The Pledge of Allegiance in Schools: "I am ashamed" etc.

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Nobody can have missed the Facebook firestorm over the response of some parent to a form his kid brought home from school.  Here's how it goes.

Not everyone is delighted with the Pledge of Allegiance.

It is well known that the version initially published by one Francis Bellamy went like this (the word 'to' was added later):

1892 to 1923
"I pledge allegiance to my Flag 

and [to] the Republic for which it stands, 

one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all."

It is just possible to object to being forced to recite even this pledge, if allegiance is understood to mean supporting in battle, etc., but by and large I know of few individuals who would complain if their youngsters were to have to say this every schoolday.  This original oath of allegiance was intended to be said by all people everywhere (obviously each to his own flag), in the spirit of universality and enlightenment that flourished in those times.

However, a minor change was made in 1923, basically making sure that the version popular in the USA specifically mentioned the United States Flag:

1923 to early 1954
"I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America
and to the Republic for which it stands,
one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all."

At this time, a family belonging to a certain religious minority objected to their children having to salute any object--in this case, a flag--that stood for any principle.  Their religion, they said, forbade paying homage to an object, even if the object represent something that they deemed worthy.  The kids, whose family name was Gobitis, refused to salute, or recite the Pledge, and were sent home.

You can read the details in Wikipedia, or you could spring for a more detailed account in a book.  But, deplorably, the Wikipedia article [Wikipedia, West Virginia State Board of Education vs. Barnette] simply drips of legal technical terms, making it very difficult indeed to unravel the lines of reasoning.  I truly wish someone with a little training would paraphrase this article for the general reader.

To continue: by missing school, the Gobitis kids were guilty of not going to school, which would have sent their parents to jail.  But they got around this by going to school every day, getting formally kicked out, and trudging back home.  Mind you, this was just for refusing to salute the flag.

The Supreme Court, considering this case,

required all schools in the state to conduct courses of instruction in history, civics, and in the Constitutions of the United States and of the State "for the purpose of teaching, fostering and perpetuating the ideals, principles and spirit of Americanism, and increasing the knowledge of the organization and machinery of the government." The West Virginia State Board of Education was directed to "prescribe the courses of study covering these subjects" for public schools.  [Wikipedia, ibid.]

The majority opinion of Justice Felix Frankfurter is given in detail in Wikipedia.  He basically said that refusal to salute the flag was insubordination, and had to be treated as such.  If they didn't like the Salute to the flag, they could try and change the law.  In other words, it had to be done through either the State House or Congress, by legislation, that is, by majority vote.  Take note of that, because this is important.  To most of us, Democracy means settling something by vote.  We never think of voting on whether somebody ought to be, say, put to death.  We can't decide everything by vote.

At this time, on Flag Day 1954, for whatever reasons, President Eisenhower decided to include the words "under God" into the Pledge, with the encouragement of one Rev. Docherty:

1954 (current version)
"I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America,
and to the Republic for which it stands,
one Nation under God,
indivisible, with liberty and justice for all."

Docherty's inspiration was a phrase that occurred in Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, namely "under God."

In 1943, some children of the name of Barnette had come into conflict with saluting the flag once again.  They, too, had religious objections to the practice, but this time they had an advocate in the Court, namely Justice Robert Jackson, the most junior member of the Court (as far as I can tell).  With what seems to me incisive logic, he pointed out why every point Justice Felix Frankfurter made in the earlier decision against the Gobitis girls was unconstitutional, and morally objectionable.

Point 1,  Refuting: The Flag as a national symbol.
From what I understand, Justice Jackson said that he (with the majority) objected not to classifying the flag as a national symbol, but to treating such symbols with such great reverence.  "One man's comfort and inspiration," he said, is another man's rubbish.

Point 2,  Refuting:  Building National Unity.
Frankfurter had said that making flag ceremonies uniformly compulsory across the country was a way of unifying the nation.  Jackson denied this.  Forcing this sort of recitation would ultimately end up in attempts to eradicate those sectors of the population that refuse to conform (implicitly alluding to the death camps of Nazi Germany, and various purges in Russia).

