On The Killing of The ACA

The Republicans are gonna kill it dead!  Like slapping a fly and then wiping the corpse off into the garbage bin, and presto!  All is good.

The peons can have their Medical Savings Accounts!*  That means having to save for medical expenses, though from pre-tax income, so if you make, say, $30,000 a year you are going to be in deep shit, because you won't be able to scrape together enough to fund much anything in health care. (Did I ever tell you how much my broken arm ended up costing me and the system?)

If real people weren't going to die because of this right-wing fox trot (hot trot? the trots?), the whole thing would be pretty amusing.  Our Dear Leader-Elect demands (demands!) instant killing of the ACA and instant replacement by something or other. 

Except that there's no way such instant acts are feasible.  The Republicans don't have a ready-made alternative, and even if they did, to install it would take at least several months.  That Trump doesn't understand that is blood-chilling.

What will be the consequences of the killing of the ACA?** 

Here's my prediction:  We are going to have roughly twenty million people without health insurance, again.  And no, dear Republicans, they can't just go into the ER and get treated for nothing.  The ER doesn't do radiation treatments for cancer or follow-ups or anything but the stabilizing of patients.  Without money, that is.

And here's my prediction:  People are going to die who wouldn't have died without this wonderful killing operation, and many of those voted for Trump.

Sometimes I am very very slow.  It took me this long to realize that all the anti-Obamacare stuff comes from the fact that it raises the taxes of those who earn over $250,000 a year!  Everything else is created by right-wing propaganda***
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*  There will be other stuff, too, such as the freedom to buy health insurance across state borders which will make all the sellers move to the state with lowest required contents for the package and highest allowed premia, and high-risk pools which will be utterly inadequate, because so many people will be put into them (such as anyone with a pre-existing condition or anyone over fifty?).

But what will go away (slap the fly) are free preventive care, free birth control and, most importantly, those subsidies for lower income people.

** A ballad should be made out of that.  (Let me tell you the story of the ACA and those who wanted her dead....)

***  The markets have trouble and the premia have risen rapidly in some markets.  But the premia rose more rapidly before the ACA and will rise more rapidly again.  It's crucial to separate the general maladies of American health insurance from the specific problems of the ACA markets.

Do Not Normalize The Trump Administration: The Case Of Chuck Johnson, Twitter Troll Extraordinaire

Do any of you remember the famous Twitter troll, Chuck Johnson?  He was so bad by doxxing people* and by  telling his acolyte trolls to harass and threaten people that he was finally permanently banned by Twitter.  And that takes some doing.

Ah, I remember him well, and that's because many of his tweets were the most out-and-out woman-hating, black-hating, Jew-hating tweets I ever came across.  Sadly, I didn't screen-cap them.

Why would I regret that?  Well, now he is among the powers that rule over us!

Would you have believed, say, two years, ago, that the white male supremacists in 2017 will be advising the incoming president on who to appoint to his team?

But that's where we are:

Charles “Chuck” Johnson, a controversial blogger and conservative online personality, has been pushing for various political appointees to serve under Donald Trump, according to multiple sources close to the President-elect’s transition team. While Johnson does not have a formal position, FORBES has learned that he is working behind the scenes with members of the transition team’s executive committee, including billionaire Trump donor Peter Thiel, to recommend, vet and give something of a seal of approval to potential nominees from the so-called "alt-right." 

...

In the months leading up to the election, Johnson, 28, used social media and his website GotNews.com to stump for the President-elect while also publishing misinformation on Trump’s detractors. Now, Johnson is helping to pick some of the leaders who may run the country for the next four years.

I'm sure Trump will be the president for all Americans when he gets advice from the likes of Chuck Johnson.  To see what Johnson thinks of blacks and of Jews, check out this Southern Poverty Law Center article.  Be forewarned:  It's not pretty.

The morale of this post:  DO NOT NORMALIZE THE TRUMP ERA.  RESIST.

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* By publishing the names and addresses of all sorts of people on Twitter.  In several cases the individuals thus treated had to leave their homes because of the threats of violence they received.  In at least one, and possibly two cases, the names given belonged to individuals who had nothing to do with whatever Johnson was fuming about, but who were still harassed and threatened.

Trump Speaks. The Peons Listen.

Trump's press conference was unique!  It was the weirdest ever!  Watching it from another planet would have been beautiful, tremendous!

It was all those very big things, not just because of the incoherence of this aspiring American dictator, as Charlie Pierce so beautifully noticed, but also because  our Dear Leader-Elect said things like these:

And the admirals have been fantastic. The generals have been fantastic. I've really gotten to know them well. And we’re going to do some big things on the F-35 program and perhaps the F-18 program. And we’re going to get those costs way down, and we’re gonna get the plane to be even better and we’re going to have to some competition. And it’s going to be a beautiful thing.

So we been very, very much involved -- and other things. We had Jack Ma, we had so many incredible people coming here -- they’re going to do tremendous things, tremendous things in this country. And they're very excited. 

...

