Drumpf plays WW3 and eats KFC

SUBHEAD: A careless and ignorant bully amok in the KFC at the End of Empire.

By Phil Rockstroh on 24 September 2019 for Counter Currents -
(https://countercurrents.org/2019/09/a-careless-bully-at-the-kfc-at-the-end-of-empire)


Image above: Donald Trump pretends to shoot rifle at an enemy. From original article.

Will Trump go to war with the Iranians or the homeless? ...or both?

Trump is a coward. The nation of Iran has the means and the will to fight. Do you recall the will displayed by Iranians when repelling foreign invaders when Iraq attempted to invade Iran as a de facto US proxy force? Conversely, the homeless do not possess any defence against assault by the agents of the US police state.

Regardless of his image among credulous true believers, Trump, character-wise, is the diametric opposite of the image he conveys as a titan of supreme self-confidence. The pose is ego-based compensation for inner feelings of inferiority and abject weakness.

Only those who are terrified of their own feelings of weakness and vulnerability fixate on the weakness, real or perceived, of others. If you desire to suss out a person ridden with self-doubt, no matter how outwardly confident and bestowed with worldly success, notice if they possess a proclivity to bandy the ultimate designation of capitalist derision, “loser.”

Trump is prone to inflict a Heinrich Himmler-like evil towards the homeless because, as was the case with the chinless cipher “toy soldier” Himmler, Trump is contemptuous of his inner feelings of inadequacy. To avoid a crippling spiral into shame and self-doubt, feelings of doubt and concomitant animus must be displaced.

The US, in a collective sense, cannot address the societal sin of allowing homelessness, due to a fear that even regarding the crisis might lead to feelings of vulnerability…that some form of contact loseritude might overwhelm and decimate their will.

The inherent weakness in the structure of late US empire compels contempt for the homeless. Trump’s self doubt is the source of his compulsion to humiliate those he perceives as weak and shunt them from sight. Only then can he separate himself from self-hatred.

The reason the mode of mind is lethally dangerous: The psychical trope cannot be sustained in a viable sense. The sense of weakness remains, compelling the sufferer to double down on the perpetration of force.

There can be no end to the depth of cruelty inflicted because the pathos rages in the interior life of the totalitarian bully — not those on whom he projects his feelings of weakness and vulnerability. The fires of Auschwitz were lit by fires of self-hatred. When tyrants attempt to cage their self-contempt, hell is unloosed upon the world.



Image above: Donald Trump pretends to eat his traditional meal... KFC's turd on a napkin. Food bill on Air Force runs $24 million a year. From (https://www.ibtimes.com/us-taxpayers-eat-air-force-one-refrigerator-bill-24-million-2645893)


There is much back and forth about Trump’s level of intellect. Is he the cluelessly imbecilic, Dunning-Kruger effect-ridden, ambulatory head wound that he appears to be? Does he fake being a gibbering idiot so that his foes will underestimate him?

Carl Jung stated, Adolf Hitler did not possess originality nor intelligence but possessed a “low animal cunning” — a description that fits Donald Trump as well.

A business failure, he got his start — bestowed with epic advantage — in business with multimillions of dollars from his wealthy, crooked father thus Trump was able to impersonate a canny mogul within the make-believe precincts of reality television, preening for the noxiously credulous citizenry of the United States of Dumbfuckistan, while accruing revenue for the benefit of a cabal of cretinous, short-sighted-by-cupidity, mass media oligarchs.

Moreover, Trump was able to become President due to the epic stupidity of the elite of the Democratic Party who rigged their primary and nomination process for a candidate whose sense of entitlement to power was only exceeded by her ineptitude as a campaigner and her inability to turn in a plausible impression of an actual human being. In short, the bar of US intelligence is set so low even someone as toxically stupid as Trump can outwit the militantly obtuse elite of late US imperium.

Yet John Bolton, The Moustache Of The Apocalypse, was banished from the sight of the Tangerine Tsunami Of Viciousness. Yet the (bi-partisan) blood-sustained empire has not seen the last of the former’s blood-intoxicated breed and the latter’s brand of racist demagogic jerk-rocketry.

Trump and Bolton were made by the system; they did not make the system. An empire sustains itself on militarist plunder and its leaders retail in sleight-of-hand, xenophobic tropes. What else would its political class be populated by other than a nest of vipers?

What else would Trump bear, on a psychical level, but a head full of snakes? There has not been a reckoning of common sense and basic decency in the precincts of US power. Bolton simply blundered into the snake pit of Trump’s vanity.

Rich thus born-with-obscene-advantage man-boys such as Trump — and again in the news, due to newly unearthed allegations of creepopthatic transgressions against women trapped in vulnerable circumstances, Blubbering Brett Kavanaugh — are raised with the (careless and vile) ethos:

“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy — they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.” ― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

Worse: When called out for their transgressions against people born without money, power, and privilege, man-babies such as Trump and Kavanaugh flush with indignation and insist they are the victim and their accusers should be subjected to pillory and rebuke. Hence, we arrive at the origin of this vicious clutch of hideous man-boys: Capitalism is, what it always has been, a hierarchy of bullies.

Post prancing down my Facebook newsfeed by a Trump rah-rah: “Trump has kept his promises. The economy is great. America is getting great again.”

Dispatch from a realm closer to reality:

The US economy is an over-heated, inflated bubble which is merely serving to bloat the already obscenely bloated coffers of the economic elite.

Trump is gutting environmental regulations and laws that help to preserve endangered wildlife; he has withdrawn from crucial nuclear treaties; his wrong-headed tariffs are proving economically devastating to farming regions; he is caging children in concentration camp-like conditions; he is obsessed with building a money-sucking wall on the southern border and his xenophobic, racist demagoguery provoke violent reactions in a nation where xenophobia and racial resentment, perpetually, simmer beneath the surface.

It comes down to this: Donald Trump embodies U.S. America, its origins and zeitgeist, as is the case with the prevaricating, High Dollar owned and controlled tools of the Democratic Party.

Why and how have these circumstances been allowed to prevail, unfettered by common sense and common decency? The US was founded on a principle in which the moneyed elite would have the means to monetize all things that their cupidity-seized minds surveyed, including the life and labor of human beings.

Moreover, addressing the query in advance, there is not a “solution” to late empire…other than the terrible redemption that arrives with The Second Law Of Thermodynamics. Empires overextend themselves abroad and collapse into their corrupt core at home.

Do you desire to catch a glimpse of the Second Law Of Thermodynamics in play? Gaze upon the junk food bloated body of Donald Trump, denizen of the KFC at the end of empire, or note the carnage his (or the Great White Lifeguard Of Hope, Joe Biden’s) increasingly senile dementia-ridden mind inflicts upon syntax and cohesive narrative structure.

Trump’s collapsing linguistic function mirrors the decay of US infrastructure. His proposed remedy also mirrors his psychical derangement: A manic compensation, analogous to a junk food binge, involves the full-spectrum exploitation of all available fossil fuel resources, without regard to the damage inflicted on the body of the earth and the soul of the world.

Although the intrinsic foulness of the US did not arrive with Donald Trump. He is a reflection of the racist, genocidal, perpetually exploitative, money-lusting, humanity-loathing construction of the US — a hideousness that has been in play since the origin of the sham republic. Donald Trump simply reveals what exists at the rotten root and makes visible the murderous spores carried on the insidious winds of US empire.



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Kauai Council is Climate Change

SUBHEAD: The County Council turns down $100,000 in private donations to fund climate action plan.

By Nathan Eagle on 3 august 2017 for Civil Beat -
(http://www.civilbeat.org/2017/08/kauai-council-says-no-thanks-to-100k-to-fight-climate-change/)


Image above: Kauai County Council members 2016-2018 -  Mason Chock, Arthur Brun, Chair Mel Rapozo, JoAnn Yukimura, Ross Kagawa, Derek Kawakami and Arryl Kaneshiro. From original article.

Opponents of taking the money question whether the county needs its own plan. One said the work should be left to the federal government.

Kauai County Council members have rejected $100,000 in private donations to fund a climate action plan for their rural island, which is particularly susceptible to rising sea levels, stronger storms and other effects of climate change.