Point 3,  Refuting:  Unifying by Coersion.
Frankfurter had taken a hard line with those students who chose not to salute the flag, saying that they should be expelled, unless they could change the law through the vote.  Justice Jackson objected to this, saying that some liberties went beyond the vote:

"The very purpose of a Bill of Rights [is] to withdraw certain subjects from the vicissitudes of political controversy, to place them beyond the reach of majorities and officials and to establish them as legal principles to be applied by the courts. One's right to life, liberty, and property, to free speech, a free press, freedom of worship and assembly, and other fundamental rights may not be submitted to vote; they depend on the outcome of no elections."--Justice Robert Jackson; italics are mine.

Point 4,  Refuting: Matters of school discipline are better left to local authorities
Jackson objected even to this.  The point is subtle, and I'm not able to paraphrase it or improve its clarity very much.  Jackson seems to say that minor issues, such as the punishment for refusing to salute a flag, could be left to the school to decide, but that no official, high or low, should be allowed to prescribe political orthodoxy.

It is tragic that the simple people, of the Salt of the Earth variety who are the backbone of the US, cannot be easily shown the subtleties of the US constitution, and the delicate balance of principles that keeps the country on an even keel.  The idea of democracy is easy to understand; it is the idea of minority rights that is (to some) vague and confusing, even if they are already convinced of the validity of those rights.


The arguments put forward by Justice Jackson contained among them both the right to free speech, and the right to refuse coerced speech.  The Golbitises and the Barnettes stood up for the rights of those of us, including atheists, who find the Pledge repugnant.  It was a political move to insert Under God, and it will be a hard sell to get it out once more.

[Added later]
I left my original thought unstated.

There could be two main reasons why certain individuals find the presence of the phrase "Under God" inspiring, or rhetorically necessary.

The first is that they are hostile to religions that they view as opposed to Christianity, or they are hostile to atheism, or they jealously defend their view that there are hidden (or explicit) Christian elements in the US constitution.  They perceive Christianity to be the only belief system capable of, or worthy of, being the foundation of US society.  Such folk may either refuse to tolerate any other religious beliefs, or may merely reluctantly tolerate as an unavoidable evil the fact that others subscribe to different religions or philosophies.  This is foolishness.  We cannot engage these people in meaningful dialog, because we more moderate individuals have little or no basis for discourse with them.  Nor can they tolerate their views to be challenged, because typically their world-views are not sufficiently flexible, and these individuals do not have the conceptual backgrounds to be able to compromise.  Us forcing them to accept a broader view actually requires our damaging their concept-world, which most of us will find too harsh a thing to do, and very difficult to accomplish anyway.

The second is that certain individuals firmly believe that Christianity, even if they subscribe to it with less than total belief, is the only belief system able to supply the moral foundation that is threaded through the Constitution.  For these people, Christianity is the only means towards this necessary end, and they cling desperately to practices and ceremonies that they believe are crucial to support the rule of law and reasonable public behavior.  Such people certainly can be engaged in dialog, because beneath their surface religiosity is an approach to religious practice that is ultimately pragmatic, and in the view of at least some of us, cynical.  The cynicism is not that of wanting something that is detrimental, but simply that of hypocrisy.

Religious belief should not be a matter of necessity, but a matter of conviction.  Countless folk subscribe to various religions because they believe that it is in the best interests of the society in which they live---they consider subscription to a particular religion a duty, or a service; something they do to set an example.  In the long run, however, it is better, in my humble opinion, to profess precisely what you believe in.  It may be a struggle to discover what one believes in, but that struggle is valuable, and saves one an enormous amount of effort; keeping one's left hand believing one thing and one's right hand believing another is a tiring exercise.  Once junior realizes that there is no Santa Claus, everyone can rest easy.  (I must express my gratitude to Mano Singham for bringing me to this epiphany, something that took place too long ago for him to remember, I'm sure.)