I look very much forward to the inauguration. It’s going to be a beautiful event. We have great talent, tremendous talent. And we have all of the bands -- or most of the bands from the different segments of the military. And I've heard some of these bands over the years -- they’re incredible. We’re going to have a very, very elegant day. The 20th is going to be something that will be very, very special, very beautiful

And on being asked about the most recent (unsubstantiated!)*  report on his possible connections with Russia:

Ok, first of all, these meetings, as you know, are confidential, classified. So I'm not allowed to talk about what went on in a meeting. But we had many witnesses in that meeting. Many of them with us. And I will say again, I think it's a disgrace that information would be let out. I saw the information. I read the information outside of that meeting. It’s all fake news. It’s phony stuff. It did not happen. And it was gotten by opponents of ours, as you know because you reported it and so did many of the other people. It was a group of opponents they got together -- sick people -- and they put that crap together. 

I have bolded the terms which I find fascinating, coming from the mouth of a president-elect of one of the most powerful countries on earth.**  Notice something interesting about them?   Well, other than a president-elect saying "crap" in a presser.

They convey no actual information.  They are intended to affect emotions.

But the most astonishing part of our Dear Leader-Elect's first press conference was none of that.  It was this:

At his presser today, Donald Trump confirmed the very worst fears of ethics experts, announcing a new arrangement for his business holdings that is designed to garner nice headlines but is unlikely to do much to reduce the possibility of conflicts of interest and, possibly, full blown corruption.
Trump did nothing to address the central ethical problem he faces: He will not divest himself of his holdings, only transferring control of them to his two sons.

He is gonna run the country and his sons are gonna run his commercial empire.  They will never (never!) tell their dad which government moves would benefit their enterprises, no foreign dignitary will never (never!) try to gain favors from Trump by, say, giving extra help to Trump's firms in other countries.  Nope!  And should it happen, we won't know, because Trump refuses to release any information on his finances.

Finally, Trump's temper tantrums against the press should frighten all of us.  The National Press Club has this to say about Trump's use of the term "fake news" whenever something critical of him is written:

“It is dangerous and unhealthy to declare a news item as 'fake news' to distract from facts that you may not like or don't favor your perspective. Our incoming president must treat the news media as the vital cornerstone of our democracy that it is. To label something as 'fake' in an effort to undermine news outlets endangers the trust granted journalists by the public and is antithetical to our country's values.

  
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* As noted in the New York Times article about those two pages Buzzfeed published.  And noted.  And noted.  And noted.  On the other hand, watch this.

** I have demoted the US from the most powerful country on earth, largely because it is now a loose cannon.

Further Tales From the Demolition Derby Administration: Ethics and the GOP, Katy Talento and Sid Miller

The one we are going to have under Dear Leader-Elect.  Interesting developments came and went while I lay moaning in the arms of Mr. Influenza, but one of them is worth a backwards glance, though it took place in the Congress and not in the transitioning team of the Trump administration.

That was the Republicans' failed attempt to spay, neuter and geld the Office of Congressional Ethics, an independent and bipartisan entity created in 2008 in the wake of certain ethics scandals, and to leave in its place a zombie version answerable to the GOP.

Trump opposed that plan, probably because it came too soon.  The country is not yet open to looting, and to so openly prepare for it is in bad taste.  Besides, it's Trump who decides about looting the government coffers, not your rank-and-file Republicans, though they naturally will get their dibs.  That's because a demolition derby administration destroys institutions, not the material aspects of those.  The latter can be carted home, assuming that there will be no viable ethics investigations.

Or that is the reading of many on that gelding attempt.  Given that, why did the Republicans think they would get away with it?  How bad are they as politicians?  Or are they playing some n-dimensional chess game where failing on this aspect of looting is intended to make some slightly less open move more invisible?

Never mind.  The Republicans will have plenty of time for looting, after the demolition vehicles ride over everything.

Trump has not forgotten us, the little ladies, either, so he appointed a female health care staffer, Katy Talento,  to his team!  She believes that birth control of the type women control: the IUD and the pill, causes miscarriages and later infertility.

Her appointment smells of Mike Pence to me, the Vice President-Elect who wants to see women barefoot, pregnant and in the kitchen.  Access to female-controlled birth control must be made more difficult for that plan to succeed.

Finally,  Sid Miller, the Texas agricultural commissioner, might be heading for a similar job in the demolition derby administration.  His shtick is to eradicate waste in the National School Lunch program which provides poorer children free lunches.

I though the idea of reducing waste in cooking and storing food was a wonderful and environment-loving initiative, but, alas, that's not what Sid worries about.  He stays awake at night because some children whose parents aren't poor enough might be eating free, nutritious meals at the taxpayers' expense.*

If that name, Sid Miller, rings a faint but ominous bell in your ears, yes, this is the same man whose Twitter account sent out this tweet in early November:

 That must give him bonus points for the USDA job in the mind of our Dear Leader-Elect.

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*  Where I grew up, free and nutritious school lunches were provided for all children, irrespective of parental income.  The idea seems perfect to me:  It guarantees at least one well-balanced daily meal for every child, it can be used to teach children to eat together, to have good table manners, and it rescues zillions of parents from the task of having to prepare separate lunches every day.  Most importantly, putting good food into children is a fantastic investment for the future of us all.

There are economies to scale from such cooking, too, and so the overall cost (funded from taxes) could well be less than the total cost of the US type system.

