Generational Dynamics World View

[John J. Xenakis]

** 22-Oct-2019 Was Hillary a senile delusional old hag in 2016?

(10-22-2019, 08:20 AM)Marypoza Wrote: > I'm not. Why are you believing a senile delusional old bag who is
> waaaaay past her expiration date & who attempts to sabotage a
> fellow sistah?

So, was Hillary a senile delusional old hag when she ran for president
in 2016? Republicans thought so.

If not, then at what point between then and now did she turn into a
senile delusional old hag?

(10-22-2019, 08:23 AM)Marypoza Wrote: > actually now that l think about it l don't think the hag is really
> female

Really?? Was Hillary not really female when she ran for president in
2016?

If not, then at what point between then and now did she stop being
female?

Lol! Perhaps she had a gender change operation.

[Marypoza]

(10-22-2019, 09:41 AM)John J. Xenakis Wrote: ** 22-Oct-2019 Was Hillary a senile delusional old hag in 2016?

(10-22-2019, 08:20 AM)Marypoza Wrote: >   I'm not. Why are you believing a senile delusional old bag who is
>   waaaaay past her expiration date & who attempts to sabotage a
>   fellow sistah?

So, was Hillary a senile delusional old hag when she ran for president
in 2016?  Republicans thought so.

If not, then at what point between then and now did she turn into a
senile delusional old hag?

(10-22-2019, 08:23 AM)Marypoza Wrote: >   actually now that l think about it l don't think the hag is really
>   female

Really??  Was Hillary not really female when she ran for president in
2016?

If not, then at what point between then and now did she stop being
female?

Lol!  Perhaps she had a gender change operation.

-- yes yes & no

[John J. Xenakis]

** 22-Oct-2019 World View: Divisiveness

(08-28-2019, 07:19 AM)John J. Xenakis Wrote: > ** 28-Aug-2019 World View: World War III
> Scenario

> Note that when Japan bombed and sank the USS Panay, America stayed
> neutral because the people didn't want to fight. And then when
> the war in Europe began, America stayed neutral because the people
> didn't want to fight. But the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the
> Bataan Death March caused the "Regeneracy," the political battles
> were put aside (despite the fact that FDR was even more
> divisive than Trump is today), and the country united behind
> FDR to fight the Japanese.

(08-30-2019, 08:20 AM)David Horn Wrote: > I know you have strongly held views, but it's impossible to
> believe that anyone has been as divisive as DJT. FDR had some
> serious detractors, but Trump is actually building a potent
> opposition that may simply be unwilling to accept Trump 2.0, of
> that occurs. He's already a minority POTUS, and there is little
> doubt that, if reelected, he will be even moreso in 2021. That
> will be the third minority election in this century -- fully 50%!
> I can't see that being opposed quietly.

Divisiveness isn't caused by the president. It's caused by
the generational era.

FDR was blamed for perpetuating the Great Depression, and for
implementing a bunch of programs that a lot of people hated. FDR
seriously split the country because of his proposal to pack the
Supreme Court, something Democrats are talking about again. Like
Trump, FDR was divisive because many people loved him, and many people
hated him.

In the current era, Democrats have been extremely divisive. They
hated Bush, and even got a movie made in 2006, Death of a President,
that portrayed the assassination of Bush. Obama's presidency was
supposed to heal racism, but instead he used every opportunity he
could to stoke racial hatred. The left constantly threatened the Tea
Partiers, calling them teabaggers, and close Obama advisor James Hoffa
frequently threatened Tea Partiers with violence.

The Democrats have been planning impeachment literally from the moment
Trump took office. They've spent three years humiliating themselves
trying to bring about a political lynching of Trump with one phony
charge after another.

Now Democrats are now using a King James/King Charles style Star
Chamber. The Star Chamber was abolished by the bloody English Civil
War, but the Democrats are reviving it, to lynch Trump by any means
possible.

Speaking of divisiveness, as cynical as I am, I was still surprised
that Democrats have shown such enormous contempt for blacks having the
lowest unemployment rate in history. But actually, if you look at
history, it makes a lot of sense. Democrats in the Civil War wanted
blacks to remain in slavery, then they formed the KKK to lynch blacks
for over a century, so now they're still contemptuous of blacks
getting jobs, since unemployment keeps blacks in slavery, which is
where the Democrats have wanted them for 150 years. It's pretty
sickening.

So I know that you have strongly held views, but Trump is not
particularly divisive. It's the Democrats who would say that even the
most benign Trump policies are divisive, even something like lowering
unemployment rate for blacks.

But the other thing to notice is that this kind of divisiveness goes
well beyond America. In this generational crisis era, xenophobia,
nationalism, and tribalism have been growing all over the world,
particularly as worldwide economic growth has been slowing. There are
bitterly divisive battles going on in Britain, Israel, Italy, and
Hungary in Europe. There are conflicts today in many places,
including Syria-Idlib, Iraq, Afghanistan, Mexico, Somalia, Nigeria,
Sudan, South Sudan, Libya, Pakistan, Egypt, Democratic Republic of the
Congo, Yemen, Ethiopia, Ukraine. There are riots in Hong Kong,
Lebanon, Chile, Catalonia, and elsewhere. The Brexit debate is
particularly hilarious.

So it isn't Trump that's causing divisiveness. It's the generational
Crisis era that causes economic stagnation, xenophobia, nationalism,
and tribalism, and those things cause divisiveness. This is all part
of "The Gathering Storm" that's leading to WW III, with or without
Trump.

[Cynic Hero '86]

LOL, Xenakis to replying to posts made two months ago when there were over half a dozen posts made just yesterday and today. I know the subject matter of the Yesterday's posts made you uncomfortable because it refutes the notion of 330 million Americans all loving liberal democracy and hating all totalitarianism, but that just isn't true. A lot of us have come to like totalitarianism and want the creation of a nationalist military state. Hillary is a globalist who is hated by the majority of the citizenry. You boomers can't even run political primaries according to the normal processes because doing so would return a result contrary to globalism. Gabbard, Williamson, Yang and Bullock are far more representative of what average Joe six-pack Americans believe in than Hillary or warren. On the Right it is TRUMP, NOT Jeb Bush, Graham or the late Mccain; who is far more representative of what the average Joe six-pack wants.

Boomers attempt to preserve the 1990s method and mindset regarding how America does things even after 9/11 is resulting in the government losing its legitimacy with the American People.

Hillary is the Russian Agent, Not Bernie or Tulsi. The notion that the Clintons are patriotic is something only stupid dog eared boomers would believe in. Warren won't be accepted as the nominee, and I'm Not referring to republicans who will side with trump, I'm referring to large segments of the democrats themselves, who will knife the woketards in the back if the latter forces through warren as nominee.