To summarize: the odious Pledge of Allegiance that is inflicted upon our youth continues to ride triumphant because a host of Social Engineers and a host of Christian Absolutists with blinkers on chose to subscribe to it in 1954, a year that will go down in infamy, and no one dares to revert the Pledge to the simple one that was initially innocently proposed by Bellamy, for fear of being accused of being unAmerican; the legacy of Eugene McCarthy.

So, anyway, by dint of sheer persistence, (or by other means,) a law was passed in Florida that says that it is the right of every student, if his family so desires, to be excused from saluting the flag, and reciting the Pledge of Allegiance.  Every kid brought home a form that the parent(s) could fill out, in order for the kid to be excused from saluting the flag, etc.  The parent who gained so much fame on Facebook expressed indignation that this form was even sent home with his son.  In other words, he was angry at the concession being offered to those who preferred not to salute the flag.  Everyone should salute the flag, whether or not they want to do it, seems to be his point of view.  He was not thinking, evidently, that his point of view implied coercion.  He did not perceive deploring the use of that piece of paper to excuse some students from saluting the flag and reciting the pledge as abridging their civil liberties.  What he did see was that allowing some kids to not salute was contradicting his own freedom to have all the kids saluting.

This tendency to view the freedom of others as circumscribing one's own freedom is a puerile thing that is easy to illustrate.  A man walks down the street, swinging his cane exuberantly, and knocks off the hat of someone else.  The two face off in the street, and the man whose hat was knocked off points out that this cane-swinging has got to stop.

The man with the cane retorts that it is a free country, and he could swing his cane just as much as he wanted to.  But his victim replies: your freedom ends where my freedom begins!

This is the problem.  The population at large is reluctant to think through the consequences of their casually taken positions.  Some would say that this is the triumph of marketing over information.  We're too accustomed to looking at the pictures instead of reading the text.  (Note to self: find a picture to go with this post.)

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What the Candidates Must Get Right

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Donald Trump, Republican Party
This candidate has no place to go but up, but he has been known to pull off miracles, so he could fall even lower in the polls if he gives it a good try.  He has favored style over substance for too long for anything he says to make much of a difference.  Even his foul-mouthed, vicious slaps at various demographics are a matter of style, albeit thoroughly wrong-headed.  I get the strong impression that he's running to please someone, perhaps the lovely Melania.  So very silly.

Hillary Clinton, Democratic Party
Despite the years of being in the public eye, in some ways Hillary Clinton is a dark horse.  For me personally, I need to have clarification on the point of: is she, or is she not, beholden to Big Business?  I get the impression that the Clintons have bought heavily into the principle that it is Big Business that is the engine of US economic development.  This statement could be true in various degrees; It is not an all-or-nothing principle.  The thing to realize is that US Business cannot easily be destroyed (except, of course, by a freaky gamble in subprime loans, or something similarly really preposterous).  I need to know whether, when Big Business says Jump, Hillary will ask: how high?  Secondly, there's a lot of mystery over the functioning of the Clinton Foundation.  They should change its name, the entire Clinton family should get off the governing boards of it, and give it over into some trustworthy hands, e.g. Jimmy Carter.  (OK, if you don't like Jimmy Carter, then someone else.)

Gary Johnson, Libertarian Party
The candidate of the Libertarian Party is not entirely a died-in-the-wool Libertarian; he was a Republican, but as far as I can tell, a very rational one.  Unfortunately, Libertarians are not always consistent in what they espouse.  For instance, they ought to privatize all the highways, so that the government does not have to maintain them.  They could be expected to privatize everything.  What Johnson has said about public health care is a little vague.  What he has said about Federal Lands is downright frightening.  He has said that the US Wetlands, which the EPA has protected as well as it can, is "a mess."  This is cause for alarm.  On the other hand, he has come out in favor of firearms legislation, which is good, and if he puts forward an initiative, it would probably be one that is sane and rational.  He has said that the Libertarian Party is for privatizing Education entirely.  This is not good, and he must clarify whether he would push through this agenda if he were elected.  It is one thing to be for privatizing education in principle, and quite another to uproot the US system of education, and handing it over to for-profit enterprises.  The same holds true for health care.  On the other hand, opening up competition between insurance companies from the semi-monopoly that exists now would be something worth trying.

