A Darker Take on Trump's Lies

A blogger called Tom Resnikoff has an interesting--and very convincing, and rather scary--point of view on Donald T's ostensibly silly utterances.

Let's take a minute to recall the sort of thing that Trump has been saying; then let's take a look at how Mr. Resnikoff interprets this, and finally consider how we should react to it.

Throughout the campaign, D. T. has said various things that are lies, or at the very least, spreading rumors:  "I don't know.  I just heard that ..."  And then he goes on to either (a) deny that he ever said it, or (b) come up with a new rumor that actually contradicts the old rumor, or (c) when challenged, assert that the lie is the truth, or deny, or ignore the accusation.  Especially to those who are already predisposed to looking favorably on anything D.T. says, this is all fine, and it has trained them to disregard facts, and furthermore, left them thinking that he himself is the only source of truth, or at least, palatable truth.  We certainly have some evidence to believe that Trumpies are immune to logic; they seem to feel (and feelings are all that they trust, especially if Trump gives them their jollies) that logic is some twisted invention of the liberals whom Trump hates.  Since the Liberals (Trump says) always argue from "logic", logic must be untrustworthy somehow.

Resnikoff proceeds to make a case for believing that Trump has set out on a campaign to actually erode the people's trust in their own reason.  Once you have the public believing that the Liberals are capable of all sorts of evil, and the only reason we don't understand why this is going on is because the Liberals (or Democrats, or what have you) are hiding all sorts of secrets, you (Donald) can persuade them that only you (Donald) are trustworthy, and the opposition just lies all the time.  Simply because you (Donald) set yourself up as the arbiter of truth.  (Resnikoff goes further, and states that this post-modern brand of conservatism is out to destroy democracy, which is on the face of it rather preposterous, but it paves the way for the Rule of Business, or at least the Rule of Certain Favored Businesses.  It is a dystopian view of the future.  (This state of affairs is not going to make life much more pleasant for the WWC--the white middle class with working-class origins.  Since they have been taught to not use their reasoning, it will be a long time before they realize that they're in the pot, getting cooked with the minorities and the women.  By then, about fifteen years from now, it will be normal for everyone except the very wealthy 1% to just suffer all the time.  That small sliver of society will not like how things go, either, but they too are convinced that this libertarian philosophy is good.  Unfortunately, they're going to run out of poor people to exploit, in about another 20 years!)

More worrisome is the information that there is some Russian fellow who is an adept at this sort of psychological warfare.  DT's team might not be bright enough to dream up this sort of disgusting strategy, but the russkies certainly are.

What is in it for these Russians?  What game are they playing?  I hate these super conspiracy theories, unless there is some tangible advantage in the outcome for whoever is being accused of doing the dirty; it has been far too convenient to make the russkies the scapegoats for everything, for at least 50 years.  So keep your eyes and ears open, but panic doesn't make a lot of sense, because panic is what (it seems) they want.

More later.

Thomas Piketty: The consequences of inherited wealth outweighing earned wealth

This is an unusually heavy topic for those of us who are not economists.  If you search on YouTube --wait; I'll find it for you: What the 1% don't want you to know-- you will find this video by Bill Moyers.  Bill Moyers, a liberal political commentator, but a fair one, and a very thoughtful one, interviews Paul Krugman, a leading economist.  Being an economist, Krugman could be expected to be more centrist than most liberals; that goes with the territory of being an economist.  But here, Krugman is explaining some of the bad consequences of the fact that inherited wealth (that is, money that has remained in a family for more than a generation, and I mean big money) is now growing significantly faster than the economy itself is growing.

We all know that there are two ways to make money: you work, or you invest.  It used to be that both ways earned you roughly the same rate of growth; in other words, the rate at which you got raises at work was more or less comparable with the rate at which a rich person's wealth grew.  (We're not talking about dividends.  We're talking about how much more valuable the holdings are.  Growth.)  But a French author, Thomas Piketty, has done statistical analysis of the flow of personal wealth in several countries, and concluded that the growth of inherited personal wealth is now faster than the growth of the economy.

Here's a simplified example.

