ralph Nader post-2000 election. Sanders’ public reaction was to choose what he had many reasons to believe was a false reality—that Clinton was not going to betray her new-found progressivism. Given Clinton’s history, Sanders had good reason to believe that Clinton as president would likely betray campaign progressive promises and simply blame failure on the Republicans. But rather than choosing Nader’s path, Sanders suppressed the reality of Clinton, and asked his supporters to do the same. 

Many Sanders supporters could not shed the reality of Hillary Clinton’s anti-progressive history and that the Democratic Party establishment had sabotaged Sanders (who the polls had shown had a much better chance than Clinton of beating Trump); and these supporters lost faith in both Sanders and the electoral process and did not vote—a political-self psychotic break of sorts for people who had ardently believed in voting.

Other Sanders supporters followed Sanders’ direction and voted for Clinton, only to find themselves now assaulted by the reality that Sanders had instructed them to support a corrupt political process that resulted in Trump winning anyway.

If you thought the Sanders supporters got it bad, well, maybe you should spare a thought for the Basket of Deplorables after all.

How about Trump supporters? Millions of Trump supporters, even before his inauguration, began having their political-self psychotic break, recognizing that they had been “played,” that Trump had no intention of keeping his campaign promises, and used them to gain power and attention. 

A major issue for Trump supporters was “crony capitalism,” but even before Trump was inaugurated, he orchestrated the Carrier deal of tax breaks for jobs, which was so obviously a betrayal that even Sara Palin decried it calling it “crony capitalism.”
That has not been Trump’s only pre-inauguration betrayal. 

Trump repeatedly promised to “drain the swamp.” The epitome of the “swamp” is the revolving door between the U.S. government and Goldman Sachs, yet Trump’s nominees for his administration include former Goldman Sachs employees Steve Mnuchin for Treasury Secretary and Gary Cohn for National Economic Council. It’s now become increasingly clear that Trump appears to be well on his way to creating the most putrid swamp ever, as he nominated for cabinet positions six of his top donors, as well as several establishment politicians (for example, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s wife Elain Chao as Transportation Secretary; 20-year U.S. Senator Jeff Sessions for Attorney General, and others).

Trump promised his supporters an “anti-politician,” and they received a caricature of a politician who didn’t even wait until he was inaugurated to betray his promises.

It could be worse. It's hard to fathom how, but it well may could be worse. But the important thing is that the message is out for once - "average Americans have no fucking influence on government policy". That's probably true of our own democracy down under in Australia as well. You could easily argue the veil-falling-off moment was when Julia Gillard ousted Kevin Rudd and called an early election to face Tony Abbott who had replaced Malcolm Turnbull as leader of the opposition. Now, it is easily argued that Ms. Gillard was trying to save us from the iniquities of the rule by the Deplorables, after all Tony Abbott represents the absolute naked nadir of intellectual ambition amongst leaders in this country. Even so, she was not successful, and by extension we can see how little control the citizens had over the outcomes.

The Thing That Could Go Wrong Yet

...and there are plenty of things that could go wrong for the Australian economy.

Here's the quick list of the various risks:

1. Car Industry shutdown.
2. Mining investment bust continues
3. Commodity prices snap back down
4. Property Bubble pops
5. Construction boom peaks
6. AAA credit rating is lost
7. Banking crisis in Australia
8. China slowdown 
9. Donald Trump being Donald Trump
10. European disintegration

Some of it reads like fairly reasonable bets. Try the China one for instance:
An ever-present risk for Australia is the economic health of its dominant trading partner.

China's private debt is up there with Australia's as one of the world's highest, with its loosely regulated "shadow banking" sector seen as a key risk for financial crises. 

Beyond a full-scale financial meltdown, there are indications the Chinese Government is planning to renew its economic shift away from heavy industry and construction towards services. 

Last year, China boosted commodity prices through increasing infrastructure spending and relaxing restrictions on real estate investment, as well as cutting its own coal production. 

Even moderate moves to limit growth in those sectors, plus a return to higher Chinese coal output, could see much of last year's commodity price gains unwind and, along with them, the boost to Australia's national income.

I mean, well, yeah. None of those on their own are likely, but there's an element where some of these risks are stacked like dominos. Plus, who knows what happens to Venezuela, and the fallout that would follow that one.

Quick Shots - 27/Nov/2016

Fidel Castro Passes Away

Fidel Castro is dead.

Fidel Castro, the Cuban revolutionary leader who built a communist state on the doorstep of the United States and for five decades defied U.S. efforts to topple him, died on Friday, his younger brother announced to the nation. 

He was 90. 

A towering figure of the second half of the 20th Century,
Castro stayed true to his ideology beyond the collapse of Soviet communism, and retained an aura in parts of the world that had struggled against colonial rule and exploitation.

He had been in poor health since an intestinal ailment nearly killed him in 2006. He formally ceded power to his younger brother two years later. 

Wearing a green military uniform, Cuba's President Raul Castro appeared on state television to announce his brother's death. 

"At 10.29 at night, the chief commander of the Cuban revolution, Fidel Castro Ruz, died," he said, without giving a cause of death. 

"Ever onward, to victory," he said, using the slogan of the Cuban revolution.

Tributes poured in from world leaders including Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Venezuela's socialist President Nicolas Maduro, who said "revolutionaries of the world must follow his legacy."

It wasn't exactly unexpected, the man was 90.

Somewhat In Defence Of Populism

The whole Trump winning the election situation has the world-knickers in a giant knot. It is as if the western world's left-leaning thinkers have been given a gigantic wedgie by the Bully-in-Chief. As a consequence, there's really not a whole lot of rational coherence going around, but it has to be said the charges that Trump is a populist and this is bad flies in the face of democracy.

Populism, by its very nature only works if the population get up behind the said candidate. A quick Google gives you this definition on 'popuist':

populistˈpɒpjʊlɪst/
nounnoun: populist; plural noun: populists1.
a member or adherent of a political party seeking to represent the interests of ordinary people.
a person who supports or seeks to appeal to the concerns of ordinary people.
"she is something of a populist—her views on immigration resemble those of the right-wing tabloid press"
adjectiveadjective: populist1.
relating to or characteristic of a populist or populists.
"populist tabloid newspapers"

First off, if you're in a democracy, it's really hard to mount an argument that says it is good for the democracy for the polity to represent the interests of ordinary people. Think about that for a moment. If you want to run a policy counter to the interests of the ordinary people, you are likely an elitist or a revolutionary. Either way, those impulses are anti-democratic.

There seems to be a double-think going on whereby democracy, which is rule by people of the polity is good, but populism which is representing the very same ordinary people is somehow bad. It seems to be an oddity of etymology. Democracy comes from Ancient Greece and especially Athens where they fought to end tyranny. The word Populism derives from Latin, that is to say ancient Rome where the Roman Senate sought to rule over the masses until the Triumvirate came along and neutered the Senate. Julius Caesar, Pompeii and Crassus were all populists - and so in the context of Roman history, populism led to the Imperium, and carries the historic connotation of being against the interests of a proper democracy because it overrode the Senate.

If we do carry with us the Roman legacy of the word populism, then we're effectively standing with the elite who deem themselves to know better than the ordinary man what is good for the state and polity. That is to say, us charging the other as populist underscores their argument that there is a "liberal elite". In a sense our use of the word 'populist' to describe the leader of the 'Deplorables' is the very essence of what gives strength to their accusations of elitism; that somehow we think we know better than they do, and so we look down upon them when they are not just the people, they are the demos that forms the democracy.

It's a bit like saying "we are the courageous, but they are the foolhardy" or "we are flexible, they are without moral fortitude". What is good in our modus operandi shouldn't really be painted as bad in the opponent. It's a bit tricky, but this tension between the words democracy and populism sums up the problematic of a Trump Presidency whereby a silver-spooned rich guy played up to the crowd of 'Deplorables' and won an election. We as the pinko liberals need to get a grip on this lurking vocabulary problem whereby one person's democracy (good) is another persons populism (bad).

Winning The Votes, Losing The Election

The last time this happened was bacon 2000 when Al Gore failed to beat George W. Bush. It was - as it turned out - a crucial election to have lost for the Democrats and by extension, pinko liberals and environmentalists and technocrats everywhere; this was because 'Dubya' led the  world into a series of wars with no discernible goalposts for victory. When you combine that event with Hillary Clinton losing this election even though she has 2 million more popular votes, you can understand why some people want to dismantle the electoral college system.

What's striking about the model of having electoral colleges is that it ends up weighing votes from different states differently. If you are from California, Texas, Florida or New York, your vote is vastly underweight next to a vote from North or South Dakota or for that matter Kentucky or Mississippi. One wonders if this is actually constitutional. This is partly how Hillary Clinton ends up with more votes and still fewer electoral colleges, but also discourages people from actually voting. There probably should be a class action to sue the United Staes of America for not allocating enough weight to votes in those four states.

The degree to which people opted not to vote is quite staggering. 46.9% of the electorate did not vote. This number dwarfs the 25% and 26% respectively of the sport Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton garnered.