Jill Stein, Green Party
For the most part, Jill Stein has expressed views that resonate with me.  The surprising exception is about Vaccination, to which her response has been confusing.  As a former physician, she should be more knowledgeable about infant vaccination, and to be able to communicate her thoughts more clearly.  My theory is that she is wary of some sector of the population or the other, and so gives "innocuous" responses which are not satisfactory.
Clearly, infant vaccinations have saved countless lives, but just as clearly, some children have been severely hurt and even killed by vaccinations.  Some groups have theories that vaccinations result in autism, and various other conditions.  Thus far, the pro-vaccination sector has taken the view that a minute risk of bad outcomes is worth the enormous benefits of vaccination, particularly in situations where kids are concentrated together, e.g. schools.
Well, minute is not good enough, and we should work towards inoculations being 100% reliable.  Until that level of reliability is achieved, what should we do?  Why is that level of reliability not with us already?  Will inoculation manufacturers want to increase the cost of inoculations to guarantee reliability?  (They won't change the process; they'll just buy insurance.)  Jill Stein has just said that the problem needs to be studied more carefully.  The problem has been studied, but (for policy reasons, I suspect,) the conclusions have been vague.  If Jill Stein also wants to be vague, she could still let us know what the issues are, and once the studies have gone the length of what she would like to see, we need to know how she will decide.  This will give her good practice for when she's asked about closing down Guantanamo, or Waterboarding, or other interesting questions.

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The Department of Defense has Never been Audited for at least Fifty Years

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This just in.

Apparently the Auditors assigned the Department of Defense just came back to Congress, saying that the DOD was impossible to audit.  I don't have references for you, partly because the incident is a little too recent, and partly because, well, this is the DOD, and they hate to let the public know anything.

Bear in mind that Defense eats up at least half of the Federal Budget.  Every year.  So half the revenue of the Federal Government, from the present day, under the Obama Administration, to as far back as the Nixon Administration, and very probably even further in the past, the Department of Defense has operated without fiscal supervision.  It seems that the DOD does not know how much money it presently has in its accounts.

Of course the DOD subsumes the security branches such as Homeland Security, and somewhere in there is the NSA, the CIA, and various other department that we probably don't even suspect to exist.  Disclosing all their accounts might compromise --heh heh-- their effectiveness.  So there's a ton of money there, something like 3 trillion by some estimates, which might easily slide into private hands.

Meanwhile, because of intermittent Congressional temper tantrums over the bottomless pit that the DOD is, from time to time we hear that some members of the armed forces are suddenly sent a zero paystub, saying that they actually owe the government money, for reasons that are not forthcoming.  This is, of course, SOP (Standard Operation Procedure) for the armed services, namely to pass the buck down to defenseless employees.  I have to wonder whether this satisfies the Congressmen who demand to know where the taxpayer's money is going, or whether the serviceman without a paycheck is encouraged to go entreat his congressman to lay off the thumbscrews on the DOD finances.

I am pissed, but more amused.  This is one thing the Libertarians could really get their teeth into, but of course they're too busy griping about Hillary Clinton to take notice of this sort of major financial fiasco.  There's also the fact that this is simply the most recent in a series of fiascos that include exorbitant prices for fantastic aircraft that are never built, $640 toilet seats, and so on.  It is probably an actual strategy of the DOD to from time to time float out a minor financial scandal to distract the public, while trillions are being thrown haphazardly at such money suckers as Halliburton, Martin Marietta, Lockheed, and similar.  The problem is that these companies are in a position to blackmail the government in various ways, so they are impossible to face down.

That's all I have for the moment.

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Journalism, Newspapers and Hate Speech

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And now for something completely different.

Often it is two posts I see on --on the face of it-- unrelated topics that prompt me to blog on something.  But today, it is two somewhat more connected ideas, about which I do not yet have a considered opinion.