Suppose A works at his job, and earns roughly $100,000 a year.  (Not many people do, but let's pretend.)  Meanwhile, B has investments in the Stock Market, and does not work.  But he is constantly watching the stock market, and and his stocks generally earn, say, $1000,000 a year.  That's not surprising.  But suppose A gets a 3% raise at the end of the year.  This means, roughly, that the company that A works for, has grown about 3% over the year.  On the average, we can expect that all American companies grow, and suppose they do so at an average rate of 3%.  But B's stocks, says Picketty, would be expected to grow at the rate of about 5%.  This means that, next year, A would make $103,000 dollars.  But B would earn dividends of $1050,000.  See that?  Income from work grows at a slower rate than investment income.

Most people whose wealth is in the top 1% have got their money from their parents.  Some have increased their wealth significantly (let's not mention names here), but it is difficult to become a multi-millionaire with money that you earn from an honest job.  This is why we're talking about inherited wealth here.

This is big news.  Not only are the wealthiest people in the country much richer than a typical person, they're constantly getting further away from the rest of us, and are impossible to catch up with.  Impossible.  None of us is ever going to catch up with people of the class of Warren Buffett, or any of the high-profile 1-percenters we hear about.  (Interestingly enough, it is generally agreed that most people don't even know who the wealthiest people are, or where they live.  They live hidden away, where their fabulous toys are not visible to the greedy eyes of ordinary citizens.  Many of our rich friends are nervous, because they feel that they're probably in the top 10%, or at least the top 20%.   They can relax; they're probably not even close.  To get into the top 10% club, you must earn $120 thousand a year.  I'm still trying to find how much a family has to be worth, to be in the top 20% of households in the US, by family wealth.)

I don't begrudge these people their ill-gotten gains.  (Well, their ill-inherited gains.)  What I do begrudge is the fact that they can control the government.  The government usually dances to the tune of the most wealthy.  This is why the Federal Government, and all the State Governments conspire to actually reduce taxes on the most wealthy.  While we pay anything from 10% taxes to 25% taxes on our salaries, they pay about 6% on their dividends.  Why are state legislatures and Congress so kind to the most wealthy taxpayers?  Because the wealthiest families not only control the government, they also control the Newspapers, radio and television, and start a huge hue and cry about Socialism as soon as anyone stands for election who has the guts to raise taxes.  The rich see taxes as eating into their personal wealth.  But only the rich can use a lot of what the government pays for: the armed services, highways, medical research facilities, airports, seaports, the coast guard.  Most of us cannot even afford the fancy drugs that they come up with, helped with government grants.  Some politicians propose a flat 15% tax for everybody.  But you can be sure that the most wealthy will never pay anything close to that rate, even if such a tax plan is made into law.  They will find creative ways of saying that their incomes from their investments are not really incomes.

The video explains much more.  Why is it less painful to live with a low income in such countries as Germany and France, than in the USA?  Because most of the expenses on which poor people --I mean the working poor, who earn around, say, $30,000 a year, which is not terrible, and certainly would not be terrible in France-- blow their incomes are paid for in many European countries.  As we know, basic health care, basic transportation, basic education are either paid for or subsidized in Europe.  (The British upper class rebelled against this, and now British poor are in terrible shape.  America has taught the fat cats around the world how to scrounge up every last penny, starving government services that used to make life tolerable for the working class.)

Indirectly, the political power of the wealthy is also increasing every year.  That is the scariest part of the story.  This is why Donald Trump ran for election.  If he had not, his kids would not get his little fortune when he dies, it would be taxed.  Even if it was taxed, the kids would still get a fortune, but not as big as they want to inherit.  This is why they want to be in control of the government: to keep an eye on the legislation.

It all becomes clear.

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Vi Hart's Take on the 2016 Election

It looks very much as though I was wrong.  Repeating my standard warning not to jump on any bandwagon without suitable thought, I have to say that the analysis of Vi Hart, a young musician, commentator, mathematician, and Net personality, is very convincing, an worthy of considering.  Her article can be found here, or watched here.  She tries to understand the election in terms of a generational divide.  [Added later: In my opinion this, too, is somewhat of a simplification, and I explain after the break.]

Put that way, it does seem as though it was the older voters who voted for Trump, for various reasons, because they did not grow up in a world with Global Warming, they did not grow up in a world where the environment was a problem (and who did row up in a world where white males had a complete dominance over society).  What Trump was saying made a lot of sense to them, because he simply denied those problems, and expressed his opposition or hostility to various conditions that are new to the older generation, and simply facts to the younger.

Apparently the younger generations voted for Hillary Clinton.  They understood the complexities of the issues, and had their thinking in place (most of them), and while grandpa and grandma were rejoicing in the company of others who were turning a blind eye to the new America, they knew that only Hillary had plans for dealing with reality.