That's why I'm not upset about "misuses" of the US system. 

A Postcard From the Land of Influenza

I bought a ticket (a flu vaccination) not to travel here, but this year it failed to work.

Try something fun:  Say "influenza" with the kind of stuffed sinuses (sini?) which produce extremely colorful moments in my sickness.  The result is something deeply erotic.

And this is also fun:  I haven't had a meal this year!

But I'm finally on the mend, and send this postcard only to let you know why the silence on the blog.

The Forgotten Topic of the 2016 Elections. Or How Echidne Almost Got Gaslighted.

We hardly discuss one of the most interesting aspects of the  2016 US presidential elections:  That the long picture gallery of all American presidents remained hundred-percent male.  Neither do we discuss why so many of us, both women and men, failed to see anything wrong with that, even while some others celebrated  the Trump victory by open pussy-grabbing or its verbal equivalents.

Imagine some other demographic groups, more than half of all citizens, calmly accepting (1) that none of its members has ever governed the country, and is very unlikely to do so in the near future!  It's not possible, my friends, except when it comes to women.

But when it comes to women, the majority of Americans,  equal representation is not an important goal.  Rather, it's outdated identity politics, at best only of symbolic worth.  The strength of that message  is mind-boggling, unprecedented and unpresidented.



How did it come about?


I argue that it is the result of gaslighting, a term which the American linguistic left adopted from psychological literature, and then adapted to political speech, often to silence someone.  Gaslighting is

manipulation through persistent denial, misdirection, contradiction, and lying in an attempt to destabilize and delegitimize a target. Its intent to is sow seeds of doubt in the subject, hoping to make them question their own memory, perception, and sanity.

My friends, we have been gaslighted, through denial, misdirection, contradiction, lying and more.  It is particularly easy to gaslight those who are prone to self-inspection, to careful scrutiny of their own ideas and to careful attention to how others criticize them.  Indeed, I have eagerly abetted my own gaslighting!

It took Mark Lilla's New York Times article "The End of Identity Liberalism," on the horrors that is identity politics inside the Democratic Party to drop the scales from my eyes. He wrote:

Recently I performed a little experiment during a sabbatical in France: For a full year I read only European publications, not American ones. My thought was to try seeing the world as European readers did. But it was far more instructive to return home and realize how the lens of identity has transformed American reporting in recent years. How often, for example, the laziest story in American journalism — about the “first X to do Y” — is told and retold.

Notice the gaslighting in the sentence I have bolded:  The story of, say, the first female president, ever, would be a lazy story.  If we pick from the terms of the quote which defines gaslighting, this would be misdirection.  Yet nobody would have stated that the story of, say,  the first black president in South Africa would have been a lazy story.  

Later, in an uplifting appeal, Lilla wrote about the values we all can share:

We need a post-identity liberalism, and it should draw from the past successes of pre-identity liberalism. Such a liberalism would concentrate on widening its base by appealing to Americans as Americans and emphasizing the issues that affect a vast majority of them. It would speak to the nation as a nation of citizens who are in this together and must help one another.

That might qualify as a lie, using the list of terms which define gaslighting,  because pre-identity liberalism was identity liberalism of the type where Lilla's own group had all the power, and because most issues do not affect the vast majority of Americans in exactly the same way.

Take Trump's infrastructure improvement promises (which he might renege on, as is his wont):  Those jobs are not going to go to all American adults, in their population proportions, but overwhelmingly to men, because construction industries are almost completely male (2).

My heartfelt thanks to Mark Lilla.  He opened my eyes and then I directed them to all the other material which almost got me gaslighted into believing that it doesn't really matter if women hold political power on the highest levels.  The rest of this post addresses some of them.

After Christmas Reading

This is pretty good, on advice to future historians who wish to understand the reasons Donald Trump broke the world.  If he succeeds in that endeavor.

This is hilarious, and nothing to do with politics.  It's also fake news, but who wouldn't like to know how cats clear houses of ghosts?

I Wish You A Wonderful Christmas, Hanukkah Or Kwanzaa

Merry Christmas!
Happy Hanukkah!
Glorious Kwanzaa!
Superb Solstice (in hindsight)!

Was that so hard?  The War Against Christmas conspiracy theorists think so, even though that war is an invention of the Fox News (the Robber Baron television company which teaches the masses what to believe).

The problem in wishing ruling conservatives a Merry Christmas or Hanukkah or Kwanzaa or Solstice is that far too many of them can't hear us because they are stuck in the late nineteenth century, or yearn to go there, to the beautiful era when the robber barons ruled, women didn't have the vote, minorities knew their place and poor children starved to death or died of easily preventable diseases in the urban ghettos.

When America Was Great, in the way our Dear Leader-Elect wishes to make it great, except for that nuclear upgrade.

But that was a wonderful era if you happened to be a robber baron.  I once read a book about the Newport summers of the super-rich of that era.  Dinner parties sometimes had sand spread on the table, between the dishes, and the sand hid pearls, diamonds, rubies, emeralds and sapphires.  Each dinner guest was provided with a small sterling silver spade, to dig in the sand.  Any treasures that guest found she or he could take home.  And also the spade.