For Australia, the other relevant problem is that the Australian Republican Movement wanted to go with this model of Republicanism to select a President. Back when John Howard allowed a referendum took take place, he successfully split the vote of the Republicans between the ARM's position and those who wanted a direct vote, thus stopping the move to a republic dead in its track. It was classic obfuscation whereby people not only had to vote for Republic, but had to overwhelmingly vote for one of two models, and so the entire republican cause suffered. You could say John Howard was  a wiley bastard, but equally it could be said the ARM were indeed the elitists of the variety that had anti-democratic notions which contributed to the ad result. At the time, they blamed the people who wanted a direct election, but really, they only had themselves to blame for being so inflexible.

All of that, is also on Malcolm Turnbull's head.

Quick Shots - 14/Nov/2016

Don't Blame The People Who Voted, Ethan

Ethan Coen of the Coen brothers fame penned a letter lambasting the people who voted for third party candidates.

1. Jill Stein voters: You helped elect a man who pledges that he will, in his first hundred days, cancel contributions to United Nations programs to fight climate change. If your vote for Ms. Stein did not end up advancing your green agenda, it did allow you to feel morally superior to all the compromising schmoes who voted for Hillary Clinton. And your feelings about your vote are more important than the consequences of your vote. So — thank you! 

2. Gary Johnson voters: Thank you, for similar reasons. You, too, may now reward yourselves with feelings of warm self-approval, and your libertarian agenda will now be advanced (or not) by someone who admires the governance of Vladimir Putin. And to Mr. Johnson himself: Not only can no one blame you for this outcome — we’re all free agents, man! — but you can stop looking for Aleppo.

Democracy's a funny thing. You can't really be getting angry at the people who voted for somebody else when they're actually participating in democracy just like you. The people who didn't bother are the people you ought to be angry at.

I know this whole Trump thing sucks, but only a tiny portion of people voted for these candidates. The problem is 46.9% of the registered electorate didn't bother to turn up. Really, if you're going to lambast anybody, they're the people who deserve a swift pen to the eyeball.

'The Expanse' - Season 1

I guess this is as hard a Science FictionTV series you could make without it costing the earth. It's a pretty cool series set in the near future where humanity is colonising the solar system and planetary governments are somewhat in conflict. None of it is unimaginable, and in most part things look nice and gritty,ratherthan white, plastic and NASA. It's long way from '2001: A Space Odyssey' or its stunted cousin 'Space: 1999'.

Without spoiling anything, it's kind of interesting how the interplanetary trips are portrayed, as well as what a space battle might look like. I'm inclined to think they set up a lot here that could be interesting to explore but it never even gets through half of its problem. I'm kind of glad there's another season coming, because Season 1 really only scratches the surface of the problem.

'Ascension'

This mini-series goes 6 episodes and literally goes nowhere. And then some important characters die and there isn't a cathartic moment. It ends like it's meant to continue on, but apparently this one didn't get renewed, so there will be no more.

The idea of a generation ship as a setting is good; combining it with the irony that they never left and they're sitting in a huge silo on earth is better. Yet, it never reaches the cathartic moment when the crew find out they've been living in this phoney environment for 50years.
It'a bit of  shame it won't continue to that logical conclusion. As it is leaves way too many loose ends which were obviously set up for a longer run.

Also, I know this came earlier than 'Stranger Things', but this business of an esper girl feels really tired. Right down to the bit where the supernatural powers are unleashed when she gets angry.

'ARQ'

Surprising cool little 'Groundhog Day' ripoff. Very suspenseful and well contained in a very small location. Very tight writing, except they wrote themselves into a corner. Some will enjoy, some will complain, that's the nature with these kinds stories. '22.11.63' comets mind as the more recent iteration apart from this one. Considering '22.11.63' was such an elaborate, grand 'Groundhog Day' derived concept, this one looks positively punchy by comparison.

All Hail Stupid, Long Live The Reign Of King Stupid

The Media Bubble

Michael Moore observed early on that Trump was on a wining track. He did that by simply traveling around the Mid-West of the USA, and found that many people were simply disillusioned with both parties, but also if the Democratic Party could think of no better than to put up Hillary Clinton as their candidate, they had no choice but to vote for the other guy, warts and all. Somehow it got discounted in the mix of things because polls said Hillary was winning.

Well, polls have had their comeuppance. Just as the pollsters completely missed Brexit in the UK, their US counterparts completely missed Trump's support on pretty much the same methodology. Dare I say the pollsters in Australia missed the support for Tony Abbott, both in 2010 AND 2013; and if you look at a number of other elections, it's been clear for about a decade that polls have been far less reliable. Had they been reliable, Nate Silver would not have shot to fame in 2008.

What's surprising and interesting to dissect in the aftermath of Trump's win is just how much the media convinced itself that Clinton would win, and just how much America's heartland disagreed. It is in stark contrast to how they actually voted. White people voted for Trump and there were enough of them spread out through the country to swing the Electoral Colleges. Hillary Clinton may have won the popular vote, but she won them predominantly in urban areas. She won big with the base and utterly failed to persuade Michael Moore country.

Now, it could be argued that these people are racists for voting for Trump who was endorsed by the KKK and various other neo-Nazi groups and white supremacists and 'Deplorables', but it actually flies in the face of the two terms won by Barack Obama. The demographic narrative that came out of the Obama victories was how the demographic was changing in such a way that a coalition could be built around various groups to beat the white majority vote. The fact that the Mid-West support Obama could count on, collapsed for Clinton has to be sheeted home to the candidate, and not the white people in the Mid-West who decided to vote against her.

Perhaps it's no coincidence - no make that, perhaps it was bloody pertinent - that the Sanders campaign offered more to those people than Hillary Clinton did, and the fact that she was carrying the baggage of Bill Clinton's presidency which effectively sold them down the river made it nigh impossible to win over those people. Thus combined, we have a situation where a bad candidate was sent out to win seats she wasn't going to win while the pollsters failed to understand this fundamental dynamic as they gathered numbers that obscured this fundamental problem, and the media reported those poll figures as if it paints the entire picture because it had a big investment in ignoring the underlying conflict, and they felt comfortable in doing this because the DNC assured them this was okay. This kind of circularity essentially led to the Media Bubble that formed around the narrative that Clinton was going to win, and this same Media Bubble got exported to the world.

No wonder the world is in shock.

"President Pussygrabber"

I know this sounds terrible, but if it does sound terrible, today is the day you should check your privileges in being able to think it's terrible - everybody has been way too keen to label Donald Trump with the expletives of the Post-Modern era. He's a sexist, misogynist, racist, entitled white male oligarch. And while all of that is true, it simply didn't matter to the wider electorate. And - again this is probably hard to bear but - those things not mattering is the normal condition of humanity and history. Also, there's a lot more to politics than identity politics, and so we ought not be jumping up an down over whether Donald Trump identifies himself as a sexist misogynist racist entitled white male oligarch - or not.

It's really easy to denigrate Donald Trump. He's been on the media as a caricature of himself for a very long time, so much so we don't even know how serious he is when he says the stuff that he says. And while it's most likely true that he sexually assaulted all those women who have come out to sue him, that's still not the entirety of the man. It might behoove us to keep in mind that the parts of the man that isn't the Pussygrabber is going be making decisions about who to drone-strike or not as the case mat be.

I know that sounds awful, but you have to get this into some kind of historic perspective. I remember when Ronald Reagan won. It was meant to be a disaster, but Reagan, combined with Bush Snr. (and a dose of Alzheimer) didn't exactly destroy the world through nuclear war. Equally, John F. Kennedy who is held in high esteem by the Democrats was a philandering sex-addict on the prowl for pussy. Nobody's seriously judging his presidency on the back of Kennedy's sexual adventurism.

While I wouldn't forgive Trump his peccadillos and sexual transgressions, the office of the President of the United States of America is going to demand much more of the man; and as long as the office is what it is, he's going to have to live up to it. He's most likely not going to be grabbing pussy. This kind of name calling isn't going to help us one bit, going forwards if we are to fight what is coming down the pike. The stupids have won, they are going to have their day. All Hail Stupid, Long Live the Reign of King Stupid.

The Gap Between What Is And What Ought To Be

Naturally, the media want to disown any claim that maybe they were part of the problem in how they couched the Trump candidacy. Politico had this editorial piece.

All that digging by the press corps meant a lot, and its message hit home. As the Cook Report notes today, newspaper investigations cemented into the public mind the preexisting image of Donald Trump as a bad person, as exit polls showed that 60 percent of voters viewed him unfavorably. But that didn’t keep 15 percent of those who thought he was deplorable from voting for him. Likewise, 63 percent of voters believe Trump lacked the right “temperament” to be president. But of those respondents, 20 percent said what the hell and voted for him anyway. And 60 percent of voters said he wasn’t qualified to be president—and you can guess the rest: 18 percent of them voted for him.

The election of Trump, then, can’t be reduced to a “failure” of the “broken” press—to lean on two worn-out descriptions of the craft. Nobody would ever say the American electorate “failed” or proved itself “broken” because it voted in numbers large enough to place a political monster in the White House. So the election of Trump doesn’t render the many journalistic findings published during the campaign worthless. Journalism at its best can only provide a set of traffic advisories. It is not and it can’t be an autopilot for life’s trip. Voters are free to read or ignore the press corps’ findings and even, as the Cook Report points out, absorb and agree with those reports and then cast ballots that contradict what’s been reported and what they believe. Being stupid is an inalienable right in a representative democracy.