Always compassionate, Vi Hart describes her theory in terms anyone can understand.  (She is a great original in many ways, and her delivery is always dramatic.  For the older reader, I recommend the print version.)

If she is right, it seems as though there is hope, because any election won by an aged demographic is doomed in obvious ways.  These septuagenarians may survive another four years, but if Trump overplays his hand, and if we take Vi Hart's suggestion that we engage with the older generation in order to explain the science and the logic of what has taken place over the last few decades to our seniors, and present it in less threatening fashion, we could change how things go.  Unfortunately, Hillary Clinton may not be willing to run again, four years from now; and if she did, she may not have the energy to work with whatever ruins Trump may leave her.  (Of course, we can't expect any understanding of Entropy from Trump, let alone any remorse for being its agent.)

Life Goes On — Sort Of: Polar Bears and Cheap Gasoline

There is a British comedian —called Jonathan Pie, I believe— who makes videos, usually ranting about something or other.  A sort of British Lewis Black.  In his most recent rant*, he talks about why it is obvious that Hillary would have lost the election.  Well, in hindsight it does seem pretty obvious; the trick is to see these things before they happen!
[*Be warned, he swears.]

Anyway, for a week I have simply been trying to make sense of what happened, but now it is time to get into a mindset of carrying on, and trying to be effective in a political way.  For various reasons, I have ways of not getting very angry when things go horribly wrong, e.g. after the election of 2010.  Garrison Keillor sang the weekend after, on his Prairie Home Companion show: “Democracy is fine for me, but I don’t know about you!”

Go ahead and listen to what Jonathan Pie has to say.  He basically says, in more colorful language, that The Left sabotaged itself.  Listening more closely, there are really two points he makes.  The first is that The Left has lost sight of reality so much that it thinks Hillary Clinton is progressive.  The second is that The Left keeps spouting precisely the sorts of things that horrifies “The Plebs,” as he calls them: the common people.  And it was the common people, obviously (aided by the conservative leaders, ever eager to win the White House at almost any cost) that gave Trump the election.  The same thing happened in Britain, with BREXIT, their referendum to leave the European Union.  It appears that The Left in both countries is unable to take a lesson from what happens.

Where was Bernie Sanders, Pie asks.  This is the same question Michael “Fahrenheit 911” Moore asks.  Unfortunately, the strategists behind the Democratic Party (and it’s time to distinguish between the various components of the Democratic Party: the so-called brains of the operation, which however seems to have lost its right to be called that, and the people on the left) have decided that we need a centrist, someone who could compromise with the Right.  Bernie would not compromise, but Clinton has, and would; that’s what they thought would appeal to voters.  This sort of makes sense, because it has been the absence of compromise that has characterized how the politics of the last decade has gone.  Everybody was calculating their strategies based on the elite on both sides (if that word can be used for idiots like Mitch McConnell, Ted Cruz and Chris Christie, and so on).  Suddenly, Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump, and the “disenfranchised” Greater White Working Class showed up.  These are people of a wide range of income levels, but who are not college educated, by and large, or at least effectively not college educated, and hostile to professionals and those who they perceive to be intellectuals.  These are the people, the White Working Class** who tend to think that the nerds and the geeks make things way too complicated.  And, it appears, that they feel that the hated lawyers, and economists, and scientists, and teachers, and atheists and foreigners, and uppity women and minorities have had it their way for far too long.
[** And those who have started out working class, but are now business owners, fairly well off.]

The difference between people like, say, Mit Romney and Carly Fiorina on the one hand, and Donald Trump, on the other hand, is that the first two are college-educated nerds and intellectuals, while Trump is just a regular idiot who says anything that pops into his head.  Now, you and I know that Trump is not just a regular idiot: he is a very affluent man who has terrible taste.  But he won.  Half the reason is that many voters wanted to screw up Washington, for having being screwed by Washington for so long.  The other half of the reason is that they have bought into the axiom that a businessman can handle government far more efficiently.  This is something that the Greater White Working Class truly believes in, because (as I blogged yesterday) some of these people in the GWWC are not working class.  They are self-made rich folks, who own their own businesses, and perceive that there is a lot of waste of money in Washington.  They believe that someone who has had to be careful with money in his business will be careful with tax money, like Trump, for instance.  Not.