[John J. Xenakis]

** 22-Oct-2019 World View: Russia-Turkey deal in Syria

• Erdogan and Putin shake hands in Sochi on Tuesday

Guest Wrote:> The Russian media has been going wild saying how America abandoned
> their posts and the Russia have moved in and taken over. They are
> smirking and laughing like they defeated America in battle.

> The one time Russian troops did clash with Americans in Syria they
> got ripped to pieces. The Russians had hundreds of their soldiers
> killed and the Americans didn't even get wounded.

> It's also interesting how the Russian media gloated about finding
> fresh Krispy Kreme dounts, gluten free noodles, Coke and Pepsi,
> and a variety of expensive food products in the abandoned
> base. They are trying to portray American troops as pansies. It
> seems to be backfiring. Many in Russia are impressed at how well
> taken care of US troops are and how well equipped the small base
> is. (Tents with A/C, video game consoles, comfortable bedding,
> etc.) American soldiers have top notch equipment, vehicles, kit,
> and food, and now everyone knows it.

> The Russians are a bunch petty and vindictive thug losers ruled by
> a deceitful goat.

Russia's president Vladimir Putin and Turkey's president Recep Tayip
Erdogan, met in Sochi on Tuesday, and after six hours hammered out an
agreement setting up a buffer zone in northern Syria, 120 km long and
32 km deep.

Both Turkey and Russia will patrol the buffer zone, and require what
Erdogan calls "YPG terrorists," referring to the Kurdish People's
Protection Units (YPG), which is thought to be allied with the
terrorist Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK). The PKK have conducted
nurmerous bombings and terrorist acts within Turkey, and have
conducted a 30-year insurgency.

Turkey's incursion into Syria will not go any further. The remaining
parts of the buffer zone will be patrolled by Russian military police
and Syrian border patrols.

One thing that isn't clear to me is what the Arabs in the Syrian
National Army (SNA) that have been cooperating with Turkey are going
to do. It's these Arabs who have been massacring the Kurds, and now
they'll have to be brought under control by either Turkey or Russia or
Syria or all of them.

The ceasefire will be extended another 150 hours, to give the YPG time
to evacuate the region.

Erdogan has said that, in the future, 1-2 million Syrian refugees,
among the 3.5 million that Turkey has been hosting, will be moved into
the buffer zone.

Some American politicians are expressing alarm over the rise in
influence of Russia. This is fine with me, as I explained in my
article a couple of days ago. China is our enemy, not Russia. And if
Russia is taking over the job of protecting the Kurds from the Turks,
then America has one less headache and Russia has one more.

** 18-Oct-19 World View -- Generational analysis of Turkey-Syria war and ceasefire agreement
** http://www.generationaldynamics.com/pg/x...tm#e191018


---- Sources:

-- Russia, Turkey Decide On Joint Syria Patrols After Putin-Erdogan
Meeting
https://www.rferl.org/a/turkey-s-erdogan...29111.html
(RFERL, 22-Oct-2019)

-- Russia, Turkey seal power in northeast Syria with accord
https://www.pressdemocrat.com/news/world...l-power-in
(AP, 22-Oct-2019)

[David Horn]

(10-22-2019, 11:46 AM)John J. Xenakis Wrote: Divisiveness isn't caused by the president.  It's caused by the generational era.

1. FDR was blamed for perpetuating the Great Depression, and for implementing a bunch of programs that a lot of people hated.  FDR seriously split the country because of his proposal to pack the Supreme Court, something Democrats are talking about again.  Like Trump, FDR was divisive because many people loved him, and many people hated him.
   
   
2. In the current era, Democrats have been extremely divisive.  They hated Bush, and even got a movie made in 2006, Death of a President, that portrayed the assassination of Bush.  Obama's presidency was supposed to heal racism, but instead he used every opportunity he could to stoke racial hatred.  The left constantly threatened the Tea Partiers, calling them teabaggers, and close Obama advisor James Hoffa frequently threatened Tea Partiers with violence.
   
   
3. Democrats have been planning impeachment literally from the moment Trump took office.  They've spent three years humiliating themselves trying to bring about a political lynching of Trump with one phony charge after another.
   
   
4. Democrats are now using a King James/King Charles style Star Chamber.  The Star Chamber was abolished by the bloody English Civil War, but the Democrats are reviving it, to lynch Trump by any means possible.
   
   
5. Talking of divisiveness, as cynical as I am, I was still surprised that Democrats have shown such enormous contempt for blacks having the
   lowest unemployment rate in history.  But actually, if you look at history, it makes a lot of sense.  Democrats in the Civil War wanted blacks to remain in slavery, then they formed the KKK to lynch blacks for over a century, so now they're still contemptuous of blacks getting jobs, since unemployment keeps blacks in slavery, which is where the Democrats have wanted them for 150 years.  It's pretty sickening.
   
   
6. So I know that you have strongly held views, but Trump is not particularly divisive.  It's the Democrats who would say that even the most benign Trump policies are divisive, even something like lowering unemployment rate for blacks.
   
   
7. But the other thing to notice is that this kind of divisiveness goes well beyond America.  In this generational crisis era, xenophobia, nationalism, and tribalism have been growing all over the world, particularly as worldwide economic growth has been slowing.  There are bitterly divisive battles going on in Britain, Israel, Italy, and Hungary in Europe.  There are conflicts today in many places, including Syria-Idlib, Iraq, Afghanistan, Mexico, Somalia, Nigeria, Sudan, South Sudan, Libya, Pakistan, Egypt, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Yemen, Ethiopia, Ukraine.  There are riots in Hong Kong, Lebanon, Chile, Catalonia, and elsewhere.  The Brexit debate is particularly hilarious.
   
   
8. So it isn't Trump that's causing divisiveness.  It's the generational Crisis era that causes economic stagnation, xenophobia, nationalism, and tribalism, and those things cause divisiveness.  This is all part of "The Gathering Storm" that's leading to WW III, with or without Trump.
   

Answering in order:

1. Trump and FDR may have the loyalty thing in common, but Trump stopped acting like a President before he even got sworn-in, so let's keep a bit of perspective here.
   
   
2. The GOP has been over-the-top since Gingrich, and things have only gotten worse.  They have actually stolen one election (2000), and corrupted another (2016) and they do so with impunity.  Calling the Obama's hate mongers is about as far off the reservation as you can get.  Sorry, but accepting everyone as equal may deflate your view of being white-and-right, but it's not racism.
   