There you have it. The media did a fine job in exposing what a terrible human being Donald Trump was; it's just that people were stupid in not taking the media's heed. It seems a little self-congratulatory as well as self-serving. It is easy to argue what people ought to have done so given the plethora of information uncovered by the media. It overlooks the fundamental problem that what *is* does not give rise to an *ought*. To that extent the Trump candidacy is incredibly instructive in that the terrible phenomena of who and what Donald Trump is, did not necessarily dictate to people they ought to vote against him. It didn't happen because on some basic level, the Trump candidacy was not based on some points system of ticking off correct answers to questions posed by the media, rather, it was made up of a stronger desire to tell the media to go fuck itself for asking such questions. The Deplorables know they are some kind of something that the elite in the media do not like; some might have even looked up the word deplorable; but ultimately they would have worn the term as a badge of honour as they voted for Trump. In that process, the media did an adverse job, simply because it allowed itself to be the insulters in chief.

There's a line in the Batman movie where Alfred offers to Bruce Wayne that some men do despicable things, because they just want to watch the world burn. What this election shows is that it's not just some men, it's roughly about half the American population.

Trump Wins! (The World Loses!)

If The Cubs Can Win, Anybody Can Win This Year

And by anybody we mean even the much reviled Donald Trump.

Where do you start? I guess we start by the inordinate amount of uncertainty that went into the election day itself this year. Contrary to the two previous elections, FiveThirtyEight led by Nate Silver was incredibly mealymouthed with his prognostication. He cited just how many people were 'undecided', and that the distribution of Hillary Clinton's votes were too concentrated in urban areas, leaving the rural electorates wide open for speculation. This view stood in stark contrast to the definitive pronouncement he was able to make going into the two Obama elections, and so therein we could see ample ground for the kind of seismic shift we saw.

The way things turned out, all those 'undecided' people were in fact Trump supporters. They were just too embarrassed to tell the pollsters they were actually going to vote for Trump, and therein lies the clue to understanding what the hell just happened. The media collectively created an environment where it was shameful to support Donald Trump by stigmatising him with everything from racism through to sexual assaults (hey, count me in on the guilty side there), and they did such a good job of it, the people who agreed with key planks of his platform felt ashamed to say they supported a man who was allegedly all these terrible things.

Now, let's not get too carried away. There is nothing sensible about most of Trump's policy platform. But it was very direct and very simple; clearly simple enough that the lefthand side of Bell curve could understand. And just as it happened with the Brexit vote in the UK, all it took was enough from the right hand side of the Bell curve to defect to the stupid side for catastrophic electoral consequences to unfold. In that light, it's amazing how the media convinced itself Hillary Clinton was actually a good candidate.

Hillary Rodham Clinton, A Candidate From Hell

I was a Hillary Clinton backer back in 2008. Obama blew her away in June that year and the rest is history. One of the frustrating things about Hillary in that campaign was how she couldn't articulate a position that transcended bits of policy positions cobbled together. She might have been great with details, but she had no way to present the big picture. It stood in stark contrast, not only with Obama who came in with a big picture vision of hope, but also her husband an ex-President Bill who was marvellous at presenting a picture of where he wanted to go.

After that election, I browned off from the idea of Hillary Clinton as presidential candidate. This year's run was always on the cards since that defeat in July, but you never really saw that she became a better candidate in the intervening 8years. The public office record of Hillary Clinton is actually much shorter than her public profile. In 2002 she became a Senator for New York state, and ran for POTUS in 2008, after which she managed to get a seat at the cabinet table for four years. During which time she presided over rather hawkish events in Libya as well as Syria with a dose of shooting Osama bin Laden. So, really she had 10years as a public official, added on to which she was First lady for 8years, but that's really not a political office so much as a ceremonial seat. She was short on experience, on top of being a not very good salesperson for her policy position.

And yet, this is the person the Democratic National Committee chose to line up behind, and to the extent that they gerrymandered their own system so well (i.e. by hobbling Bernie Sanders' legitimate campaign), the DNC in fact set the whole world up for this marvellous bit of political failure we see today.

The DNC has a lot to answer for. Yet, it's clear Hillary was the Regressive Left's candidate from day one, and here we are, watching that project burned down to the ground. I'm just wondering if any of these Regressive Left types are going to take note, let alone understand the significance.

Because Bernie Would've Beaten Trump

This was one of the crucial things about the Bernie Sanders candidacy - as an outsider, he was in position to take a sledgehammer to the machine that made so many voters unhappy and outside. Of course, that would have meant the DNC would lose out on its vested interests as well, so they decided the safer candidate was Hillary Clinton. It overlooked the fact that the electorate was looking for a big change. Theft that the electorate was looking for a big change probably goes to the heart of what's wrong with the DNC. If you ask the DNC, they would tell you that the 8 years of Obama's presidency were an outright success. If Obama's presidency were such a success, why are there so many people unhappy and on the outside?

Obama's presidency was a massive attempt to shore up the status quo in the wake of the GFC. If you lost your life savings the GFC, and then never recovered it during the anaemic growth of the last8 years, then you might not be so positively disposed towards President Obama. Combine that with being called a racist any time you object to any of his policies, and maybe you start getting a picture of how vast swathes of white flyover-land might have decided they wanted a big change. As an encore to the Obama administration, the DNC managed to pick the candidate who promised in no uncertain terms that she was for more of the same.

As for Bernie, he was addressing the grassroots and they were responding. It is not hard to believe that those same people might have voted Trump to punish the DNC, or simply stayed home. The DNC will want to blame them, but they would be wrong. They had a candidate who could make inroads into the real plight of the American people, and they decided they wanted the pre-fab apparatchik. They've only got themselves to blame.

End Of The Clinton Dynastic Politics

I write the subheading, mostly in hope. Just as we don't need more Bushes, we don't need more Clintons running for high office. Age would suggest it would be unlikely that Hillary would run for office again. I guess Bill would want Chelsea to run for President one day, but that's exactly the problem, the dynastic politics begets the kind of corruption that hobbled Bernie Sanders' campaign, which in turn hobbled the Democratic Party. You don't get something for nothing in the world of politics.

The election machine of the Clintons would likely stay in place, and maybe somebody can ride upon it to challenge Trump next time; that's entirely conceivable, for it's hard to imagine the Clintons bowing out of politics completely, or for them to abandon the apparatus that so efficiently delivered Hillary to the doorstop o theWhite House this time. Yet in all honesty, we're sick of the dynastic politics and the American electorate is showing signs it wants to move on.

It's Not One Thing

There's this vein of critique doing the rounds that the Trump victory proves that America is one racist nation, or that it is one sexist nation. I would warn people from trying to compress the entire meaning of the Trump victory into a trite one-liner.

I confess I do find it a little amusing that the women who are shocked by this are saying this like this:

Many women in the empty Javits Center concluded that the country was sexist and rejected Clinton in a large part because she was a woman -- and was now headed backwards when it came to women’s rights.

“If Hillary Clinton were a man, tonight would be a much different night,” said Dana Nicolette, who manages a wellness center on Martha’s Vineyard. “Do people not know what autonomy over our own body means? They haven’t read history books? I have no words. I have no idea. I don’t know how as a woman, you could vote for that person who I don’t even want to say their name right now.”

Maybe the electorate simply don't buy any of your discourse? I know, it's hard to believe, but maybe the brand of academic feminism that places such an importance on Hillary being a woman is exactly the wrong kind of intellectual tool to understand what people didn't vote for her. My two cents would be to suggest that it's not that these people don't value these things, it's that they value other things more - and a vote for one or the other candidate is an incredibly un-nuanced tool to dissect thought.

Not even the KKK are voting Trump on just the race issue alone. They are likely voting on a whole range of issues. Similarly, there are non-racists voting for Trump and for that matter non-sexists, non-misogynists and non-capitalists even. The above kind of academic feminist discourse attempts to label-and-shame these people when it is exactly what foments their resentment towards the 'elite' who push Hillary Clinton their way.

Indeed, the label-them-and shame-them routine that has become the staple of the internet era radical feminism is in essence driving more people away from their candidate than it attracts them. The reductio ad absurdum of such electorate support is 100% of the women vote, but 0% of men vote. You'd still only get to a split result with 50% of the population; and frankly presidential politics has to be much bigger than that.

Equally it can be observed that if Trump's support truly were white, male, and old, he shouldn't have enough of a constituency to get to 25%. The fact that he got over 50% in enough electorates clearly demonstrates he wasn't a candidate that could be boxed into this kind of discourse. It's not like Trump is some Mens' Rights Activist either.

Making Trains Run On Time

Before Mussolini tagged up with Hitler, he had along run presiding over a growing Italian economy. The fascist playbook of state and corporate interests looking for synergies while marching a lot of people around actually did okay. Could have done better? Possibly - but there were real reasons why Fascism found adherents around the globe, as a competing ideology to communism. Of course, Mussolini's better moments have been summarised as "he made the trained run on time," so we should all take it with a grain of salt.