Jonathan Pie fumes that The Left got its message wrong.  It just so happens that Bernie Sanders’s message was a little more on point, and Hillary Clinton’s message, which resonated with the Party Faithful, did not resonate with everyone outside of the Democrat Convention hall.

The question I struggle with is: how much can you dilute the message to make it palatable to people who want all the wrong things?  We have to realize that a lot of the time, it is campaign bullshit that wins the election, and then the winning side can stop pretending, and has two short years in which to deliver whatever goods they’re going to deliver, in time to get another two years in which to build on it.  (Recall how the Democrats were mowed down in 2010.)  But is it worth the bad taste in the mouth to promise all sorts of things that you had absolutely no intention of doing?  Should the Democrats pander to the GWWC the next time around, promising lower taxes, no agreements with Iran, bombing the heck out of the Middle East, no support of Planned Parenthood, lower gasoline prices, and higher wages for coal miners, if we just can’t, and won’t, deliver on those promises, just because they would be totally wrong?

That’s the choice when the next election rolls round, and we can be sure that more pressing issues will raise their ugly heads before campaign season begins.

My theory is that we have to go back to the stage where we were trying to educate the the public on the reasons for the progressive agenda.  Why does the environment matter, and what is the evidence?  Why does reproductive choice matter, and what is the evidence?  Why does health care reform matter, and what is the evidence?  Why does controls for Wall Street matter?  Why is multiculturalism a good thing, and what is the evidence?  What are the points in support of equal pay for equal work?  Just because anyone with a brain takes these things as given does not mean that our work is done: most of our population does not care to think deeply about anything; they have to be forced, encouraged, cajoled, or bribed into thinking deeply about these matters.  That’s going to take longer than a mere four years.  It makes me mad.

The WWC and Trump

This article on the Harvard Business Review website explains fairly effectively why Trump was supported so enthusiastically by such a large proportion of voters.

The blogger, Joan Williams, took her father-in-law's personal history into account, and has come up with a very persuasive theory.  It is that many working-class men were able, over the years, to start up their own business, with no help from the Government, and no college education.  These people are now very middle-class, but by no means part of the white-collar Republican Elite.

They distrust professionals, but they respect the Rich.  This unfamiliar pair of values: Rich Yes, Educated No, describes many of our conservative acquaintances; it was just that we did not realize that it describes such a huge population.  Democrats, of course, are, by and large, educated, professionals, many of us actually teachers, many of us liberated women, many of us lawyers, and though we hate the banks and Wall Street, when Wall Street is in a bind, we tend to rush to their rescue.

The White Working Class hates every single demographic on that list: Professionals (who are often managers in businesses owned by white men who never went to college), teachers (who keep trying to teach good American kids "stuff they don't need to learn"), liberated women (who are a shame to society, who "keep getting abortions"), lawyers ('nuff said), Stockbrokers (moneysuckers and crooks), and foreigners, minorities, and tree-huggers and those against good old fossil fuels.

The moderately affluent business owners, though from an socioeconomic point of view are not considered working class, nevertheless identify with the working class, which is why all this ranting about Obamacare did not make sense for the longest time.  When liberals think of the working class, they think of the black working-class, and the Latinos, and Native Americans.  Well, that's a mistake we're not going to make again very soon.

It is emerging that the Conservative Christian Right is divided about supporting the president-elect.  That's something they have to figure out for themselves: it is hard to advise people who have mythological beliefs from a rational point of view; they have to consult their fairies and come to some sort of conclusion within their cosmology.  All we know is that Trump is furiously walking back lots of his campaign rhetoric, and pumping up the apologetics on behalf of his team.  That's all very entertaining, but one thing we can be sure: no lessons will be learned.  Americans will not lay the blame for anything that goes wrong on Donald Trump and his ignorance; it will all be blamed on Barack Obama.  On the GOP side of the Aisle, the only mistakes are mistakes in public relations, period.  They have their eyes on the only prize: re-election.

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Post-Apocalyptic Landscape, The

Well, I've seen these sorts of disappointments before, and so have you, and we've built up a lot of scar tissue to handle them.  If the crop of Republican people in Congress at this time were as concerned with legislation and governance as they are with retaining their blasted seats, we would see a certain amount of remorse and anxiety.  Any congressman who had an electorate with numerous voters under the poverty line, would not be perfectly cavalier at seeing the social welfare apparatus being dismantled.  Perhaps the President Elect will permit the so-called Social Safety-Net to remain in place at least for a while, as a special birthday present for those penniless idiots who voted for him.  Remember: those who want taxes cut the most, and the government handouts for the poor taken away, are not the Trumpets, rather it is the Big Business-funded traditional core conservatives, the Koch Brothers and their like.  Trump will settle for reduced taxes for himself and his immediate family!  I don't really know that; Trump was elected despite our total ignorance of the principles behind his candidacy.  Like any mediocre businessman who runs his business based on paranoia and rules of thumb, Trump is likely to outsource his administration to Indian kids in Bangalore, who can only be reached at night!

