Our Southern Border

Southern Border

Not like the mighty woman of olden fame,
With welcoming arms outstretched unto the sea;
Here at our desert-washed, cruelly-locked gates shall stand
A bloated coward with a stubby hand, whose finger
Points at Mother and Child, and his name
Proclaims Trumpery. From his bloated, orange lips
Drip poisonous bile; his bloodshot eyes command
The stubble-littered border that he would further maim.
“Keep, ancient lands, your wretched poor!” cries he
With curling lips. “Give me your young, your white,
Your stupid masses yearning to be me,
The wretched refuse of your "faith-based" schools.
Send these, the foolish, tempest-tossed to me,
I 'lift' their wallets beside my Golden door!”

Is the probability that the GOP will steal control of the House in the November elections 18.4%?

Is the probability that the GOP will steal control of the House in the November elections 18.4%?


538's hybridization and weighting of polling and other data say there is a 84.6% chance that the Democrats take control of the House in 2018.


Yet the political markets are selling those buy contracts at 66 cents -- political investors think the chance the Dems actually secure this victory is only 66% or 18.4% less.


Can these very different estimates be reconciled?


One hypothesis: Nate Silver's shop does NOT estimate the likelihood of the GOP STEALING votes. When these polls are conducted, people who believe themselves registered state their voting intention, but many of them do not yet know their registrations and thus votes will be suppressed, or that their mail-in votes will be thrown out on a variety of illicit technicalities.


Is 84.6-66=18.6% the (extraordinary) measure of the likelihood that the GOP will "steal" the House in 2018? This is not the probability that they will TRY to steal the election -- that probability may be 100%. It is the probability that they will SUCCEED.


Alternative hypothesis: 18.4% is the measure of the likelihood that the final three weeks of key campaigns will see massive infusions of GOP financing and attack and other ads that will convert massive numbers of voters across many swing districts.


Of course, the 18.4% gap could be explained by a combination of these two, failures of 538's methods, and failure of the political markets. We just don't know.

Trump is the Anti-Eisenhower

Trump is the Anti-Eisenhower.

We once had a brave man who led by example, served his country, built up our infrastructure, and taxed the rich. He enforced the Constitution, protected civil rights, executed the decisions of the Supreme Court, and despite a lifetime career in the military, warned us of the dangers of its overreach.

And I would bet half my portfolio that he did not frenetically cheat on his wife, assault women and girls, cheat on his taxes, collude with the Russians, and call women 'Horseface' and 'Pocahontas' in public or private, much less perform the 1001 embarrassments we have endured in only two years.

I was born in the 50's, so I have watched my country fall from The Great Anti-Fascist Hero to the Monstrous Fascist Anti-Hero who serves, and serves sadistically, only Mammon.

And I have watched the Greatest Generation, some great liberals, some great conservatives, descend into this anti-fact, anti-reason, incoherent, sadistic blood mob, hooting like angry chimps when anyone dares stand in their way. When women came forward crying out about the abomination of a man who hurt them, this sadistic mob attacked those women and those who supported them and despite his falsified appointment to the Court are MORE inclined to vote GOP to punish those who would dare ask for justice from the Grotesque Old Patriarchy.

My generation is the Anti-Merlin, converting gold into dreck.

I have to accept that as Pogo said, rephrasing Commodore Perry, we have met the enemy and he is us.

The US is now the existential threat, the cancer that will kill humankind. Cancer of the wallet — and we must be excised from the human body before we kill off every human being on the planet.

The international community needs to ostracize any nation that does not commit to the Paris Accords and the UN Declaration of Human Rights. No trade, no treaties, no travel. Starve us into submission until we repent and place our leadership into the hands of sane and decent people and commit to trying to avert ecological collapse before it is too late. We can’t clone Eisenhower in time, so like Diogenes we must set off in search of one honest person to lead us out of this darkness.

Shall we find it possible to forgive the Alt Right Soldiers in this dangerous culture war?

A democracy cannot survive if one exposé after another uncovering criminality and deceit is ignored by a blood mob, millions strong, surrounding the castle, protecting evil in power while cheering on attacks against truth tellers.

That’s not painting a rosy picture of nearly half of America, but it’s not inaccurate.

If we bend over backwards to understand what is happening, I think we come to this: there is one time when most of us think it is justified to plug our ears and refuse to risk conversion to another view, and that time is in War.