Now, I'm NOT a fan of fascism, but in President Donald Trump, we have to understand that his policies are fascist, and so we have to parse how this might play out. If we're lucky, he won't appoint himself dictator, and when he does leave office, he just might have presided over some economic growth. That wouldn't be something to sniff at; but to get to that point, he's going have to break some eggs in the classic fascist playbook. One imagines Wall Street is in for a surprise.

I'm also not being hopeful; instead I'm offering up the tiny possibility that Trump's time in power is not going to be a total and utter loss.

Having to go through Mussolini's track record to find some hope is a tough call, I admit.

News That's Fit To Punt - 08/Nov/2016

On Political Correctness

Don Watson was on Q&A and summed up what the majority of intelligent people think.

Of political correctness, Watson said: "I hate political correctness. I hate anti-political correctness more, though, and I'm much more suspicious of it. It's nearly always an agenda underneath it. So it is the quintessential vexed question and the reason I gave up dinner parties."

This is pretty much it. Unfortunately the solution with dealing with political correctness isn't the kind of harsh reactionary bullshit peddled by those who declare themselves to be anti-political-correctness, but to take it case by case and use discernment and judgment - which is a lot more tedious and boring a task, and hence the retreat from dinner parties.

I don't think the advocates of political correctness correctly understand how idiotic it is to push a one-size-fits-all language experiment as if it deals with the nuances of the world. I don't think the anti-political-correctness groups understand how they too ignore the nuances of what they say. It is like two tone deaf parties trying to shout out competing songs, neither of which are well written but the yelling part seems over-rehearsed.

While we're sort of on the topic, this IPA thing is turning into bit of a joke. Their alumnus-turned-Senator James Paterson is the same idiot who mused about selling off 'Blue Poles' because it wasn't Australian enough, and the other IPA flunky Georgina Downer aren't exactly what you might call scintillating intellects. The IPA clearly is a bastion of neo-liberalist rhetoric practitioners, more than actual *thinking* as advertised by its self identification as a think-tank. This is evinced by just how predictable and monotonous are the entreaties that emerge from the IPA grandees. It has to be some kind of rort that such non-thinking can disguise itself as actual thinking and earn airtime on Q&A. It makes you wonder just how far the Right has sunk in terms of being unable to offer up a principled argument, whether it be economic or sociological. It's the same downward trend that led America to Tea Parties and Trump. Our misery it seems is to deepen further than a mere Abbott Government - the stupid is readily being embraced by the Right, all over the world. it's going to get worse before there's any recovery.

Here's the rest of it from Mr. Watson about political correctness and its strident opponents:

And of the Turnbull government's contortions over the Racial Discrimination Act and the right or otherwise to cause offence, he confessed to a confusion that seems common even to the cause of it: George Brandis.

"Brandis said everyone had a right to be a bigot and everyone has a right to be a fool. On the other hand, it's funny, because in Brandis's workplace, the mildest slur, let alone a religious or a racist slur, would have the president of the Senate pulling that person into order and ruling it out of order. He works in the safest workplace possible. I'm not sure the parliament should have other rights the rest of us don't."

That sounds about right.

George Christensen Is Still Stupid (And Fat!)

Speaking of safe work places...

Victorian Liberal Russell Broadbent used a speech to Parliament on Monday to express regret for not immediately criticising a speech Mr Christensen made in September, calling it a "diatribe about the rise of Islam" and accusing the Queensland National MP of "cuddling up to Hansonite rhetoric". 

"The issues swirling in our multicultural nation are for me public and passionate, but for me they are not personal," Mr Broadbent said.

"The truth is I didn't act as I should have because I am not Muslim, Chinese, Afghan or Greek looking. Not Italian, Sri Lankan or Sudanese. Not Aboriginal."

That's not all that surprising. It's all classic conservative-speak in line with Winston Churchill and all that guff. It's nothing new; this is exactly what somebody in the Liberal Party should be saying if they want to go around calling themselves the Liberal Party. While I myself am a pinko,  I'm inclined to accept an argument from a Liberal Party member citing liberal principles at face value. That should be par for the course.

Of course, George Christensen's response is as predictable as it is (pardon the pun) fatuous.

Mr Christensen hit back on Tuesday, saying Mr Broadbent was like other "politically correct hand wringers" in Parliament.

"Mr Broadbent is part of the elitist set here in Canberra that we find on all sides of politics," he wrote on Facebook.


"This is confirmed by the fact he told Parliament last night that MPs shouldn't reflect the concerns of their electors but instead should be 'leading' them.
"The last time I checked I sat in the House of REPRESENTATIVES not the House of Lords.

"This is why many people are coming to the conclusion that politics is broken: MPs of all political persuasions don't listen much at all to the public's concerns and they hardly ever act upon them." 

Mr Christen said his critics did not hear the word "radical" when he speaks against perceived threats from "radical Islam". 

"Islam is a religion and we have freedom of religion in this country. Radical Islam or Islamism is an ideology and a dangerous one at that.

"Nowhere in the speech Mr Broadbent has criticised me for will anyone find any criticism of Islam," he said.

It's astounding to see a MP talk Parliament like it's a schoolyard with bullies. Here's poor little George Christensen trying to represent his electorate of xenophobic homophobic reactionaries as he imagines all good Australians ought to be, being picked on by the big city politically correct brigade. I know philosophically - as per David Hume - an *is* does not give rise to an *ought*, but in his case we should make an exception and say he ought to give up and go home and the LNP find a better candidate, because he is a truly fatuous moron.

As I wrote above, the problem for the Liberal Party is that their future belongs to the Christensens of this world and not the Broadbents.

The Future Is Not Only Here, It Too Is Stupid

They've started counting the votes overrun the USA. It's looking like Clinton is maintaining her edge in the polls into the voting booths. I myself can't believe that too many women would want to vote for a man as contemptuous of women as Donald Trump, so that's like 50% of the vote right there! You can tell Nate Silver won't be asking me to join his team at FiveThirtyEight anytime soon.

Just how will things turn out after this irascible, execrable, awful US election? Here's a glimpse:

Politico magazine sets out a troubling scenario: "Suppose on Election Night, Pennsylvania's secretary of state announces that Clinton has won the state, and with it the presidency, but Trump says, 'Prove it.' The secretary of state responds, 'That's what the machines tell us'. Trump responds, 'Well, how do I know that the machines weren't hacked?' What is the secretary of state supposed to say then? 

"So who will resolve the conflict if Trump loses Pennsylvania and insists on seeing proof, and the state can't provide it? The Pennsylvania Supreme Court, despite being dominated by Democrats? The US Supreme Court, despite being hamstrung by a vacancy and thus at risk of a 4-4 split? Congress, paralysed by partisan gridlock?"
The extent to which the GOP establishment backs any trump challenge will be the first post-election measure of how seriously the GOP establishment will be in fighting to regain control of the Republican Party. 

A natural segue from a Trump challenge to the result would be for him to assume a leader-of-the-opposition role, to become a freewheeling face and voice of all opposition to the Clinton presidency – its existence and all that she might do. 

When Trump was not running his "rigged" argument in the last days of the campaign, he was crying "constitutional crisis" – warning of back-to-back congressional committees investigating Clinton and likely efforts to impeach her. Loser Trump will be deeply conflicted – wait for the Twitter storm.

Or you know, Donald Trump could suck it up and declare himself a loser. Likely, he won't. And if he starts insisting on these kinds of recounts it's going to be more of the same hell, with no end in sight. 

I guess this is the bit where I join the chorus and say how amazing it is that American politics has come this point of immense stupor, but I don't want to go there. The Republicans had all the opportunity in the world to reform themselves with a coherent policy platform after Mitt Romney's defeat in 2012. In fact, the writing on that wall was there after Obama defeated McCain in 2008. Instead dealing with it as an anomaly, they should have engaged with the challenge as a demographic shift. That they didn't and doubled down twice (call it quadrupled down, I guess) on pretending none of it was real, has resulted in the Republican party identifying itself as the party of racists, fascists, misogynists, rapists, and disgruntled white people without a clue or an education, which is kind of sad.

Of course, this kind of politics is well on our horizon as well. The stupid is heading our way like a wayward iceberg, ready to sink our little ship Democracy.

Twilight Zone Of Politics

We're So Screwed It's Not Funny

Just check out this list:

• The first day of the new sitting week began with a government MP calling for Labor leader Bill Shorten to resign if Donald Trump is elected US president.
• One Nation senator Malcolm Roberts then released a 42-page document claiming the CSIRO and Bureau of Meteorology corrupted climate data and that global warming is an international scam.
• Roberts was flanked by fellow climate science deniers, Tony Heller (left) and Tim Ball. The latter claimed the ~global climate conspiracy~ was all the fault of a group of elites called the “Club of Rome” and an international businessman named “Maurice Strong”.
• It was later discovered that Tony Heller blogs under the pseudonym Steve Goddard and has written conspiracy theories about the events surrounding the Sandy Hook massacre.
• When journalists at the event started asking questions about fellow One Nation senator Rod Culleton, party adviser James Ashby yelled at the media and the press conference was shut down.
• The Senate spent most of the morning discussing the plebiscite on same-sex marriage. But with Labor, the Greens, the Nick Xenophon Team and Derryn Hinch all pledging to vote against the bill, it’s going to fail.
• During that debate, David Leyonhjelm dismissed the argument that the plebiscite will be hurtful to LGBTI people, comparing it to Martin Luther King halting his advocacy for fear of hurting “psychologically fragile Negroes”.
• OK, back to the House of Representatives… government MP (and former whip) Scott Buchholz accidentally seconded a motion criticising his own government for “short-changing pensioners”.
• Then One Nation senator Rod Culleton got up in the Senate and delivered a bizarre speech defending himself from claims he’s actually ineligible to serve as a senator because of a previous conviction (since overturned) for stealing a truck key.