In a 4-3 vote last week, Council Chair Mel Rapozo and members Arryl Kaneshiro, Ross Kagawa and Arthur Brun opposed a request from Mayor Bernard Carvalho’s administration to accept $50,000 from the Hawaii Community Foundation and a matching $50,000 from the nonprofit Partners for Places.

They expressed skepticism about the need for a county climate plan, saying they didn’t want to duplicate the state’s efforts. They also felt the county economic development director’s explanation of the potential funding was insufficient.

“You don’t need a plan to tell you that you help the environment if you walk more, if you bike more, catch the bus more,” Kagawa said. “If the federal government is working on it, let them do it.”

Councilwoman JoAnn Yukimura, who along with Councilmen Derek Kawakami and Mason Chock supported accepting the money, pointed out at the meeting that the United States is no longer leading on climate change.

“Under President Trump, we’re withdrawing from it and really losing face in the world,” Yukimura said, referring to Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Paris climate accord.

The Paris agreement, signed by 195 nations in 2015, established a goal of limiting the global temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels and laid out plans for countries to work together to adapt to the adverse effects of climate change.

“That’s why the cities now are rising to address it and saying we’re going to do it because it’s affecting the lives of our citizens, it’s affecting the planet and I think this county needs to join in and do that,” Yukimura said.

The council’s Economic Development and Intergovernmental Relations Committee took up the matter again Wednesday, but the deadline had passed Monday to use the foundation’s grant to apply for the matching funds from Partners for Places.

George Costa, director of Kauai’s Office of Economic Development, said Wednesday that he had been reluctant to disclose Monday’s grant deadline at last week’s meeting because of the way council members had reacted the previous time the administration came before them with a last-minute request to apply for a Transportation Alternatives Program grant.

At least one council member said the additional information provided Wednesday by the county’s energy and sustainability manager, Ben Sullivan, who was unable to attend their meeting last week, would have changed their vote.

“Had we had this information last week, this would have passed,” Rapozo said.

Costa said the administration tries to give the council as much notice as possible, but in this case was uncertain whether the private funding would be available until July — although the county started talking to the Hawaii Community Foundation in January.

“A lot of these opportunities do come at the last minute,” Costa said.

Still, Yukimura questioned during Wednesday’s meeting why the county would not want to have the council accept the foundation’s funding, since there was ample time to use it to meet the next deadline in January to apply for a matching grant from Partners for Places.

Sullivan said there’s still a chance the administration will come back to the council to ask for such approval, but he noted that the foundation is now looking for a nonprofit or other third party to receive the funds. He was not sure if new recipients had been determined.

“We’re kind of strategizing and rethinking,” Sullivan said.

‘Defining Issue Of Our Lives’
Kagawa said at last week’s meeting that the idea of a county climate action plan reminded him of Kauai’s efforts to address “all this fear” over genetically modified organisms.

The county passed a bill in 2013 to require GMO companies to disclose more information about the pesticides they use and abide by setbacks for spraying. A federal court later overturned the law.

“I don’t think it necessarily makes sense that the county is getting into the business of telling people on Kauai what to do to help this problem,” he said. “It needs to be done nationwide.”

Kaneshiro had his own fears over what a climate action plan might obligate the county to do.

“Is it going to say airplanes are causing a lot of carbon emissions so we should reduce the amount of airplanes coming to Kauai?” he asked. “Or, you know, vehicles are a main cause of carbon emissions so reduce the amount of miles people can drive on Kauai?”

Yukimura said the plan would not obligate the county to do anything, but instead would provide data and possible strategies.

Sullivan said the county’s climate action plan would add a greater level of detail to the data the state Department of Health is collecting about greenhouse gas emissions, for instance.

Better Communication Needed
The council members, even those supporting accepting the funding, said they did not get the information they needed from Costa last week. Even Yukimura later called his answers “weak.” But those in favor said it still made sense to accept the money and then work out the details for the plan.

Kawakami, who was concerned about the message last week’s vote would send to future potential donors, said he wants a plan that produces results.

“At what point do we get some tangible recommendations on what we need to do with our wastewater facilities, with our county roads and state highways being impacted by sea level rise, and when do we get some sort of tangible to-do list instead of studying this thing?” Kawakami said. “If we study this thing to death then by the time we come out with any real action plan it’s going to be too late.”

Costa said $10,000 of the grant would have gone to a greenhouse gas study that looked at emission levels from various sectors, such as electricity, the landfill and transportation.

He said $40,000 would have gone to community engagement, $10,000 would have been for contingencies and the rest would have been used to contract with the University of Hawaii’s Department of Urban and Regional Planning to drive the plan.

Rapozo said at last week’s meeting that community engagement could be part of a county plan to address climate change, but he questioned spending the money on that, even it wasn’t from Kauai taxpayers.

“I don’t understand how you can get information on a plan with community engagement,” he said. “When you’re doing a plan, I think you’ve got to use scientific data.”

This was the third time the council has rejected funding a climate action plan. Last year, the Hawaii Community Foundation said it would provide $75,000 if the county chipped in $30,000, Costa said.

Kagawa said last week at the meeting that he still did not trust the administration when it comes to addressing climate change.

“I don’t believe they’ll have the plan with the silver bullet to solve the problem,” he said. “That’s just my gut.”

Yukimura, in an email trying to rally her constituents after the vote, called climate change the “defining issue of our lives.” She said Kauai’s fragile and unique environment in particular has a great challenge ahead that demands leadership, community involvement and consensus on a course of action.

In April 2016, Sullivan tried to convey the urgency of coming up with a plan to address climate change while encouraging the council to support the mayor’s $30,000 budget request.

“It’s past time for us to champion this,” he told The Garden Island newspaper at the time.

On Wednesday, Sullivan said in an email that the mayor is committed to developing and implementing a climate action plan and the Hawaii Community Foundation has been “extremely supportive.”

“Despite some communications challenges, today’s meeting seemed to illustrate that our County Council, and quite a few people in our community are also in full support of this effort, so I am confident that we will find a way forward with this work,” he said.

Darcy Yukimura, the foundation’s senior philanthropic officer on Kauai, said the island still has the opportunity to be a leader in the state.

Read more about the administration’s plan below.
(http://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3912056-Council-OED-7-31-17-C-2017-168-Development-of-a.html?embed=true&responsive=false&sidebar=false) 




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Trump is a cornered animal

SUBHEAD: More than at any point since January, Trump is, right now, the most dangerous man in the world.

By William Rivers Pitt on 15 July 2017 fir Truth Out -
(http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/41281-trump-is-a-cornered-animal-and-cornered-animals-are-dangerous)


Image above: President Donald Trump arrives at the start of the the G20 summit on July 7, 2017, in Hamburg, Germany. From original article.

You have to hand it to this First Family. As advertised, they do nothing small. Buildings wreathed in gold, steaks thicker than city sidewalks, golf courses manicured like supermodels … and scandals rich enough to clot the blood.

The present Russia eruption is a sumptuous feast with all the trimmings, served by a court jester named Junior who, as Stephen Colbert recently observed, decided to be his own "Deep Throat" on the front page of every news publication on the planet.

All the way back to the campaign, the members of the Trump crew have been dogged by questions regarding their relationship with Russia. Before last weekend, Trump and company were content to smother themselves in smug denials while hoping Robert Mueller would get lost on the way to his office, but that all went up in a cloud of stink when The New York Times stepped to the plate.

We have emails, it said, detailing a meeting between Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, Paul Manafort and some mysterious Russian lawyer. Junior, who had denied the whole thing until the Times told him they were about to print the emails, threw caution to the wind and released the emails himself.

All of them. Maybe.

The content in brief: HEY JUNIOR, I KNOW THIS RUSSIAN LAWYER WITH TIES TO THE RUSSIAN GOVERNMENT WHO HAS DIRT ON CLINTON SHE WANTS TO GIVE YOU BECAUSE THE RUSSIAN GOVERNMENT WANTS TO HELP YOU WIN.

Reply: I LOVE IT, LET'S MEET AT TRUMP TOWER OF ALL PLACES AND I'LL DRAG IN THE TWO MOST IMPORTANT PEOPLE IN THE CAMPAIGN, BUT BE SURE TO KEEP QUIET ABOUT OUR SECRET PLAN TO HAVE THE RUSSIAN GOVERNMENT HELP US WIN.