   
3. Now we're deep in the Kool-Aid.  The evidence from the Mueller Report alone was compelling enough that over 500 prosecutors declared the report an indictment, and half of them are Republicans.  Since then, Trump and his gang of misfits have stopped pretending, and are breaking the law in public.  Hint: that doesn't make it less illegal.
   
   
4. A Star Chamber?  Really?  This is all happening in plain sight, or is your complaint that "due process" is lacking at this point.  Hint: an investigation is not an impeachment, and one held in the open soils the evidence being collected.  That's why grand juries are totally secret.  This is a lot more open than any grand jury, so you might take a minute, and review the concept of a Star Chamber.
   
   
5. Unemployment in general is down.  Will it stay down once the $1Trillion deficit generating tax cut stops working?  I don't know, but we'll be the worse for it.
   
   
6. If Trump isn't divisive, then I'm actually living on Mars.
   
   
7. On this we actually agree.  Authoritarian-populism is rampant, and the case is pretty easy to determine: massive and persistent inequality.  The world's Billionaires either have to give-up some of their mostly illicit gains, or the war you see coming will be an anarchistic melee.
   
   
8. AGW will have more to say than anything, but inequality has to decline or the chaos will be bad -- really bad.  No WW-III though.
   

[John J. Xenakis]

Wow! Our respective world views have absolutely nothing in common.

By the way, the Martian InSight lander is suddenly back in service,
after getting stuck 8 months ago. Don't forget to take some snapshots
of it for your memory book.

[David Horn]

(10-22-2019, 04:14 PM)John J. Xenakis Wrote: Wow!  Our respective world views have absolutely nothing in common.

I agree; that's a point we can share.

[pbrower2a]

(10-22-2019, 11:46 AM)John J. Xenakis Wrote: ** 22-Oct-2019 World View: Divisiveness



Divisiveness isn't caused by the president.  It's caused by
the generational era.

Some eras are inherently divisive, and some aren't. It is obvious that American life is least divided just after a Crisis war is over (young men are more likely to be accustomed to taking orders and enduring privation and are unwilling to let anything get in the way of peace, prosperity, and normality) and most divided as America starts to go from an Awakening Era to an Unraveling because the Idealist generation has stretched things as far as it can while the Reactive generation is more likely to put individual gain and comfort above a Voyage to the Interior that it can never understand.    

This said, some Presidents are more likely to enhance the divisiveness of a time and some are more likely to mollify the divisiveness of a time. Those who push a one-sided agenda and are unwilling to back down to get what they want piecemeal are more likely to divide America than are those who can make pragmatic compromise to get most of what they want more gradually. Thus I contrast Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump and find Trump severely lacking. As far as that goes -- Barack Obama has much the same political skills as Ronald Reagan began with as a communicator... the difference was that the Hard Right was ready to stop Obama as the moderate Left was unable to stop Reagan. 

Quote:FDR was blamed for perpetuating the Great Depression, and for
implementing a bunch of programs that a lot of people hated.  FDR
seriously split the country because of his proposal to pack the
Supreme Court, something Democrats are talking about again.  Like
Trump, FDR was divisive because many people loved him, and many people
hated him.

He was blamed wrongly. The Great Depression reached its low point in stock-market valuations in the autumn of 1932 (stock-market valuations are a coincident indicator in economics), and the perception of danger ended after the Bank Holiday that FDR established, after which major reforms of banking made any further erosion of the economy from the low point . After the Bank Holiday, America started on a recovery that, within six years, would have most Americans living better than they did around the time of the Great Stock Market Crash. 

According to the arch-conservative economist Friederich Hayek, it is the speculative boom leading into the financial panic (as in 1857, 1929, and 2008) it is the speculative that does the real damage by devouring capital that might otherwise go into the gritty investment in plant and equipment that creates jobs and genuine investment. People perceive easy money from speculation in paper instead of investing in small businesses that create real prosperity for owner-operators and do far better at spreading economic opportunity through capital formation than does a welfare system, let alone a speculative bubble certain to burst.

It is possible that the growth from the nadir of the Great Depression was mostly the result of people out of work starting small businesses such as one-location supermarkets. One may have a reality close to that which Doctor Pangloss (from Voltaire's Candide) would offer: that the aftermath of an economic meltdown is the best time in which to start a small business. Opportunities to get jobs in bureaucratic organizations are few, so starting a small business in which one must work 70-80 hours a week building a business is better than anything else that anyone can do. Because so many people are out of work, labor is cheap for its overall competence and diligence. Inventories, and real estate and equipment that got devalued greatly are available cheaply. Employees recognize the need to seek out customers who make their jobs possible, so everyone who has a job is hustling to get a revenue stream if he cares about his private-sector job. The economy goes in short order from people looking for easy income from short-term, lavish returns from highly-liquid assets to the unpleasant default in survival through long-term, low yield means that require much effort that one cannot reasonably abandon. The 1930's were arguably the best time ever in which to start a small business.

So what is the difference between the 1930's and the 2010's? The economic meltdowns from 2007 and 1929 were similarly severe after a year and a half. From the middle of 1931, bank runs and a deflationary policy in the money supply made things far worse. By 2009 the federal government was backing the banks, so businesses and investors did not find that their bank accounts were gone when payrolls, accounts payable, loans, and taxes came due. By 1931, businesses that had done nothing wrong started going under, and things got steadily worse. Governments had to retrench because their tax revenues vanished.   Early in 2009 the effects of the government backing the financial industry ensured that things would not get as bad as they did in the 1930's. The bank runs did not happen. Businesses could meet payrolls, accounts payable, loans, and taxes. Governments did not need to shrink just to meet the fall in revenues; they could borrow. 

But note well: the economic elites got rescued, and they had the means for spending lavishly on politics. They backed exactly the sorts of people who shared the agenda of tycoons, rural magnates, and executives: the idea that no human suffering could ever be in excess so long as the Master Class gets whatever it wants -- which is its own indulgence while the rest of Humanity is reduced to peonage with survival as a dubious privilege easily lost. 95% of the people are to suffer for 1-2%, maybe 3% would do well in any economic system (like physicians, engineers, accountants, and senior military officers), and 1-2% would get to live like sultans in oil-rich kingdoms with small populations. What those elites wanted was ultra-cheap labor in a society in which the proles had responsibilities to the rich and the rich had none to the proles. You can blame the economic elites from the Boom Generation, many of them educated in MBA schools in which they learned finance but not human values -- and, impoverished in learning the liberal arts, gravitated to the more primitive drives of sex, drugs (OK, it became fine whiskey instead of cocaine fashionable for a short time), bureaucratic power, material gain and comfort, and mass culture. Donald Trump exemplifies such, and he shows how putrid such a philosophy can get.

