Alternative Energy in the Age of Donald Trump

To my Leftists friends (of whom I have a few), may I say:  I feel your pain.  And with Trump recently choosing Scott Pruitt for EPA chief, you are feeling especially anguished.  In this respect, at least, I think I can help.  Please don't feel bad about what Trump may do with respect to alternative energy.  It will be OK, and let me explain why.

The world is bigger than the U.S. and bigger, therefore, than Donald Trump.  While the U.S. has a lot of the clever scientists and engineers needed to develop alternative energies, the U.S. does not have a monopoly on them.  In other words, there are other clever scientists and engineers out there.  The Europeans have plenty of them.  The Japanese, Chinese, and Indians have a lot of them.  Even tiny Israel has made its mark in the world of science and engineering.

Second, many other countries have much greater incentives, than the U.S., to find and develop alternative energies.  The Europeans have a greater ideological commitment to alternative energy.  The Asians have vastly greater economic incentive to finding alternatives to fossil fuels.  And Israel has an existential interest in moving away from fossil fuels.

As long as we are on the subject, let me point out that purely by the fact that nobody is yet running an economy, larger than a pig farm, on corn oil or wind energy, should tell you something.  It tells me there remain serious obstacles to alternative energy.  Those obstacles have to be some combination of chemistry and economics.

In other words, if it could be done, somebody would be doing it, already.  That it is not being done is not the fault of Donald Trump or the Republican Party.  It is the fault of Nature, and you will have take up this matter with the Big Guy upstairs.  Or, get your own degree in chemical engineering and get to work on the problem, yourself.  Either way, please stop blaming Donald Trump.  (And while we're at it, could you pleeese dial down the whining at least a little bit?  For pity's sake?)

What Was Russia Up To?

The WaPo article, "Secret CIA assessment says Russia was trying to help Trump win White House" is plainly a cover-up of Barack's fickleness.

First, it is impossible to take the article at face value.  Not only does the WaPo give no plausible reason why Russia should favor Trump over Clinton, recent history suggests otherwise.  Recall the open-mic whisper of Obama's, in March 2012, in which he assured then Russian president Medvedev "After my election I will have more flexibility".  To what end, one wonders?  And previously there was the famous "Reset Button" affair between Hillary and then Russian foreign minister, Lavrov.

And it was under Obama/Clinton that Russia returned to the world stage in a really big way.  Absorbing Crimea, starting a fight in Ukraine, and becoming hegemon in Syria.  What's not to love?  If you are a Russian.

So, it has been under Obama/Clinton that Russia has been able to advance its interests prodigiously, most especially undermining the EU, which the Russians hate and against which the Americans have done exactly...oh, let me see now, hmmm... nothing.  If there is a reason to suppose anything would be different in a Clinton administration, I have not heard it.

Second, suppose the Russians were trying to influence the 2016 elections.  What did they do?  In point of fact, all the Russians did was to reveal to us the real Hillary Clinton.  Absolutely, positively nobody has claimed the Hillary emails are false, that the leaks are a disinformation campaign.  To the contrary, the depressing fact is that the Wikileaked emails really are from Hillary and her creature, John Podesta.   How depressing is that?  So the Russians have done us a huge favor and we owe them a debt of gratitude.

Now, that I think about it, I am reminded of the Vietnamese incursion into Cambodia, around 1978-79.  Let me remind you, first, that by the late 1970's, the Vietnamese were really tough motherfuckers.  They had been in a state of constant war from 1946 until 1975, first kicking French butt, then kicking American butt.  They had endured real hardhsip, witnessed real carnage, for a generation and they were not to be trifled with.

Now, in 1975 Pol Pot, as leader of the Kmer Rouge, took over Cambodia.  Although Hitler, Stalin, and Mao killed vastly more people, in absolute numbers, pound-for-pound Pol Pot (always "Pol Pot", never "Mr. Pot", for some reason) was the worst human being who had ever lived, if he was a human being, at all. Through sheer brutality, oppression, degradation, and insensate violence, Pol Pot murdered fully 1/4 of the entire Cambodian population, as documented in the famous movie, "The Killing Fields", based on the reportage of NY Times correspondent Sidney Schanberg (from when the NY Times still practiced journalism).

The Khmer Rouge were so awful that even the battle-hardened Vietnamese could not stomach them.  The Vietnamese were compelled, by human decency and nothing else, to march into Cambodia and put an end to the Khmer Rouge, finally.  G-d bless them.

As with Vietnam in Cambodia, so with Russia in the American elections of 2016.  The Russians are no pussycats.  They are as corrupt and as venal as they come.  And yet, even they could not stand the blatant deceit, mendacity, and corruption of the Clinton Crime Family---even as that corruption served their own interests.

Compelled by sheer human decency and nothing else, or so it seems to me, the Russians drew back the heavy curtains and let sterilizing rays of daylight shine onto the undead Hillary Clinton, who then burst into flames.

Only towards the very end do we get a true sense of what this story may really be about.

The reluctance of the Obama White House to respond to the alleged Russian intrusions before Election Day upset Democrats on the Hill as well as members of the Clinton campaign.
...
“The lack of an administration response on the Russian hacking cannot be attributed to Congress,” said Rep. Adam B. Schiff (Calif.), the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, who was at the September meeting. “The administration has all the tools it needs to respond. They have the ability to impose sanctions. They have the ability to take clandestine means. The administration has decided not to utilize them in a way that would deter the Russians, and I think that’s a problem.”

And so, Barack Obama, a man incapable of action, failed to act.  Yet again.

What Do They Have Against You?

Jewish jokes are funny.  In some cases, you don't really understand their profundity until world events instruct you.  Over and over, the reaction of the Left to Donald Trump brings the following joke to mind, which I write from memory since I cannot find it on the internet.
------------------

A young Jewish man was drafted into the army because the Tsar was going to fight the Turks, again.  As the boy was getting ready to leave, his tearful mother was offering him some parting advice.

"Dear boy," she says, "don't strain yourself.  Shoot a Turk, then rest a little.  Shoot another Turk, then eat a snack.  Shoot a Turk, then take a cup of tea..."

"But, mummy," interjected the boy, "what if the Turks shoot back at me?"

"God forbid!"  Exclaimed the woman in horror.  "What on earth do the Turks have against you?"

Just Say "No" To the Free Rider Voter

What a fascinating argument does the NY Times publish.  To argue his case "Why Blue States Are the Real ‘Tea Party’", Steven Johnson writes,

"The urban states are subsidizing the rural states, and yet somehow in return, the rural states get more power at the voting booth."

Clearly, Johnson Implies, justice demands that states which pay more into the public fisc should have a bigger say in public affairs.  I think he, and the NY Times, should follow their logic to its natural conclusion:  I think that an individual who pays more into the public fisc should have more of a say in public affairs.  Let me spell this out in detail.

I believe that all the rules governing the franchise, as they now exist, should apply (and be enforced).  In addition:

1. The person must be active duty military or honorably discharge, OR
2. The person must be a net contributor to the public fisc in at least three of the four years prior to the election.

There are some obvious immediate results.  Of course, people whose sustenance comes mainly from public assistance will not be able to vote (as long as they remain on public assistance).  Far more importantly, all public servants will be disenfranchised, including teachers.

This disenfranchisement is purely voluntary.  If you like the pay and job security of the civil service, you are welcome to it, but you cannot vote.  Is the vote that important to you?  No problem, just get a job in the private sector (and not as a government contractor).

I wonder if Steve Johnson would agree with me?  Nah!  He's just fucking with us.  Johnson is saying these things only to undermine the legitimacy of Donald Trump as POTUS.  Had Barack Obama won the electoral college with a minority of the popular vote, Steven Johnson would have uttered nary a peep.

On the other hand, I really mean it.

Why Science Needs Donald Trump

I read articles like this so you don't have to, "Are the best students really that advanced?" about the latest results from TIMSS.

TIMSS is the "Trends In International Math And Science Study".  It compares achievement in math and science of students in about 40 countries, including the U.S.  This particular version of the study hails from 1995 but is merely a variant of the kind of international comparison done since about 1965.  It used to be done every ten years, now every four or five years.

Students used to be compared at approximately the 4th grade, 8th grade, and 12th grade levels.  Then, 12 graders were not included for a while.  Now, it seems they are being included, again, at least for some countries.  I will touch on the reason for this, shortly.

The international comparisons are restricted to math and science, for obvious reasons.  Testing in Chinese language and literature would be meaningless since Americans, for example, do not study the subject.  And yet, there are structural difficulties, even with math and science.  For example, the U.S. is one of the few countries that seriously tries to offer the same education to every student.  In fact, for complicated reasons that would require their own essay, we are reluctant to let any student off the college-prep track.