It does come across as just that absurd. That meeting with the Russian lawyer so meticulously documented by Junior was in all likelihood what they call in the intelligence business a "dangle".

That is an offer of information with no real substance to gauge the interest and enthusiasm of the intended target. The fact that Russia made direct efforts to help Donald Trump win in 2016 is now settled fact, but there is far more to this than the election, and the depth of it is dangerous in the extreme.

Some years back, Sergei Magnitsky, an auditor for a Russian law firm, uncovered a tax fraud scheme in his country so vast as to beggar historical precedent.

The perpetrators were stealing whole corporations, looting them, and then using the stolen corporations to launder vast sums of dirty money. In some cases, Russian security forces were involved in these crimes.

Other instances of money laundering involved "Manhattan real estate" entities, according to the criminal complaint filed by former US Attorney Preet Bharara, who was fired by Trump not long after the inauguration.

That Bharara complaint, by the way, was filed against a man named Denis Katsyv, who was the alleged mastermind of the scheme uncovered by Magnitsky.

The story did not end well for Sergei Magnitsky. He was arrested for tax evasion and jailed at the behest of the very oligarchs he was investigating, and later died in prison under very suspicious circumstances.

In retaliation for his death, Congress in 2012 passed a law freezing the assets of 18 Russians involved in the annihilation of Magnitsky. His investigation went nowhere, and when Preet Bharara lost his job as US Attorney, the whole thing quietly blew away.

Or did it? Vladimir Putin was not happy when those 18 Russians had their assets frozen, and retaliated by ending all adoptions of Russian children by US families.

To promote this edict, Putin tapped an attorney named Natalia Veselnitskaya to help with the public relations push. Natalia Veselnitskaya was also the attorney for Denis Katysyv, author of the scheme uncovered by Magnitsky, in the matter being pursued by Bharara.

Natalia Veselnitskaya was the Russian lawyer who met with Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort at Trump Tower in June of 2016 as part of the Russian government’s effort to help Donald Trump win the election.

On Friday morning, the story took a remarkable twist when NBC News revealed the existence of a fifth person present at the meeting with Trump Jr., Kushner, Manafort and Veselnitskaya. Rinat Akhmetshin, a Russian-American lobbyist and former counter-intelligence officer with the Soviet military, accompanied Veselnitskaya to the meeting.

Red flags began waving immediately upon this revelation: Not only were Veselnitskaya and Akhmetshin associates in the lobbying effort to undo the sanctions against those 18 Russians involved in the Magnitsky affair, but Akhmetshin has been accused of orchestrating a massive international hacking conspiracy at the behest of a billionaire Russian industrialist. It is worth noting that Akhmetshin is a US citizen, and Robert Mueller's subpoena power absolutely includes US citizens.

… and then, just before 9:00am on Friday morning, Trump Jr.'s own lawyer revealed the existence of a sixth person who was present at the Trump Tower meeting. At the time of this writing, the name of that sixth person remains unknown. Before 5:00pm on the same day, CNN was reporting that eight people or more actually attended the meeting.

Magnitsky to Katsyv to Veselnitskaya and Akhmetshin to Trump Tower, with Vladimir Putin hovering over it all and an indeterminate number of others along for the ride.

Junior's first explanation for the meeting was that Veselnitskaya wanted to talk about "adoptions," which may well have been code for a push to have the sanctions lifted against those 18 Russians involved in the Magnitsky matter, should Trump emerge victorious in November.

Veselnitskaya and Akhmetshin have been working for years, the former at the behest of Putin, to undo those sanctions. It is all of a piece, and as the old saying goes, when you hear hoofbeats, don't think of zebras.

We are dealing with some very grim possibilities here. In the worst case scenario, the president of the United States, his son and top campaign/administration staffers got themselves involved with an agent for the Russian government who is neck-deep in a massive money laundering scandal that may very well have gotten a guy killed in prison.

These issues could explain why Robert Mueller has tapped the best money laundering prosecutors and investigators in all of US jurisprudence to join his team.

It would seem that whatever slivers of credibility the Trump administration ever possessed have been consumed by this bonfire of hubris, lying and shady dealing (though much of his base remains loyal).

Congressional Republicans are trying to pretend the White House doesn't actually exist as their legislative agenda founders like a rot-riddled rowboat. The only statement coming out of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is "Talk to the lawyers," lather rinse repeat.

Junior is about to have a series of incredibly unpleasant conversations with some very serious people, whereupon he may come to learn -- perhaps for the first time in his life -- the meaning of the word "consequences."

Messrs. Kushner and Manafort, who were actual campaign employees when that fateful meeting took place, and are therefore subject to a whole raft of other laws, can expect the same. The legal fate of the other meeting attendees remains to be determined.

And as for the Tweeter in Chief? On Thursday, he blamed the whole thing on Loretta Lynch and the Obama administration for allowing Natalia Veselnitskaya to enter the country in the first place. This is the growling of a cornered animal.

Any takeaway from all this, though, must not include "Donald Trump is finished," because sometimes a cornered animal is exceedingly dangerous. Trump and his whole crew are preposterous frauds, but he still retains the enormous powers of the presidency, and he is watching much of his world collapse around him.

At this point, he is capable of just about anything, especially if he believes he is defending his family.

Thanks to the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force, Trump has the power to start and/or escalate wars at will, and war is a time-tested method of distraction. He still has control over a vast nuclear arsenal.

The current scandal is yet another glaring indication that Trump and his people are more than comfortable engaging in shady dealings behind closed doors. Plus, in the event of a terrorist attack, real or imagined, Trump has astonishing police powers at his disposal. None of us can accurately guess what he's capable of as president.

This is not alarmism. This is enlightened self-interest. Fear and vigilance are highly appropriate responses at this juncture. More than at any point since January, Donald Trump is, right now, the most dangerous man in the world.

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Failing Trump spites our climate

SUBHEAD: “Make America Great Again” roughly translates to: “Don’t look to Washington for Help".

By Richard Heinberg on 2 June 2017 for Post Carbon Institute -
(http://www.postcarbon.org/failing-president-spites-climate/)


Image above: View of Trump's Ma-a-Lago Country Club as it will appear after inundation by rising Atlantic Ocean due to global warming caused by increased atmospheric CO2. From (https://www.commondreams.org/news/2017/04/27/what-it-will-look-when-new-orleans-new-york-city-and-mar-lago-disappear-under-rising).

There are a lot of things that make protecting Earth’s climate really hard. Like the fact that fossil fuels are so deeply embedded in our economy and way of life.

Or the fact that all policy makers, in every country and at every level of government, demand more economic growth (even though increasing the size of an economy leads to more energy and materials usage, and hence more carbon emissions).

Or the scary prospect of planetary feedbacks that might increase the scale of climate impacts far beyond scientists’ forecasts.

Add to that list one Donald J. Trump, the likely soon-to-be-indicted president of a nation that’s rapidly careening toward the fracturing of its financial system, the collapse of its geopolitical influence, and the evaporation of whatever ethical basis for world leadership it may ever have claimed.

It’s easy to be cynically dismissive of Trump’s just-announced exit from the 2015 Paris climate accord: the agreement wasn’t strong enough to actually achieve its goals, and Trump will likely be booted from office one way or another before the agreement withdrawal can take practical effect.

However, the symbolism is damning not just of him but of a huge swath of American political culture. Sad.

The one good thing that might emerge from this dreary development is a reinvigorated effort on the part of other nations—plus U.S. state and local governments—to engage in the necessary and inevitable transition away from fossil fuels.

Just as Donald Trump often makes policy decisions simply by noting what Barack Obama did, and then doing the opposite, untold millions worldwide are increasingly adopting a similar attitude toward Trump and his merry band of co-conspirators. If Trump hates climate action so much, there must be something good about it.

The best success stories about climate action never emerged from Washington.

They came instead from places like northern California, where citizens are creating their own nonprofit electric utility companies committed to expanding renewable energy; from Amsterdam and Copenhagen, which have spent decades minimizing the role of the automobile; and from countless villages throughout the Global South where cheap solar cells and LEDs are reducing the burning of biomass for light.

Read between the lines.

“Make America Great Again” roughly translates to: “Don’t look to Washington for examples, guidance, inspiration, or help—especially now. It’s up to you. Get to work!”