If you think that such is essential to capitalism, then think again. I know of one clearly-capitalist community in which men do not ditch a wife when they no longer looks like a Playmate of the Monty ™, who have no tendency to drugs stronger than alcohol, whose community has few white-collar jobs, in which the material standard of technological indulgence is about one hundred years in the past, and for that has largely been immune to the degrading effects of an amoral mass culture. 

Such people are the Old Order Amish... you might not want to live as they do, but their way of life is far more sustainable than the one that Trump stands for. Individual prosperity depends upon the size of the farm that an Amish farmer can operate (with his children's labor, of course), and the only way in which to get rich in their world is to be a capitalist. 

I could make the case that the health of a capitalist society is the extent to which this is true: that almost the only people who can get rich are the capitalists. The fault with Soviet communism was that the people who got rich were the bureaucratic administrators better at feathering their nests and ensuring that their own kids could succeed them than in creating prosperity through entrepreneurial innovation. Guess what is happening in America? Our bureaucratic elites are beginning to look much like a nomenklatura in "socialist" states.      
   

Quote:In the current era, Democrats have been extremely divisive.  They
hated Bush, and even got a movie made in 2006, Death of a President,
that portrayed the assassination of Bush.  Obama's presidency was
supposed to heal racism, but instead he used every opportunity he
could to stoke racial hatred.  The left constantly threatened the Tea
Partiers, calling them teabaggers, and close Obama advisor James Hoffa
frequently threatened Tea Partiers with violence.

Wrong. The Hard Right has been fostering division along ethnic and class lines since the 1980's. It has sought to exploit the class line between educated and under-educated people, between regions in states and between states, and between ethnic groups. Its efforts have degenerated into tribalism. The Tea Party exists as an effort to give populist support to a reactionary agenda that holds that multitudes must suffer for economic elites. The Hard Right believes that capitalism is essentially and incorrigibly corrupt, inequitable, cruel, hierarchical, and repressive -- just as doctrinaire Marxist say that capitalism is. The difference between the American Hard Right and doctrinaire Marxists is that the American Hard Right endorses what Marxists consider the horrible vices of capitalism. Capitalism saved itself by making avid consumers  out of the proletariat, and contemporary plutocracy seeks to create an economy that fits a Marxist stereotype of capitalism. 

Some people have caught on. Blacks, Asians, and non-Cuban Hispanics have caught on. Maybe well-off blacks, Asians, and non-Cuban Hispanics have long recognized that the poor of their groups deserve attention from the well-off. Thus the black bourgeoisie sees responsibility toward blacks left behind. "Asians" is of course a category which includes peoples as diverse as Koreans and Pakistanis... but all of the Asian groups that I have met have shown respect for formal learning essential to smooth functioning in American life. The only Hispanics that I have known in large numbers are Mexican-Americans, and they seem to insist that their kids pay attention in school so that they do not become a permanent underclass in intractable poverty. The people not catching on are most white people. 

So what is wrong with White America? The white upper class and middle class generally has little contact with poor whites and really cares little for them. You do not see white people from Suburbia serving as mentors to poor whites in Appalachia.  Therein lies much of the division in White America. Well-off blacks, Asians, and Hispanics vote like the poor people in their own groups. 

As for the movie Death of a President... it is largely forgotten. Maybe it wasn't good enough to remember -- or so awful (think of Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, Heaven's Gate, Inchon!, Howard the Duck, or Gigli) so awful that they leave lasting impressions upon those unfortunate enough to have seen them.

Quote:The Democrats have been planning impeachment literally from the moment
Trump took office.  They've spent three years humiliating themselves
trying to bring about a political lynching of Trump with one phony
charge after another.

If you want an analogy, consider Richard Nixon. About everyone recognizes that Richard Nixon ran a largely-clean campaign and had no connections to gangland creeps before being elected. To be sure, Nixon had some spiders in his soul, but not enough to overpower his rationality until he got full of himself when the power of the Presidency went  to his head. Nixon did not have a legacy of sleazy dealings in business. He had a keen legal mind. 

Donald Trump was a sleazy, hollow character before he became President -- and he saw his status as a celebrity as a rationale for his excesses as a leader. Corrupt dealings were already in place before Trump started his campaign for the Presidency. Trump has seen his business connections as things to enrich him and his progeny while President with the aid of his power as President. Three years into his Presidency, Nixon started his dirty-tricks campaign against opponents and dissidents; that was the start of his downfall. Sure, Nixon could win in a landslide while the full nastiness was only a rumor to most Americans, and when "Tricky Dick" was simply an echo of his start as a California politician. It took about two years from the start of the dirty-tricks campaign for the Nixon Presidency to unravel. It has taken a little more time with Trump -- with far-bigger offenses. 

So what is the difference? Trump has more people enabling him for partisan ends. His supporters are largely those politicians that the Tea Party elected or tolerated. Donald Trump is the apotheosis of the anti-human agenda of the backers of the Tea Party.  Remember well that the financial backers of Tea Party pols wanted to divide America on class lines between a Master Class and its victims.  

Quote:Now Democrats are now using a King James/King Charles style Star
Chamber.  The Star Chamber was abolished by the bloody English Civil
War, but the Democrats are reviving it, to lynch Trump by any means
possible.

Which is exactly what gangsters and large-scale cheats say of the process that takes them down. This is exactly what I expect from drug traffickers, child pornographers, human traffickers, and large-scale financial cheats. For such people I shed no tears. 

Quote:Speaking of divisiveness, as cynical as I am, I was still surprised
that Democrats have shown such enormous contempt for blacks having the
lowest unemployment rate in history.  But actually, if you look at
history, it makes a lot of sense.  Democrats in the Civil War wanted
blacks to remain in slavery, then they formed the KKK to lynch blacks
for over a century, so now they're still contemptuous of blacks
getting jobs, since unemployment keeps blacks in slavery, which is
where the Democrats have wanted them for 150 years.  It's pretty
sickening.

Uhhh -- blacks have been getting better formal education and starting small businesses, two of the surest means of escaping poverty. No single politician deserves credit for that, unless it is Obama for economic stewardship that allowed one of the longest periods of economic growth in history. Check an overlay of Eisenhower and Obama elections, and you will notice that the Democratic and Republican Parties have largely switched constituencies over about sixty years. The exceptions are in the High Plains and Mormon Country, and those could be at risk to Trump and the GOP in 2020. Donald Trump is an arrogant, obnoxious @$$hole irrespective of his political values.