And if you go to the link, there's more!

Like, uh, what the fuck has happened to our polity to throw up such idiots into seats of power and high office of this land? This is the like the Peak Stupid, the Apotheosis of Climactic Idiocy, The Apocalypse of Dumb, the Twilight of the Idles, the Dance the Sugarplum Morons... you get the picture. If you had a competition to see how much stupid you could fit in a Volkswagen and replaced the venerable wagon with Parliament House, well then you'd get what we seem to have right now running our nation. Really, never has the fine line between *running* and *ruining* been so fine.

It's Coming To An End

We can almost see the finish line. It'll be about 36hours from now before we'll know who is going to be the next POTUS. At this point the smart money - and I do emphasise the smart bit - is on Hillary Clinton. The dumb, deplorable, miserable, crass, ill-educated money is on her opponent Donald Trump, from whom if we never heard anything ever again after this election, would be too soon. 

The FBI have now cleared Hillary. This has been one of those issues that make you scratch your head; especially the zombie movie like second life this idiotic email server business got in the wake of James Comes announcing that there might be something in Anthony Weiner's laptop that might pertain to Hillary. Well of course there *might*, seeing that Weiner is the rare talent who combined his name into his behaviour and managed a political career of some description while doing so and -let's face it- being so. If anybody's computer could possibly connect dick pics with blown covers on classified information, it would be Anthony Weiner's laptop. 

I have to say it's a brave officer who wants to even touch said machine. 

Anyway, what surprises me about the FBI is that they want to search through that stack of emails in search of something upon which to indict Hillary Clinton. The better stack would be the stream of emails that Wikileaks are releasing. 

JOHN PILGER: In terms of the foreign policy of the United States, that’s where the emails are most revealing, where they show the direct connection between Hillary Clinton and the foundation of jihadism, of ISIL, in the Middle East. Can you talk about how the emails demonstrate the connection between those who are meant to be fighting the jihadists of ISIL, are actually those who have helped create it. 

JULIAN ASSANGE: There’s an early 2014 email from Hillary Clinton, not so long after she left the State Department, to her campaign manager John Podesta that states ISIL is funded by the governments of Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Now this is the most significant email in the whole collection, and perhaps because Saudi and Qatari money is spread all over the Clinton Foundation. Even the U.S. government agrees that some Saudi figures have been supporting ISIL, or ISIS. But the dodge has always been that, well it’s just some rogue Princes, using their cut of the oil money to do whatever they like, but actually the government disapproves.
But that email says that no, it is the governments of Saudi and Qatar that have been funding ISIS. 

JOHN PILGER: The Saudis, the Qataris, the Moroccans, the Bahrainis, particularly the Saudis and the Qataris, are giving all this money to the Clinton Foundation while Hilary Clinton is Secretary of State and the State Department is approving massive arms sales, particularly to Saudi Arabia. 

JULIAN ASSANGE: Under Hillary Clinton, the world’s largest ever arms deal was made with Saudi Arabia, [worth]more than $80 billion. In fact, during her tenure as Secretary of State, total arms exports from the United States in terms of the dollar value, doubled. 

JOHN PILGER: Of course the consequence of that is that the notorious terrorist group called ISIL or ISIS is created largely with money from the very people who are giving money to the Clinton Foundation. 

JULIAN ASSANGE: Yes. 

JOHN PILGER: That’s extraordinary. 

JULIAN ASSANGE: I actually feel quite sorry for Hillary Clinton as a person because I see someone who is eaten alive by their ambitions, tormented literally to the point where they become sick; they faint as a result of [the reaction]to their ambitions.
She represents a whole network of people and a network of relationships with particular states. The question is how does Hilary Clinton fit in this broader network? She’s a centralising cog. You’ve got a lot of different gears in operation from the big banks like Goldman Sachs and major elements of Wall Street, and Intelligence and people in the State Department and the Saudis. 

She’s the centraliser that inter-connects all these different cogs. She’s the smooth central representation of all that, and ‘all that’ is more or less what is in power now in the United States. It’s what we call the establishment or the DC consensus. One of the more significant Podesta emails that we released was about how the Obama cabinet was formed and how half the Obama cabinet was basically nominated by a representative from City Bank. This is quite amazing.

So yes, that would be the person who is most likely going to be the next POTUS. Amazingly, the FBI won't be investigating this stack of emails because it wants to busy itself with the other emails. Unbelievable. 

I sure as hell don't want to be on the side of Trump, but honest to goodness, Hillary Clinton is a really tough sell as the 'good' alternative to the 'bad' choice of Donald Trump.

Being Where?

Maybe We Need To Talk About The Donald (Some More)

One of the more interesting narratives developing is the notion that Donald Trump isn't all there. It's hard to pick up all the strands of this story because a lot of people are now discussing it in earnest, but the best strand might be Martin Amis' take in Harper's.

Our psychological exam cries out for hard evidence. Now, the written word is always hard evidence; and I have before me “two books by Donald Trump.” That phrase is offered advisedly, particularly the preposition “by.” But we can be confident that Trump had something to do with their compilation: it very quickly emerges that he is one of nature’s “reluctant” micromanagers, having discovered (oh, long, long ago) that every single decision will hugely benefit from his omnicompetence. “By” is tentative, and even the epithet “books” is open to question, because Trump always calls his books his “bestsellers.” Anyway, almost three decades separate The Art of the Deal (1987) and Crippled America (2015). I suppose a careful study of the intervening bestsellers — among them Surviving at the Top (1990), How to Get Rich (2004), Think Like a Billionaire (2004), The Best Golf Advice I Ever Received (2005), and Think Big and Kick Ass in Business and Life (2007) — might have softened the blow. As it is, I can report that in the past thirty years Trump, both cognitively and humanly, has undergone an atrocious decline.

It's a delightful skewering of a pompous ass. A tremendous read, really, written by a man who knows how to demolish any character worth calling a character, and by Amis' estimation there's really not that much character to demolish.

Harper’s readers will now have to adjust themselves to a peculiar experiment with the declarative English sentence. Trump’s written sentences are not like his spoken sentences, nearly all of which have eight or nine things wrong with them. His written, or dictated, sentences, while grammatically stolid enough, attempt something cannier: very often indeed, they lack the ingredient known as content. In this company, “I am what I am” and “What I say is what I say” seem relatively rich. At first, you marvel at the people who think it worth saying — that what they say is what they say. But at least an attitude is being communicated, a subtext that reads, Take me for all in all. Incidentally, this attitude is exclusively male. You have heard Chris Christie say it; but can you hear a woman say, in confident self-extenuation, that she is what she is? 

Fascinating. And maybe there’s some legible sedimentary interest in “Donald Trump is for real.” Or maybe not. As well as being “for real,” Trump has “no problem telling it like it is.” To put it slightly differently, “I don’t think many people would disagree that I tell it like it is.” He has already claimed that he looks like a very nice guy, on page ix, but on page xiv he elaborates with “I’m a really nice guy,” and on page 89 he doubles down with “I’m a nice guy. I really am.” “I’m not afraid to say exactly what I believe.” “The fact is I give people what they need and deserve to hear . . . and that is The Truth.” See if you can find anything other than baseless assertion in this extract from the chapter “Our Infrastructure Is Crumbling”:

In Washington, D.C., I’m converting the Old Post Office Building on Pennsylvania Avenue into one of the world’s greatest hotels. I got the building from the General Services Administration (GSA). Many people wanted to buy it, but the GSA wanted to make sure whoever they sold it to had the ability to turn it into something special, so they sold it to me. I got it for four reasons. Number one — we’re really good. Number two — we had a really great plan. Number three — we had a great financial statement. Number four — we’re EXCELLENT, not just very good, at fulfilling or even exceeding our agreements. The GSA, who are true professionals, saw that from the beginning. 

That’s the way the country should be run. 

Before we turn to the naked manifestations of advanced paranoia, we had better tick off the ascertainable planks in Trump’s national platform; they are not policies, quite, more a jumble of positions and intentions. On climate change: he would instantly desist from any preventive action, which is “just an expensive way of making tree-huggers feel good.” On immigration: he tries to soften the edges, but the nativist battle cry is intact and entire (“Construction of the wall needs to start as soon as possible. And Mexico has to pay for it”). On health care: he would stoke up interstate competition among insurers, and let the market sort it all out. On governmental style: he would restore “a sense of dignity to the White House,” bringing back the old “pomp and circumstance.” On religion: “In business, I don’t actively make decisions based on my religious beliefs,” he writes, almost comatose with insincerity, “but those beliefs are there — big-time.” On gun control: here, Trump quotes that famously controversial line about the necessity of “well regulated militias,” and then appends the one-word paragraph, “Period.”