Looking at the Media Machine that Trump had put in place, we have an inkling about the people who will play a role in a Trump administration: Rudy Giuliani, Chris Christie, and Mike Pence, and a few shameless sycophants who will crawl forward to take some of the responsibility for keeping Washington running well enough to serve the interests of the Trump financial holdings.  (Trump certainly thinks he can continue to make money without Washington, but he doesn't have a clue.)

My best guess at the Trump "plan" is as follows.  My comments are in plain text; when I'm channeling the Donald, it will be in (what else?) orange:

1.  I think he will not rock the boat for a few weeks, just to keep everyone guessing, including the GOP.  In actual fact, he will be going over the playbooks of his predecessors, looking for easy words that he can quickly read, so if there were to exist a publication such as "Presidency for Idiots: How to take the Country through your first Presidential Term without Really Trying!" that's what he will have his kids read to him at night.  Meanwhile he will wait for the GOP leadership to send a courier or two, nice guys, who can tolerate some nonsense from Trump, and leak to him a step or two that he could take, while still keeping his options open.

2.  I don't think Trump is interested in doing anything the way the GOP would expect him to do, and certainly not exactly how they want it.  If Congress has leaders who are willing to work with him (and some of they are very unhappy about the prospect), he will start to work at putting through legislation that directly affects monied families, e.g. the so-called Death Tax.  That's terrible; that's the worst, in his opinion.  That has got to go.  That. has. got. to. go.

3.  We need oil.  We need gasoline.  We need energy.  We need everything: coal, gas, everything; oil, coal, gas, wind power.  Everything.  We'll reduce their taxes, we'll give them incentives.  And you know what?  We have tons of oil stored away in bunkers.  Tons!  Open them up.  Bring the price of oil down.  Frack, baby.  (Just not anywhere near Trump Tower!)

By the early summer, it will be clear that the White House is not really interfering with the running of the country very much; at least I hope not.  Pence and the other social conservatives in government might start pushing to repeal or reverse the marriage equality amendment, and at that point we will have some idea concerning to what degree the Supreme Court is willing to jump on the Trump bandwagon.  They may be ideologues, but they're also lawyers, and not in the habit of suffering fools gladly.  But I suppose, it depends on which sort of fools.  My bet, however, is that until and unless a new Supreme Court judge is appointed, there will be little cooperation with Trump.  But I could be wrong.

I do not want to make any guesses about Republican appointments to the Supreme Court.  Except for Scalia and Thomas, the justices have not ruled as predictably along party lines as we could have expected.  We can expect anything at all from Trump.

We would expect that Education takes a beating.  But Trump probably does not know too many people who have an educated opinion as to how the education system (for lack of a better word) should be steered.  If Trump realizes that without indigenous educated talent, he would forced to import foreign educated labor to service the one-armed bandits, he will know to support education at least enough to service the technology that we have.  As long as we have the money, he probably thinks, we can buy the talent.  This is the implicit point of view that has held for the last several decades.  If all our best students fly off to work for the Chinese, then we can begin to worry about Education.

If things go kaplooey in every direction, then we could invade Iran.  Trump has learned from somewhere that Iran is dangerous.  He doesn't have any ideas about how to approach that problem, but whatever it is, we're not going to like it, and Iran will like it even less.  ISIS is another potential target, and which target Trump chooses will be based entirely on its potential for scoring points with the American public, and any other parties that Trump is courting; perhaps the people he wants to sell condominiums to.  But I forget: he is not allowed to keep his eye on his financial concerns; at least not without changing the law.

Finally, I have a hope that Obamacare will be left largely alone, unless he thinks of a way to twist the arm of Insurance Companies to get them to concede some points that have been the basis of rather punitive deals that some customers have been forced to accept.  The Insurance Industry spends an enormous amount of money on lobbying Congress; Trump doesn't really care about those sorts of things, unless he can drive a deal whereby he gets more money than the others!!  Hey, that's how you make deals.