Doesn't that sound like the Trump administration, but only to the friends and family of our Dear Leader-Elect?

But I digress.  I wish you a peaceful and hopeful holiday season, the company of your loved ones, time in nature and with pets, time to rest and recuperate, so that you are ready and fit for the coming battles.  I hope you join me in the necessary resistance and in speaking truth to power.

My love and appreciation to you all.

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The song in the video is a Christmas song and a religious one, but its message is more general:  I don't desire power or gold but the heavenly light and peace on earth.

Trump Likes Putin's Criticisms of Hillary Clinton

This is hilarious, tell me all the observers on distant planets who are resting their transportation parts while imbibing their equivalent of beer and pop corn.  Because it's always fun to watch another planet fall apart:

So our Dear Leader-Elect decided to tweet on international politics, by commenting on the utterances of his Best Friend Forever (BFF), one Vladimir Putin:

Oh, that's just Trump being Trump, some might mutter, especially the ones who came here by Googling "snake sex." But replace Trump with any past or present US politician, and notice what the reaction would have been.  People would have gone haywire.

And that is the calm, collected and rational reaction:  To go haywire.

Here is our Dear President-Elect, praising a foreign ruler for bashing another American politician!  And doing it in public.  And using only the first name for that American politician (she is a chick, after all, and neither Trump nor Putin care for chicks or their rights).

But much more importantly, the contents of the tweet are a bare-faced lie when it comes to Hillary Clinton.  Her behavior after the election is so dignified that for it to be any more dignified she would have had to be lifted to heaven as a saint.

So what are the deep, deep political chess moves in this exchange?

Putin wants to hamstrung NATO, of course, he wants destabilize the EU and the USA, for all sorts of reasons, some fair (to protect Russia), some extremely unfair (to possibly re-annex Ukraine and the Baltic states, in the first round of expansion politics), and he sees Trump as his Useful Idiot in all that.

The closer, tactical, move Putin is arranging here is to get the internal American opposition to Trump labeled as us just being sore losers, to hint at lost dignity!  As if Trump isn't quickly using up all dignity this country ever had?  (I bet Putin is secretly laughing over the escapades of one Donald Trump.)

Trump also has his international politics!  They vary day by day, naturally, because of his volatility.  One day it's all about re-launching the nuclear arms race, then the next day it is about appeasing Vladimir by finding something they can both agree on:  Girls have cooties and are of value only because of their vaginas.  The manly autocrats holding hands across vast distances.

The norms and decency violations are flabbergasting:  Internal politics shared with a foreign power?  Check.  Badmouthing an ex-rival who has given zero cause for such badmouthing?  Check.  Not letting the elections be in the past?  Check (remember the victory laps).  Acting like a petulant child who didn't get that second dish of ice-cream?  Check.  Making the US into a laughing stock all over the world?  Check.

Now Trump's own motivations for doing all he is doing are fairly obvious.  He is a narcissist, so anything negative said about him (and there's a lot) makes him want to lash back, and he doesn't care what weapons he uses for that, because he knows nothing about how politicians are supposed to act and cares even less.  It's All About Trump.

And he currently likes Vladimir so Vladimir can do nothing wrong.  Still, narcissistic persons switch such assessments overnight, so the first time Vladimir scolds Donald he will be cast overboard.  Then the nuclear race can continue.

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Added later:  Yet another norm Trump has violated is the old-and-boring idea that the president of the United States speaks for the country in foreign affairs, not for himself or only about himself, that international politics are not about whom the president would like to have a beer with and whether they like the president's bouffant hairdo.

I guess I no longer need to have the courtesy of writing "himself or herself" in this particular context...

Trump's Knowledge Of Labor Market Discrimination: Nonexistent

While writing my previous post about Trump transitioning team turning their nasty little eyes at those State Department programs which just might make the lives of poor women and girls in other countries better, I also spotted this wonderfully erudite comment by our Dear Leader-Elect:

 On equal pay for women, Trump implied there was no need for promoting it. “You’re going to make the same if you do as good of a job,” he said.

His solution to labor market discrimination is to decide that it doesn't exist.*

Now that would be a failing answer at a college level test, but not to worry, because our Dear Leader-Elect is not in college.

But I do predict that us wimminz are not going to be any kind of priority for the Trump administration, except in the sense of getting scored on our fuckability.

It would be interesting, if excruciating, to learn what those women had in mind who voted for Trump.

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* For same basics about this topic Trump assumes away, see this post.

And the Demolition Derby Administration Focuses on Wimminz' Issues (No, Donald, Not Tits And Butts)

This is probably scary:

The Trump transition team instructed the State Department to turn over all information Wednesday about “gender-related staffing, programming, and funding,” setting off alarm bells among those who fear that the new administration is going to purge programs that promote women’s equality along with the people who work on them.

I guess it could be the reverse:  Trump might wish to work to promote women's equality all over the globe?  Well, a goddess can always dream.

What are these gender-related issues in the State Department?