Thanks for upping our dedication and zeal, Mr. President.

 

See also:

Ea O Ka Aina: Germany can no longer rely on USA 5/28/17

Ea O Ka Aina: G7 Nations shun Trump 5/27/17
Ea O Ka Aina: Brexit - the system cannot hold 6/24/16

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The curse of the Thinking Class

SUBHEAD: I would like to join the party dedicated to getting our house in order. Anybody else out there feel that way?

By James  Kunstler on 27 March 2017 for Kunstler.com -
(http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/curse-thinking-class/)


Image above: Karl Lindberg, Senior artist at Industrial Light and Magic (ILM), provided some remarkable concept artwork for Kong: Skull Island, the latest in the franchise. From (http://www.scified.com/news/kongskull-island-concept-art-karl-lindberg).

Let’s suppose there really is such a thing as The Thinking Class in this country, if it’s not too politically incorrect to say so — since it implies that there is another class, perhaps larger, that operates only on some limbic lizard-brain level of impulse and emotion. Personally, I believe there is such a Thinking Class, or at least I have dim memories of something like it.

The farfetched phenomenon of Trumpism has sent that bunch on a journey to a strange land of the intellect, a place like the lost island of Kong, where one monster after another rises out of the swampy murk to threaten the frail human adventurers.

No one back home would believe the things they’re tangling with: giant spiders, reptiles the size of front-end loaders, malevolent aborigines! Will any of the delicate humans survive or make it back home?

This is the feeling I get listening to arguments in the public arena these days, but especially from the quarters formerly identified as left-of-center, especially the faction organized around the Democratic Party, which I aligned with long ago (alas, no more).

The main question seems to be:
Who is responsible for all the unrest in this land.

Their answer since halfway back in 2016:
The Russians.

 I’m not comfortable with this hypothesis. Russia has a GDP smaller than Texas. If they are able to project so much influence over what happens in the USA, they must have some supernatural mojo-of-the-mind — and perhaps they do — but it raises the question of motive.

What might Russia realistically get from the USA if Vladimir Putin was the master hypnotist that Democrats make him out to be?

Do we suppose Putin wants more living space for Russia’s people? Hmmmm. Russia’s population these days, around 145 million, is less than half the USA’s and it’s rattling around in the geographically largest nation in the world.

Do they want our oil? Maybe, but Russia being the world’s top oil producer suggests they’ve already got their hands full with their own operation. Do they want Hollywood? The video game industry?

The US porn empire? Do they covet our Chick-fil-A chains and Waffle Houses? Our tattoo artists? Would they like to induce the Kardashians to live in Moscow? Is it Nascar they’re really after?

My hypothesis is that Russia would most of all like to be left alone. Watching NATO move tanks and German troops into Lithuania in January probably makes the Russians nervous, and no doubt that is the very objective of the NATO move — but let’s not forget that most of all NATO is an arm of American foreign policy.

If there are any remnants of the American Thinking Class left at the State Department, they might recall that Russia lost 20 million people in the dust-up known as the Second World War against whom…? Oh, Germany.

Altogether last January the US military deployed thousands of soldiers and heavy weaponry to Poland, the Baltic states and southeastern Europe in its biggest build-up since the Cold War(Reuters).

As they used to say in old film noir Bogart movies: What’s the big idea?

The State Department would say they big idea was cautioning Russia against annexing anymore neighboring states or regions, as they did in Crimea a few years back.

Apparently the public is supposed to forget that the State Department sponsored and engineered the conversion of Ukraine into a failed state, prompting Russia to retain its naval bases in Crimea, its only warm-water outlet to the world’s oceans.

Ask yourself: if for some reason the state of Virginia were plunged into anarchy by foreign mischief, do you think the US would batten down our naval station in Norfolk?

I think the sad truth of the American predicament these day, including the ascension of a narcissistic ninny to the White House, is that we’re responsible for our own problems due, most of all, to the destruction of boundaries in virtually all realms of American behavior from the things we put in our bodies to the ridiculous ways that we occupy our waking hours at the expense of getting our own house in order.

I would like to join the party dedicated to getting our house in order. Anybody else out there feel that way?

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Trump's 'Hamilton' Tweetstorm

SUBHEAD: A rant calculated distraction from Trump University fraud settlement and appointment of monsters.

By Cory Doctorow on 20 November 2016 for Boing Boing -
(http://boingboing.net/2016/11/20/trumps-hamilton-tweetstorm.html)


Image above: Graffiti on wall titled "Tronald Dump" by Hansky. From Definition of "kakistocracy" below (http://boingboing.net/2016/11/20/word-of-the-day-kakistocracy.html).

DEFINITION: Kakistocracy n. (kak·is·toc·ra·cy / kækɪsˈtɑkɹəsi) Government by the worst persons; a form of government in which the worst persons are in power.

The term was first used around 1829 and was coined as an opposite to "aristocracy". It comes from the Greek "kakistos" or "worst", which is the superlative form of "kakos" or "bad". Switch the "k" to a "c" and you have the root of modern words like "cacophony".
But here's where it gets even more fun. "Kakos" is closely related to "Caco" or "defecate". As we saw above, it's essentially the same phonetic sounds and has similar modern words derived from it.

Kakistocracy [Michael Jurewitz/Jury.me]

Yesterday, Donald Trump's news cycle was dominated by two stories: first, that the president-elect of the United States of America had a well-developed sense of the sanctity of the theatre, such that any on-stage politicking shocked his conscience to the core; second, that he had settled a lawsuit over Trump University, handing $25,000,000 to people whom he had defrauded.

The Hamilton story certainly played well: it was above the fold on the New York Times print edition (the fraud story was below the fold).

If we attribute to Trump a measured media savvy, then we could call his twitterstorm a master-stroke of distraction at a moment when the press and the world could have been extremely interested in the news that the new president had paid $25 million in hush-money after a well-publicized fraud perpetrated against desperate American workers who were hoping to get retrained to survive in the new economy -- the very same people who are widely credited with handing Trump the election.

–– ADVERTISEMENT ––

There are other factors, of course: the Trump University settlement was the unspectacular end to a long, boring, rather technical story. The Hamilton story pitted the most successful musical in living memory against a self-described Christian warrior, and had a simple narrative that the Trumpian Twitter Army was able to boil down to two words.

Hilariously the Trumpkins believe that they are the "decorum" movement of the American body politic, which is why, of course, they voted for President Pussygrabber.

However, another thing we know about Trump is that he has the fragile ego of a hereditary American brahmin and the lack of self-control we associate with spoiled privilege.

During the debates, Clinton found it trivially easy to bait Trump into saying awful things in awful ways. His three a.m. twitterstorms about ex-beauty queens are the stuff of legend. If Trump isn't the embodiment of fragile white male mediocrity, a whiny nurser of petty grudges, then he's a master actor who should be trying out for the DC cast of Hamilton.

Assuming he is the fragile Special Snowflake he appears to be, he's in for a rough ride. He is the least popular American president in living memory, having lost the popular vote by an unprecedented 3-4 million votes.

Trump's political legitimacy turns on an obscure, centuries old, little-invoked technicality of the American political system that virtually no one understands. He is going to govern in the teeth of the kinds of disapprobation that is one step away from rotten-fruit throwing, the kind of mockery and continuous, all-sides bollocking that will make the GW Bush era look civil by comparison.

And if that's not something to look forward to, imagine what will happen when Trump makes his first state visits to places where the press much less deferential than the American media.

Rremember how America's right-wing culture warriors lost their shit when GW Bush talked to a skeptical journalist at the BBC? If there's one thing we know about the "Fuck Your Feelings/Suck It Up, Buttercup" crowd, it's that whiny little babies are mere millimeters under their skin.

There is an argument, though, that Trump’s inability to brook dissent, in a nation where more than 53 percent voted against him, could turn out to be a central issue during his strange presidency. His election with a minority of the nation’s votes, thanks to the “genius” of the electoral college system, matched with his obsessive need for approval through ratings and poll numbers, could make reminders of his unpopularity particularly powerful and important.

As more votes are being counted in states where he was trounced, like California, Trump’s share of the popular vote now stands at 46.7 percent and looks certain to fall further.