Quote:So I know that you have strongly held views, but Trump is not
particularly divisive.  It's the Democrats who would say that even the
most benign Trump policies are divisive, even something like lowering
unemployment rate for blacks.

Trump may not have intended to intensify divisions that already exist, but he has certainly aggravated them through his incompetence and personal nastiness. This is a man who mocks the handicapped -- something that I learned not do do when I was a small child. I learned early -- "See that disabled veteran? You might have to make that sacrifice for your country! See that blind person? There but for the Grace of God go you!" I am on the autistic spectrum, and my life is a mess for that. To be sure, I would rather have Asperger Syndrome than anything else in the DMS-IV classification (including the extreme narcissism or even sociopathy of Donald Trump)... I would rather be black than have Asperger syndrome, and I recognize that white privilege still persists. (I would not give up some points of IQ because my intellect is all that I am).

Incompetence and malign intent have much the same effect in bringing about tragedy... and good organizations root them out of positions of responsibility so that incompetence or malign intent puts one in positions in which one can hurt only oneself. With Donald Trump I cannot make a ready distinction, but all in all it would have been better had he been brought up without privilege and had to make a living selling used cars. In view of his character I might expect odometer fraud from him.      

Quote:But the other thing to notice is that this kind of divisiveness goes
well beyond America.  In this generational crisis era, xenophobia,
nationalism, and tribalism have been growing all over the world,
particularly as worldwide economic growth has been slowing.  There are
bitterly divisive battles going on in Britain, Israel, Italy, and
Hungary in Europe.  There are conflicts today in many places,
including Syria-Idlib, Iraq, Afghanistan, Mexico, Somalia, Nigeria,
Sudan, South Sudan, Libya, Pakistan, Egypt, Democratic Republic of the
Congo, Yemen, Ethiopia, Ukraine.  There are riots in Hong Kong,
Lebanon, Chile, Catalonia, and elsewhere.  The Brexit debate is
particularly hilarious.

Happy people do not rebel.  Maybe if times were not so bad...  

Quote:So it isn't Trump that's causing divisiveness.  It's the generational
Crisis era that causes economic stagnation, xenophobia, nationalism,
and tribalism, and those things cause divisiveness.  This is all part
of "The Gathering Storm" that's leading to WW III, with or without
Trump.

So what happens if Trump manages to avoid removal by Congress, but he and the Republican majority in the Senate also goes down with him in the 2020 general election?

The world has a general problem. Much of it is prosperous enough that most people cannot improve their lives just by buying more stuff. So what happens to the proletariat who, as Marx put it, has nothing to sell but its labor, when making more stuff is no longer a means of creating more prosperity? I suggest Piketty, who is only a start but is as far as anyone goes. 

So how does a post-scarcity society solve the issue of workers becoming superfluous? Rejection of technology so that people must work harder for the basics again? I will pass on the mass culture that the Old Order Amish reject with their rejection of the technologies of mass media, but do not ask me to give up J S Bach or Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart -- or the cinematic wonders of about eighty years ago.

[pbrower2a]

(10-22-2019, 11:46 AM)John J. Xenakis Wrote: ** 22-Oct-2019 World View: Divisiveness



Divisiveness isn't caused by the president.  It's caused by
the generational era.

Some eras are inherently divisive, and some aren't. It is obvious that American life is least divided just after a Crisis war is over (young men are more likely to be accustomed to taking orders and enduring privation and are unwilling to let anything get in the way of peace, prosperity, and normality) and most divided as America starts to go from an Awakening Era to an Unraveling because the Idealist generation has stretched things as far as it can while the Reactive generation is more likely to put individual gain and comfort above a Voyage to the Interior that it can never understand.    

This said, some Presidents are more likely to enhance the divisiveness of a time and some are more likely to mollify the divisiveness of a time. Those who push a one-sided agenda and are unwilling to back down to get what they want piecemeal are more likely to divide America than are those who can make pragmatic compromise to get most of what they want more gradually. Thus I contrast Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump and find Trump severely lacking.  

Quote:FDR was blamed for perpetuating the Great Depression, and for
implementing a bunch of programs that a lot of people hated.  FDR
seriously split the country because of his proposal to pack the
Supreme Court, something Democrats are talking about again.  Like
Trump, FDR was divisive because many people loved him, and many people
hated him.

He was blamed wrongly, and only by a tiny minority that has not gained respect over time. The Great Depression reached its low point in stock-market valuations in the autumn of 1932 (stock-market valuations are a coincident indicator in economics), and the perception of danger ended after the Bank Holiday that FDR established, after which major reforms of banking made any further erosion of the economy from the low point . After the Bank Holiday, America started on a recovery that, within six years, would have most Americans living better than they did around the time of the Great Stock Market Crash. 

According to the arch-conservative economist Friederich Hayek, it is the speculative boom leading into the financial panic (as in 1857, 1929, and 2008) it is the speculative that does the real damage by devouring capital that might otherwise go into the gritty investment in plant and equipment that creates jobs and genuine investment. People perceive easy money from speculation in paper instead of investing in small businesses that create real prosperity for owner-operators and do far better at spreading economic opportunity through capital formation than does a welfare system, let alone a speculative bubble certain to burst.

It is possible that the growth from the nadir of the Great Depression was mostly the result of people out of work starting small businesses such as one-location supermarkets. One may have a reality close to that which Doctor Pangloss (from Voltaire's Candide) would offer: that the aftermath of an economic meltdown is the best time in which to start a small business. Opportunities to get jobs in bureaucratic organizations are few, so starting a small business in which one must work 70-80 hours a week building a business is better than anything else that anyone can do. Because so many people are out of work, labor is cheap for its overall competence and diligence. Inventories, and real estate and equipment that got devalued greatly are available cheaply. Employees recognize the need to seek out customers who make their jobs possible, so everyone who has a job is hustling to get a revenue stream if he cares about his private-sector job. The economy goes in short order from people looking for easy income from short-term, lavish returns from highly-liquid assets to the unpleasant default in survival through long-term, low yield means that require much effort that one cannot reasonably abandon. The 1930's were arguably the best time ever in which to start a small business.

So what is the difference between the 1930's and the 2010's? The economic meltdowns from 2007 and 1929 were similarly severe after a year and a half. From the middle of 1931, bank runs and a deflationary policy in the money supply made things far worse. By 2009 the federal government was backing the banks, so businesses and investors did not find that their bank accounts were gone when payrolls, accounts payable, loans, and taxes came due. By 1931, businesses that had done nothing wrong started going under, and things got steadily worse. Governments had to retrench because their tax revenues vanished.   Early in 2009 the effects of the government backing the financial industry ensured that things would not get as bad as they did in the 1930's. The bank runs did not happen. Businesses could meet payrolls, accounts payable, loans, and taxes. Governments did not need to shrink just to meet the fall in revenues; they could borrow. 