Advocating for women and girls abroad was a major focus of Hillary Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state. Clinton raised the priority of women’s and gender issues at the State Department, for example, by making the Office of Global Women’s Issues part of her personal staff. That office spearheaded several programs to promote and protect women in oppressive countries, such as the Women, Peace and Security initiative, which was based on the argument that increased security for women can contribute to overall peace and security, and vice versa.
The U.S. government’s attention to the plight of women and girls abroad continued after Clinton left office. The House voted unanimously to pass the Women, Peace and Security Act just last month, which was meant to make the State Department’s initiative permanent.
In March, Kerry announced a national strategy to promote the protection of adolescent girls around the world from things such as forced marriage, genital cutting, sexual violence and denial of access to education.
“We are here, all of us, every single one of us, because we believe … that equitable treatment of women and girls is and always must be a core tenet of America’s global leadership,” he said.

Why on earth would grab-the-pussies-Trump or forced-birth-Pence be opposed to fighting against forced marriage, genital cutting, sexual violence and denial of access to the education?  Perhaps I shall be pleasantly surprised and the programs described above will be continued?

On the other hand, the Trump administration may think that each country should be allowed to oppress women as the rulers of those countries wish.  Or forced-birth Pence may be trying to sniff out any baby-killing initiatives. 

Trump's transitioning team is not making these lists for the purpose of Christmas gifting, nope.  What are they for, then?

Most likely for the demolition of those programs, and as the linked article states, that will hurt a lot of women and girl around the world.

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Added later:  The New York Times offers yet another guess for why Trump's team wants this list:

Some officials said they feared that the incoming Trump administration was trying to determine what programs were focused on lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender issues, though the memo did not refer to them.

In The Republican Health Care Plan Parents Are To Be The Diagnosticians!

Because if they have to weigh the out-of-pocket costs of taking a sick child to the ER against the potential an ER visit might have, well, they might delay that visit and save us all loads of money:

A Republican congressman outlined the way he would like to see the health care system operate if Obamacare is repealed, as GOP lawmakers are promising. It is a brave new world in which parents would wait and think about it before bringing in their sick or injured kids for costly treatments.
The example Rep. Bill Huizenga (R-MI) gave in an interview with MLive.com was from his own experience when he waited until the morning after to take his youngest son to the doctor with an injured arm, because he did not want to waste money on an expensive emergency room visit. The arm, it turned out, was broken.
"We weren't sure what was going on. It was in the evening, so I splinted it up and we wrapped it up, and the decision was, okay, do we go to the ER? We thought it was a sprain, but weren't sure," Huizenga said, adding that he and his wife "took every precaution and decided to go in the next morning."
"When it [comes to] those type of things, do you keep your child home from school and take him the next morning to the doctor because of a cold or a flu, versus take him into the emergency room? If you don't have a cost difference, you'll make different decisions," he said.

Isn't that just precious?

Let me respond by giving you my own experience about something where Rep. Huizenga probably would have recommended waiting:

One Sunday, when my sister was still a baby, she began crying and would not stop.  She was also feverish, but her fever wasn't terribly high.  My parents thought that she might have caught a cold and took terms carrying her to soothe her.

But her crying would not stop, so very late that night my father took her to the ER.  She was diagnosed with bacterial meningitis, and the doctors told my parents that had they waited until Monday to see the family doctor, my sister would have died.  Even as things were, she almost didn't make it.

Now Rep. Huizenga would have recommended that my parents wait, because ER care is expensive?  That they are good enough diagnosticians to know when a fever is caused by, say, teething and when it is a sign of something very serious?

The basic problem in his recommendations is this: 

When we consume health care we don't always know what treatments, exactly, we might require.  That's why physician visits are called consultations:  It's not only the treatment we wish to buy, but also the diagnosis. 

When out-of-pocket health care costs are raised, poorer families are going to delay the seeking of care for financial reasons.  And some people will die because of that choice to make us all into medical diagnosticians.

This doesn't mean that unnecessary care shouldn't be curtailed, to save money overall*.  What it does mean is that it's not the initial consultation we wish to curtail, because that's where we learn if care is necessary or unnecessary.

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*There are many ways of doing that, including urgent care centers as an alternative to emergency rooms during weekends, weekend 24/7 phone services which attempt to tell the caller if an ER visit is necessary and so on.  But to argue that bigger monetary costs is the answer totally ignores the basic aspect of medical care: It is a form of consumption where we learn what we should consume.

On Trump's Private Body Guards

Politico tells us that Our Dear Leader-Elect is using a private security force, and -- in a breach with presidential tradition -- plans to continue keeping at least some of it after he is in office.

Apropos of nothing, another Dear Leader also used a private security force:

The antecedent of Himmler's "Black Corps," or SS, is to be found in Hitler's private bodyguard, formed before the 1923 Putsch from a small clique of desperados known as the Assault Squad. The Assault Squad's few men, demobilized NCOs, freebooters, laborers, and adventurers, shared utter loyalty to the person of Hitler, whom they had sworn to protect at all costs.

So I went there!  I'm not arguing that Trump is like Hitler, but that there are excellent reasons for the presidential tradition of handing over all protection to the Secret Service.  We shouldn't allow Trump to break from those traditions or from general democratic rules the president is expected to follow.

Paul Krugman Is Angry At The Loss Of Democratic Rules. Echidne Concurs.