In War we expect our soldiers to give only name, rank and serial number, refusing to otherwise engage. Resistance to reason is commended as strength against propaganda, coercion, and the risk of treason. We believe that the incredible strain of being a prisoner of war makes it impossible to honestly evaluate propaganda, we are at risk of brainwashing under such pressure, so we are exhorted to treat all communication as false, and to resist instead.

When the soldier hums an anthem and plugs his ears against his captive’s arguments, we applaud his valor. We know that self-interest pushes the captive into embracing the man with the whip and the bread, and the man who refuses and faces lash and starvation instead is a true hero.

But perhaps many never really understood the point of this sort of valor? Especially those raised in closed-minded Churches that praised congregants for clinging to faith in the face of reason? Did they learn the pernicious lesson that plugging one’s ears against attacks on one’s current dogma is not ignorant, but somehow valorous? That refusing to learn, especially that Emperor has no clothes, is not vice but virtue?

Is this a description, perhaps even a defense, of at least some of those Americans who seem deaf to the mountains of evidence that this is an authoritarian Coup and democracy is fast slipping away?

Are they plugging their ears and humming to block us out because this is what the loyal, faithful, obedient soldier does, even when the Officers in Charge have turned traitor?

Surely there is no forgiveness for those who have justified terrorizing sexual assault victims or terrorizing children in detention camps or depriving the poor of food stamps and the elderly of medical care, but what of the others?  The simple, faithful soldiers, already, but unbeknownst to them, victims of this cabal, too? Shall we forgive them?

The Right is Lost to Uncompromising Rigidity. The Left must be moved to save the remnants of a Constitutional Republic in the US.

My hope for productive discourse is waning after decades of working hard to keep channels open.

I am reminded of that poignant moment in The Chosen when, toward the end of World War II when Jews around the world are hearing unrelenting news of horrors in the Camps, the Orthodox boy turns to the Zionist and says, shockingly, "You are worse than Hitler. He killed the body of the Jews but you kill the soul."

The second boy has already enlisted to fight Hitler and later dies in the War. Chaim Potok treats both sides gently and generously, but having the boy die fighting Hitler makes his point clearly enough.

A first impulse is to be repelled by the Orthodox boy's egregious characterization of the Jews who wish to protect Jews in the disapora from another Holocaust by establishing a Jewish state. To say they are worse than Hitler is so outlandish as to seem insane.

But that's where my memory gets traction this morning. That Orthodox boy, for all his vitriol and hyperbole, was not insane -- at least not at the individual and clinical level. What he said would appear insane on an individual level, but it actually made sense GIVEN HIS RELIGIOUS EDUCATION. For the Orthodox believe that a Jewish state must await a Messiah, and rushing it to avert a Holocaust is, in their sacred texts, an insult to God -- and thus harmful to the souls of the patient sufferers awaiting God's intervention.

Is productive discourse possible when people are made "insane" by religious upbringings? I am not naive and neither am I uneducated. I am also not so wedded to one political affiliation that I live in an information ghetto; nor am I so wedded to personalistic analyses that I reject good thinking done by imperfect people -- casting aspersions on good arguments because the author once kicked his dog, cheated on his wife, or even supported an immoral war. So I have no problem recalling that the young Henry Kissinger, when still a teacher at Harvard, published his work on the Congress of Vienna and noted that international and intercultural negotiations broke down terribly when religion was brought to the negotiating table. For Kissinger, the ongoing instability of 19th and 20th century Europe -- and the brutal catastrophes caused by that instability -- was in large part caused by the introduction of uncompromising religious beliefs to the negotiations for peace.

We see this in the Christo-Fascist influence on the Tea Party. They proudly (and ignorantly -- but not insanely, at least not clinically) tout their unwillingness to compromise. When they think God whispered something in their ear, they are willing to take us all to oblivion rather than compromise on it. Of course, negotiations fail when agents on both sides bring uncompromising positions to the table. I have negotiated for companies and countries in my consulting career, and I know that when the other side is uncompromising on something, they will pay too much to get it -- so my side does not object. But when both sides bring uncompromising positions to the table -- specifically, when those two positions directly conflict with one another -- there is no peaceful, stable resolution.

Religious beliefs do just this. Hence they must stay out of the negotiation. They must stay out of the policy discourse. They must remain in the private sphere.