And there in that bit Amis nails down the cognitive degeneration, very apparent in the texts separated by time. If Donald Trump wasn't all too polished as an intellect way back when, he's since degenerated considerably. He is having trouble slinging sentences together in speeches. Amis, as a professional at reading into text, certainly as any capable novelist is, can parse out the degeneration of cognitive function. 

It's an important idea because we tend towards seeing people in continuity and not as changeable personae. We assume that the people we know and meet maintain a consistent personality and persona over the vast time of a lifetime. I assume my friends are consistent with who they were five years ago, ten years ago, maybe even twenty or thirty. We assume that this consistency applies to people all around me. This is why it so hard for relatives to spot the onset of degenerative cognitive diseases like Alzheimers. 

Now, it turns out somebody in Salon floated the observation that the Donald might not be all there, back in April.

We have become so accustomed to these sorts of ramblings that we don’t really register them as anything more than standard nonsensical Trump-speak—a pattern of speech we have seen crop up across the GOP in recent years, most notably in Palin’s gibberish. But I urge you to re-read the exchange above and register the range of nonsense—the lack of basic grammar, the odd syntax, the abrupt shift in topic, the disconnect from reality, the paranoia, and the seeming inability to even grasp the question. 

As we scratch our heads and wonder how someone who says and does such things can still be a frontrunner, I want to throw out a concern. What if Trump isn’t “crazy” but is actually not well instead? To put it differently: what if his campaign isn’t a sign of a savvy politician channeling Tea Party political rhetoric and reality TV sound bites? What if it’s an example of someone who doesn’t have full command of his faculties? 

We’ve watched both Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton come under fire for potentially being unfit medically to run, but have we wondered enough about Trump? There is far more media coverage about Clinton’s health at 68 than Trump’s at 69. 

There could be a good reason why. At times it can be very hard to distinguish between extreme right-wing politics and symptoms of dementia. The Alzheimer’s Association tells us that if two of the following core mental functions seem impaired then it is time to seek medical help: Memory, communication and language, ability to focus and pay attention, reasoning and judgment, visual perception. Alzheimer’s carries other symptoms besides memory loss including difficulty remembering newly learned information, disorientation, mood and behavior changes; deepening confusion about events, time and place; unfounded suspicions about family, friends and professional caregivers; more serious memory loss and behavior changes. 

Scholars of the recent trends in GOP politics point to some of the very same tendencies happening across the extreme right-wing faction of the party. (See thisand this for example.) 

Much to the chagrin of the reasonable conservatives who wonder what has happened to their party, it is now often difficult to distinguish Republican rhetoric from the ravings of someone suffering from diminished mental capacity.

She has a point. In Donald Trump, we might be having the closest candidate to Chauncey Gardner.

UPDATE:
Wait, there's more! Moments after I put out the post, this one came in:

Trump’s shortage of empathy can be seen clearly by his stances on topics like immigration. Instead of recognizing that the data shows that most Mexican immigrants are not violent, but instead people simply looking for a place where actual opportunity exists, with a broad brush he claims that they are “criminals, drug dealers, rapists, etc.” In a similar vein, Trump has vowed to ban all Muslims from entering the country should he be elected. It appears that his lack of empathy has distorted his mind’s ability to grasp the fact that the refugees he speaks of are actually seeking safety from the same murderous maniacs that he wants to keep out. Perhaps if Trump had relatives in countries like Syria and Iraq, he might understand the constant fear that most live under, and in turn become more willing to welcome them with open arms rather than leaving them to be slaughtered. 

But a lack of empathy is just one part of narcissistic personality disorder. Just beneath the surface layer of overwhelming arrogance lies a delicate self-esteem that is easily injured by any form of criticism. We have all seen Trump unjustifiably lash out at a number of people with harsh and often extremely odd personal attacks. When he thought he had been treated unfairly by Fox News host and Republican debate moderator Megyn Kelly, he responded by calling her a “bimbo” and later saying that she had “blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever.” In response to the strange, misogynistic comments Kelly said that she “may have overestimated his anger management skills.” If the news host would have pegged him as a bona fide narcissist from the beginning she might have expected such shamelessly flagrant behavior.

He's rather unwell. He needs care. Not the president's chair.

Midnight In The Garden of Democracy And Failure

Sign O' The Times

It didn't take long...

Hey, it's a new day. 

The obits are coming in for Bernie Sanders' campaign. This one here is worth the read, even though it hails from Rolling Stone.

Democratic voters tried to express these frustrations through the Sanders campaign, but the party leaders have been and probably will continue to be too dense to listen. Instead, they'll convince themselves that, as Hohmann's Post article put it, Hillary's latest victories mean any "pressure" they might have felt to change has now been "ameliorated." 

The maddening thing about the Democrats is that they refuse to see how easy they could have it. If the party threw its weight behind a truly populist platform, if it stood behind unions and prosecuted Wall Street criminals and stopped taking giant gobs of cash from every crooked transnational bank and job-exporting manufacturer in the world, they would win every election season in a landslide. 

This is especially the case now that the Republican Party has collapsed under the weight of its own nativist lunacy. It's exactly the moment when the Democrats should feel free to become a real party of ordinary working people.
But they won't do that, because they don't see what just happened this year as a message rising up from millions of voters. 

Politicians are so used to viewing the electorate as a giant thing to be manipulated that no matter what happens at the ballot, they usually can only focus on the Washington-based characters they perceive to be pulling the strings. Through this lens, the uprising among Democratic voters this year wasn't an organic expression of mass disgust, but wholly the fault of Bernie Sanders, who within the Beltway is viewed as an oddball amateur and radical who jumped the line. 

Nobody saw his campaign as an honest effort to restore power to voters, because nobody in the capital even knows what that is. In the rules of palace intrigue, Sanders only made sense as a kind of self-centered huckster who made a failed play for power. And the narrative will be that with him out of the picture, the crisis is over. No person, no problem.

Yep, it'll go by like it was on skates. The Democrats don't want to deal with this because dealing with it  will turn the party inside out an if you're on the inside, it's always better to stay there. The way it is with most institutions is that the institutional culture is preserved at the expense of the mission statement. The Democratic Party is clearly exhibiting signs of a thoroughly ossified institution. It is going hand in hand with the Republicans who are also ossified to the point of immobility, and so cannot catch out a rogue insurgent candidate like Donald Trump. American democracy is deeply in the poo.

We're not exactly too behind in Australia if this year's Federal election is anything to go by.

Julia, Hillary, And The Things That Maybe Don't Matter Like Legitimacy

I mentioned Hillary's candidacy in relationship to Julia Gillard's prime ministership yesterday and had some more thoughts about all this. I'll be honest, I didn't think Julia Gillard really established her  legitimacy with the electorate as evinced by the hung parliament of 2010- very much like how Malcolm Turnbull has failed to establish legitimacy for his government.

Generally speaking politicians and legitimacy is a funny thing. It's even harder in a democracy where leaders come to power on vote and not by the sword. Consider Machiavelli's take on legitimacy.


So who comes to mind as not having solved the legitimacy problem in a democracy? Kristina Keneally as NSW Premier was a fraught figure because she too always had the problem of legitimacy in the eyes of the public. I've been told by those who worked the Department of the Premier how on top of her brief Keneally was and how sharp she was in negotiations with Kevin Rudd (something which Kevin Rudd himself conceded), and even then I never warmed to the premier who got the nod on the back of failed Premiers and backroom deals. But then again Nathan Rees and Morris Iemma weren't exactly people who sparkled with legitimacy. That entire musical-Premier-chairs phase of the NSW Labor Government was strange and demented, infested as it was with Morbid Obeidity to boot. Yes Eddie Obeid had a marvellous way of subtracting from the sum total of legitimacy right across the board.

In that light, and while we're talking about female politicians  I do want to say I liked Anna Bligh a lot. I wish she'd run for Federal office. I liked Joan Kirner - I think she got a raw deal. And going back a fair way, I liked Janine Haines; I was indifferent to Dr. Carmen Lawrence (I sure didn't dislike her but the Easton Affair was troubling); and well, Cheryl Kernot was great until she jumped ship to the ALP - again legitimacy was an issue there. The Anna Bligh thing was interesting because at the hight of the Brisbane flood waters, Anna Bligh looked so much more the states-person than the visiting PM, Julia Gillard. In fact it made Julia Gillard look so bad, it probably wasn't worth her while standing next to Bligh in the big press conference, which was surprising.

The point is, regardless of gender, it's important to look like you got your office fair and square and in the right way. You could be an utter dickhead like Campbell Newman, but at least you have to hand it to the dickhead that he stormed to office on an agenda that was voted in in a landslide. He was eminently despicable, but while he was in office, legitimacy wasn't an issue. It's deeply ironic, isn't it?