Paul Krugman is still full of righteous anger:

Lately I’ve been reading a lot about the ancient world. Initially, I have to admit, I was doing it for entertainment and as a refuge from news that gets worse with each passing day. But I couldn’t help noticing the contemporary resonances of some Roman history — specifically, the tale of how the Roman Republic fell.
Here’s what I learned: Republican institutions don’t protect against tyranny when powerful people start defying political norms. And tyranny, when it comes, can flourish even while maintaining a republican facade.
On the first point: Roman politics involved fierce competition among ambitious men. But for centuries that competition was constrained by some seemingly unbreakable rules. Here’s what Adrian Goldsworthy’s “In the Name of Rome” says: “However important it was for an individual to win fame and add to his and his family’s reputation, this should always be subordinated to the good of the Republic … no disappointed Roman politician sought the aid of a foreign power.”

America used to be like that, with prominent senators declaring that we must stop “partisan politics at the water’s edge.” But now we have a president-elect who openly asked Russia to help smear his opponent, and all indications are that the bulk of his party was and is just fine with that. (A new poll shows that Republican approval of Vladimir Putin has surged even though — or, more likely, precisely because — it has become clear that Russian intervention played an important role in the U.S. election.) Winning domestic political struggles is all that matters, the good of the republic be damned.

Bolds are mine.

Think of a different example:  Baseball or soccer or football or basketball teams which are full of the competitive spirit, but however assertive or aggressive the players get, they still accept the decisions of the umpires or referees, they still follow the rules of the game.

Now think of the same game, but change only one thing:  Take baseball.  Suppose that a team threatens to kill an umpire's family if he makes a decision they don't like.  What are the consequences of that?

The team will get punished, you say.  But what if the team is somehow in power?  What if the team can decide to ignore common courtesy, established traditions and the rules of the game?  What then?

Would an umpire stick his neck out under those circumstances, or his children's necks?

The collapse of democratic institutions and rules, as is happening in North Carolina, is a serious political crisis.  It's as if one baseball team has decided to simply ignore all rules about strikes and balls, and it's as if that baseball team chooses victory over those rules in every single game.  The fans simply cheer, not caring about the rules, because victory is all, being able to thumb one's nose at the opposing team is all.

 I've been told by Trump aficionados that the Democrats are simply bad losers, that the elections are over and they won.  But what if they won because they disregarded the rules of the game, and those rules, my friends, are the rules of democracy?

I am very troubled by the idea of "president Trump" because I don't think he has the skills, personality or knowledge to govern this country.  But in a deeper way I am more troubled with the widespread disrespect of those rules which democracies and republics are based on.  Once it's acceptable to kill the umpire, anything will be legal in baseball.

Private Echidne Stuff: On Baking, Computers And Snow

1.  I made two pear frangipane tarts as a private challenge against the doom-and-gloom of the times, because:

--  there is nothing less necessary than a pear frangipane tart and that is exactly what we need if we are going to soldier on,

--  I have never made them before (love new things!), and the not knowing and uncertainty are good teachers in this time (they turned out well)

 --  they test sinfully luxuriant and perfect, tiny mouth orgasms, and that is what is denied from us, the Internal Enemies of the Reich (those who don't support Trump)

Each is intended to feed fifteen people.  I have almost finished one in less than two days, and with each mouthful I think of all those who would not want me to be happy, whose own joy is based on my humiliation and despair.  And then I want to share my tarts with them, to make them sunny and kind, too.

2.  A perfect storm of the usual kind of computer crap hit me.  I spent almost seven hours yesterday trying to fix the problems on my own, then another two hours with a "technician" who tried the solutions I had already found and managed to fix nothing but add two more problems before abruptly breaking off the connection.

Finally, at one in the morning, I got hold of a technician who was a goddess.  She was competent, smart and simply fixed all my problems slam-bam-thank-you-ma'am (and yes, I know that is about something else, but brevity can be what lifts one's heart up when it comes to computers).  Sadly, I bet she is paid chicken feed.

I was struck again by the way all the big computing sites hide from us, their customers.  Just try to find an actual address to write to about your bill, just try to find an actual answer to your problem without sacrificing the next ten years to the search.

Many sites instruct you to go to their discussion forum, an imaginary almost-empty room, with banana peels and empty beer bottles and dirt on the floor, chairs overturned, a few geeks deep in their computers, and nobody from the firm present.  The questions at those forums (fori?) are about whether dogs really have four legs, whether computers need to be turned on and so on.

The free sites, such as Blogger, are obviously the worst, because we users are not the customers of the site.  Nope, we are the content!  And the content cannot have a voice.  But even the paying sites try their utmost to not speak to any of their customers.  It's hilarious, given that old saw about customers always being right.

The concept of ownership has changed with Internet.  You can buy a service or a product and think that you own what you paid for, but in fact you do not, and "improvements" can be entered every few days to your email system or to your blogging system or to anything else, and you have no say in those changes, but must simply learn a totally different dashboard all over again.