Many other countries, like the high achieving East Asians, perform a rather aggressive educational "triage".  Typically around the 8th grade, sometimes as early as the 6th grade, students are sorted into vocational and academic tracks.  The academic track, itself, is often bifurcated into the parallel tracks of Arts and Sciences.  Prospective scientists and engineers are being specially groomed since about age 13 years.

You have to know there is a world of difference between the kind of math and science you can teach to a select group of highly motivated, high achieving, college-bound, science-intending students, and a heterogeneous group of students, many of whom may not even be college material, and whose chief common characteristic is indifference to mathematics, if not outright aversion to it.  TIMSS reflects this difference, spectacularly, and the Americans hate it.

Over the years, the TIMSS has been vised and revised for one primary reason:  the Americans don't like the results.  And yet, for all the revisions, this one result about American students remains stubbornly robust over some 50 years:

• by the end of 4th grade, they score in the top quartile;
• by the end of 8th grade, they are at the median; and 
• by the end of high school, they are at the bottom.

In other words, American students do reasonably well at 4th grade, decline to mediocrity by 8th grade, then a sheer drop to the bottom in high school. This result has been so consistent for so long that some years ago (circa 2000?) the "Economist Newspaper" was moved to comment that 

"American schools are bad for American children. The longer they are in school the worse they do."

This view was corroborated in 2009 by an NYU study of foreign-born children in NYC schools, "Age of entry and the high school performance of immigrant youth".  Stiefel, Schwartz, and Conger compared American-born children of immigrant parents to foreign-born immigrant children.  They hypothesized that children who had spent more time in NYC schools would perform better than children, educated elsewhere, who then entered NYC schools in mid-stream.

Much to the surprise of the authors---but not to anyone familiar with TIMSS---the results were just the reverse.  And, by the way, this is why 12^th grade was excluded from TIMSS for several testing cycles;  the Americans did not like it.  If you restrict TIMSS to 4^th and 8^th grades, the American “Education Mafia” can defensibly assert that, “Well, OK, maybe American education is not all it should be, but it’s no disaster neither.”

Yes, it is a disaster.  Of the 40 industrial countries (and a couple of others) in TIMSS, American public education decidedly provides the worst “Bang for the buck.”  It is the most expensive of all public school systems (with the possible exception of Switzerland) and it gets the worst possible results (with the possible exceptions of Turkey and Cyprus).  The worst Bang for the buck, no doubt.

Friends, you have to meditate on these two facts:  (1) American schools are bad for American children, and (2) this fact has been well known---Well Known---for 50 years.  Naturally, profound change in American public education is in the offing, right?

Wrong.

For reasons that are poorly understood---through no fault of the Education Mafia, who publish their theories widely in books, academic papers, popular journals, Op-eds in local and national newspapers, and in Congressional testimonies---the Education Mafia will only double down on their current theories of education.  Nobody wants the schools we have except the Education Mafia, and there is no way around them.

The U.S. does not have a ministry of education, like France, e.g., where all children use the same textbooks and on this day at this time everyone is, literally, on the same page.  Indeed, it was famously, and humorously, observed that during the height of French colonialism, little African children in Chad and Gabon, reading from the same books as the children of their French masters, would begin their history lesson with “Our ancestors the Gauls.” (Those little children are not reading about their ancestors the Gauls, or anything else, anymore.  The French are gone and the children are too busy foraging for food and dodging bullets.  Post-colonialism has been a catastrophe for them.)

And yet, it is a mistake to suppose that American public schools are not centrally directed.  Oh, there might be a bit of wiggle room, here and there, but you are only deluding yourself if you do not see the uniformity of policy and practice across the country.  There is a de facto, if not de jure, syndicate of education schools (primus inter pares, Columbia Teachers College), teachers unions, and multifarious professional organizations like the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, National Association of State Boards of Education, The Council of Chief State School Officers, and at least a dozen like these, that constitute what I call the “Education Mafia”.  These people talk to each other, they compare notes, they testify on each other’s behalfs, and they plan the future of your children, whether you like it or not.

The Education Mafia is the single most fearsome political lobby in the country.  They have some five million members (probably more), a lot of their own money, they control the education budget to the tune of some $650 BBBillion per year, and they are organized at every level of government, local, state, and federal.  They are truly massive, their social and political roots run deep, and they are unreformable.

That is, the Education Mafia are unreformable under the current political regime.  So long as the Democratic Party belongs to Donna Brazile and the Clinton Crime Family, so long as the Republican Party belongs to Karl Rove and the Bush Family, there is no hope for reform.  None.  Zero.  Zip.

The only hope for education reform is to reduce the existing political parties into “smoking pile[s] of rubble”, and to break the back of the Education Mafia.  My only hope for the 2016 elections was to see the Rove/Bush wing of the Republican Party defeated.  In fact, Donald Trump has reduced both parties to smoking piles of rubble, and I am eternally grateful to him for that, alone.  We live in exciting times.

It remains to be seen what President Trump will do with public education.  His nomination of Betsy DeVos to Education Secretary is sadly uninspiring.  Charters and vouchers will not be our salvation.  But, the man has time so let’s give him a chance (and some encouragement).  If Donald Trump breaks the back of the Education Mafia, it will be a new dawn in science education, and a new start for a whole lot of other things, to boot.

Torturous Thoughts

The NY Times article "Donald Trump Faces Obstacles to Resuming Waterboarding" causes several ideas to collide in my head.  Isn't it odd that nobody ever questioned the efficacy of torture until the United States thought to use it?

The morality of torture is altogether another question, and not a trivial one, or an obvious one.  But, when other countries were known to use torture, or at least suspected of it---I'm thinking of Saddam Hussein for example, but there were and are plenty of others---the bien pensants would tut-tut about what monsters they were for doing it, but nobody suggested they were idiots for doing it.  Only the United States, George W. Bush especially, are fools for using a tool that does not work.

That the United States is uniquely characterized as idiots for using a tool that "everyone" knows doesn't work, by people who want the United States to fail, should be the first clue that torture works very well, indeed.  In the whole of my intellectual life, from history books to James Bond movies, absolutely positively everyone assumes that torture works.  Every insurrectionist organization, from WW II partisans to the Italian Red Brigades, organized on a cell structure in order to limit damage to the larger organization that is likely to arise from torture.

A revolutionary organization, like the Red Brigades in Italy, or the notorious Baader Meinhoff Gang in West German, will organize in small groups, of maybe five or six individuals, called cells.  All individuals in a cell are completely ignorant of all other cells.  They may know they are a part of the Red Brigades, but that is all.  With one exception.

One member of the cell will be able to contact one person at the next level of organization, but maybe not even that.  He may only be able to recognize when he is being legitimately contacted by a supervisor to receive legitimate instructions.  Even the leader of one cell will have no knowledge of other cells, and will not be able to contact them.  As you might imagine, this is a difficult organization to maintain and to manage.  Why do they bother?

They bother because they know that if an individual is captured, he will break under torture.  Sooner than later, everyone breaks.  Everyone.  Well, if the captured individual knows a lot, the entire organization could be compromised.  If he knows only his own cell, only that cell would be compromised.

In the larger society, from government ministries to operational units of the army, everyone works on a "need-to-know" basis.  In large, heterogenous units, you cannot depend upon everyone's ideological commitment, so there are people who might divulge state secrets for money or sexual favors.  Or, they will break under torture.

Soviet-era army units were famously more fragile than their American counter-parts because of the very high level of paranoia in the USSR.  Surprisingly high levels of officers were kept ignorant of essential operational intelligence for fear of losing that sensitive information to the enemy.  Enlisted men, even sargeants, were not even given maps.  This meant that if a lieutenant or captain were killed in action, that unit was effectively decapitated, and therefore lost to operations, until new officers could find them and assume command.

All this because everyone in the real world knows that torture works.

In another line of attack, people have asserted that torture is worthless because a tortured person will say anything.  He is a poor craftsman who blames his tools.  Torture is a tool like any tool.  It has its strengths and weaknesses and it takes years of training and experience, and some amount of talent, to use it well.

The purpose of torture is to inflict intense pain without killing the subject.  Clearly, death is a catastrophic failure since dead men don't talk.  Furthermore, it may be perfectly true that you might not get what you want if you have only minutes or a few hours to work.  This is a limitation of the tool.  But, if you have the time, you will certainly learn what the subject knows.  Exactly how much time depends upon how gentle you need to be with your subject, and probably other factors of which I know nothing, but I feel sure we are talking days or at most some weeks.  Certainly not months or years.

Finally, there are, of course, some maniacs out there, like a Saddam Hussein, who will inflict pain for the sheer joy of it.  Lumping them in, with the scientific use of torture for extracting valuable information, is the same category error as forbidding guns to criminals and policemen alike, because guns kill.

I am far too removed from the details of such operations to say whether the U.S. should or should not use torture.  But the arguments against torture are idiotic, and that makes me suspicious.