But note well: the economic elites got rescued, and they had the means for spending lavishly on politics. They backed exactly the sorts of people who shared the agenda of tycoons, rural magnates, and executives: the idea that no human suffering could ever be in excess so long as the Master Class gets whatever it wants -- which is its own indulgence while the rest of Humanity is reduced to peonage with survival as a dubious privilege easily lost. 95% of the people are to suffer for 1-2%, maybe 3% would do well in any economic system (like physicians, engineers, accountants, and senior military officers), and 1-2% would get to live like sultans in oil-rich kingdoms with small populations. What those elites wanted was ultra-cheap labor in a society in which the proles had responsibilities to the rich and the rich had none to the proles. You can blame the economic elites from the Boom Generation, many of them educated in MBA schools in which they learned finance but not human values -- and, impoverished in learning the liberal arts, gravitated to the more primitive drives of sex, drugs (OK, it became fine whiskey instead of cocaine fashionable for a short time), bureaucratic power, material gain and comfort, and mass culture. Donald Trump exemplifies such, and he shows how putrid such a philosophy can get.

If you think that such is essential to capitalism, then think again. I know of one clearly-capitalist community in which men do not ditch a wife when they no longer looks like a Playmate of the Monty ™, who have no tendency to drugs stronger than alcohol, whose community has few white-collar jobs, in which the material standard of technological indulgence is about one hundred years in the past, and for that has largely been immune to the degrading effects of an amoral mass culture. 

Such people are the Old Order Amish... you might not want to live as they do, but their way of life is far more sustainable than the one that Trump stands for. Individual prosperity depends upon the size of the farm that an Amish farmer can operate (with his children's labor, of course), and the only way in which to get rich in their world is to be a capitalist. 

I could make the case that the health of a capitalist society is the extent to which this is true: that almost the only people who can get rich are the capitalists. The fault with Soviet communism was that the people who got rich were the bureaucratic administrators better at feathering their nests and ensuring that their own kids could succeed them than in creating prosperity through entrepreneurial innovation. Guess what is happening in America? Our bureaucratic elites are beginning to look much like a nomenklatura in "socialist" states.      
   

Quote:In the current era, Democrats have been extremely divisive.  They
hated Bush, and even got a movie made in 2006, Death of a President,
that portrayed the assassination of Bush.  Obama's presidency was
supposed to heal racism, but instead he used every opportunity he
could to stoke racial hatred.  The left constantly threatened the Tea
Partiers, calling them teabaggers, and close Obama advisor James Hoffa
frequently threatened Tea Partiers with violence.

Wrong. The Hard Right has been fostering division along ethnic and class lines since the 1980's. It has sought to exploit the class line between educated and under-educated people, between regions in states and between states, and between ethnic groups. Its efforts have degenerated into tribalism. The Tea Party exists as an effort to give populist support to a reactionary agenda that holds that multitudes must suffer for economic elites. The Hard Right believes that capitalism is essentially and incorrigibly corrupt, inequitable, cruel, hierarchical, and repressive -- just as doctrinaire Marxist say that capitalism is. The difference between the American Hard Right and doctrinaire Marxists is that the American Hard Right endorses what Marxists consider the horrible vices of capitalism. Capitalism saved itself by making avid consumers  out of the proletariat, and contemporary plutocracy seeks to create an economy that fits a Marxist stereotype of capitalism. 

Some people have caught on. Blacks, Asians, and non-Cuban Hispanics have caught on. Maybe well-off blacks, Asians, and non-Cuban Hispanics have long recognized that the poor of their groups deserve attention from the well-off. Thus the black bourgeoisie sees responsibility toward blacks left behind. "Asians" is of course a category which includes peoples as diverse as Koreans and Pakistanis... but all of the Asian groups that I have met have shown respect for formal learning essential to smooth functioning in American life. The only Hispanics that I have known in large numbers are Mexican-Americans, and they seem to insist that their kids pay attention in school so that they do not become a permanent underclass in intractable poverty. The people not catching on are most white people. 

So what is wrong with White America? The white upper class and middle class generally has little contact with poor whites and really cares little for them. You do not see white people from Suburbia serving as mentors to poor whites in Appalachia.  Therein lies much of the division in White America. Well-off blacks, Asians, and Hispanics vote like the poor people in their own groups. 

(As for the movie Death of a President, it is largely forgotten. It may not have been as awful as Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, Howard the Duck, Gigli, Inchon!, Showgirls, Jaws 4, or Superman 4, movies that leave impressions in people who had the misfortune to watch them, which might be a backhanded compliment. So what is the relevance! Why bring it up?)

We liberals do not see assassination as a way to deal with Donald Trump. We believe in lawful, constitutional means. I'd be more wary of the Armed Services, the intelligence agencies, and federal law enforcement -- entities usually on the Right but who find Trump far more objectionable than Obama ever was. The current President has done something no prior president has done -- making a coup possible. This country is about as polarized as Chile was in 1973, with the President showing undue solidarity with totalitarian leaders at the expense of his country's usual allies. Sure, Allende was as far Left as Trump is far Right.  

Quote:The Democrats have been planning impeachment literally from the moment
Trump took office.  They've spent three years humiliating themselves
trying to bring about a political lynching of Trump with one phony
charge after another.

If you want an analogy, consider Richard Nixon. About everyone recognizes that Richard Nixon ran a largely-clean campaign and had no connections to gangland creeps before being elected. To be sure, Nixon had some spiders in his soul, but not enough to overpower his rationality until he got full of himself when the power of the Presidency went  to his head. Nixon did not have a legacy of sleazy dealings in business. He had a keen legal mind. 

Donald Trump was a sleazy, hollow character before he became President -- and he saw his status as a celebrity as a rationale for his excesses as a leader. Corrupt dealings were already in place before Trump started his campaign for the Presidency. Trump has seen his business connections as things to enrich him and his progeny while President with the aid of his power as President. Three years into his Presidency, Nixon started his dirty-tricks campaign against opponents and dissidents; that was the start of his downfall. Sure, Nixon could win in a landslide while the full nastiness was only a rumor to most Americans, and when "Tricky Dick" was simply an echo of his start as a California politician. It took about two years from the start of the dirty-tricks campaign for the Nixon Presidency to unravel. It has taken a little more time with Trump -- with far-bigger offenses. 