3.  Snow.  It's coming down (tuisku, a snow storm with snow coming down sideways).  Finnish has many more words for different types of snow than English, either snow coming down, snow on the ground or snow on ice or water or mud.  That's because many more words are needed about life experiences which are frequent and which matter.  In the olden days one would wax the skis differently for "nuoska" and for "hangenkanto*," and although "loska" and "sohjo" are both words for "slush," sohjo has only snow and water in it while loska may also have mud.  Your feet are more likely to get wet with sohjo than loska, so knowing which it is outside determines which boots you will don.

This is not proof for any version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, but surely more specific terms affect how we see events?

The site I link to mentions that despite this embarrassment of riches when it comes to naming snow, Finnish has no word that matches "to snow."  The equivalent is "it rains snow."

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* The link doesn't get "hanki" the way I learned it.  Yes, the word can be a general word for snow, but it tends to be used for the kind of snow which has a hard top crust, possibly hard enough so that you can walk on it as if it was a ballroom floor.  Which is nice after months of wading through soft snow, though it's also associated with very cold weather.

What To Read Today: Democrats Don't Have To Fight Like Used Soggy Tissues

This is a good take on something I have written about for years.

Imagine a political debate on American television:  The number of conservative participants almost always exceeds the number of Democratic participants, the number of extreme right-wing participants vastly exceeds the number of extreme left-wing participants, and that role is given to some neo-liberal politician.

In the debate itself, fire spouts out of the conservative mouths, while the progressive or liberal participants look at their feet and mumble something inaudible.

Or imagine a political quarrel where one side uses anything to win, including fraud, corruption, threats and utter disregard for democratic principles or rules, while the other side consults a book on etiquette and then decides to have a parallel fight with its own base.

Or imagine a president (Barack Obama) who wants to be bipartisan so very hard that he is willing to let the Republicans win, because the only "bipartisanship" Republicans acknowledge is their complete victory.  And yes, that president has been accused by the very same Republicans for not reaching a hand across the aisle to a sufficient degree, even though they themselves reach hands across the aisle only to throttle someone.

And have you ever wondered why the ghastliest acts, the most disgusting comments and the sneakiest plots are perfectly fine, in the eyes of the media, but only when they come from the Republicans?  I hope that I'm correct when I spot a slight change in this, but for years all Democrats have been held to different and higher standards of behavior.  It's as if you had two children, one can kick, punch and yell at the other child who, in contrast, is expected to only whisper and never hit back.  Except that the well-behaved child has for some odd reason decided to act that way, even if it means that the other child has taken almost every toy and hidden or broken them all.

Indeed, I agree with the writers.  We need Democrats with spine, Democrats who know that politics today is not a polite tea party with cucumber sandwiches but a Republican heist of the country.

You might wonder if Democrats-with-spines would necessitate the creation of a parallel political Mafia organization.  But the assumption of only two options (be decent or be like Republican corrupt and crooked politicians) is false.  There are many other alternatives, but the ones I prefer include speaking up and  active resistance.

The "Pizzagate." Or Down The Rabbit Hole of Fake News.

1.  We have fallen through the rabbit hole, my sweet and erudite readers.  That makes Lewis Carroll a useful guide on our trip.  His poem about the walrus and the carpenter who took a nice walk on the beach and then invited lots of tiny oysters to keep them company is a useful guide to the world of the Pizzagate:

O Oysters, come and walk with us!'
      The Walrus did beseech.
A pleasant walk, a pleasant talk,
      Along the briny beach:
We cannot do with more than four,
      To give a hand to each.'

The eldest Oyster looked at him,
      But never a word he said:
The eldest Oyster winked his eye,
      And shook his heavy head —
Meaning to say he did not choose
      To leave the oyster-bed.

But four young Oysters hurried up,
      All eager for the treat:
Their coats were brushed, their faces washed,
      Their shoes were clean and neat —
And this was odd, because, you know,
      They hadn't any feet.

You can imagine what happened later.  It involved bread, butter and oysters:

It seems a shame,' the Walrus said,
      To play them such a trick,
After we've brought them out so far,
      And made them trot so quick!'
The Carpenter said nothing but
      The butter's spread too thick!'

I weep for you,' the Walrus said:
      I deeply sympathize.'
With sobs and tears he sorted out
      Those of the largest size,
Holding his pocket-handkerchief
      Before his streaming eyes.

O Oysters,' said the Carpenter,
      You've had a pleasant run!
Shall we be trotting home again?'
      But answer came there none —
And this was scarcely odd, because
      They'd eaten every one."

So.  In the tale I shall tell you you should see yourselves as the oysters (I hope as the old and experienced ones) and the Walrus and the Carpenter as the manufacturers of false news, of conspiracy theories and of made-up lies created and disseminated for political purposes, such as the tarring and feathering of one Hillary Clinton with the rumors that she traffics in pedophilia, even kills children.

2.  There.  And now the so-called Pizzagate:

The time has come,' the Walrus said,
      To talk of many things:
Of shoes — and ships — and sealing-wax —
      Of cabbages — and kings —
And why the sea is boiling hot —
      And whether pigs have wings.'

 And whether a vast pedophile ring is run from a family-style pizzeria in Washington, DC, by important Democratic politicians close to Hillary Clinton, including his campaign manager John Podesta.