Which brings me back to Hillary Clinton who basically has a legitimacy issue not unlike the one Julia Gillard carried through her tenure as PM. Now that it's out in the open that the DNC manipulated the system to Hillary's advantage and did its best to bury Bernie Sanders, she's never going to escape the lack of legitimacy this 'win' gives her. Now, legitimacy is one of those iffy things where it's hard to pin it to a person or an office, but when the role is head of government, you sort of need that thing to beat over the heads of your opponents both domestic and foreign. Indeed, Barack Obama does an excellent job of wielding his legitimacy to beat up on the GOP.

Things worked out the way they did because clearly the Clintons own the Democratic Party and the party owes the Clintons too much not to give Hillary the nod. To that end it burnt its own constituents as well as the youth vote, condescending and patronising them as they disenfranchised them. Legitimacy is in short supply now. She might be the world's best candidate, but we've seen what happens to a head of government who struggles to establish legitimacy. To that end, it's just like the Rolling Stone article linked above says, the Democrats have poisoned themselves, just to deliver the nomination to Hillary Clinton. We'll see if the poison ends up killing them.

Wall Street And The Dems

Wall Street told Hillary Clinton that she couldn't pick Elizabeth Warren as her running mate.

NEW YORK — Big Wall Street donors have a message for Hillary Clinton: Keep Elizabeth Warren off the ticket or risk losing millions of dollars in contributions.
In a dozen interviews, major Democratic donors in the financial services industry said they saw little chance that Clinton would pick the liberal firebrand as her vice presidential nominee. These donors despise Warren’s attacks on the financial industry. 

But they also think her selection would be damaging to the economy. And they warned that if Clinton surprises them and taps Warren, big donations from the industry could vanish. 

“If Clinton picked Warren, her whole base on Wall Street would leave her,” said one top Democratic donor who has helped raise millions for Clinton. “They would literally just say, ‘We have no qualms with you moving left, we understand all the things you’ve had to do because of Bernie Sanders, but if you are going there with Warren, we just can’t trust you, you’ve killed it.’” 

Most big donors don’t want Warren on the ticket because she is the most accomplished anti-Wall Street populist in the Democratic Party. But many also think her presence would drive a potential Clinton administration too far to the left, poison relations with the private sector from the start and ultimately be damaging to the economy.

And so it came to pass that Elizabeth Warren wasn't the VP nominee and running partner to Hillary Clinton. I'm sure it's some kind of pragmatism but this is the very kind of deal that browns off people  from the Clintons. Then some person tells you it's because you're a misogynist. How can you be a misogynist if you want a woman to be a VP to go with the female POTUS candidate?! 

More importantly, the fact that Hillary couldn't run it past Wall Street tells you just how much Wall Street has it all over the politicians. Wall Street got TARP and the bail out in 2008 because it was Wall Street. Did you get a bail out? No? See what I mean? Jokes aside, all this proves that there's too much money in US politics as well as outline the unlikelihood of Bernie anders getting up as the nominee. If people really want the political revolution, we're all going have to dig in a lot harder to dig out these banksters.

Democracy Is Deeply Wounded

The Deep Blue Sea

For some days I've been trying to write something sensible about the end of Bernie Sanders' Presidential campaign and how Hillary Clinton is now the last standing hope in stopping Donald Trump from becoming POTUS. The thing is, if Donald Trump is the devil, then Hillary Clinton surely is the deep blue sea, and so one cannot in good conscience say that the latter is a better candidate because they are the lesser of two evils.

This is not to be childish and scream Bernie-or-Bust, but more a long distance sketch of how things stand. In many ways it reminds me of the 2013 Australian Federal Election whereby PM Julia Gillard mired in bad polls would point at Tony Abbott as the terrible threat coming our way. In the end she was ousted by her own party and worse sill, the electorate voted in the dreaded Tony Abbott and Australia has had a basket case government ever since. It has the same quality of a not very popular person pointing at a terrifying opponent saying they are the only person who can stop the unspeakably awful from happening. We in Australia have been here, and continue to live through the horror of government by oligarchical interests with scant attention for good public policy. There's not much advice we can offer Americans in how to survive this horror.

Of course in that likening, I do Julia Gillard an immense disservice, for as unpopular as she was, she was not wrapped up in some strange twilight zone of corruption and coverups that is the hallmark of the Clintons. There was Whitewater, there was Mena Arkansas and the gun-running, the Vince Foster thing, the Monica Lewinsky affair (and the distraction of Operation Desert Fox), and above all else the strange charity that is the Clinton Foundation which takes money from dodgy oligarchs to create access in very strange places while the Foundation itself accepts colossal sums of money in exchange for the influence of the Clintons. It's nuts. It really is. That's not a few skeletons rattling around in the closet, it's like a mass grave after a genocide hiding in their closet. It's so bad that when Wikileaks leaks more and more emails from Clinton's past revealing terrible deeds and judgment, the world greets it with an indifferent shrug because we are so inured to the Clintons being scandal-prone.

It goes without saying hat Donald Trump is a terrible candidate. He is such a bad candidate that people really think it's some kind of elaborate hoax or joke. And yet the opposite number American democracy has managed to throw up against him is Hillary Clinton, the dodgiest nominee since maybe Richard Nixon. Talk about your wildest nightmares. If democracy really was just a popularity contest, it's amazing the two finalists are two of the most disliked candidates out of a field of dregs. They've scraped the bottom of the barrel and found there was shit down there - and they must really love shit because they're waving it around like a trophy.

The End Of Bernie's Run

It all came out in the leaked emails how the DNC were far from impartial and went out of their way to hobble Bernie Sanders' campaign. In the end, Bernie Sanders ended up being the only sane candidate with a decent plan and policy platform that withstood rational scrutiny out of a large field of candidates. He's still more popular than Hillary when polled and more importantly far more popular than Donald Trump. And yet the DNC is hellbent on going with their gal Clinton, so it's anybody's guess what's going to happen to the Democratic Party after this election.

It tok more than a generation since Robert F Kennedy's ill fated campaign in 1968 to Bernie Sanders' campaign in 2016 to bring the properly progressive agenda back to the Democratic Party. 48years is a long time between drinks. Maybe the good news is that the Progressive bas that supported Bernie is young, and so the future belongs to them to push forwards. Things can still change in the future, but for now the progressive push back into the Democratic Party platform is stalled. The flip side of the constituency dialogue is that the Baby Boomers are not yet the minority and with the help of a few dirty tricks can keep the Boomer candidate in Hillary Clinton going.

This may not work out the same way in say 2020. The youngest Boomer will be 55 then. One would imagine it would be harder to wage the kind generational demographic war the Boomers of the DNC waged this time around. They would have fewer numbers and less of an influence. Whatever happens in the next 4 years, Bernie sure won't be back to run again next time, and that is the shame of it.

In the mean time, the sensible people are asked to get behind the corrupt candidate to beat the unthinkably awful candidate. The DNC created this mess by insisting on the corrupt candidate - surely they will rue the turn of events they fomented by trying to manipulate the democratic process.

View From The Couch - 26/Jul/2016

Runaway Trump

Since confirming his nomination as GOP nominee for the POTUS elections, the critiques, the attacks and brickbats have mounted against Donald Trump. It's game on for everybody to have a hack.

First cab off the rank was Michael Moore who pessimistically prognosticated a Trump win.

I can see what you’re doing right now. You’re shaking your head wildly – “No, Mike, this won’t happen!” Unfortunately, you are living in a bubble that comes with an adjoining echo chamber where you and your friends are convinced the American people are not going to elect an idiot for president. You alternate between being appalled at him and laughing at him because of his latest crazy comment or his embarrassingly narcissistic stance on everything because everything is about him. And then you listen to Hillary and you behold our very first female president, someone the world respects, someone who is whip-smart and cares about kids, who will continue the Obama legacy because that is what the American people clearly want! Yes! Four more years of this! 

You need to exit that bubble right now. You need to stop living in denial and face the truth which you know deep down is very, very real. Trying to soothe yourself with the facts – “77% of the electorate are women, people of color, young adults under 35 and Trump cant win a majority of any of them!” – or logic – “people aren’t going to vote for a buffoon or against their own best interests!” – is your brain’s way of trying to protect you from trauma. Like when you hear a loud noise on the street and you think, “oh, a tire just blew out,” or, “wow, who’s playing with firecrackers?” because you don’t want to think you just heard someone being shot with a gun. It’s the same reason why all the initial news and eyewitness reports on 9/11 said “a small planeaccidentally flew into the World Trade Center.” We want to – we need to – hope for the best because, frankly, life is already a shit show and it’s hard enough struggling to get by from paycheck to paycheck. We can’t handle much more bad news. So our mental state goes to default when something scary is actually, truly happening. The first people plowed down by the truck in Nice spent their final moments on earth waving at the driver whom they thought had simply lost control of his truck, trying to tell him that he jumped the curb: “Watch out!,” they shouted. “There are people on the sidewalk!” 

Well, folks, this isn’t an accident. It is happening. And if you believe Hillary Clinton is going to beat Trump with facts and smarts and logic, then you obviously missed the past year of 56 primaries and caucuses where 16 Republican candidates tried that and every kitchen sink they could throw at Trump and nothing could stop his juggernaut. As of today, as things stand now, I believe this is going to happen – and in order to deal with it, I need you first to acknowledge it, and then maybe, just maybe, we can find a way out of the mess we’re in.