So what is the difference? Trump has more people enabling him for partisan ends. His supporters are largely those politicians that the Tea Party elected or tolerated. Donald Trump is the apotheosis of the anti-human agenda of the backers of the Tea Party.  Remember well that the financial backers of Tea Party pols wanted to divide America on class lines between a Master Class and its victims.  

Quote:Now Democrats are now using a King James/King Charles style Star
Chamber.  The Star Chamber was abolished by the bloody English Civil
War, but the Democrats are reviving it, to lynch Trump by any means
possible.

Which is exactly what gangsters and large-scale cheats say of the process that takes them down. This is exactly what I expect from drug traffickers, child pornographers, human traffickers, and large-scale financial cheats. For such people I shed no tears. 

Quote:Speaking of divisiveness, as cynical as I am, I was still surprised
that Democrats have shown such enormous contempt for blacks having the
lowest unemployment rate in history.  But actually, if you look at
history, it makes a lot of sense.  Democrats in the Civil War wanted
blacks to remain in slavery, then they formed the KKK to lynch blacks
for over a century, so now they're still contemptuous of blacks
getting jobs, since unemployment keeps blacks in slavery, which is
where the Democrats have wanted them for 150 years.  It's pretty
sickening.

Uhhh -- blacks have been getting better formal education and starting small businesses, two of the surest means of escaping poverty. No single politician deserves credit for that, unless it is Obama for economic stewardship that allowed one of the longest periods of economic growth in history. Check an overlay of Eisenhower and Obama elections, and you will notice that the Democratic and Republican Parties have largely switched constituencies over about sixty years. The exceptions are in the High Plains and Mormon Country, and those could be at risk to Trump and the GOP in 2020. Donald Trump is an arrogant, obnoxious @$$hole irrespective of his political values.

Quote:So I know that you have strongly held views, but Trump is not
particularly divisive.  It's the Democrats who would say that even the
most benign Trump policies are divisive, even something like lowering
unemployment rate for blacks.

Trump may not have intended to intensify divisions that already exist, but he has certainly aggravated them through his incompetence and personal nastiness. This is a man who mocks the handicapped -- something that I learned not do do when I was a small child. I learned early -- "See that disabled veteran? You might have to make that sacrifice for your country! See that blind person? There but for the Grace of God go you!" I am on the autistic spectrum, and my life is a mess for that. To be sure, I would rather have Asperger Syndrome than anything else in the DMS-IV classification (including the extreme narcissism or even sociopathy of Donald Trump)... I would rather be black than have Asperger syndrome, and I recognize that white privilege still persists. (I would not give up some points of IQ because my intellect is all that I am).

Incompetence and malign intent have much the same effect in bringing about tragedy... and good organizations root them out of positions of responsibility so that incompetence or malign intent puts one in positions in which one can hurt only oneself. With Donald Trump I cannot make a ready distinction, but all in all it would have been better had he been brought up without privilege and had to make a living selling used cars. In view of his character I might expect odometer fraud from him.      

Quote:But the other thing to notice is that this kind of divisiveness goes
well beyond America.  In this generational crisis era, xenophobia,
nationalism, and tribalism have been growing all over the world,
particularly as worldwide economic growth has been slowing.  There are
bitterly divisive battles going on in Britain, Israel, Italy, and
Hungary in Europe.  There are conflicts today in many places,
including Syria-Idlib, Iraq, Afghanistan, Mexico, Somalia, Nigeria,
Sudan, South Sudan, Libya, Pakistan, Egypt, Democratic Republic of the
Congo, Yemen, Ethiopia, Ukraine.  There are riots in Hong Kong,
Lebanon, Chile, Catalonia, and elsewhere.  The Brexit debate is
particularly hilarious.

Happy people do not rebel.  Maybe if times were not so bad...  

Quote:So it isn't Trump that's causing divisiveness.  It's the generational
Crisis era that causes economic stagnation, xenophobia, nationalism,
and tribalism, and those things cause divisiveness.  This is all part
of "The Gathering Storm" that's leading to WW III, with or without
Trump.

So what happens if Trump manages to avoid removal by Congress, but the Republican majority in the Senate also goes down with him in the 2020 general election as Trump goes down in a defeat?

The world has a general problem. Much of it is prosperous enough that most people cannot improve their lives just by buying more stuff. So what happens to the proletariat who, as Marx put it, has nothing to sell but its labor, when making more stuff is no longer a means of creating more prosperity? I suggest Piketty, who is only a start but is as far as anyone goes. 

So how does a post-scarcity society solve the issue of workers becoming superfluous? Rejection of technology so that people must work harder for the basics again? I will pass on the mass culture that the Old Order Amish reject with their rejection of the technologies of mass media, but do not ask me to give up J S Bach or Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart -- or the cinematic wonders of about eighty years ago.

[John J. Xenakis]

** 23-Oct-2019 World View: Trump's victory speech on Turkey and Syria

I just watched Trump's victory speech on the Turkey-Syria-Kurd
situation, and have a couple of quick thoughts.

Trump said that the ceasefire would be "permanent." When I heard
this, I wondered, as I often do, what comes over almost all
politicians to think that they're so brilliant that they can make
impossible things happen. (This is the discredited "Great Man Theory
of History.")

However, I share the view that this outcome was much better than if
Trump had sent in thousands of American troops to stop Turkey's
invasion, as many, many people said they wanted. "Countless Kurdish
lives have been saved, without the spilling of any American blood."
And: "Let someone else fight on this long bloodstained sand."

Trump said that the Kurdish generals were very pleased by the outcome,
since the alternative was a massacre by the Turks. He didn't mention
the claim that the Kurds were betrayed. Trump said that the ISIS
prisoners were under control of the Kurds, and that most of those few
who had escaped had been recaptured.

Trump did not say anything about the Syrian and Russian troops in the
region. In fact, he never once uttered the word "Russia." This will
continue to be a controversial issue.

Trump looked very tired, much more tired than I can recall ever
seeing him.

[John J. Xenakis]

** 23-Oct-2019 World View: The stupidest person in Congress - Chris Murphy

• Chris Murphy speaking to the Center for American Progress
  (al-Jazeera)

I've often said that the stupidest person on the scene today is
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), who makes one moronic, pathetic
statement after another.

Just to prove that I'm not sexist, I've now found someone who is even
stupider than AOC. AOC is just a young girl, new in Congress, so has
an excuse for being stupid.

But Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy is 46 years old, was in the House
from 2007-13, and has been in the Senate since 2013 and he's a member
of the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee.

So I was watching al-Jazeera, and they showed a brief video of Murphy
speaking to the Center for American Progress, where he's apparently
thought to be an expert.