The more recent one is an appeal from a British group against Hate Speech.  British tabloid papers --principally the Sun-- have been featuring articles with hate speech, and because this is a relatively recent phenomenon, it is even more noticeable there than it is in the US.  The reasoning goes like this.  (1) Why do papers like the Sun feature hate speech?  Because hate speech sells.  (2) What generates more revenue than circulation?  Advertising.  (3) How can we apply pressure on the Sun?  Get businesses to refuse to pay for ads in the Sun.

Hate speech is rather a blanket concept.  In fact, because I put up so many posts critical of Donald Trump, I could be accused of hate speech too, if the Trump foolishness machine rejects the reasons behind my positions.  The core, mainline hate speech, accepted by the Good Housekeeping Seal, is Racial Hate Speech.  Next comes LGBT hate speech, though at the moment I do not endorse Transgender rights to be included along with LGB folks for equal rights.  Okay.  So we have to be careful in using the phrase hate speech, because it can mean different things to different people, depending on their particular list of categories that should not be vilified in print.  But even if we limit hate speech to speech humiliating racial minorities --the most vicious form of it-- we would be targeting the most politically potent forms of public hate speech.

The other post that caught my attention was also a video, an episode of Last Week Tonight by John Oliver.  In this video, John Oliver brings up the point that the foundation of the News industry are local reporters working for local newspapers.  But, for various reasons, local newspapers have been losing readership steadily since the 1970s, and so they have been laying off reporters (and selling themselves off to Rupert Murdoch) and so (3) a lot of the "news" is just recycled and rehashed, or (4) manufactured.

As independent newspapers continue to fail, a few newspaper chains dominate all the news outlets, which makes it very easy for anyone who wants to do this to spin the news in favor of a particular point of view.  For a while, the news favored Trump, which was not a good thing, and now the news opposes Trump, which is not a good thing either.  There are no good things in News, and it all starts with people not reading newspapers.  (The reason people stopped reading newspapers could easily be that newspapers were more full of advertising than news.  It is hard to tell whether people stopped reading because of ads, or whether ads began to flood newspapers because of people not reading.)

To summarize, we can put pressure on businesses not to advertise on newspapers that indulge in hate speech.  This is a first line of attack, but once the initial strategy of putting pressure on newspapers whose major selling strategy has been hate speech has been accomplished, we have to consider papers that indulge in hate speech only part of the time, and dealing with them will not be easy.

The news industry is now very fragile because thus far the primary news sources have been local reporters from newspapers.  But it really seems as though the process of losing readership is not going to be reversible; reading is really hard, as Barbie will be saying pretty soon.

Oliver features a clip in which the new owner of a certain newspaper calls for a conference with his reporters, and instructs them only to feature news of certain categories that readers like to see.  A reporter gets viciously attacked for criticizing this strategy.  This is not a new thing, going on anecdotal evidence; fiction about the news industry has countless instances of fighting for a better balance between news and crap, and this can't all be without any roots in reality.  Of course, that isn't proof of anything . . .

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Marketing! Everyone has to learn how to deal with this.

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We all love to complain about how Internet Marketers hound us.  Marketing is an important factor in this day and age, because it is the other side of the coin of encouraging people to do what really makes sense for them to do anyway.  But if you knew how hard people work to get you to spend your money the way they want, you would be amazed.

Here is a blog by a marketer, describing a more sophisticated way of influencing potential customers.

[To be continued, to optimize your customer journey.]

Fear of Globalism vs. the View from Space

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About fifty years ago when the US Space Program was going full blast, the Apollo 8 mission yielded a fabulous photograph of the Earth.  This was one of several photographs, which showed the daylight side of the Earth as the spacecraft orbited the planet.

When these photographs were widely circulated soon after they were taken, notably in such magazines as Life, Time and Newsweek, people's view of the Earth began to change.  It took a while to actually realize just how much our concept of the Earth as a planet had been based on maps, which at best presented an abstract view of the planet.  At one time, whether or not the Earth was flat had to be argued based on theoretical and scientific evidence that was essentially indirect, though of course the fact that the Earth was roughly a sphere had been suspected for millennia.  To have direct visual, photographic depiction of the Earth was a shock.  Suddenly, the atmosphere, the clouds, the various different views of Earth, now centered on the Atlantic, now centered on Africa, or on India, forced people to think of the planet objectively, rather than as simply something on which we stood.