Many different walruses and carpenters spread the online theory that one family-oriented pizzeria (with ping pong tables in the back room), the Comet Ping Pong, is  a center for a pedophilia ring of powerful Democratic politicians. But at least one site keeping the rumors going is a white supremacist one, and Trump's Best Friend Forever, Alex Jones, the fabricator of a vast number of conspiracy theories, has also played a decisive role in the story.

The basic facts are these:

And in Business News

The Exxon Mobil Company has acquired the United States of America in a merger.  The acquisition will be of global value as a lobbying and marketing tool.

The Russian Connection

First, suitable music (not safe for work viewing, contains depictions of sexual violence)



Second, the news about possible Russian influence in the 2016 US elections.  The Washington Post article which broke the news said this:

In a secure room in the Capitol used for briefings involving classified information, administration officials broadly laid out the evidence U.S. spy agencies had collected, showing Russia’s role in cyber-intrusions in at least two states and in hacking the emails of the Democratic organizations and individuals.
And they made a case for a united, bipartisan front in response to what one official described as “the threat posed by unprecedented meddling by a foreign power in our election process.”
The Democratic leaders in the room unanimously agreed on the need to take the threat seriously. Republicans, however, were divided, with at least two GOP lawmakers reluctant to accede to the White House requests.
According to several officials, McConnell raised doubts about the underlying intelligence and made clear to the administration that he would consider any effort by the White House to challenge the Russians publicly an act of partisan politics.
Some of the Republicans in the briefing also seemed opposed to the idea of going public with such explosive allegations in the final stages of an election, a move that they argued would only rattle public confidence and play into Moscow’s hands.
McConnell’s office did not respond to a request for comment. After the election, Trump chose McConnell’s wife, Elaine Chao, as his nominee for transportation secretary.

Emphasis is mine.   Compare the bolded sentences with what Comey, the FBI director, did only a few days before the elections.  Partisan politics is acceptable if it benefits Republicans, but unacceptable if it benefits Democrats.  That quote makes it utterly plain and clear to everyone, should some still be in doubt after decades of the same arguments.

But there is another difference between Comey's "revelation" about the Clinton emails which turned out a nothing-burger and the revelations about a foreign power meddling in the US election process.*   I leave that difference for you to ponder.

Third, the commercial interests of the Trump dynasty may influence Trump's foreign policies.  He is considering Rex Tillerson,  the head of Exxon Mobil for the Secretary of State.  Tillerson has close ties to Vladimir Putin, and, of course, extremely close ties to crony capitalism on the global level:

Tillerson, 64, was a driving force behind ExxonMobil's partnership with Russian oil giant Rosneft and drilling projects in the Arctic, Black Sea and Siberia. In 2014, Putin awarded the ExxonMobil CEO the Order of Friendship, one of the highest honors Russia grants to foreign citizens.

Finally, and as an aside, note this bit in the Washington Post article:

The Trump transition team dismissed the findings in a short statement issued Friday evening. “These are the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. The election ended a long time ago in one of the biggest Electoral College victories in history. It’s now time to move on and ‘Make America Great Again,’ ” the statement read.

Bolds are mine.  The bolded sentence didn't elicit any kind of clarification in that article, so it's worth noting that it is not true.

 

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* The US has meddled in the elections of other countries, of course, but two wrongs do not make a right.  Besides, that meddling is an explicit Putin policy, aimed at destabilizing Western democracies and at weakening NATO,  part of larger campaign, much of it aimed at Western European countries.

It is also of some concern that the RNC emails might have been also hacked, though only the DNC emails were brought to sunlight.  This wouldn't mean that the RNC emails had nothing of public interest in them, or to those who might still hold them.  On the other hand, if only the DNC emails were hacked, the question is why only those.

My Pseudo-Psychological Take on Trump

Trump wants to be the silverback gorilla.  He wants to dominate, to be the top male gorilla whose butt all other male gorillas kiss and who has the whole harem of female gorillas. 

Everything else is commentary, even his narcissism, because that, too, is based on his need to dominate, to always be number one (or number zero, as it comes earlier!).

That is why he makes rude faces at China, and that is why he publicly yells at every comedy skit that makes fun of him.

And that is why he likes Putin.  Trump's idea of foreign policy is for every country to be run by their own silverback gorilla, as a dictator.  Then the dictators can nuke it out with each other.

Democracy doesn't enter those calculations, public debate doesn't enter those calculations, the US Constitution doesn't matter much.

The die-hard Trump base knows what Trump wants, and they want it, too.  They want a stern daddy gorilla to go and beat up all those other gorillas they don't like.  It is utterly immaterial what it might cost the Trump-supporters themselves in lost Social Security or Medicare or earnings.

When Trump told them that he was going to lock Hillary Clinton up, they cheered.  When he now tells them that locking her up was just a campaign joke, they cheer. 

Why the non-stop cheering?  Because Trump stays on top in both examples!  Whatever he says goes, and that is what the base loves.

If you accept my pseudo-psychological interpretation, you can also see why Trump treats minorities and women they way he does.  Minority men are not seen as members of his gorilla tribe.  They are a threat.  And women are resources over which silverback gorillas fight.  Their value is based on their fuckability.

The rabid base is mostly comfortable with that, because it's the only interpretation that makes sense to them within that dominance framework.