The Founding Fathers in the US were brilliant. They Churches around them pressured them to create a State Church -- and Churchmen to this day compile mountains of falsified history to advance their greedy case to make their own sect the State Religion. Yet the Founding Fathers wished to permanently resist a State Church, separating them from the political sphere, insisting on freedom of religious belief as a foundation stone in the American Republic. Too bad they did not anticipate the centuries long struggle among the illiterati to misconstrue the First Amendment. For if they did, they would have written in no uncertain terms: freedom of PRIVATE religious belief, not the "freedom" to impose one's religious beliefs on others -- which is ludicrous on the face of it, but consistent with the behavior of perhaps half of American Christians.

These lessons sadly must be hard fought and learned slowly. It took until the 1960s for the Civil Rights movement to FINALLY gain enough momentum for the Supreme Court to articulate that prejudices (a subset of beliefs) are private matters -- you can be a racist and never invite a black family to your home, but in the public sphere, you must respect the civil rights of all human beings, and seat anyone who wishes at your lunch counter. If your "club" is a place where business (public sphere) is conducted, it is not private and thus not free from the obligation to behave decently.

Of course, these lessons are being unlearned by the uprising of Tea Party/ Christo-Fascists -- key: uncompromising -- movements which have provided tools to their evil child -- the White Supremacist/Neo-Nazis -- and the newly engaged cousin, the Putin/Russian Eurasianist Fascists -- who never apparently imagined that so many Americans would so foolishly invite them into the Oval Office and defend them so feverishly.

If you thought the ultimate sacrifice by our fathers and grandfathers to stop the Fascists in the 30s and 40s would be enough, you were wrong. If you spent a lifetime wondering how so many Germans allowed the Nazis to commit such horrors, you were as naive as was I.

Fascism at one extreme and statist Communism at the other have something in common and that something -- strongmen doing the bidding of the zealots against the rest -- is natural to humankind. Do you still believe that serfs were all oppressed by brutal Lords and would have voted them out if they had the chance? You may be watching too much Braveheart. Think that Patriots fight over monarchical or dictatorial overtures with life-sacrificing courage? Now I think you are a Mel Gibson fan.

Some thoughtful Libertarians may have once supported Trump when they imagined he would dismantle inefficient regulatory frameworks, but they can no longer in good conscience support precisely the sort of statism their patron saints, Von Mises and Hayek, warned them about.

Some thoughtful Conservatives may have once supported Trump because they imagined that HRC represented too much of a challenge to their core beliefs, but they can no longer in good conscience support precisely the sort of Constitution-burning that the Founding Fathers warned them about.

Yet some continue to defend this takeover from within, this impeding Coup. Why?

Ah, yes. You have failed, as did I, to learn this lesson: once the UNCOMPROMISING values are interjected into the negotiation, it is all over. Christo-Fascists (and their even more dangerous cousins, the Russian Eurasianists) have infiltrated the Conservative and Libertarian movements and polluted what were once well-reasoned camps with UNCOMPROMISING talking points and values. Once the reasonable conservatives abandoned reason for the "insanity" of compromise-free, religious dogma, only the best and brightest and most reflective Conservatives and Libertarians abandoned that toxic platform. Many have, of course, to their credit. But others, like Rand Paul, who apparently adopted without sufficient reflection his father's Libertarianism, have jumped on board the Putin train.

Just because people mimic rational discourse, it does not mean that they are reasoning. I know I have been as naive as any, so this warning may merely be an apologia for taking so long to acknowledge that our country will be saved from the Coup not by reasoning with the Center (especially given the theft of about 8% of the vote by GOP gerrymandering), but by uniting the Left and the disenchanted to believe that the American Experiment, despite all its flaws, is worth saving. It is essential for old, liberal Patriots to keep in mind that for many on the Left, the American Experiment has NOT been good to them, so exhorting them to help us save it will not be an easy task. But Putin's plan for destabilizing the EU, NATO, and the US, and installing a permanent kleptocracy that impoverishes us all is a far worse scenario, even for the youngster with college loans and a minimum wage job, so we must make the case -- well and soon.