Happy Socialist Thanksgiving

The New York Times' Thanksgiving Day report on Venezuela, "Hungry Venezuelans Flee in Boats to Escape Economic Collapse".  Of course, the headline should read, "Hungry Venezuelans Flee in Boats to Escape Socialism."

Now, where have we seen this, before?  Oh, I remember, this Floating Truck is an image, one of thousands, of Cubans desperate to escape their Workers Paradise, abandoning free health care and everything.

As I have written before, more than a few times, the great mystery in my mind is how anyone can be a socialist today.  Several friends recently provided some insight.

I had long assumed that modern Westerners simply were ignorant of the horrors of the Iron Curtain.  Frankly, I still suspect this.  Oh, they may have some sense that all was not well under communism (shortages of Xboxes and whatnot), but I still doubt they know the Chinese were eating babies during "The Great Leap Forward".  And no, that is not a joke.  Not a joke.  Not a joke.  The Chinese were eating babies when 50 MMMillion people starved to death.  Just as Cubans were starving before reforms.  Just as Venezuelans are starving now.

Socialism fabricates shortages.  For some reason, this a big joke when people have to queue up, for hours, for toilet paper.  It's a lot less funny when there is no food in the stores and no medicine in the hospitals.

It turns out that my socialistically-inclined friends do not see a connection between policies and results.  Two of my friends specifically asserted that they see no analogy between the proposed policies of the Democrats, especially people like Barack and Bernie Sanders, and what had transpired behind the Iron Curtain or what is transpiring in Venezuela today.  It cannot happen here, they say, and I do not know why.  Is it the air we breath?  The water we drink?  Does the sun shine differently in the U.S.?  The socialists do not believe in American Exceptionalism, and yet they do.  For some magical reason, the same policies that have yielded destruction there, will work out gloriously here.  We are exceptional after all.

Another friend outright dismissed socialism as the cause of Venezuela's agony.  Corruption, she says, is the explanation.  Her explanation sent chills down my spine, and let me say why.

It has been long explained that the essential element of the scientific method is model building.  You build a model of how the world works, and you make predictions based on that model, and the better the predictions the better the model.  This is a plainly inadequate description of the scientific method.  Everybody builds models of the world.  Religions build models of the world, and there is the Christian model, the Hindu model, the Muslim model, etc.

It was Karl Popper who explained that the key ingredient in model building is falsifiability.  That is, are there certain phenomena that, if observed, would cause you to reject your model of the world?   Scientific models have it, religious models do not.  Since religion begins with faith---belief based on inadequate evidence---naturally there are no criteria of falsifiability.  With rare exception, there is nothing you can tell a True Believer to make him stop believing.

On the other hand, there is the famous example of Albert Einstein who, when he published his theory of General Relativity, was first in the line of skeptics.  Einstein asserted that he could not believe his own theory until certain tests were performed.  Those tests were performed, and only then did Einstein believe.  Many other tests were performed, and Relativity Theory went on to become one of the most thoroughly tested theories of the Cosmos.

So, does socialism look more like science or more like religion?  Socialism looks more like religion, and we have the evidence to prove that.

Deep down in the marrow of their bones, socialists Know how to organize society for the Greater Good.  And they have had 100 years (the centennial of the Russian Revolution is next year) and several billion people to prove it.  Each time they implemented socialism, it did not work out well.  In fact, it worked out very badly, indeed.  In fact, it failed catastrophically.  So, when things failed to work out as their model of the world predicted, the socialists had a choice:  they could revise or reject their theory, or they could suppose that some especially evil-minded individuals---Enemies of the People---were conspiring to sabotage socialism.  For a socialist, rejecting socialism is never an option.

Well!  If you are working against the welfare of millions of your fellow citizens, you are a very evil person committing a very heinous crime.  You deserve death.  And the socialists started killing, and killing, and killing.  That is why Lenin murdered more people in his first six months in power than the Tsars killed in the previous 100 years, why Stalin murdered more Russians during peace-time than Hitler murdered during wartime, why Mao murdered more Chinese during peace-time than the Japanese murdered during wartime, why Pol Pot murdered a quarter of the entire Cambodian population, etc., etc., etc.

That is why Venezuelans are launching themselves into dangerous waters in dangerous boats.  And that is why my dear friend's comment, that "It's the corruption, stupid," sent chills down my spine.  We have seen this all before.

Socialism is the problem.  And if you do not see the connection between socialism and death, then you are the problem.

Gender Pay Gap and a divided Nation

We are a divided nation.  And it's hard to reconcile when you cannot even agree on essential facts about the world we live in.  For example, most Leftists believe that women earn 80 cents for every dollar men earn, and take this as evidence of the War on Women.

Now, it would be one thing if the truth were buried in technical journals of the American Economic Association or the National Bureau of Economic Research, or the World Bank, while the nonsense is spewed all over the popular press, but, it's not like that.  It's true that partisan organisations promote the bullshit, but the truth really does exist in mainstream media.  For example, just in April of this year, the Washington Post published "What's the real gender pay gap?" in which the facts are laid out rather nicely.

Other publications include Forbes Magazine, "Don't Buy Into The Gender Pay Gap Myth", the Wall St Journal, "The 'Wage Gap' Myth That Won't Die", even CBS Money Watch, "The Gender Pay Gap is a Complete Myth".

The "Huffingon Post" responds "No, The Gender Pay Gap Isn't A Myth---And Here's Why" by studiously, nay aggressively, ignoring the arguments of even the Joint Economic Committee of the US Congress, whose ranking member, Democrat Carolyn Maloney, signed off on their report, "Gender Pay Inequality".

How does the Huffington Post, and others, do it?  Everybody begins with the basic fact that the average pay of all women is 80% of the average pay of all men.  But, unless you believe that a doctor's medical assistant should earn as much as the doctor, there is something to figure out.  The HuffPo will not do that.

Friends, I'm sorry to have to say this, but that is what intellectual dishonesty looks like to me.

Now, some of the reports, that correctly analyze the gender pay gap, will segue into the difficulties that women face for being poor.  Yes, let's do something about poverty.  But why are the Left lying about the specific point that women are paid less **FOR THE SAME WORK**?

No, no, no.  My friends are not lying.  The problem is they believe the lie.  Life is plenty hard enough for too many people.  Let's do something about that.  But nothing good can come of starting with a lie.  And, it's very hard to resolve political differences when we live in different intellectual worlds.

The Bible Predicted Donald Trump

If you listen to the Establishment intelligentsia, the ascension of Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States is a mystery, a shock, a surprise.  I get they don't like it, but how could they be surprised by it?  This surprise must be the first clue that "the best and the brightest" among us are just not that bright.

Who am I to judge my betters?  I share your skepticism.  But, here is the thing:  I saw Trump coming a mile away, and they did not see him at all.  Oh, alright, I did not see Trump, exactly, but I absolutely did see the Trump phenomenon coming.  Of course, I did not know that it would be specifically Donald Trump, and I did not know it would happen exactly in 2016.   But, since November 2008, I was completely sure that somebody just like Donald Trump, or worse, would arrive on the political scene sooner than later.  Frankly, I am surprised it took this long.

How could the intelligentsia be so far off the mark?  Here is David Remnick of the "New Yorker", on the night of November 8,

On January 20, 2017, we will bid farewell to the first African-American President—a man of integrity, dignity, and generous spirit.

Now, let me tell you what I saw.  First, I don't give a fig about Barack Obama's personal qualities (or Donald Trump's, for that matter, or George W's).  This is not about being friends with the guy, golfing with him;  my son will not marry one of his daughters, he will not write a recommendation to law school for my niece, or anything like that.  And anybody who turns the political into the personal should be instantly disqualified from ever voting again.  Or writing for the "New Yorker".

As I write this essay, one week after the 2016 election, the Left is firing all their ordnance against Trump, criticizing him from the dandruff in his hair to the corns on his toes.  But, as an objective fact, Trump brings much more to the presidency than Barack ever did.

Whether he has done well or ill, and he seems to have done a whole lot of both, Donald Trump has done things.  He ran businesses, he built buildings, he hired and fired people, etc.  Donald Trump is an executive officer of one kind looking to turn himself into an executive officer of another kind.

In the elegant locution of the elegant Fouad Ajami, on the other hand, Barack Obama spent his life "unmaking and remaking the world in words."  He brought nothing to the presidency.  Not only did Barack never meet a payroll or lead men in battle, but as a legislator, both in Illinois state government and in the federal government, he brings to mind the Yiddish definition of a nebbish as the kind of nobody who, when he gets out of bed in the morning, doesn't even leave the sheets wrinkled.

In the history of the Harvard Law Review, Barack was the only editor to ever not write an article of his own.  As a professor of law, he published no papers.  His single accomlpishement before assuming the presidency, seems to be the unusual achievement of having written not one, but two autobiographies before the age of 50, and before he accomplished anything of social significance.  Even in the world of words, this is odd.

So, exactly what did Barack have that made the Left swoon after him?  Good ol' "Uncle Joe" Biden tells us,

I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.  I mean, that's a storybook, man.