It's not a happy thought, and he's right in assuming we're all in denial that this is going on.

The more urgent hit came from the Washington Post, famous as the home of the guys who brought down Richard Nixon. This time it appears they're not taking any chances.

DONALD J. TRUMP, until now a Republican problem, thisweek became a challenge the nation must confront and overcome. The real estate tycoon is uniquely unqualified to serve as president, in experience and temperament. He is mounting a campaign of snarl and sneer, not substance. To the extent he has views, they are wrong in their diagnosis of America’s problems and dangerous in their proposed solutions. Mr. Trump’s politics of denigration and division could strain the bonds that have held a diverse nation together. His contempt for constitutional norms might reveal the nation’s two-century-old experiment in checks and balances to be more fragile than we knew. 

Any one of these characteristics would be disqualifying; together, they make Mr. Trump a peril. We recognize that this is not the usual moment to make such a statement. In an ordinary election year, we would acknowledge the Republican nominee, move on to the Democratic convention and spend the following months, like other voters, evaluating the candidates’ performance in debates, on the stump and in position papers. This year we will follow the campaign as always, offering honest views on all the candidates. But we cannot salute the Republican nominee or pretend that we might endorse him this fall. A Trump presidency would be dangerous for the nation and the world.

And on it goes, right down to the end where they say:

The party’s failure of judgment leaves the nation’s future where it belongs, in the hands of voters. Many Americans do not like either candidate this year . We have criticized the presumptive Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, in the past and will do so again when warranted. But we do not believe that she (or the Libertarian and Green party candidates, for that matter) represents a threat to the Constitution. Mr. Trump is a unique and present danger.

Look, I don't know about you, but the candidacy of Donald Trump and the surprising Brexit vote and even the election of Tony Abbott indicates a world where democracy seems to have one to mean much less than it used to. We seem to be voting in favour of less tolerant less meaningful, less nuanced, less informed, less intelligent positions in spite of ourselves. A little like how we seem to like to cut off our noses to spite our own faces or cut off our dicks to spite our balls. We should know better than to be voting in the likes of Abbott or Turnbull, or listening to demagogues lie Farage, Gove and Boris Johnson, or for that matter making one Donald J. Trump a serious candidate for the Presidency of the most powerful nation on the planet on nothing but a promise to make that land great again (whatevertjhe hell that means). There are a lot of asshole voters giving into their inner fascist assholes in the first world.
I don't exactly relate to that mentality.

In that light, it is perhaps valuable to assay the catastrophes of the past that we as humans inflicted upon ourselves.

So zooming out, we humans have a habit of going into phases of mass destruction, generally self imposed to some extent or another. This handy list shows all the wars over time. Wars are actually the norm for humans, but every now and then something big comes along. I am interested in the Black Death, which devastated Europe. The opening of Boccaccio’s Decameron describes Florence in the grips of the Plague. It is as beyond imagination as the Somme, Hiroshima, or the Holocaust. I mean, you quite literally can’t put yourself there and imagine what it was like. For those in the midst of the Plague it must have felt like the end of the world. 

But a defining feature of humans is their resilience. To us now it seems obvious that we survived the Plague, but to people at the time it must have seemed incredible that their society continued afterwards. Indeed, many takes on the effects of the Black Death are that it had a positive impact in the long term. Well summed up here: “By targeting frail people of all ages, and killing them by the hundreds of thousands within an extremely short period of time, the Black Death might have represented a strong force of natural selection and removed the weakest individuals on a very broad scale within Europe,“ …In addition, the Black Death significantly changed the social structure of some European regions. Tragic depopulation created the shortage of working people. This shortage caused wages to rise. Products prices fell too. Consequently, standards of living increased. For instance, people started to consume more food of higher quality.” 

But for the people living through it, as with the World Wars, Soviet Famines, Holocaust, it must have felt inconceivable that humans could rise up from it. The collapse of the Roman Empire, Black Death, Spanish Inquisition, Thirty Years War, War of the Roses, English Civil War… it’s a long list. Events of massive destruction from which humanity recovered and move on, often in better shape. 

At a local level in time people think things are fine, then things rapidly spiral out of control until they become unstoppable, and we wreak massive destruction on ourselves. For the people living in the midst of this it is hard to see happening and hard to understand. To historians later it all makes sense and we see clearly how one thing led to another. During the Centenary of the Battle of the Somme I was struck that it was a direct outcome of the assassination of an Austrian Arch Duke in Bosnia. I very much doubt anyone at the time thought the killing of a minor European royal would lead to the death of 17 million people. 

My point is that this is a cycle. It happens again and again, but as most people only have a 50–100 year historical perspective they don’t see that it’s happening again. As the events that led to the First World War unfolded, there were a few brilliant minds who started to warn that something big was wrong, that the web of treaties across Europe could lead to a war, but they were dismissed as hysterical, mad, or fools, as is always the way, and as people who worry about Putin, Brexit, and Trump are dismissed now.

It makes for some sobering reading. The rest of it is no less somber and sobering. History tells us we're heading in for some self-destructive times. We'd better take note.

Meanwhile The Arseholes We Have Down Here

It's no secret Kevin Rudd wants to be the Secretary General of the UN. He has two problems on that front. One is that the Australian government hats officially endorse him as the Australian candidate. The other is that Helen Clarke is also running. While none of this is fresh news, the Australian Government has prevaricated mightily over Kevin Rudd's candidacy. In short, they don't want to give him the nod in cabinet. Why? Partisan politics.

Except John Key over in New Zealand's quite happy to endorse Helen Clark, who was the NZ Labour Prime Minister.

Mr Key, who hails from the conservative National Party in New Zealand, is barracking hard for his former Labour party rival Ms Clark to become the UN Secretary-General.
It marks a curious contrast with his Australian counterpart, Malcolm Turnbull, still struggling to decide whether his government will do the same for Mr Rudd. 

Mr Key also revealed he had spoken to Mr Turnbull about the race and was quizzed about whether he'd asked him not to support Mr Rudd. 

"I've had a couple of chats with him about it," Mr Key told breakfast television in New Zealand, but was coy about details. 

"All I'd say is if any person wants to be in the race, be in the race … You've got to get either your host country, preferably, or a country, to nominate you. At the moment, he [Mr Rudd] doesn't have a country nominating him. 

"I still think anyway, if it's a drag race between Kevin Rudd and Helen Clark, New Zealanders - and I reckon a hell of a lot of Australians - know who the best candidate is, and it's not Kevin Rudd."

It's all bit academic really, because the man in the lead is Antonio Guterres from Portugal. All the same, it's worth pointing out that Kevin Rudd was quite nice to departing Coalition politicians. The least they could do is return the damn favour. The fact that they don't immediately say yes says tons about these people. 

IOC Takes A Stand Against Doping And Passes The Buck

Nobody really has spine. 

It seemed a mere formality that the entire Russian team would be rubbed out, saving the Olympics any more of the embarrassment that the host city keeps heaping on itself with incomplete facilities. 

There was an expectation – not a mere desire – that Russia would be excluded.
Instead, the Olympic Committee's executive board has displayed the type of leadership that allows doping to flourish: it passes the buck and instructs individual sporting federations to decide which Russian athletes can compete in Rio. 

In other words, it has been left to sporting federations to wade through a legal minefield … in 12 days. 

Some of these sporting federations are loyal to Russia and the bottomless money it provides. Some are too scared. Some are complicit to doping themselves, turning a blind eye to the poison in their own sport and yes, cycling, we are looking at you. 

The IOC has had an appalling bet each-way. Foremost, it is a slap in the face for WADA, which has again been undermined. 

"WADA is disappointed that the IOC did not heed WADA's Executive Committee recommendations that were based on the outcomes of the McLaren investigation and would have ensured a straight-forward, strong and harmonised approach," WADA president Sir Craig Reedie said. "The McLaren Report exposed, beyond a reasonable doubt, a state-run doping program in Russia that seriously undermines the principles of clean sport embodied within the World Anti-Doping Code." 

That's not a few rogue athletes. That's not even a rogue sport. That's a rogue country. If the same happened here, we'd be calling for Royal Commissions, lifetime bans and jail time for those responsible.

Oh the outrage blahblahblah. As I asked - rhetorically - in my previous entry, are we done with this PED hysteria yet? We really need a new approach to the problem especially if the body that allegedly is in most favour of the current method of shaming athletes and banning them, won't back itself to carry out its policies. Go figure.  

We live in a world where haters are gonna hate and cheaters are gonna cheat. It's just the way it goes when sport is anachronistically wrapped up in nationalism of 200-odd nations,some of whom have no shot at any medal, but more importantly some of whom whose national pride depends upon it. Like Russia and Australia. The dumbest thing about the Olympics is how somebody from some nation wins a gold medal and the whole nation gets to thump their chest over that win. This idiotic bit of identification is bolstered by nationalist sentiment and misplaced identity politics. These are really 19th century kinds of modes of thinking, unbecoming of the 21st century. Yet here we are again at another Olympic Games ready urge our boys and girls on to medals. 

Go you beautiful Aussies as you swim through the raw sewerage waters of Rio! Do we relate to this experience? Really?