Memo to Trump supporters in the summer of 2018

For most of our lives, ignorance was a personal matter. You believe hogwash because you want to believe it? That's your business. You never read a serious non-fiction book because it strains your limited capacities? That's your business. You subscribe to no serious national and foreign affairs journals? That's your business. You don't believe in science or even expertise -- for you, every story is a Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, your only heroes are men who match common sense and decency against the experts who in your annals care little about the little guy, and none of your repertoire includes men like Jonas Salk who stopped polio and gave away the vaccine to anyone willing to believe in knowledge and decency, or well-trained doctors risking and sometimes losing their lives in medecins sans frontieres, or the researcher who spent five years learning that the most effective way to reduce abortion is not right wing rhetoric about family values but access to sex education, contraception and good family planning -- but it was still your business. You know absolutely nothing about the rest of the world because being an Ugly American suits you? That was your business.

You are so astonishingly ignorant that when Fox and Friends says we defeated a "communist" Japan in WW2, or that Denmark's gentle and civilized social democracy is the equivalent of Venezuela (whose circumstances you don't understand, anyway), you blithely watch them anyway. But it is still your business.

We don't have to like you and we certainly cannot respect you, but it's still your own damn business if you wish to live life as a fool.

But now that your ignorance means you have invited a Russian agent into the Oval Office and your stubbornness means you persist in defending an accelerating Coup (and voting for Trump is not remotely the problem of supporting him now) -- and the damage you will do is horrifying and well-known (as millions of citizens of fascist and communist nations have endured -- if they were not killed outright at home, in camps, or in the gulag) -- your ignorance is our business. Now that many of us will have to soon close down our social media accounts and make plans to move our families overseas because we do not want to be as naive as the Jews of mid-30s Germany, your ignorance is our business. Now that you have not rebuked but encouraged attacks on the media, attacks on dissent, the firing of all those professionals providing the checks and balances we so badly need, the lies, lies, and more lies, the kleptocracy that threatens the livelihood of every American who must count on social security and medicare in old age, vile attacks on the safety and security of school children, or on exhausted children carried to our border by frightened parents running from violence, or against clean air and water because you are blithely and inexplicably craven -- your ignorance is our business.

The incoherence makes no difference to you because ideas no longer matter. Some of you turned on the American icon Harley Davidson because they were not prepared to support your delusions. You have yet to figure out that NFL players are kneeling about racial injustice and not because they want to spoil your Sunday afternoon. Your team is the red team, and that's all that seems to matter to you. Some of you are bright enough to know better, but the game has assumed more importance than the reality -- that Trump/Putin may soon be killing journalists, silencing all critics, immiserating all those whose pockets can be picked, and doing what every dictator does -- just what Putin did -- end term limits by fiat (as he did in 2008 implicitly and then in 2012 explicitly) and carry on looting national resources until the oligarchs are engorged with trillions of dollars taken from us and our children and our grandchildren.

When Benjamin Franklin was asked on the steps of Independence Hall whether he had given us a monarchy or something else, he presciently replied (and I am paraphrasing) "A Republic, madam, if you can keep it."

The remarkable story of the American experiment is that we kept it so long. Especially shocking in that one third of us were secret fans of dictatorships all along, and we only learned it recently. (And it is not just the Christo-Fascists who share so much with Putin, but so many others.) But now that your ignorance threatens to end the Republic with a Russian-assisted Coup -- one Putin has been completely open and frank about since 2012 -- your ignorance is our business.

No one ever said you should toss out your conservative values, but we all know Trump/Putin have nothing to do with that. You could have pressured your corrupt Congressional leaders to restrain or impeach Trump and replace him with a sane and honest conservative. You could have demanded they honor their oaths to the Constitution and put country over party. But you did not. So it is our business.

And you should not be surprised that some of us are taking it personally.

Our incapacity to distinguish fantasy from reality will be our death

Samuel Eliot Morison famously said that English North America was colonized by people who believed in the Reformation but not the Renaissance. If the Admiral and historian cared less for alliteration, he might have said that early Americans rejected the Enlightenment.

Just to be clear: Americans have in their DNA a rejection of rational and scientific ways of knowing. We embrace fantasies that we prefer with less than the usual caution and skepticism.

This is the condition that will be the end of the American Empire. But it is not actually uniquely American. It was, after all, nearly universal before the 15th century. If you were well educated, somewhere along the way a professor or two had you read Francis Bacon -- a man who took a giant step forward into the rational world. If very well educated, that professor had you read between the lines in Descartes, discerning Rene's truth from his clever but false hand-waving for the Church, a powerful institution that could not be directly confronted.