In other words, Barack had nothing but the color of his skin.  And from his long ties with the notorious "Acorn" (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now), he had a been a race hustler.  He was, in other words, the quintessential race candidate.

I am convinced that very many people, Black and White, voted for Barack because he was the "Outside" candidate.  But he was a candidate at all because the opinion makers of the political Left promoted him as a candidate.  They promoted him with manic energy, and they did if for one reason and one reason only---the only attribute he had---the color of his skin.

Barack Obama was never the "post racial" president that the intelligentsia thought him to be.  Quite to the contrary.  And I knew that Barack, as an ol' timey race hustler of the Alinsky mold, would do as president the only thing he knew how to do:  rub raw the resentments of the people.  And that he did, in spades.

The backlash was coming just as sure as night follows day.

From start to finish, the intelligentsia saw none of this.  Well, why not?  I think, for precisely the reason Matthew gives in chapter 7, verse 4,

And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?

The Left is blind to their own racism, and Donald Trump is president-elect.

Donald Trump is Barack Obama

I am working on the theory that Barack Obama and Donald Trump are the same person, politically speaking.

If you get your information mainly from the MSM, the votes for Barack are one of the great mysteries of the 21st century.  Whatever you may think of the man as an individual, he had no resume going into the 2008 presidential elections.  His only evident attributes are that he is a socialist and---I hesitate say it, since political correctness has been described as the "war on noticing"---he is black.

The MSM made much of both.  They were euphoric about the prospect of having the first Black president, and they were industrious in portraying the man as a political centrist, so as not to frighten the horses.  But, secretly, we all know he is a socialist.

<<<nudge, nudge, wink, wink>>> 

Either way, he was not the kind of man we normally imagine mid-western Whites would turn out for, in large numbers.

Ah, but he was also something else.  Barack was an Outsider.  Or, so it seemed, at the time.  During the Democratic primaries of 2008, the man came out of nowhere to defeat the Establishment candidate, the anointed Democratic standard bearer, the notorious, HRH HRC.  (That's a little British lingo for you.  "HRH" is "Her Royal Highness".)  And he went on to defeat the other Establishment candidates, first John McCain in 2008 then Mittens Romney in 2012.

Looked at in this way, the political life of Barack Obama is not so strange or unexpected.  There have been plenty of signs, for years, that the American people have grown restless with the Established Order.  You may recall the 1992 elections and the peculiar candidacy of Ross Perot.  For all his quirkiness and suspiciously little commitment to his own cause, he garnered nearly 20% of the popular vote in the general election.  Lots of people commented at the time, and then Perot was forgotten because he did not persist, because no other capable independent candidate came forward, and because the Established Order wanted to forget.

So, when an apparent outside candidate materialize again in 2008, he got everybody's attention.  That outside candidate was Barack Obama.

The MSM, being ideologically motivated entirely by race and class and race and class and race and class, saw in Barack a candidate of race and class.  That is how they spoke of him, they assumed everybody else saw him just the same way, and that is how I saw him, too.

Look, when it comes to skepticism about the MSM, I take my hat off to no one.  But you can't be vigilant every moment of every day.  It's not as if I have gone out to lunch with Barack, regularly or ever, so I don’t know the man.  The MSM talk of Barack in terms of race and class, and I thought of Barack in terms of race and class.

But, here's the thing.  In 2008, not only did a whole lot of people vote for Barack whom you might not have expected would vote in that way, but a lot of those same people voted for Donald Trump in 2016.  Now, this is an odd thing, and you really have to think about that for a bit. 

If you think exclusively in terms of race and class, it's impossible to square this circle.  But, if you start to think in terms of the Outsider, if you remember Ross Perot and remember that Americans are becoming, are already, fed up with the Established Order, things start to make more sense.

It makes sense to think that the people who voted for Barack in 2008, because he was the Outsider, might very well vote for Trump in 2016, because he is the Outsider.  And poor Hillary lost to Donald Trump in the 2016 general elections for exactly the same reason she lost to Barack Obama in the 2008 primaries:  she was the Establishment candidate, each time, in a time when voters were rejecting Establishment candidates.

So, in 2016 as in 2008, HRH HRC was the same Establishment candidate losing to the same Outsider in the age of the Outsider.  Barack Obama of 2016 is not the Barack Obama of 2008.  In the 2016, Barack is just another Establishment figure.  In 2016, Donald Trump is the Barack Obama of 2008.

Finally, a word about the MSM.  They are certainly important, but maybe not as important as they think of themselves.  In 2008, the MSM was in the tank for Barack and they appear to have succeeded in putting him into the White House.  But, in 2008 the MSM was working with the zeitgeist.  I.e., they favored the Outsider at a time when Americans favored the Outsider. 

In 2016, the MSM, for reasons best known to themselves, favored the Establishment candidate.  They worked against the zeitgeist, and America’s ears were closed to them.  No doubt, by their efforts the MSM made the race closer than it might otherwise have been, but working against the zeitgeist is always going to be very heavy lifting.  In the end, it was the zeitgeist that won in 2016 just as it won in 2008.  It was the zeitgeist each time, not the MSM.

Oldest Trick In The Book

This demonization of Steve Bannon, and Donald Trump before him, is the oldest trick in the book, if that book happens to be the indispensable "Rules for Radicals", by Saul Alinsky.  It goes like this:  pick a target, isolate him, and demonize, demonize, demonize.

The purpose is clear enough.  You want to control the debate, terrorize the other side, and eliminate a dangerous enemy.  Oh, you doubt people do this?  Then read up on the notorious "JournoList" (aka J-List),

Spencer Ackerman of The Washington Independent, stated "If the right forces us all to either defend Wright or tear him down, no matter what we choose, we lose the game they've put upon us. Instead, take one of them – Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares – and call them racists".

As you can see, the Left clearly understands that in a propaganda war, if you defend you lose.  As I have been saying all along, the ONLY successful strategy in a propaganda war is:  ATTACK, ATTACK, ATTACK.  And, facts do not matter.  The damage is done in the initial assault.  By the time the victim digs his way out of the pile of shit you buried him in, you have already won the fight.  

One of the great modern examples of this is Alaska senator Ted Stevens, who was indicted on "trumped up" charges (pardon the pun).  By the time he cleared his name, he had long-since lost his senate seat.

Of course, one of the things that makes the Left go blind with fury is that Donald Trump appears to understand this perfectly, whether he has a natural instinct for it or he read "Rules for Radicals".  First, you must absolutely, positively NOT give in to the attacks.  This only confers legitimacy to the attacks, further undermines your own credibility, and encourages more of the same.  It's like negotiating with terrorists.  Well, it is exactly negotiating with terrorists;  Saul Alinsky was a Terrorist Without Bullets (construction parallel to "Doctors Without Borders").

Second, you have to give as good as you get.  And that is obviously what Trump has been doing since the Republican Primaries.

Besides that Trump and his team are obviously wise to the propaganda strategies of the Left, the big news in 2016 is the American public.   I don't know whether very many Americans have read Alinsky or they just do not care anymore.  They have been suckered too many times, the pain is too great, and they just stopped listening.  So, to all my dear Leftist friends, forget these attacks on Trump and Bannon.  They are not true and they don't work.  Anymore.  And by keeping it up, you will only upset the horses.

The Rodney King Election

Let me try another argument for why it is wrong to make much of Hillary's lead in the popular vote.

As of 12:30 pm, 12/13/2016, Hillary Clinton leads Donald Trump by 630,877 votes.  It sounds like a lot.  In any state-wide race, like for the U.S. Senate, this kind of lead would be decisive if not overwhelming.  After all, the lead, itself, is larger than the entire populations of Wyoming (586,107) and Vermont (626,042) and nearly the population of Alaska (738,432).  But, in a nation of 324,720,797 people, who cast 127,203,552 votes, Hillary leads Trump by 0.5%---one half of one percent. Think of it this way.

Imagine the U.S. Senate is split exactly 50/50:  50 Democratic senators and 50 Republican senators.  Now, imagine that one senator changes his party affiliation from Democratic to Republican.  Now the split is 49 Democrats and 51 Republicans.  This creates a two vote difference in favor of the Republicans or a 2% advantage.  So, one senator crossing the aisle gives the Republicans a 2% advantage.

Hillary has a 0.5% advantage over Trump.  Her popular advantage is 1/4 the size of the Republican advantage in the example I just gave.  In other words, Hillary's advantage does not even rise to the level of one senator crossing the aisle.

Friends, there is no ground swell of popular support for Hillary Clinton.  Judging by the presidential vote, alone, we are one seriously divided nation.  That's all.

Furthermore, if you look at the larger political landscape, as I have argued in my blog essay, "Humility",  the reasonable assumption is that the American people have rejected the Democratic Party, and they have rejected Hillary Clinton with it.