All this has to happen in between remodeling the White House to come up to decent standards, and other important things that Trump has to do to keep up his world image as a successful businessman, and now, world leader, which is important.

Jennifer Lawrence has written a brief post-election opinion piece which you can see here.

Michael Moore, of Fahrenheit 911 fame, has put forward a 5-point plan to fight back!  First of all, let me say that getting mad and fixing things with violence in your mind is sort of destructive.  When Michael Moore does it, it gives a little extra punch to what he has to say, and people are likely to pay attention.  It's part of how he delivers his message: anger and indignation.  But for private individuals, a little simmering anger is not bad, but it has to be moderated with the fact that we don't really know everything.  People act in various inexplicable ways for various reasons that they do not have the skills to explain accurately.  The art of using language effectively is dying (and I do not know as much of it as I would like to know, and as much as my old teachers would have expected me to know!) but, instead of trying to guess, we can work towards a political climate that is more conducive to a balanced approach to government and social welfare.  If you're reading this, you're probably interested in social welfare, and civil discourse, a sane foreign policy, but you're probably beginning to think of civil disobedience and Occupying this, that and the other thing.  Let's look at Mikey's 5 point plan with an open mind.

 1.  Take over the Democratic Party.  They have failed the people.

This is certainly true.  Unfortunately too many Democrat officials have taken their professionalism just a little too seriously, and forgotten what the party is about.  They have looked at the GOP, and begun to think that lying, cheating, and vilifying the GOP is enough to win the White House.  Unfortunately, in their roles of kingmakers, they decided to tinker with the Primary campaign, and alienated their own people, because they felt that Bernie Sanders simply could not win.  Why?  Because Bernie was a little too non-establishment.  So on this point, I think we can agree with Michael Moore.

2.  Fire all the pundits, pollsters, and other media experts who hung on to their narrative long after the facts made it clear that their reasoning was flawed.  (I paraphrase.)  They're probably urging you to "heal the divide."

Okay, so this is, in a sense, following on on point 1, and including the people on TV and the Internet whose occupations are to be professionally enthusiastic about politics, and who use various oracles to indicate how to proceed.  It is certainly true that there is a lot of technical mumbo-jumbo that political specialists have come up with, especially the pollsters, who confuse the stream of information with insights that, in hindsight, do not always work.  Fine, let's jettison them all; I never liked them anyway.  But if anyone says to "heal the divide," I find it difficult to turn my back on them.  As someone said, a lot of our friends were in the other camp, and not all of them were racists and bastards.  So: yes, and no, on that point.

3.  Any Democrat in Congress who doesn't obstruct the Republicans at every single step of the way should get out, and allow a serious obstructor to do what is necessary.

Well, this would certainly give the Republicans a dose of their own medicine.  Do we want to be mindless obstructors like Mitch McConnell?  This is the tactic that the Republicans who resented Obama's popularity settled on: unable to fight Obama's suggestions based on their own merits, they simply decided to obstruct everything.  It is a strategy intended to deliver political victories, but neither policy victories nor legislative victories.  It is what you do when you're so frustrated, you can't think of anything to do to further your cause, but to give setback upon setback to your opponent.

But the problem here is that not everyone in the GOP is united in Trump's agenda.  In the weeks ahead, it will emerge how the GOP plans to salvage a few objectives given the Trump framework, but knowing the puerile mindset of both the core Republicans and the President-elect, turning against them might just succeed in uniting them.  I do not know to what extent to support point 3.

4.  Trump is just a media star.  His plan was to destroy both parties, and to tell them: You're Fired!  He was created by TV, but TV will not admit it.

Well, this is an analysis, and does not give us something to actually do.  We did not realize Trump was a danger, but I don't think anyone is confused any more.  We need to think how to * hold onto our gains, * resist changes to our laws and our government what will make it harder for the weaker and least powerful members of our society, and * resist attempts to fragment our population, but pull in the opposite direction whenever possible.

5.  Hillary Clinton won the popular vote.  It was the Electoral College that destroyed our chances of electing the best leader for this time in our history.

Well, there are many reasons why the electoral college will continue to survive.  One commentator from Prager University give several good reasons for its existence.

More as I find out.

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Is this a revolt against education?

I have a suspicion that the underlying phenomenon driving the conditions of this election cycle is the anger of the uneducated (and the marginally educated) against the stranglehold that they see the college-educated people as seeming to have on everything.