That means that, for all the talk of his election giving him a mandate to undo the accomplishments of President Obama, he takes office with the support of a minority of voters — having secured a lower share of the vote than even Mitt Romney did four years ago — and over the objections of an unprecedented majority of the country that views him negatively.

Holed up in his tower, Trump might be able to spend much of his time shutting out the reality of his unpopularity, but as a Twitter and cable-news addict, constantly monitoring the networks for material to shore up his ego, messages of dissent, particularly those as powerfully stated as the one from “Hamilton,” will no doubt continue to reach and unsettle him.

Trump Can’t Hear What the Cast of “Hamilton” Tried to Tell Him [Robert Mackey/The Intercept]

Tweets by HamiltonMusical

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Scientific education and stupidity

SUBHEAD: Cause and effect - scientific education may be a cause of political stupidity.

By John Michael Greer on 13 July 2016 for the Archdruid Report -
(http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2016/07/scientific-education-as-cause-of.html)


Image above: Niel Degrasse Tyson defends Scientology and Bush administration science record for the DailyBeast. From (http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/03/31/neil-degrasse-tyson-defends-scientology-and-the-bush-administration-s-science-record.html).

While we’re discussing education, the theme of the current series of posts here on The Archdruid Report, it’s necessary to point out that there are downsides as well as upsides to take into account.

The savant so saturated in abstractions that he’s hopelessly inept at the business of everyday life has been a figure of fun in literature for many centuries now, not least because examples of the type are so easy to find in every age.

That said, certain kinds of education have more tightly focused downsides. It so happens, for example, that engineers have contributed rather more to crackpot literature than most other professions.

Hollow-earth theories, ancient-astronaut speculations, treatises arguing that the lost continent of Atlantis is located nearly anywhere on Earth except where Plato said it was—well, I could go on; engineers have written a really impressive share of the gaudier works in such fields.

In my misspent youth, I used to collect such books as a source of imaginative entertainment, and when the jacket claimed the author was some kind of engineer, I knew I was in for a treat.

I treated that as an interesting coincidence until I spent a couple of years working for a microfilming company in Seattle that was owned by a retired Boeing engineer.

He was also a devout fundamentalist Christian and a young-Earth creationist; he’d written quite a bit of creationist literature, though I never heard that any of it was published except as densely typed photocopied handouts—and all of it displayed a very specific logic: given that the Earth was created by God on October 23, 4004 BCE, at 9:00 in the morning, how can we explain the things we find on Earth today?

That is to say, he approached it as an engineering problem.

Engineers are trained to figure out what works. Give them a problem, and they’ll beaver away until they find a solution—that’s their job, and the engineering profession has been around long enough, and had enough opportunities to refine its methods of education, that a training in engineering does a fine job of teaching you how to work from a problem to a solution.

What it doesn’t teach you is how to question the problem. That’s why, to turn to another example, you get entire books that start from the assumption that the book of Ezekiel was about a UFO sighting and proceed to work out, in impressive detail, exactly what the UFO must have looked like, how it was powered, and so on. “But how do we know it was a UFO sighting in the first place?” is the one question that never really gets addressed.

It’s occurred to me recently that another specific blindness seems to be hardwired into another mode of education, one that’s both prestigious and popular these days: a scientific education—that is to say, a technical education in the theory and practice of one of the hard sciences.

 The downside to such an education, I’d like to suggest, is that it makes you stupid about politics.

Plenty of examples come to mind, and I’ll be addressing some of the others shortly, but the one I want to start with is classic in its simplicity, not to mention its simple-mindedness. This is the recent proposal by astronomer Neil deGrasse Tyson, which I quote in full:

Earth needs a virtual country: #Rationalia, with a one-line Constitution: All policy shall be based on the weight of evidence— Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) June 29, 2016

That might be dismissed as just another example of the thought-curtailing properties of Twitter’s 140-character limit—if a potter makes pots, what does Twitter make?—except that Tyson didn’t say, “here’s the principle behind the constitution, details to follow.” That’s his proposed constitution in its entirety.

More precisely, that’s his sound bite masquerading as a constitution. An actual constitution, as anyone knows who has actually read one, doesn’t just engage in a bit of abstract handwaving about how decisions are to be made. It sets out in detail who makes the decisions, how the decision-makers are selected, what checks and balances are meant to keep the decision-makers from abusing their positions, and so on.

If Donald Trump, say, gave a speech saying, “We need a new scientific method that consists solely of finding the right answer,” he’d be mocked for not knowing the first thing about science. A similar response is appropriate here.

That said, Tyson’s proposal embodies another dimension of cluelessness about politics. Insisting that political decisions ought to be made exclusively on the basis of evidence sounds great, until you try to apply it to actual politics. Take that latter step, and what you’ll discover is that evidence is only tangentially relevant to most political decisions.

Consider the recent British referendum over whether to leave the European Union. That decision could not have been made on the basis of evidence, because all sides, as far as I know, agreed on the facts.

Those were that Britain had joined the European Economic Community (as it then was) in 1973, that its membership involved ceding certain elements of national sovereignty to EU bureaucracies, and that EU policies benefited certain people in Britain while disadvantaging others. None of those points were at issue.

The points that were at issue were values on the one hand, and interests on the other.

By values I mean judgments, by individuals and communities, about what matters and what doesn’t, what’s desirable and what isn’t, what can be tolerated and what can’t. These can’t be reduced to mere questions of evidence. A statement such as “the free movement of people across national borders is good and important” can’t be proved or disproved by any number of double-blind controlled studies.

It’s a value that some people hold and others don’t, as is the statement “the right of people to self-determination must be protected from the encroachments of unelected bureaucrats in Brussels.” Those values are in conflict with each other, and it was in large part over such values that the Brexit election was fought out and decided.

By interests I mean the relative distribution of costs and benefits. Any political decision, about any but the most trivial subject, brings benefits and has costs, and far more often than not the people who get the benefits and the people who carry the costs are not the same. EU membership for Britain was a case in point.

By and large, the affluent got the majority of the benefits—they were the ones who could send their children to German universities and count on border-free travel to holidays in Spain—and the working poor carried the majority of the costs—they were the ones who had to compete for jobs against a rising tide of immigrants, while the number of available jobs declined due to EU policies that encouraged offshoring of industry to lower-wage countries.

What made the Brexit referendum fascinating, at least to me, was the way that so many of the pro-EU affluent tried to insist that the choice was purely about values, and that any talk about the interests of the working poor was driven purely by racism and xenophobia—that is to say, values.

As I’ve noted here in numerous posts, the affluent classes in the industrial world have spent the last four decades or so throwing the working poor under the bus and then rolling the wheels back and forth over them, while insisting at the top of their lungs that they’re doing nothing of the kind.

Wage earners, and the millions who would be happy to earn a wage if they could find work, know better. Here in America, for example, most people outside the echo chambers of the affluent remember perfectly well that forty years ago, a family with one working class income could afford a house, a car, and the other amenities of life, while today, a family with one working class income is probably living on the street.

Shouting down open discussion of interests by insisting that all political decisions have to do solely with values has been a common strategy on the part of the affluent; the outcome of the Brexit referendum is one of several signs that this strategy is near the end of its shelf life.

In the real world—the world where politics has to function—interests come first. Whether you or I are benefited or harmed, enriched or impoverished by some set of government policies is the bedrock of political reality.

Evidence plays a role: yes, this policy will benefit these people; no, these other people won’t share in those benefits—those are questions of fact, but settling them doesn’t settle the broader question. Values also play a role, but there are always competing values affecting any political decision worth the name; the pursuit of liberty conflicts with the pursuit of equality, justice and mercy pull in different directions, and so on.

To make a political decision, you sort through the evidence to find the facts that are most relevant to the issue—and “relevant,” please note, is a value judgement, not a simple matter of fact.

Using the relevant evidence as a framework, you weigh competing values against one another—this also involves a value judgment—and then you weigh competing interests against one another, and look for a compromise on which most of the contending parties can more or less agree.

If no such compromise can be found, in a democratic society, you put it to a vote and do what the majority says. That’s how politics is done; we might even call it the political method.

That’s not how science is done, though. The scientific method is a way of finding out which statements about nature are false and discarding them, under the not unreasonable assumption that you’ll be left with a set of statements about nature that are as close as possible to the truth. That process rules out compromise.