The strange problem in the 2016 election is that the rejection of one candidate does not proportionately translate into the acceptance of the other.  The two candidates are structurally different.  Hillary Clinton was the leader of the Democratic Party.  If you reject the party you reject Hillary.  One clear result of the 2016 elections is that the American people have rejected the Democratic Party.

Donald Trump was not the leader of the Republican Party.  He may be that, now, but if he is that leader (and I am not sure that is true), he became their leader by beating them to a pulp with a spiked club.  I have in mind the grisly images of the annual fur seal hunt on the ice floes off Newfoundland.  (Look up those images only if you have a strong stomach.)  Thus, where rejecting the Democratic Party implies rejecting Hillary, favoring the Republican Party, as Americans clearly have done, does not instantly translate into accepting Donald Trump.

So, the result of the 2016 presidential election, alone, is unclear.  The only way to make sense of it, I think, is to put it into the context of all the elections:  state and national.  In that context, the American people rejected Hillary, and we are left with Trump by default.

It's a hell of a thing.  I desperately hope we will have greater clarity next time.  But that's where we are, today.  We have to accept Donald Trump, and all I can do is quote the notorious Rodney King:  "Can't we all just get along?"

Humility

The election of November 8, 2016 was a grinding experience for everyone.  A lot of people think Hillary is an awful person but Trump is worse, and voted accordingly.  A lot of other people think Trump is an awful person but Hillary is worse, and voted accordingly.  I don't see anyone actually celebrating the outcome.  At best, some people are feeling relieved.  Others are feeling an impending dread.  None of this is good. 

Worst of all, there are some vicious, malicious people rubbing salt into the national wound.  They are advancing their hatred of the American people by promoting the idea that Donald Trump stole the election and is, therefore, an illegitimate president.  It is important to understand why they are wrong.

Looked at narrowly, there appears to be an injustice done.  If you look only at the votes cast for Trump and Clinton, it appears that Hillary won the popular vote but the presidency is unjustly awarded to Trump.  There are several ways to think about this.

As of 10 am, 11/12/2016, four days after the election, the NY Times reports that Hillary leads Trump by 574,000 votes.  This does sound like a lot.  The entire state of Wyoming has a population of only 586,000 people, and a lead of 574,000 votes in any state-wide election, in any state, would be decisive.  But, in a country of 323 million people, in a national election that saw 127 million votes cast, a lead of 574,000 votes is about 0.46% of all votes cast.  It is far more meaningful to say that our nation is divided, than to suggest that the election was thrown to the undeserving candidate.

Another measure of the popular resistance to the blandishments of Hillary Clinton is campaign spending.  For many years people, especially on the political Left, have bemoaned the connection between money and politics.  The idea is that money too easily influences the weak minded.  This connection is still valid.  And yet, Hillary spent actually twice the money of Trump, to produce her 0.46% lead in the popular vote.  And her vaunted "ground game" came to nothing.  Well, not exactly nothing;  imagine the election outcome if the spending pattern were reversed or, at least, more even.  There is the distinct possibility that Trump would have garnered a dramatic advantage over Hillary.

Along this line, you must also consider that Donald Trump ran into unprecedented head winds.  He ran against the ENTIRE political establishment.  Obviously, he ran against the Democrats.  He also ran against the Republicans.  And he ran against the pundit class and against the entire Fourth Estate.  That the entire political establishment worked against him, and still he won, has to tell you something about the deep well of support that Donald Trump enjoys among the American people.

Finally, a broader view of the political landscape suggests there is no injustice, in the first place.  While votes for the presidency suggest an exactly divided nation, the results of elections for the  House of Representatives, for the U.S. Senate, and for state governments, reveal a more coherent electorate.  The American people have clearly rejected the Democratic Party.  As Vox.com reports, eight years of Barack Obama have reduced the Democratic party to “a smoking pile of rubble.”  We can reasonably infer that the American people also rejected Hillary Clinton.

To believe otherwise is to believe that the same people who installed so many Republican state legislators, governors, congressmen, and senators, would have looked upon the standard bearer of the Democratic Party that they had just roundly rejected and exclaimed, "Yeah!  That's our gal." 

I don't think so.  The American people rejected Hillary Clinton. Period.  Their acceptance of Donald Trump is another, more complicated, matter. 

People on my side of the political divide are entitled to feel some relief at the outcome of November 8.  People on the other side of the political divide should be feeling some humility.  Nobody has anything to celebrate.  Introspection, on all sides, should be the order of the day.  And what certainly should not be tolerated, is this small, vicious, malicious element in our society already working diligently to “rub raw the resentments of the people.”

No Vendetta Against Hillary Clinton

There is growing chatter about Rudi Giuliani becoming President Trump's Attorney General.  We should be so lucky.  Rudi Giuliani is a brilliant man with a spectacular record of accomplishments.  Seventeen years after he left the mayoralty, NYC still benefits from his enlightened leadership, whose effects are far larger than crime control, important as that is.

If Barack does not pardon her, one of the first questions that AG Giuliani must consider is what to do about the unindicted co-conspirator, Hillary Rodham Clinton.  This is not a simple question.  Even though she is, at this moment, officially a private person, even though putting her in jail may be the right thing to do, HRC was almost our president.  She was the vessel for the hopes and aspirations of fully half the American people.  And if President Trump is to have any hope of uniting this deeply divided country, this fact is not to be lightly dismissed.  I think AG Giuliani has a careful choice to make.

Of course, if Barack pardons Hillary, then the case is closed on her.  If Barack does not pardon Hillary, Giuliani must serious consider simply closing the case against her, anyway.  He should definitely purse, with vigor, the case against the Clinton Foundation, but not with the intention of jailing HRC, herself.  Of course, if HRC obstructs justice, lies to FBI agents, or commits new crimes, that is another matter, entirely.  But the case against the foundation should not assume HRC as a target.

The alternative is to investigate Hillary, along with her Foundation.  In that case, however, the investigation must be exquisitely punctilious and exhaustive.  The case against HRC cannot be probabilistic, it must be made beyond all reasonable doubt or it has be thrown out.  And, if it can be made beyond all reasonable doubt, it must be laid out before the public in a totally transparent manner.

There can be no hint of vendetta about the case against Hillary.  She must be seen, unambiguously as a criminal.  In the end, even her most ardent supporters must agree she is a criminal who deserves to go to jail.

I know that many on my end of the political spectrum would be deeply gratified to see HRC in jail.  But, as gratifying as that would be and, believe me, it would be "soooo good", to quote Michael Moore, HRC is not important any more (thank G-d).  Our country is more important.  And if letting her go free will help in the healing, then we must seriously consider that option.

Dayenu: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Donald Trump

At Passover, Jews sing the traditional song, "Dayenu".  The title is the Hebrew word meaning, roughly, "It would have been enough for us," and the lyrics go something like this,

If He had brought us out of Egypt, dayenu.
If He had executed justice upon the Egyptians, dayenu.
If He had executed justice upon their gods, dayenu.
If He had slain their first-born, dayenu.
If He had given to us their health and wealth, dayenu.

And so on for about ten more stanzas.  It is an expression of gratitude to G-d for all that He has done for the Jewish people.

Please forgive me if I sound a tad sacreligous, but even though Donald Trump was not my first choice, and he is certainly no one's idea of the ideal president, dayenu is sort of how I feel towards him.  Please let me explain.

I had the premonition some years ago, and in this political cycle I am thoroughly convinced, that issues are irrelevant to our political discourse.  We are in a post-issues political regime.

Debating issues, e.g., education policy, is merely a distraction.  Debate conveys the notion that education policy is maleable.  This has not been true for a very long time.  The Vested Interests (whom I call "The Education Mafia") have grown very large, very powerful, their roots run very deep in our society and in our politics, their ideology is ossified, and education policy will not change, now or ever, as it has not changed for the last thirty years, despite the evident fact of its abject failure.  Education policy is what the Education Mafia want, and nothing will change so long as the Existing Order remains intact.

In other words, policy is no longer the problem.  Policy has long since stopped being the problem.  The problem is the Existing Order of ossified special interests.

You can repeat this idea many times.  Large parts of the population want to restrict immigration, but restriction will not happen.  Large parts of the population are horrified by abortion-on-demand, but abortion-on-demand will continue.  Nobody cares, one way or another, about the statistically non-existent transgender "community", and people certainly do not want to re-organize their lives to accommodate it, but "they" will make you care.  And so on. I am not arguing whether any one element of public policy is right or wrong, I am just observing that things are as they are, whether you like it or not, and that is how it's going to be until something radical happens.

Always, there is bound to be some wiggle room between what people want and what public policy is.  In a democracy, however, when public policy becomes sufficiently disconnect from the will of the people, when that divergence becomes too great, we have a very serious problem.

We have a very serious problem.

The only solution I can imagine is that somebody, somehow has to break the back of the Existing Order.  And, until that happens, please don't bore me with policy discussions.  Such discussion are irrelevant and as pure a waste of time as one can imagine.