For centuries, people of science, in particular, and other freethinkers of various persuasions had adopted the idea of A Citizen of the World, in which a person viewed him- or herself as belonging to the human race, rather than to a particular nation.  In some quarters, this attitude is regarded with great alarm, and understandably, people with such a view were considered to be traitors.  There is a concept of the antinationalist, which is someone opposed to the idea of nationalism (i.e., "devotion to one's country or nation"), which, by implication, meant that the person being described as such was less interested in devotion to his or her country than in devotion to the human race at large, or with even broader interests.

Coming back to the Apollo 8 photograph(s), a contemporary American poet, Archibald MacLeish (who was incidentally the Librarian of Congress at one time) wrote the following words, to describe how the photograph had struck him:

"To see the Earth as it truly is, small and blue and beautiful in the eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the Earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the eternal cold—brothers who know now that they are truly brothers."

(MacLeish chose not to capitalize the word Earth, for inscrutable reasons of his own.  The capitalization in this quote is mine.)  Though I would not romanticize the sentiment quite the way MacLeish has chosen to do it, it is truly remarkable how these photographs—to the extent that they were truly looked at, and their effect completely absorbed—have a strong effect on anyone.  From the perspective of viewing it from space, it is the smallness of the planet that really strikes one.  Down on the surface, we all see it as enormous, and we're preoccupied with staking out our own little holding on it, jealously guarding our claim to a little bit of Earth, and viewing everyone else as a potential threat, or invader.  Territorial feelings are uppermost in the minds of most people, especially those in countries such as the USA and Australia, built by pioneers.  But from in Space, as MacLeish tries to explain, one sees for the first time (and one is reminded whenever one really looks at one of these photographs) that the problem is one of sharing a planet that is much more fragile than it appears to us.  In the USA, certainly, there are a vast number of people who are accustomed to thinking that the Earth can take a kicking and keep on ticking indefinitely, while the rest of us view all this kicking with horrified alarm.

These days I am frequently out of town, helping an elderly uncle and his wife downsize their home in preparation for moving into a retirement-sized dwelling.  They were old-time intellectuals, and their house is full of issues of Time and Newsweek, and almost every issue of Life Magazine, and their specials on the occasion of the assassination of JFK, and Martin Luther King, not to mention enormous influential books by such as Arnold Toybee and Jacob Bronowski.  And they have an enormous poster, the original of the image at the top of this post, and they were arguing about whether to take it with them.  It has a far greater significance to them than it would have for the vast majority of Americans alive today; even the most liberal of us are preoccupied with the political implications of a global perspective, rather than the human implications.

To people with extreme working-class or (neo-) Marxist perspectives, the word globalist has apparently come to mean something that you would never guess.  It means, I was stunned to discover, a person who subscribes to the philosophy that the boundaries between nations should be brought down, so that the economic and political elite of certain nations, namely the UK and the USA, should more easily dominate the world population and its resources.  [Added later: to clarify, I, for one, had thought that a globalist was simply someone who was a humanist, who put the well-being of the planet at large ahead of the well-being of his homeland, as explained below.]  We must now resort to describing ourselves as universalists, or something similarly bombastic, too bombastic to represent such a simple idea.

This is just one article (dated from 2012), and there are hints in the article that this might be one of the more extreme definitions of the term.  The article is replete with common words given technical senses; in other words this paranoid view of the world has been polished and elevated to the level of a political theory or a system of beliefs.  How widely accepted it is I do not know.  So, I suppose, it would be a serious mistake for me, for example, to call myself a globalist in the sense in which I would use it, namely that I am not as interested in the economic success of the USA as my neighbors would like me to be, as I am interested in the welfare of the people all over the Earth.