This stranglehold is mostly illusion.  There are vast numbers of people like Trump himself that have attended degree factories, who have gone on to terrorize their city councils, their boards of educations, their County governments and their chambers of commerce, and possibly their Lion's Clubs and their Rotary Clubs.  None of these institutions require very much education to take over.  Many of them are run by perfectly well-educated guys, but not all of them.

Perhaps working-class whites are sick and tired of being given the runaround by (ostensibly college-educated) minor bureaucrats at various levels of government.  They must hate the fact that in order to put in a huge new restaurant on a piece of land that they bullied somebody out of, they must make sure that they are not in a flood plane, that they're not going to adversely influence the water flow through the ground, and the runoff during a rainstorm, blah blah, blah blah.  Who gives a ^%$# about runoff, anyway?  There you go.  You gotta go to school to understand what that is, and why it is important.

Trump types (we've got to come up with a name for them) probably look at Hillary C, and shudder.  There's a ton of paperwork waiting to be created, they're probably thinking.  They really, really want the olden days back, when you could make a buck for a few years, before someone realizes that you're serving crap in your new restaurant.  All the lessons they have learned, about making a fast buck, all for nothing.

I have learned a great deal about how an honest County government saves foolish citizens from themselves.  It's like the people say about Obamacare: PLEASE allow me to get sick.  I don't need insurance, never did, never will.  The miserable fact is that the number of those who do need medical insurance are difficult to predict.

Actually, they're not that difficult.  If the insurance companies knew * who drank to excess, * who smoked in excess, * who had a unhealthy body weight, etc, they could easily set differential premiums for people based on their lifestyles.  But you can easily imagine that Congress would disallow that practice, just as it has declared that different car insurance rates should not be allowed for guys and girls, despite the fact that girls are evidently much safer drivers.  I do not know the details, but under pressure from consumers, Congress tends to prefer equal rates for everyone.  (Perhaps it is set state by state.  I don't know.  But it is very, very bad.  It is terrible.  It is rigged.  You know something?)

The word ignorance has many meanings.

* Someone who does not know how things work, and why things are done.
* Someone who does not know how to behave in complex situations.
* Someone who does not know the reasons why certain rules and laws exist.
* Someone who does not know the benefits of having certain members of society.
* Someone who does not know how to respond to a statement that makes them mad.
* Someone who does not know how to show a little class.
* Someone who does not know how to bring up their kids to be decent human beings.
* Someone who thinks that it is nobody's business how their kids behave.

I can't pretend that a few years in college can rectify seventeen years of parental neglect; in fact, I know that they cannot.  On the other hand, I do know some classy kids who transcend the limitations of their subhuman parents, and I can only marvel.  But there is a lot more good in the world than the ignorant can recognize, and there's nothing we can do about it.

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Teen Suicide

Recently, I read in the news that a teen couple had made a suicide pact, and carried it out at an idyllic location not far from where I live.  Certainly, people commit suicide all the time, even if often it is not made a fuss of in the media; at one time, TV news never hesitated to make hay with such incidents, and kept it in the limelight for weeks.

I don't know who the young people in this incident are, but I am sorrowful in the abstract, and that's the way I want to keep it.  How are we to console the parents?  Wouldn't the parents feel that all their friends and neighbors would be critical of them as a matter of course?  Wouldn't we be critical; wouldn't we suspect that there must have been something someone could do to head this crisis off at the pass?  This horrible sense of being out of control is getting to be a dull roar in the background, and here we are, thinking that a dull roar is preferable to a howling alarm.

First of all, we have to remember that in 2016, the diversity among our friends and neighbors, even in our almost comically racially homogeneous region, is far greater than ever before in its history.  Even in a little township that consists entirely of white, middle-class families, the family cultures vary widely from one family to the next.  In one home, the family lovingly brings up their kids, but places high expectations on them.  In another, the kids grow up without much interference from their parents, but they place high expectations on themselves, determined to do better than the old folks.  It's almost impossible to get a feel for the psychodynamics of the home environment of a given family; I can hardly describe the psychodynamics of my own home objectively.