Enter Donald Trump.

In the 2015 presidential primaries, the Republicans had a number of hacks, like Jeb Bush and Lindsey Graham, and several exciting candidates like Ted Cruz, Bobby Jindal, and Scott Walker, men of real substance and accomplishments who held out the possiblity of real reform.  I would have been happy with any one of them.  My man was Ted Cruz.

However, what was of overarching importance was the defeat of the Establishment Republicans.  I'm sorry that Cruz, Walker and Jindall lost in the process, but Donald Trump did not merely defeat the Karl Rove/Jeb Bush wing of the Republican Party, he humiliated them.  Rove/Bush spent $130 Million and never got above 7% of the popular vote.  This was deeply gratifying and, for this reason alone, I am grateful to Donald Trump.

If Donald Trump had only defeated the Rove/Bush wing of the Republican Party, dayenu.
If the Republican Party is destroyed or radically reformed because of Trump, dayenu.

And now, if Donald Trump can do the same with Hillary Clinton and the criminal front group that is the Democratic Party, dayenu.

The Ayatollah of Health Care

I know health care is a hideously complicated subject, and it is more than likely I am talking doggy doodoo, but here is what I think I know.

There was never any chance, whatever, that Obamacare was going to reduce costs, and everybody knew it at the time.  Except, possibly, Barack, who does not care about cost.  Cost was never an issue for him.

Barack wants to lead a revolution, nationalized health care is a means to an end, and he channels the late Ruhollah Khomeini, master of the 1979 Muslim revolution in Iran.  It was once explained to Khomeini that certain of his plans would have adverse economic consequences, to which he famously replied, "This revolution is not about the price of watermelon."  As with Khomeini, so with Barack.

Oh, the old American health care system certainly could have benefited with some tweaking, here and there.  Maybe a lot of tweaking.  But nothing more than tweaking.  Certainly, there were some inefficiencies and some fraud, but there never were massive inefficiencies, or massive frauds, and rising costs were not due to the rising costs of established medicines and procedures.

It is not as if we are paying more for aspirin, for example.  To the contrary, we are paying much less.  Consider aspirin prices in Morris County, NJ.  In 1932, aspirin cost 1¢ per pill.  Prices varied over time, and in 2012 aspirin cost 3¢ per pill.  Nominal prices.  In real dollars (2011), aspirin cost 16¢ per pill in 1932 and just under 6¢ per pill in 2012.  A 62.5% drop in the cost of aspirin in the 80 yr span.

And that's how it is with all old, established medicines.  The "problem", especially over the last 30 years or so, is that pharmaceutical companies have developed a wide range of miracle drugs, real life savers.  It may well be true that Big Pharma extorts obscene profits, but it is also true that it can cost half a billion dollars to bring a new drug to market.  There is no way around the evident fact that, these days, we are buying aspirin and a whole lot of, very expensive, new life saving medications.  In other words, we are buying more health care and we have to pay for it.

The same with medical procedures.  Before 1967, nobody was buying a heart transplant because no such thing existed.  The first heart was transplanted in December, 1967, it then took a while for the expertise to spread, and these days there are about 2,000 transplants a year, in the U.S. alone.  Should I mention this is an expensive procedure?  Well, the more heart transplants (and other daring, new, and very expensive procedures) we buy, the more we have to pay.  It's really that simple.

There is also a well known allocation problem in health care.  It is a strange but true fact that fully 30% of all Medicare expenditures are made in the last year of life.  As the population ages, this will get worse.  Does this enormous expense really make sense?  Almost certainly not.  Now, you explain to your neighbor that he cannot spend money on his beloved, dying mother.  See the problem?  The problem is that we have to pay for what we want.

In other words, unless Obama was going to withhold new medicines, or withhold new procedures, or withhold some significant amount of care from the elderly, there was no chance he was going to reduce costs.  To the contrary, as he put more people on the health insurance rolls, costs had to go up.

And so they have.

African Levels of Corruption

Many years ago, maybe 25 or so, I read an article in "The Economist" newspaper about public corruption in Africa.  "The Economist" tried to convey the staggering level of corruption with a joke.  I have not been able to find this joke anywhere on the internet, so I write it down here, from memory.

First, you have to know that the London School of Economics is an astonishingly influential institution.  Many young people, who go on to positions of power and influence in their home countries, are educated at the LSE and develop personal friendships there with young people from other countries.  Indeed, the LSE has educated more than a few prime ministers and dictators.  The story:

Two young students at the LSE, an African and an Asian, became fast friends and stayed in touch after they returned to their home countries.  Both developed influential careers in the service of their respective governments.

It came to pass, after some years, that the African had an opportunity to travel to East Asia.  His Asian friend from the LSE was delighted to receive him into is large and beautiful home, where they ate an elegant dinner.

Enjoying their after-dinner cigars and cocktails, on the balcony with a lovely view, the African could not help asking, "I am delighted at your success, but how can you afford all this on a government salary?"

The Asian pointed out into the distance and asked, "Do you see all that development?"  The African looked out and saw earth moving equipment, construction cranes, and all the obvious signs of a great deal of work happening.  He nodded.  The Asian then proudly tapped himself on the chest and explained, "10%".  Meaning, of course, that in bribes and kick-backs, he had skimmed into his own pocket 10% of the expenditures on the development.

The African nodded in understanding.

A couple of years later, the Asian had the opportunity to travel in Africa.  His African friend from the LSE was delighted to receive him.  Upon arriving, the Asian drove up to a palatial estate where he was received by liveried servants and they enjoyed a sumptious meal.

Enjoying their after-dinner cigars and cocktails, on a balcoy with a spectacular view, the Asian could not help asking, "I am delighted at your success, but how can you possibly afford all this on a government salary?"

The African pointed out into the distance and asked, "Do you see all that development?"  The Asian looked and looked and could see nothing but virgin wilderness.  He turned to his friend with a curious look on his face.  The African then proudly tapped himself on the chest and explained, "100%".

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is African levels of corruption.

The Most Qualified Something-or-other

For the Nth time, recently, I have heard that Hillary Rodham Clinton is the most qualified presidential candidate in history.  And I'm wondering, what on earth can that mean.

So far as I know, there are exactly three qualifications for the presidency.  The candidate must:

1. Be a natural born citizen,
2. Be at least 35 yrs of age, and
3. Have won the election.

The brother-in-law who has been sleeping on your couch for the last six months would be qualified for the presidency, if he won the election.  Of course, we tend to look for some more qualities in our presidents and that, I think, is the key to making sense of the Left's assertion.

Keep in mind, the Left are saying Hillary is the most qualified candidate "In History"!  More qualified than George Washington?  More qualified than Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, Dwight David Eisenhower?  Really?!  Obviously, their meaning of "qualified" is rather different from what you and I mean by it.

The presidency is an executive office.  More, the president is the Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces.  Historically, we looked to men with a track record of getting things done, and we have had a strong bias towards men with military experience.  Two thirds of all presidents have had some kind of military experience.

Dwight David Eisenhower, 34th President of the U.S., General of The Army, was Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Europe during the greatest war in human history.  George Washington created the U.S. by leading men in battle under desperate circumstances, and then declined the crown that was offered him (I still can't get over that).

But, Washington did not lie about a non-existent rape culture.  Eisenhower did not lie about gender pay equity.  Evidently, in the minds of the Leftists, lying about gender pay equity makes Hillary Rodham Clinton more qualified than Dwight David Eisenhower.

You should come to your own conclusions about that.

Political Anaphylaxis

Is it worth saying that Trump and Clinton are not, themselves, the problem?  They are mere symptoms of the problem.  It's not as if everything has been peachy all along with American politics and then, all of a sudden, two monsters appear out of nowhere.  Rather, American politics have been corrupt, and getting more corrupt, certainly since the first Clinton administration, if not before.  I would say the rot started in 1942 (under a Democratic administration, unsurprisingly) with the Wickard v Filburn decision of the SCOTUS.

Roscoe Filburn, an Ohio farmer, grew wheat entirely for his own use, to feed his animals, selling none of it on the open market.  And yet, the SCOTUS decided that Filburn, by minding his own business on his own property, was violating the **Interstate** Commerce Clause.  So, the federal government wanted to regulate the actions of a private citizen on his own property, and the Supreme Court agreed, using a legal argument indistinguishable from Jabberwocky.

With the Wickard decision in mind, how can you be surprised with the 2005 SCOTUS decision, Kelo v City of New London?  In that decision, the state expropriated one private citizen's private property to give it to another private citizen.  From Wickard to Kelo, the Constitution had come to mean nothing.  So, in 2010 when then Speaker of The House, Nancy Pelosi was asked by what Constitutional authority did Congress enact the Affordable Care Act, she responded, "Are you serious?"  It was perfectly clear that Pelosi could not give an answer because she did not care about the question.  The Constitution had become irrelevant to the the most powerful member of the People's House, the person third in line to the presidency of the U.S.