To be honest, what we call our circle of concern evolves as we age, and is not a static thing.  A child is concerned simply with itself and its own needs; an adult's circle of concern expands to his entire community and beyond.  Simply from a practical standpoint, we're more likely to be concerned about the welfare of the people in our family than about those across the street; but to some, it stops there: it is only our street that matters; all other streets should be none of our concern.  You can argue with them into allowing that the entire city deserves our concern, but not the entire county, and so on.  Being concerned about the welfare of Mexico, for example, would rate a score of utter foolishness from some, and to be concerned about what Vladimir Putin was doing to those helpless Russians would be utter madness, regardless of the fact that Putin could do a lot more than he is about making the lives of Russians better.  The point is not to make the lives of Americans better at the cost of the quality of life of the Mexicans, or the lives of Russians better at the cost of the quality of life of Georgians, or what have you.  I don't have the vocabulary to express this conviction properly: that I would rather that everyone's quality of life be improved modestly than that our own quality of life be improved enormously.  This is almost an unAmerican attitude, and I know better minds than mine have dealt with this issue, and the terminology we need is out there.  But [the term] globalism is out of bounds, because, of course, we do not want to encourage the US economic and political elite to gain control of the world population or the planetary resources.  It is almost as though the movie Avatar has become real.  (I really resent the way some people hijack a term and give it a specialized meaning which spoils it for the rest of us.  [An example is the use of the phrase the World in Christian theology.  There goes another perfectly good word.])

For the goofballs who have run away with the GOP, of course, the sort of anti-nationalism that I'm describing—which is certainly not an interest in destroying the nation, or anything of the sort—is easy to describe: they would call it stupidity.  This is why there is all this talk of walls, and getting Mexico to pay for them, etc, etc.  But —despite the threat of too much centralization of power— it seems to me that one thing that must come first before the standard of living of the world population should be raised, is that the infrastructure should be put in place.  The reason that Arkansas, or West Virginia, or other states in the US do not have to worry about roads or power lines is that some things can be left to the Federal Government to solve.  The reason that the Texas education standards are so dismal is that they are in the hands of Texas, which does not know its right hand from its left.  (Unfortunately, of course, if the education standards of Texas were to be raised, it would cause great alarm among Texans for the same reason.)  It is far easier to put in place the infrastructure of progress by administering it centrally, than it is to administer it separately in each region.  At some level, of course, administrative details will fall to local authorities.  But the planning will move along much more efficiently if it is carried out globally.  This is why the roads of the Interstate highway system are, generally speaking, a little better than local highways.

Imagine, if you would, that the drug pandemic does not exist, and that we do not live in fear of our population being addicted to drugs coming in across the Mexican border.  This would mean that all the violence that narcotic gangs perpetrate in Mexico and US states on the border would not exist.  Then the sole threat from Mexico would be cheap labor, and of course the language barrier.  I don't think I'm the first one who concluded that if the two nations were to be amalgamated into one, that the standard of living of both peoples would rise.  Both the Mexicans and the Americans would be vastly better off, despite the prospect of lovely young American damsels dating young Mexican hunks, to the dismay of their parents, and young Mexicans competing to mow your lawns, to the frustration of high school kids wanting to do the same.  Extending this principle, some people see great progress when national barriers are loosened or eliminated entirely.  Others view the prospect of this with fear and disgust.  Anyone observing the phenomenon of the European Union sees these two forces at play over several decades.  In that case, the paranoia has won, and it really appears as though the EU will explode.  (Unbelievably, the deterioration of the EU was brought about by one of the most stable of the component nations, namely Britain.  Modern Britain is not as stable as it has been historically, especially since the British economic elite has begun exploring the exploitation of the country.  Evidently the Conservative Party has not been paying attention to what globalism means.)

Though it is currently out of fashion for anyone to describe themselves as citizens of the world, perhaps in the not-too distant future, the perspective that Archibald MacLeish recommends to us might become a reality, and that people, especially younger people, will begin to view the planet as a shared resource for mankind, and that we live not unimaginably far from those in foreign lands, but very, very close to them, on a tiny planet in a modest solar system.