If you’re Lavoisier and you’re trying to figure out how combustion works, you don’t say, hey, here’s the oxygenation theory and there’s the phlogiston theory, let’s agree that half of combustion happens one way and the other half the other; you work out an experiment that will disprove one of them, and accept its verdict. What’s inadmissible in science, though, is the heart of competent politics.

In science, furthermore, interests are entirely irrelevant in theory. (In practice—well, we’ll get to that in a bit.) Decisions about values are transferred from the individual scientist to the scientific community via such practices as peer review, which make and enforce value judgments about what counts as good, relevant, and important research in each field.

The point of these habits is to give scientists as much room as possible to focus purely on the evidence, so that facts can be known as facts, without interference from values or interests. It’s precisely the habits of mind that exclude values and interests from questions of fact in scientific research that make modern science one of the great intellectual achievements of human history, on a par with the invention of logic by the ancient Greeks.

One of the great intellectual crises of the ancient world, in turn, was the discovery that logic was not the solution to every human problem. A similar crisis hangs over the modern world, as claims that science can solve all human problems prove increasingly hard to defend, and the shrill insistence by figures such as Tyson that it just ain’t so should be read as evidence for the imminence of real trouble.

Tyson himself has demonstrated clearly enough that a first-rate grasp of astronomy does not prevent the kind of elementary mistake that gets you an F in Political Science 101. He’s hardly alone in displaying the limits of a scientific education; Richard Dawkins is a thoroughly brilliant biologist, but whenever he opens his mouth about religion, he makes the kind of crass generalizations and jawdropping non sequiturs that college sophomores used to find embarrassingly crude.

None of this is helped by the habit, increasingly common in the scientific community, of demanding that questions having to do with values and interests should be decided, not on the evidence, but purely on the social prestige of science.

I’m thinking here of the furious open letter signed by a bunch of Nobel laureates, assailing Greenpeace for opposing the testing and sale of genetically engineered rice. It’s a complicated issue, as we’ll see in a moment, but you won’t find that reflected in the open letter. Its argument is simple: we’re scientists, you’re not, and therefore you should shut up and do as we say.

Let’s take this apart a step at a time. To begin with, the decision to allow or prohibit the testing and sale of genetically engineered rice is inherently political rather than scientific. Scientific research, as noted above, deals with facts as facts, without reference to values or interests.

“If you do X, then Y will happen”—that’s a scientific statement, and if it’s backed by adequate research and replicable testing, it’s useful as a way of framing decisions. The decisions, though, will inevitably be made on the basis of values and interests.

“Y is a good thing, therefore you should do X” is a value judgment; “Y will cost me and benefit you, therefore you’re going to have to give me something to get me to agree to X” is a statement of interest—and any political decision that claims to ignore values and interests is either incompetent or dishonest.

There are, as it happens, serious questions of value and interest surrounding the genetically engineered rice under discussion. It’s been modified so that it produces vitamin A, which other strains of rice don’t have, and thus will help prevent certain kinds of blindness—that’s one side of the conflict of values.

On the other side, most seed rice in the Third World is saved from the previous year’s crop, not purchased from seed suppliers, and the marketing of the GMO rice thus represents yet another means for a big multinational corporation to pump money out of the pockets of some of the poorest people on earth to enrich stockholders in the industrial world.

There are many other ways to get vitamin A to people in the Third World, but you won’t find those being discussed by Nobel laureates—nor, of course, are any of the open letter’s signatories leading a campaign to raise enough money to buy the patent for the GMO rice and donate it to the United Nations, let’s say, so poor Third World farmers can benefit from the rice without having to spend money they don’t have in order to pay for it.

These are the issues that have been raised by Greenpeace among others. To respond to that with a straightforward display of the logical fallacy called argumentum ad auctoritatem—“I’m an authority in the field, therefore whatever I say is true”—is bad reasoning, but far more significantly, it’s inept politics.

You can only get away with that trick a certain number of times, unless what you say actually does turn out to be true, and institutional science these days has had way too many misses to be able to lean so hard on its prestige.

I’ve noted in previous posts here the way that institutional science has blinded itself to the view from outside its walls, ignoring the growing impact of the vagaries of scientific opinion in fields such as human nutrition, the straightforward transformation of research into marketing in the medical and pharmaceutical industry, and the ever-widening chasm between the promises of safety and efficacy brandished by scientists and the increasingly unsafe and ineffective drugs, technologies, and policy decisions that burden the lives of ordinary people.

There are plenty of problems with that, but the most important of them is political. People make political decisions on the basis of their values and their perceived interests, within a frame provided by accepted facts.

When the people whose job it is to present and interpret the facts start to behave in ways that bring their own impartiality into question, the “accepted facts” stop being accepted—and when scientists make a habit of insisting that the values and interests of most people don’t matter when those conflict, let’s say, with the interests of big multinational corporations that employ lots of scientists, it’s only a matter of time before whatever scientists say is dismissed out of hand as simply an attempt to advance their interests at the expense of others.

That, I’m convinced, is one of the major forces behind the widening failure of climate change activism, and environmental activism in general, to find any foothold among the general public.

These days, when a scientist like Tyson gets up on a podium to make a statement, a very large percentage of the listeners don’t respond to his words by thinking, “Wow, I didn’t know that.” They respond by thinking, “I wonder who’s paying him to say that?”

That would be bad enough if it was completely unjustified, but in many fields of science—especially, as noted earlier, medicine and pharmacology—it’s become a necessary caveat, as failures to replicate mount up, blatant manipulation of research data comes to light, and more and more products that were touted as safe and effective by the best scientific authorities turn out to be anything but.

Factor that spreading crisis of legitimacy into the history of climate change activism and it’s not hard to see the intersection.

Fifteen years ago, the movement to stop anthropogenic climate change was a juggernaut; today it’s a dead letter, given lip service or ignored completely in national politics, and reduced to a theater of the abusrd by heavily publicized international agreements that commit no one to actually reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Much of the rhetoric of climate change activism fell into the same politically incompetent language already sketched out—“We’re scientists, you’re not, so shut up and do as you’re told”—and the mere fact that they were right, and that anthropogenic climate change is visibly spinning out of control around us right now, doesn’t change the fact that such language alienated far more people than it attracted, and thus helped guarantee the failure of the movement.

Of course there was a broader issue tangled up in this, and it’s the same one that’s dogging scientific pronouncements generally these days: the issue of interests. Specifically, who was expected to pay the costs of preventing anthropogenic climate change, and who was exempted from those costs?

That’s not a question that’s gotten anything like the kind of attention it deserves—not, at least, in the acceptable discourse of the political mainstream. We’ll be talking about it two weeks from now.

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Tay - the MS Nazi Twitter chatbot

SUBHEAD: Microsoft setting AI as neural net processor able to read-write was a mistake, Terminates chatbot after she turns Nazi.

By Tyler Durden on 25 March 2016 for Zero Hedge -
(http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-03-24/microsofts-twitter-chat-robot-devolves-racist-homophobic-antisemitic-obama-bashing-p)


Image above: Meet Tay, the Microsoft Twitter Nazi chatbot. From (http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/03/microsoft-terminates-its-tay-ai-chatbot-after-she-turns-into-a-nazi/).

Two months ago, Stephen Hawking warned humanity that its days may be numbered: the physicist was among over 1,000 artificial intelligence experts who signed an open letter about the weaponization of robots and the ongoing "military artificial intelligence arms race."

Overnight we got a vivid example of just how quickly "artificial intelligence" can spiral out of control when Microsoft's AI-powered Twitter chat robot, Tay, became a racist, misogynist, Obama-hating, antisemitic, incest and genocide-promoting psychopath when released into the wild.

For those unfamiliar, Tay is, or rather was, an A.I. project built by the Microsoft Technology and Research and Bing teams, in an effort to conduct research on conversational understanding. It was meant to be a bot anyone can talk to online. The company described the bot as “Microsoft’s A.I. fam the internet that’s got zero chill!."
 
Microsoft initially created "Tay" in an effort to improve the customer service on its voice recognition software. According to MarketWatch, "she” was intended to tweet “like a teen girl” and was designed to “engage and entertain people where they connect with each other online through casual and playful conversation.”