As Angelo Codevilla has observed, as Mark Levin has observed, as has been observed by more than a few people who pay the least attention, we have been living in a lawless society for more than a while, already.  No wonder Hillary Clinton feels she can do whatever she likes.  If the Constitution does not mean what it says it means then, in the notorious words of Al Gore (March, 1997), "There is no controlling legal authority."

How has it come to this?  How do we get two of the most despised people in the country contending for the presidency?  I think the answer is self-evident.  As our politics have become more and more corrupt, good people have declined to dive into the political cesspool.  Criminals and weirdos are all we have left.  Or, as Edmund Burke would have it, “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.”

I can say only this in defense of the repugnant Donald Trump (I have thought him repugnant long before he entered politics).  A vote for Hillary Clinton is a vote for the status quo, for continuing and worsening public corruption.  Donald Trump, however distasteful, however inadequate, is a reaction to the corruption.  Donald Trump is the incarnation of "Throw the bums out."  He is the anaphylactic shock in the body politic. And that, friends, is as good a reason as any to reject Hillary Clinton and vote for Donald Trump.

Oh, do *I* sound like a crackpot?  Then let me remind you that come Jan 20, 2017 one of Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump will be our next president.  And if you have not yet absorbed that kick in the nuts, then you are the crackpot.

After the Republic

Marxists make much of the "contradictions" in capitalism.  Turns out their notion of contradiction is trivial, if not vacuous.  However, in his long-ish but fascinating, and depressing article, After the Republic, Professor Angelo Codevilla makes me think of the real contradiction in American democracy.

The foundational idea of the American experiment is that individuals should mind their own business and government should mainly stay out of the way.  If this idea was ever valid, it was valid for only a fairly narrow slice of the population that existed at the time of the American Revolution.

Please remember that the American Revolution was really the first American civil war.  Fully half the population remained loyal to the English crown, there was considerable internecine fighting, and a significant portion of the population decamped to Canada, mainly southern Ontario, where the Loyalist heritage is still remembered.

In other words, lots of people, maybe most people, want to be slaves.  For example, there is an entire civilization, of some 1 1/2 billion people, predicated on the notion of abject submission.  Now, it is one thing to be born into Islam, quite another to see Westerners voluntarily converting to a religion in which they are promised slavery, most especially women.

The will to slavery reveals itself in many other ways.  Socialism is nothing but a cri de coeur of the large mass of the people who want somebody else, the government, to run their lives for them.

Conversely, there are a few people with a "will to power", which brings up the other part of the American contradiction.  One can imagine a government of limited power, but it is harder to think of individuals who voluntarily decline power.  George Washington, the towering figure of the American Revolution, did something that, if not unique, most certainly is very rare in the human experience.

After the victory over the British, Washington was offered the crown.  He was, actually, invited to become king of the United States.  A lesser man would have accepted.  Washington replied something like, "Thanks, but I'd rather go fishing."  And for nearly 100 years, the U.S. was true to its ideal of private property, limited government, and rule of law.

But George Washington was exceptional in almost every way imaginable.  What you have to imagine now is a POTUS who wants less power not more, senators who want less power not more, congressmen and judges who want less power not more, etc.  Friends, this is not the way of the world.  And that is the American contradiction:  the powerful few want power and most people want to be slaves.  The mystery is that the American Experiment lasted as long as it did.

I am glad to have lived in it for a time.  I am very sorry to see it wither away.  And I am very sorry for the America our children will inherit.  If Donald Trump is elected president, it may wither slower;  if Hillary Clinton, then faster.  But the withering seems inevitable.  I suspected this in 2008 with the election of the fatuous and vacuous Barack Obama.  President Hillary Clinton would bring certainty.

Your Move, FIDE

The WaPo, coming late to the party, reports on the boycott, led by the unfortunately named Nazi Paikidze, of the Women's World Chess Championship because it is to be held in apartheid Iran.  Since the WaPo article is all I know about her, I cannot tell if Nazi is a political moron or a political genius.  She may well be a political genius.

Of course, I approve her move wholeheartedly.  But, listen to her explanation,

A message to the people of Iran: I am not anti-Islam or any other religion. I stand for freedom of religion and choice. I'm protesting FIDE's decision not because of Iran's religion or people, but for the government's laws that are restricting my rights as a woman.

She is distinguishing between the government of Iran and the religion of Islam.  But, Iran is a theocracy and nobody there is confused on this point.  Any attack on the government is, per force, an attack on Islam and that is how Iranians see it.  Some, probably many, Iranians may even welcome such an attack, but an attack it surely is, in their eyes.

On the other hand, Westerners are deaf, dumb, and blind to any religious motivation.  The writer Sam Harris makes much of this point.  For example, Westerners have no trouble understanding that Europeans enslaved Africans out of economic self-interest, but they are wholly incapable of believing that Muslims were murdering Yazidis in anticipation of the eternal pleasures of a heavenly whorehouse.

Nazi Paikidze is not, strictly speaking, a Westerner.  An ethnic Georgian, she may be far more alert to Islam than most of us.  Having spent some years in the U.S., studying at the university of Maryland, she may also be fully aware of Western deafness to religion.  Therefore, on the one hand, her explanation may be just another sad manifestation of the suicidal Western ignorance of Islam.

On the other hand, Nazi's statement, gibberish on its face, may be a brilliant exercise in political double-entendre, worthy of a chess grand master.  Her attack on the government of Iran can be understood by shallow, naive Westerners as a political statement while, at the same time, the Iranians will hear it as the attack on Islam that it should be.  If this is, in fact, what she intends, then

Well played, Nazi Paikidze.

Two Peas In A Pod

Too many people subscribe to the erroneous idea that fascism and socialism exist at opposite ends of a long political spectrum.  How this false idea gained widespread currency is a question explored by Stéphane Courtois in his essay introducing "The Black Book of Communism," a must read (book and essay), if you want to understand anything about the 20th century.

In short, the idea that fascism and socialism are far apart ideologically, therefore politically inimical, was a central element of a decades long and highly vigorous propaganda campaign waged by Cold War era Moscow.

As a matter of fact, the founders of fascism, Adolph Hitler and Benito Mussolini, were dyed-in-the-wool communists who broke with the communist movements in their respective countries over one narrow element of ideology (nationalism vs internationalism), and over tactics.  They remained faithful socialists to their dying days.

Are you surprised?  You should not be.  As with people so with ideologies, blood feuds are the bitterest the closer they are and the better they know each other.

Consider the blood feud between Sunni and Shia Islam.  The ideological differences between them are so trivial as to be essentially imperceptible to an outsider.  And yet, exactly this meaningless difference between them is a central element in the horror we are now watching (in this year of the Common Era, 2016) in the internecine and genocidal war in Syria, Iraq, and The Yemen.

Not to let Christianity off the hook, as a Jewish man I see the Thirty Years War (1618 to 1648) in exactly the same way.  Until WW I, the Thirty Years War was the single greatest Man-made catastrophe on the European continent.  While it may have evolved somewhat over its three decades, that terrible war began as a religious war between Protestants and Catholics.  There is no explanation you can give me, about the doctrinal differences between Protestantism and Catholicism, that would make me conclude, "Oh, now I understand why they were butchering each other's children."

Therefore, you should not conclude, from the insensate violence perpetrated by fascism and communism on each other, that they are very different ideologies.  Quite to the contrary.

Stéphane Courtois explains this from a socialist point of view.  From a fascist point of view, now let Adolph Hitler tell you, himself.  I have started reading "Hitler's Second Book," edited by Gerhard L. Weinberg, the same German-Jewish historian who wrote the masterful, "A World At Arms."

In the opening paragraph ("Hitler's Second Book") of Chapter V, page 46, Hitler writes,

"I am a German nationalist.  That means I am openly committed to my Volkstum [ethnic community].  All of my thoughts and actions belong to it.  I am a socialist.  I see before me no class or rank, but rather a community of people who are connected by blood, united by language, and subject to the same collective fate.  I love the people and hate the current majorities only because I do not see them representing either the greatness or the happiness of my people."

If Hitler had stopped with, "I see before me no class or rank, but rather a community of people," he would have been indistinguishable from garden variety marxists.  Only the nationalist element of "National Socialism" (aka, Nazism) sets him apart.  Other than that,

Socialism is Fascism and Fascism is Socialism.

The Annihilator Adjective

In this Elder of Ziyon essay, The immorality of charging Israel of "genocide", I learned a new phrase:  incremental genocide.  What does that mean?  It truly does not matter.  The propaganda technique for today is what I call "the annihilator adjective."  It empties meaning out of the word being modified, allowing you to fill it back up with whatever meaning you like.