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Hillary Clinton's E-mail Fiasco-Sort Of

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One of the few things that make the GOP happy--or used to make them happy, until they realized that the alternative was Trump--was the scandal-and-a-half that involved e-mails.  One scandal revealed that at least certain members of the Democrat National Committee were interested in sabotaging Bernie Sanders's candidacy.  The more important scandal involved Hillary Clinton and the fact that she used a private e-mail server instead of the official Department of State (or whatever) server that was highly secure, and the one she was supposed to use.  Now, kids, you're not fooling anybody.  Listen up.

First of all, the FBI looked into it, and declared that they do not think it appropriate to prosecute the issue.  This could mean any number of things.  For instance: (1) it could be a huge waste of time, after which Ms. Clinton would get a slap on the wrist, but the FBI is mad, and they feel that not prosecuting her would mean that the Republicans would create such a stink that it would be actually worse for her.  (2) It could mean that other members of the government have abused the communications system so much more, that the embarrassment would be too widespread.  We actually know that this is true, since Dick Cheney is said to have deleted far more e-mails than Hillary.  I don't know the facts, and I'm guilty of spreading hearsay.  (3) It could mean that if the details of the e-mail misadventure got into the wrong hands, it could make government communications still more insecure.  I'm at best an amateur when it comes to computers, but I know this much: half the battle in cracking a security system is knowing certain procedures.  (4) Perhaps it is the case that if Hillary Clinton were to release the e-mails, the e-mails themselves would compromise certain aspects of security.  So, saying that the e-mails were security-sensitive would put the FBI in a bind, because, of course, the Republicans wanting to compromise the Obama Administration, would insist on the e-mails being made public, but the FBI doesn't want that to happen.  So the FBI says: "Trust us, it was not security sensitive."

A lot of it is semantics.  What do we mean by sensitive?  Suppose, for the sake of the argument, that there was an agreement that if $1 was deposited in a certain account in a bank in Atlanta, that something was to happen.  If an e-mail referring to this were to be made public, it could jeopardize that whole system.  This example is patently absurd, because such a system is too clumsy and slow to be useful.  But the ways of the State Department are screwy and devious, and unfortunately, probably not devious enough.  Suppose it was something as simple as the phrase girl scout cookies.  If the simple-minded GOP talking heads insisted that the e-mails be made public, it could scare the daylights out of girl scouts across the country, and Hillary Clinton could lose a lot of girl scout votes.  Or it could have been some inside jokes about how small some people's hands were.

The problem for the GOP is that Hillary Clinton has so much experience in government that it shows Donald Trump up as a completely inexperienced outsider.  Of course, he was flown around to several foreign countries and offended a number of people in record quick time.  But Hillary Clinton has represented the US at inter-governmental meetings.  The GOP wants to capitalize on any idea that suggests that Hillary was clumsy in how she conducted herself as Secretary of State, and the GOP attack dogs and attack hyenas cannot afford to drop the tired old "Hillary is a liar and a thief" ball, so they're going to stagger around with it until it gets deflated in late October.

In contrast, Donald Trump has so many weaknesses that Democrat apologists and Democrat attack dogs (and hyenas, if you must have it) simply cannot find one that is truly suitable.  Almost anything you say about Donald Trump sounds like harping on the obvious.  It all boils down to: What has he done for anyone lately?  It appears that his plans are so fantastically good that he doesn't want to make them public, and risk Hillary stealing them.  So the only concrete plan he has described--no pun intended--is to build that wall, which Mexico was to pay for, and it appears that it was a figurative wall all along.

Boys and girls, electing Hillary Clinton to office is the easy part.  We have to elect competent democrats (or, if absolutely unavoidable, independents) to Congress in the Fall.  And we must keep putting pressure on Congress to pass certain laws.  Warren Buffett suggests a few:

Abolish pensions for Congressmen.  Make them join Social Security.
Abolish health care for Congressmen.  Make them buy private insurance.  (The Insurance lobby will be only too happy to make it available for cheap to them.)

He suggests a lot more, but these were the big winners for me.

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