More, young people these days have a difficult time handling the difference between how they deal with modern technology and life, and how their parents do it--or don't do it.  Some kids are patient with the dysfunctionality and the technophobia of their parents, others are the opposite: they deplore how their parents interact with technology.  But even the seeds of how a child responds to new problems with culture and family, are found in the way they were brought up as infants: how they were handled when they threw a tantrum in the grocery store; how the parents responded to "unreasonable" requests from the kids, for a car at age sixteen, or new sneakers, or whatever.  And not least, the way the self-worth of a young person influences his interaction with his peers, especially romantic prospects, and how a young man responds to emotional demands from someone he loves is very complex.  And also, our desire to be generous with our support is at war with how much we feel we can offer without being irresponsible in financially hard times.

No parent can be certain that they have brought up their kids in such a way that the kid, or kids, can be comfortable with coming to them with a problem under all circumstances.  If that is the case with you, just be happy; you are very lucky.  If that is not the case, you have to try to move the situation in the right direction, but I have no words of advice!  You have to learn this from your own parents, and if you survived your childhood in spite of your parents, then it will be a supreme effort to develop a better model of parenting on your own.  On the other hand, if you were lucky to have a good model, you must ask yourself whether your children were enough like you and your siblings for this model to work!

Those who think seriously about being effective parents are probably not the ones whose children face tragedy, but we live in troubled times.  Part of what we have to do is to suffer tragedy gracefully, which is a tall order.

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Let's Not Be Quick To Judge

The news on NPR this morning included that in many workplaces, tension was mounting over political differences among the employees.  Perhaps because a college is largely stratified in such a way that people of wildly different political opinions are rarely thrown together to the point of arguments arising, here at our institution things have not got out of hand.  We academics love to argue, certainly, but we've also learned, over the years, to avoid being unnecessarily harsh in our political criticism.

At the outset, of course, when the GOP was still working on selecting their candidate, I was so certain that Trump patently did not have the credentials to be given the nomination that I ignored the entire primary season, except to entertain myself with ridicule for the GOP field.  At that time, all Republicans, their candidates for nomination, and the horses they rode in on were all equal recipients of my scorn.

But now, as you know, everyone has his back against the wall: many Democrats and liberals, who bought into the anti-Hillary propaganda funded by the Koch brothers, and other conservative die-hards of the My Party, Right or Wrong persuasion.  Hillary Clinton is too friendly towards Wall Street for the comfort of many liberals, certainly for the comfort of those who supported Bernie Sanders.  Bernie wanted to reduce Income Inequality, which is something that is apparently not a priority with Hillary Clinton.  Clinton wants less gun violence, better education and health care, she wants to put limits on what sorts of tricks Business pulls on the population and the environment, but she appears not to be interested in Income Equality per se.  If I were a conservative, this would be great news for me.

Meanwhile, Trump does not offer any specifics to fiscal conservatives.  He promises drastically reducing certain sorts of Government services, but it is difficult to be confident about his ability to do so without any hints about how he would proceed.  But he's a businessman, and he does not want to give away his strategy at this point, for fear of precipitating pre-emptive moves from his targets.  He pretends to be a populist, and most low-income conservatives are buying into it, but thus far he has not shown any actions in support of workers, or the small businessman.  This is the problem with Competition: it's each man for himself.

Trump has certainly, however, shown support for racism and prejudice, and lots of Republicans seem to be saying: Now, that's what I REALLY like!  But others seem to be less enthusiastic.  After several decades of waning racism (during which we were all tricked into making friends among those of other races!), in many quarters it must feel uncomfortable being overtly racist.

There are many conservatives who will vote for Trump next week who will do so extremely reluctantly.  Many decent people among our friends will do so (i.e., vote Trump), not because they have adopted Trump's values, but because of party loyalty, and residual suspicion of Clinton's motives.  Because of the power of the financial resources of the far Right: the Koch Brothers, and others who are too clever to get their names into the media, in addition to shallow idiots trying their best to support the conservative cause, there have to be some very clever people working alongside them, but more subtly.  Despite the missteps of the Fox Newsniks, there is a certain amount of headway they have made, which make things very difficult for Hillary Clinton.  At this time, particularly, it is probably not worth the cost to turn our hostility against everyone who displays a Trump sign on their lawn; some of them really have no alternative, at least in their own minds.  The more hostility we encourage this season, the worse the emotional and psychological and social damage we will have to endure for years to come.  Whether Hillary Clinton wins or loses, we're going to have to stockpile tons of Prozac to survive the rest of this decade.  And alienating all our conservative friends is not going to help.  It's time to give up aggravating those whose politics are odds with ours, just to make us feel better; it's going to make us feel worse very soon.  Just my opinion.

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