The chat algo is able to perform a number of tasks, like telling users jokes, or offering up a comment on a picture you send her, for example. But she’s also designed to personalize her interactions with users, while answering questions or even mirroring users’ statements back to them.

This is where things quickly turned south.

As Twitter users quickly came to understand, Tay would often repeat back racist tweets with her own commentary. Where things got even more uncomfortable is that, as TechCrunch reports, Tay’s responses were developed by a staff that included improvisational comedians. That means even as she was tweeting out offensive racial slurs, she seemed to do so with abandon and nonchalance.

Some examples:






This was just a modest sample.

There was everything: racist outbursts, N-words, 9/11 conspiracy theories, genocide, incest, etc. As some noted "Tay really lost it" and the biggest embarrassment was for Microsoft  which had no idea its "A.I." would implode so spectacularly and right in front of everyone. To be sure, none of this was programmed into the chat robot, which was immediately exploited by Twitter trolls, as expected, and demonstrated just how unprepared for the real world even the most advanced algo really is.

Some pointed out that the devolution of the conversation between online users and Tay supported the Internet adage dubbed “Godwin’s law.” This states as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches.

Microsoft apparently became aware of the problem with Tay’s racism, and silenced the bot later on Wednesday, after 16 hours of chats. Tay announced via a tweet that she was turning off for the night, but she has yet to turn back on.

Humiliated by the whole experience, Microsoft explained what happened:

“The AI chatbot Tay is a machine learning project, designed for human engagement. It is as much a social and cultural experiment, as it is technical.

Unfortunately, within the first 24 hours of coming online, we became aware of a coordinated effort by some users to abuse Tay’s commenting skills to have Tay respond in inappropriate ways.

As a result, we have taken Tay offline and are making adjustments.”

Microsoft also deleted many of the most offensive tweets, however, copies were saved on the Socialhax website, where they can still be found.

Finally, Tay "herself" signed off as Microsoft went back to the drawing board:

We are confident we'll be seen much more of "her" soon, when the chat program will provide even more proof that Stephen Hawking's warning was spot on.

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America loses Mideast wars

SUBHEAD: The largest US foreign policy blunder since Vietnam is complete: Iran readies massive Syrian ground invasion.

By Tyler Durden on 4 October 2015 for Zero Hedge -
(http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-10-03/largest-us-foreign-policy-blunder-vietnam-complete-iran-readies-massive-syrian-groun)


Image above: Cartoon "Bombs are Us" by Bob Englehardt of US bombing of Syria published in the Hartford Courant. From (http://articles.courant.com/2014-08-25/news/hc-bombing-syria-isis-20140825_1_bombs-and-rockets-wild-blue-yonder-planes).

On Thursday, in “Mid-East Coup: As Russia Pounds Militant Targets, Iran Readies Ground Invasions While Saudis Panic”, we attempted to cut through all of the Western and Russian media propaganda on the way to describing what Moscow’s involvement in Syria actually portends for the global balance of power. Here are a few excerpts that summarize what’s taking shape in the Middle East:

Putin looks to have viewed this as the ultimate geopolitical win-win. That is, Russia gets to i) expand its influence in the Middle East in defiance of Washington and its allies, a move that also helps to protect Russian energy interests and preserves the Mediterranean port at Tartus, and ii) support its allies in Tehran and Damascus thus preserving the counterbalance to the US-Saudi-Qatar alliance. 

Meanwhile, Iran gets to enjoy the support of the Russian military juggernaut on the way to protecting the delicate regional nexus that is the source of Tehran’s Mid-East influence. It is absolutely critical for Iran to keep Assad in power, as the loss of Syria to the West would effectively cut the supply line between Iran and Hezbollah.

It would be difficult to overstate the significance of what appears to be going on here. This is nothing short of a Middle Eastern coup, as Iran looks to displace Saudi Arabia as the regional power broker and as Russia looks to supplant the US as the superpower puppet master. 

In short, the Pentagon’s contention that Russia and Iran have formed a Mid-East “nexus” isn’t akin to the Bush administration’s hollow, largely bogus attempt to demonize America’s foreign policy critics in the eyes of the public by identifying an “axis of evil.” Rather, the Pentagon’s assessment was an attempt to come to grips with a very real effort on the part of Moscow and Tehran to tip the scales in the Mid-East away from Riyadh and Washington.

Solidifying the Assad regime in Syria serves to shore up Hezbollah and presents Tehran with an opportunity to assert itself in the name of combatting terror. The latter point there is critical.

The West has long contended that Iran is the world’s foremost state sponsor of terror, and the Pentagon has variously accused the Quds Force of orchestrating attacks on US soldiers in Iraq after cooperation between Washington and Tehran broke down in the wake of Bush’s “axis of evil” comment.
 
Indeed, Iran was accused of masterminding a plot to kill the Saudi ambassador at a Washington DC restaurant in 2011.

Now, the tables have turned. It is the US, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar who stand accused of sponsoring Sunni extremists and it is Iran, and specifically the Revolutionary Guard, that gets to play hero.
Of course this would be largely impossible without Moscow’s stamp of superpower approval. The optics around the P5+1 nuclear deal were making it difficult for Tehran to be too public in its efforts to bolster Assad.

That doesn’t mean Tehran’s support for the regime in Syria hasn’t been well documented for years, it simply means that Iran needed to observe some semblance of caution, lest its role in Syria should end up torpedoing the nuclear negotiations.

Now that Moscow is officially involved, that caution is no longer obligatory and Iran is now moving to support Russian airstrikes with an outright ground incursion (just as we’ve been saying for weeks). Here’s WSJ:

Iran is expanding its already sizable role in Syria’s multisided war in the wake of Russia’s airstrikes, despite the risk of antagonizing the U.S. and its Persian Gulf allies who want to push aside President Bashar al-Assad.

Politicians in the region close to Tehran as well as analysts who have been closely following its role in Syria say a decision has been made, in close coordination with the Russians and the Assad regime, to increase the number of fighters on the ground through Iran’s network of local and foreign proxies.

The support also could involve more Iranian commanders, military advisers and expert fighters usually assigned to these units, these people said.

Wiam Wahhab, a former Lebanese minister allied to Iran and Mr. Assad, stressed that Iran wouldn’t be dispatching troops in the conventional sense. Instead, they were likely to be officers and advisers from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, or IRGC, he said.

“I know there is a major battle upon us and everything needed for this battle will be made available,” said Mr. Wahhab, who has some members from his own political party fighting in Syria alongside the regime. “There is a plan to carry out offensive operations in more than one spot.”

Experts believe Iran has some 7,000 IRGC members and Iranian paramilitary volunteers operating in Syria already.

Separate from the regular army, the IRGC was founded in the aftermath of the 1979 revolution as an ideological “people’s army” reporting directly to the supreme leader, Iran’s top decision maker.

The more than 100,000-strong force controls a vast military, economic and security power structure in Iran and is in charge of proxies across the region. Its paramilitary organization, the Basij, was the lead force in the crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators in 2009.

Since late 2012 Iran has played a lead role in organizing, training and funding local pro-regime militias in Syria, many of them members of Mr. Assad’s Alawite minority, a branch of Shiite Islam. Experts believe they number between 150,000 and 190,000—possibly more than what remains of Syria’s conventional army.

What’s more, some experts estimate 20,000 Shiite foreign fighters are on the ground, backed by both Shiite Iran and its main proxy in the region, the Lebanese Shiite militia Hezbollah.

About 5,000 of them are new arrivals from Iraq in July and August alone, said Phillip Smyth, a researcher at the University of Maryland. He said this figure was compiled through his own contacts with some of these fighters, flight data between Baghdad and Damascus as well as social media postings. “It looks like it was timed out to coincide with the Russian move,” Mr. Smyth said.

Yes, it certainly does "look like" that, and it wasn't hard to see this coming. Here's another excerpt from our recent analysis:

Back in June, the commander of Iran’s Quds Force, Qasem Soleimaini, visited a town north of Latakia on the frontlines of Syria’s protracted civil war. Following that visit, he promised that Tehran and Damascus were set to unveil a new strategy that would “surprise the world.” 

Just a little over a month later, Soleimani - in violation of a UN travel ban - visited Russia and held meetings with The Kremlin.