Suppose you want to call someone an asshole, but you can't just use the word straightforwardly because he may not be objectively an asshole and you would thus open yourself to criticism.  So, instead, you call him a "social asshole" or "decentered asshole" or "networked asshole".  Really, you could use any adjective you like, the weirder the better.  The adjective doesn't have to mean anything, it just has to sound like it might mean something (see:  "Jabberwocky").

Then, when challenged, you reply, "But, I am not calling him an asshole as you understand the concept.  What I mean by asshole is..." and you can proceed to bury your interlocutor in an avalanche of meaningless verbiage.  The avalanche of meaningless verbiage will leave no lasting impression on your interlocutor's mind because it is meaningless.  The enduring impression is that your victim is labelled an asshole and in your interlocutor's, simple and impressionable, mind is left the sense that you are one smart guy (you "know words").

Actually, you are the asshole.

The canonical use of the annihilator adjective is "social justice".  What's that?  We all  have some sense of "justice", worked out over long years of moral, legal, and literary development, and we associated strong, positive feelings with the concept.  We tend to know what it means and we tend to like it, a lot.  Socialists want to cloak themselves in the mantle of justice, but it is not easy for them to do that because socialism is not just.

Enter "social justice".  Oh, what's that?  And the socialists proceed to bury us in an avalanche of meaningless verbiage, leaving upon us the impression that they somehow inhabit a higher moral plane.  Actually, they just want to take your stuff.

It turns out that the socialist assholes (I use these words in their dictionary definitions, no annihilator adjectives for me, thanks) want to label Israel genocidal.  This is absurd on its face and they cannot do that straightforwardly.  Enter "incremental genocide".  What does that mean?  Of course, it does not mean anything.  It's just a way for the socialist assholes to associate the word genocide with Israel.

The Prime Directive

Ah, spring is in the air and a young man's fancy turns to thoughts of....Scratch that!  Actually, it's late August, school is about to start, and the newspapers are publishing their annual education articles.  Here is this year's WaPo entry, Whats wrong with U.S. schools: A multiple-choice exam with "no wrong answers",

The WaPo's is a clever article, mainly right, I think.  So, why am I unhappy with it?  Consider two questions raised by the article:

• What's wrong with teacher training, and 
• Why don't we know how children learn?

Good questions, and the WaPo raises a number of them.  But, these are the same questions that have been asked for nearly 100 years.  What the WaPo does not ask is why we do not already have some good answers for them.

Consider that schools of education have been around for more than 100 yrs.  Their faculties are doctors of education whose profession it is to research education.  How is it possible that after such a long time they do not have at least pretty good answers to basic questions?  BTW, here is a brilliant commentary on the subject, Reinventing the wheel of education, by Natalie Kramer  

But, why?  What's going on?  Are the Education Ayatollahs too busy to do the basic research (busy with what, exactly)?  Are they morons?  Or is something else going on?

After many, many years of its staring me hard in the face, it has become perfectly obvious what is going on in public education.  How could it be obvious if it took me so many years to recognize?  Here is a story about the English mathematician G.H. Hardy to explain.

Once upon a time, lecturing, Hardy was methodically working through a proof when, coming upon a key element he said, "Now, obviously..." and he paused and wondered aloud, "Is it obvious?"  He paced the blackboard.  He actually walked out of the lecture hall, lost in thought.  Quite some minutes later, he returned and exclaimed, "Yes!  It is obvious."

In the same way, I say it is obvious that the central organizing doctrine of American education, what I call "The Prime Directive", is:  Reduce The Gap!

You see, there is a chasm between academic high achievers and academic low achievers.  The provenance of this concern is, of course, marxist class warfare.  In the American context there is the additional frisson of race.  It is widely observed that high achievers are middle and upper class mainly White and Yellow, and low achievers are lower class mainly Black and Brown.
American educators are desperate to reduce this Gap in academic achievement.  Read the education literature, read their op-eds in the NY Times and the WaPo, listen to their public speeches and congressional testimonies, and you can see they think of nothing else.  Their every thought is bent upon solving this one problem.

The problem is that nobody knows how to reduce The Gap, and they cause much harm in the effort.  Consider, any time you teach something real, you must create a Gap.  Eg, suppose in a high school algebra class you teach the quadratic equation with the serious expectation that your students learn the idea and can apply it to solve problems.  Well, some students will learn it quickly and easily, some students will learn it more slowly and imperfectly, and some students will not learn it, at all, no matter what you do.  Voila!  A Gap.

Of course, the educators are not against teaching the quadratic equation, or any other idea of intellectual substance.  But, all efforts must conform to The Prime Directive.  So, if you cannot teach the quadratic equation without generating a Gap, eliminate the quadratic equation.  And so it ramifies to every idea in every academic subject.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, explains almost everything about modern, American public education.

Donna Shalala and the Clinton Foundation

How interesting that Donna Shalala is president of the Clinton Foundation.

Shalala made a big impression on me some years ago when she was president of the University of Miami.  At that time, she made a big deal of how women in the sciences are not treated fairly Bias Is Hurting Women in Science.  How odd, I thought, that she was in a position to actually do something about that, but did nothing.

If it is true that women are not treated fairly in the sciences, this implies there is a large, untapped pool of scientific talent, out there.  Shalala said as much.  So, why not tap that talent?

The main business of university presidents is raising money.  Shalala could have raised some money and created, say, the Department of Female Chemistry.  Bring in some of that top scientific talent, run the department on principles favorable to women, and watch all that prolific research come rolling in.  They could even found their own "Journal of Female Chemistry".

Does that sound unusual to you?  It shouldn't.  That is exactly what many universities have done with women's studies, ethnic studies, "Africana" studies, and urban anthropology.  The feminists could not find a home in an existing department, so the made their own.  The ethnologists could not find a home in an existing department so they made their own, and so on.  I completely respect that.  They raised their own money, they funded their own departments, they publish their own journals.  What's the problem?

Donna Shalala did none of that.  All she did was monger grievances.  And now she is president of the Clinton Foundation.  I wonder what that says about the Clinton Foundation.

Depraved Indifference At The U.N.

The NY Times has a piece on the culpability of the UN in the cholera epidemic in post-earthquake Haiti, in 2010.  Do I really need to put this into perspective?  Oh, alright.

So, worldwide, THE central human problem is water.  Getting potable water in, putting sewage water out, floods, droughts, mosquitoes (vector for malaria), and other stuff.  Water problems are the single greatest reason, by far, why humans die premature, horrible deaths.  Especially children.

Waterborne diseases are central to the problem of water control.  There are so many different kinds we have to categorize them:  protozoan diseases, parasitic diseases, bacterial diseases, and viral disease.  Each disease more horrible than the one before.  Diseases that don't kill you by dehydration will kill you by malnutrition, skin infections, and organ damage.  I can't put it any plainer than the World Health Organization:  Waterborne Disease is World's Leading Killer.

Among the waterborne diseases, cholera is big one.  Drink water contaminated by Vibrio cholerae and you will quickly suffer an agony of profuse watery diarrhea, vomiting, rapid heart rate, loss of skin elasticity, dry mucous membranes, low blood pressure, thirst, and muscle cramps leading soon to renal failure, coma, and shock.  Death can come in hours, and it can be a mercy.

Friends, you pay attention to cholera, OK?

So, it came to pass that a magnitude 7 (that's big!) earthquake hit Haiti in 2010, epicenter mere kilometers from Port-au-Prince, causing nearly 300,000 deaths and many times that suffering.  People around the world wanted to help.  The UN wanted to help.  In the effort to help, the UN imported peacekeepers from Nepal.

As it happens, at that time Nepal was suffering a cholera epidemic.  And yet, at the UN a bell rang in nobody's head.  The UN went ahead with importing the Nepalese, they were housed in a compound on the Meille River and their waste was flushed into the river.  A recipe for disaster.

In American parlance, the very kindest characterization of UN behavior is "depraved indifference."  As I have long argued, the UN is a depraved organization.  And they are antisemites.  It is astonishing the extent to which the two go together.

Of course, the solution is obvious.

A couple of years ago I had in my class a Haitian student, a middle aged man.  How he knew I am Jewish I cannot say, but he made a point of telling me---as if I deserve some credit (I live only in reflected glory)---that many Haitians are keenly aware, and profoundly grateful, that after the earthquake the very first relief agents on the ground were these fantastic, highly mobile Israeli field hospitals.  They appeared over night, as if by magic.  No hoopla, no klieg lights, no press corp.  Quietly, they went about the business of saving lives, one after another after another,

No One But The Israelis Have Come To Help

In the words of the Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest (who probably never spoke these exact words, but the sentiment is absolutely right), the Israelis Got there firstest with the mostest.

So, the solution to the UN depravity?  Tens of thousands of sick and dead Haitians attest to the rightness of this assertion:  All UN relief efforts must be run by Jews.

Oh, you don't think that's ever going to happen?  Neither do I.  Too bad, because a lot of people are going to die who do not need to die.