Epistemological defect, what I now believe is better described in many as epistemological psychosis, is a widespread disease. It is only partially about insufficient mental capacity. It is in part about the transmission of contagious memes that reflect myths many find impossible to resist.

Surely it is the contagious element, more than the defects in mental capacity, that make some nations in some times more prone to epistemological psychosis than others.

For many -- possibly the majority -- plagued by this brand of irrationality, ideas don't really matter. (Snyder delivers a substantial and subtle proof of the latter in The Road to Unfreedom, but I wish to go elsewhere.). This makes the current paradox possible: Putin's obsession with a unique branch of kleptocratic, Christian Fascism -- one imbued with a powerful view of Russian exceptionalism that must be advanced by the destruction of everything in its way -- is being served by a different American form of kleptocratic, Christo-Fascism that believes in American exceptionalism.

But in this chess game, we are being horribly outplayed. Putin is destroying us. Not only is Trump not remotely up to the match, he's not on our side.

For the rational processing events as they unfold, it is clear that Putin's long stated goals of destabilizing the EU, NATO, the US, and the global economy while re-establishing control over former Iron Curtain and Soviet peoples, are being achieved at an astonishingly high rate.

No one wins one chess game after another like this on merit alone. US Intelligence, diplomatic and military functioning are being short-circuited by alternative, probably treasonous, channels, turning over to Putin this extraordinary series of victories.

Trump's allegiance is to his wealth and power. No use bemoaning now the disloyalty of a five-time draft dodger. What has kept the Trojan doors open to the giant, stuffed bear is a strangely corrupted GOP who abandoned their sworn duty to Constitution, Law, and Country.

And what has made GOP treason possible is the extraordinary and probably lethal level of epistemological psychosis in the American voting population.

We can stare at a Russian Bear and see an Eagle. It's hard to defend yourself when nearly half your countrymen are throwing confetti at the invaders.

The Democratic Party must successfully embrace the populist uprising against Trumpism, and the hijacked-GOP will not allow that to happen without a fight

If a populist swell rises up in 2018 -- one whose ranks are increased by many first-time young voters -- you can be absolutely sure that the craven brains behind the kidnapped-GOP will do everything in their power to steer that populist wave away from the DNC and toward 3rd party candidates.

THIS WILL BE THE DEFINING BATTLE AT THE END OF AMERICAN EMPIRE.

We survive if the DNC successfully embraces the populist uprising against fascism and corruption, incompetence and inhumanity.

We do not survive if the GOP fools even a few hundred thousand of them in key places to imagine -- ludicrously -- that the GOP (a veritable existential threat to the human species, soon to invite massive global coordination against our trade, nuclear and environmental policies, as well as a damning force for plutocracy and the death knell for Constitutional democracy) and the Democrats are "the same."

The GOP's task is made much easier by how very easily the disenchanted leftist skeptics fell prey to this damning logic before.

The DNC must do more than they did in 2016. I said at the time that HRC needed to invite Sanders to run with her -- and even that may not have been enough as many Sanders supporters (we don't know how many were Russian bots) appeared to think like radical rightists who are quick to call Republicans with a conscience RINOs, and freaked out about Sanders supporting Hillary over Trump -- the only rational and ethical course of action available to anyone in his position.

Righteous indignation and passion have their place, even more so when those in control of government threaten to tear children from the arms of their mothers, when corporations are let loose to destroy the air we breathe and the water we drink, when environmental and nuclear proliferation treaties are abandoned with narcissistic caprice.

BUT unbridled passion -- the kind we see on the radical right (1/3 of Americans, shockingly) and the radical left (perhaps 1/10 of us) -- the sort that cannot stop to reason, learn something new, COMPROMISE -- will kill us all.

Those of us who have not yet descended into the primordial ooze of American ignorance -- fueled by blinding anger -- must remember Yeats.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

THE BEST LACK ALL CONVICTION; WHILE THE WORST

ARE FULL OF PASSIONATE INTENSITY.

Compromise between the DNC and the populist uprising against the evils of Trumpism must happen or we are all lost. Set aside your passions long enough to think through what must be done. The GOP will be fueling divisions on the left from now through the elections.

Stand together. Don't be fooled. Don't be a fool. There is too much at stake.