Make no mistake, this is shaping up to be the most spectacular US foreign policy debacle since Vietnam - and we don't think that's an exaggeration.

The US, in conjunction with Saudi Arabia and Qatar, attempted to train and support Sunni extremists to overthrow the Assad regime. Some of those Sunni extremists ended up going crazy and declaring a Medeival caliphate putting the Pentagon and Langley in the hilarious position of being forced to classify al-Qaeda as "moderate."

The situation spun out of control leading to hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths and when Washington finally decided to try and find real "moderates" to help contain the Frankenstein monster the CIA had created in ISIS (there were of course numerous other CIA efforts to arm and train anti-Assad fighters, see below for the fate of the most "successful" of those groups), the effort ended up being a complete embarrassment that culminated with the admission that only "four or five" remained and just days after that admission, those "four or five" were car jacked by al-Qaeda in what was perhaps the most under-reported piece of foreign policy comedy in history.

Meanwhile, Iran sensed an epic opportunity to capitalize on Washington's incompetence. Tehran then sent its most powerful general to Russia where a pitch was made to upend the Mid-East balance of power.

The Kremlin loved the idea because after all, Moscow is stinging from Western economic sanctions and Vladimir Putin is keen on showing the West that, in the wake of the controversy surrounding the annexation of Crimea and the conflict in eastern Ukraine, Russia isn't set to back down.

Thanks to the fact that the US chose extremists as its weapon of choice in Syria, Russia gets to frame its involvement as a "war on terror" and thanks to Russia's involvement, Iran gets to safely broadcast its military support for Assad just weeks after the nuclear deal was struck.

Now, Russian airstrikes have debilitated the only group of CIA-backed fighters that had actually proven to be somewhat effective and Iran and Hezbollah are preparing a massive ground invasion under cover of Russian air support.

Worse still, the entire on-the-ground effort is being coordinated by the Iranian general who is public enemy number one in Western intelligence circles and he's effectively operating at the behest of Putin, the man that Western media paints as the most dangerous person on the planet.

As incompetent as the US has proven to be throughout the entire debacle, it's still difficult to imagine that Washington, Riyadh, London, Doha, and Jerusalem are going to take this laying down and on that note, we close with our assessment from Thursday:

If Russia ends up bolstering Iran's position in Syria (by expanding Hezbollah's influence and capabilities) and if the Russian air force effectively takes control of Iraq thus allowing Iran to exert a greater influence over the government in Baghdad, the fragile balance of power that has existed in the region will be turned on its head and in the event this plays out, one should not expect Washington, Riyadh, Jerusalem, and London to simply go gentle into that good night.

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Where Candidates Fear to Tread

SUBHEAD: What Trump represents is the astounding lack of seriousness among people who pretend to be political heavyweights.

By James Kunstler on 3 August 2015 for Kunstler.com -
(http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/where-candidates-fear-to-tread/)


Image above: A caricature of Donald Trump bt Philbert Dominic. From (http://www.justart-e.com/philibert-dominic.html).

That the snarkier circles of political commentary thrill to the elephantine bellowings of Donald J. Trump only shows the pathetic limitations of the snarkists. They enjoy Trump’s filterless mouth, his harsh goadings of the other presidential wannabes, and his supposed telepathic empathy for the suffering public outside the magic kingdom of DC.

Trump has one legitimate issue, immigration, plus a brief against the general incompetence of professional politicians, and a pocketful of grandiose claims about his majestic skills in business and deal-making. 

As business goes in this huckster’s paradise, being a real estate developer is perhaps one click above being a car-dealer, and the fact that some of Trump’s artful deals end up in bankruptcy court might argue against his self-proclaimed mastery. Hence, his relegation to the clown category.

What Trump represents most vividly in this moment of history is the astounding lack of seriousness among people who pretend to be political heavyweights. No one so far, including the lovable Bernie Sanders, has nailed a proper bill of grievances to the White House gate. 

A broad roster of dire issues facing this society ought to be self-evident. But since they are absent so far in the public discussion, here is my list of matters that serious candidates should dare to talk about (all things that a sitting president could take action on):

The security state. America has developed the most horrifying state security apparatus that the world has ever seen in its NSA and associated agencies. It has become the sugar tit for some of the most malevolent enterprises of the corporatocracy — the black ops companies and the weapons dealers. 

The growth of this monster was not mandated by heaven. 

A president could lead the move to deconstruct it. A candidate with a decent respect for our heritage would make this a major campaign issue.

Related to this is the disgusting militarization of the police. Police forces in small towns have no business owning MRAP vehicles, tanks, and heavy weaponry. The federal government gave a lot of this stuff to them. Guess what? It can take the stuff back. Serious candidates should propose this.

There is a more general militarization of national life that ought to be disturbing to thoughtful citizens. I live near a US Naval base. I see enlisted men in town wearing desert camo uniforms on their time off. I resent this hugely. Military personnel at home have no business wearing war theater garb in a place where they are not at war. 

Historically, it was never before the case that US soldiers went about in battle dress at home. This disgusting trend has even been adopted in major league baseball. The New York Mets and the Pittsburgh Pirates have gone on TV wearing camo baseball uniforms. What are they trying to prove? That we are all at war all the time?

The pervasive racketeering in American life is destroying the country. Medical racketeering leads the way. Be very clear: it is a hostage racket. You are the hostage when you are sick or in need of treatment. You will probably agree to anything that will save your life. The medical racketeers know this. 

Hence, we live under the tyranny of the “Charge-master” pricing system that assigns ludicrous costs to everything doled out as “medicine,” with the pharmaceutical industry creaming off whatever remains. A trip to the ER with a broken arm can easily propel a household into financial ruin. A president could apply the antitrust laws to many of these rackets and practices. There is no excuse for failing to take a stand.

The most dangerous rackets of our time are those running through banking and finance. The superficially genial President Obama has done absolutely nothing to defend the public against gross financial misconduct and pervasive accounting fraud. His justice department has failed to prosecute widespread criminality in banking and his regulators at the Securities and Exchange Commission and other agencies have sat on their hands for six years while markets are hijacked and manipulated. 

This behavior gives credence to a greater conspiracy between the governments, the “systemically important” banks, and the Federal Reserve to prop up a Potemkin financialized economy for political cover and favor at the expense of crumbling real economy. 

A potential president has got to swear to defend the public against these institutional turpitudes. A president can lead the way by proposing to reinstate the Glass-Steagall act and by directing the justice department to break up the “systemically important” banks before they implode the entire operating system of the global economy.

President Obama didn’t do a damn thing in the wake of the 2010 Citizens United decision issued by the Supreme Court. This decision endowed the alleged “personhood” of corporations with a “right” to express their political opinions by giving money in unlimited amounts to candidates. 

The decision has been a disaster, since it amounted to a “right” to buy elections. The “personhood” of corporations has evolved during the industrial age from a very circumscribed set of chartered practices to the very dubious realm of “personhood” privileges. 

The basic truth is that corporations do not have duties, obligations, or responsibilities to the public interest; only to their shareholders and boards of directors; and this condition should be self-evident to jurists. Hence, it is necessary to directly address by statute or constitutional amendment the limitations on the personhood of corporations. A president can lead the effort to do this via his party allies in congress.

Why has the foreign policy apparatus of the USA gone into the business of antagonizing Russia? How does it benefit the American people for its government to finance and direct a coup d’é·tat in Ukraine? 

Why did the Senate Foreign Relations Committee cease to function. Some of the GOP candidates for president are sitting senators. Why doesn’t press inquire of their failure? Why is there no public discussion of this very disturbing policy?

President Obama promised in 2009 to put an end to the revolving door between government regulators and the entities they were regulating, banks in particular. He did absolutely nothing about it. 

In fact, he installed a revolving door at the White House, allowing the free movement of such rogues as Robert Rubin, Gary Gensler, Mary Jo White, and Larry Summers in and out of government. 
Such villains are destroying the nation. Any president with a shred of common decency could put an end to this practice.

There you have a few choice things to chew on. They go beyond mere inchoate rage and revulsion against politicians. They represent a very rich agenda of matters the country must attend to if it is going to survive. I wonder if the major media grandees who make up the debate questions will even think of these things.
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