Here's what he said in his speech:

Quote: "Elsewhere in the Middle East, things are falling
apart fast, due mostly to the Trump administration's
incompetence. It started with this nonsensical fracture of
relations between Saudi Arabia and another key US ally Qatar.

It was the kind of disruption that frankly would normally be
papered over and fixed by a competent US administration probably
in days, but three years later, these two countries, Saudi Arabia
and Qatar, still aren't talking, largely because we did nothing to
fix it."

I hear politicians say really stupid things all the time, but this is
about the stupidest thing I've heard a politician say recently -- and
that's saying a lot.

He's referring to a major split in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC)
that occurred on March 1, 2014, when Saudi Arabia, the United Arab
Emirates (UAE) and Bahrain recalled their ambassadors from Qatar, and
then on June 5, 2017, when the same four Arab countries imposed a
land, sea and air blockade on Qatar.

I've written about this subject many times, and how it's based deep in
the history of the countries involved, going back to the collapse of
the Ottoman Empire.

So we can infer the following from Chris Murphy's statement:

• He knows absolutely nothing about the history of the countries
  in the Mideast.
  
  
• He thinks that the blockade is "nonsensical."
  
  
• He thinks that a US president could "fix" a problem that two other
  countries have had for decades or centuries within days by "papering
  it over."
  
  
• He thinks that the blockade is still in place "largely because we
  did nothing to fix it."
  
  
• He thinks that the entire Mideast will be stabilized if Trump
  "papers over" the dispute.

This goes beyond simple ignorance. Someone who has been in Congress
since 2007 and is on the Foreign Relations Committee should at least
know that he doesn't know what he's talking about, and should have the
common sense to keep quiet. This goes we'll beyond ignorance into
sheer stupidity.

Qatar-based Al-Jazeera ran this video without comment. They must have
run it to show the world how stupid the Americans are.

And it isn't just Democrats. Lindsey Graham has been saying some
really dump things about the Syria situation that I won't go into
here. Of course, almost all other politicians could be said to be
competing with one another to say the stupidest possible thing.

In 2006, the Congressional Quarterly and the London Times conducted a
survey of Mideast experts (Democrats and Republicans), and found that
they couldn't answer simple questions like whether al-Qaeda was a
Sunni or Shia organization. (As I recall, most thought they were
Shia.)

You know, I really do despair that the country is being run by total
idiots. And the "experts" in China are also idiots. But this is why
we're headed for World War III.

[John J. Xenakis]

** 23-Oct-2019 World View: Another confused person: Bill Gates

I used to think that Bill Gates was smart. Well, he's the second
richest person in the world, so I guess he is pretty smart, a lot
smarter than I am.

But I just saw a half-hour interview with him, and he said some really
dumb things.

-- Climate change: He said that there will be a massive world wide
effort to fix climate change. Is he really so dumb that he thinks
that will actually happen? Oh, and he said that Trump will have to go
first. He kept talking about what will happen in 10, 20, 30, 40
years, and the thought of a war apparently never entered his mind.
Maybe he even believes the fantasy that the world will end if climate
change isn't fixed in 11 years, as AOC says.

-- Child mortality: He talked about how deaths from childhood diseases
are being cut in half. Does he really not realize that cutting child
mortality just creates a lot more cannon fodder for the next war?

So I suppose if you're the second richest person in the world, you can
live in whatever fantasy world you want.

Hmmmm. I wonder if he takes jet planes? I wonder if his mansion has
a bunker for surviving a war? Enquiring minds want to know.

[pbrower2a]

(10-23-2019, 09:54 PM)John J. Xenakis Wrote: ** 23-Oct-2019 World View: Another confused person: Bill Gates

I used to think that Bill Gates was smart.  Well, he's the second
richest person in the world, so I guess he is pretty smart, a lot
smarter than I am.

But I just saw a half-hour interview with him, and he said some really
dumb things.

-- Climate change: He said that there will be a massive world wide
effort to fix climate change.  Is he really so dumb that he thinks
that will actually happen?  Oh, and he said that Trump will have to go
first.  He kept talking about what will happen in 10, 20, 30, 40
years, and the thought of a war apparently never entered his mind.
Maybe he even believes the fantasy that the world will end if climate
change isn't fixed in 11 years, as AOC says.

Climate change is real enough that animal life is adjusting to it. I live in southern Michigan, and last Sunday while I was out for a walk I saw a snake. Ordinarily, snakes are in hibernation by now where I live, but not yet.

Donald Trump is an extreme ignoramus on science, so he can accept corporate PR as gospel truth (which also indicates his hollowness as a person. Trump has said that he wants people driving more gas-guzzling vehicles because such is good for the fossil-fuel industry that he considers a cornerstone of prosperity. It is possible to see projections of climate change in the movement of climatic boundaries based on the levels of emissions of greenhouse gases. The Cfa/Dfa line between snowy winters and rainy winters (that of the freezing point of water for the coldest month of the year) used to be through Philadelphia and New York City, but it now seems to be going through Indianapolis and Boston about now. By 2100 that line is projected to pass through the Straits of Mackinac and into the Canadian Maritime Provinces. 

What is so bad about losing the real winters in southern Michigan? This is a grain-growing area, and the line between the corn belt and the wheat belt goes through about Battle Creek, Michigan -- home of the giant cereal plants of Kellogg's Corporation. It is no coincidence that Kellogg's has a huge cereal plant in a place in which the grain belt meets the corn belt, as do such competitors as Post and Ralston-Purina. The optimal situation for either wheat or corn involves a real winter whose blizzards protect the soil moisture that germinating crops need in the spring and supply melt-water that those crops need. Michigan's spring is basically April, with March as a winter month and May as a summer month, for all practical purposes. Without those real winters the crops would not be as plentiful, as demonstrated in the year (2012) in which Michigan had the mildest winter of all time. By summer, drought-like conditions had turned the grasses yellow as happens in the San Francisco Bay Area which has a severe and predictable summer drought. Crop yields fell that year. 

Quote:-- Child mortality: He talked about how deaths from childhood diseases
are being cut in half.  Does he really not realize that cutting child
mortality just creates a lot more cannon fodder for the next war?

What really cuts child birth rates is the education of girls so that they do not start having children in their teens. This reality crosses all ethnic, religious, and cultural lines. High rates child mortality contribute to high birth rates. When children are not born in as large numbers they tend to be treated with more lavish care and are less likely to be seen as sources of remittances as soldiers in wartime. 

Quote:So I suppose if you're the second richest person in the world, you can
live in whatever fantasy world you want.

Much unlike Donald Trump, Bill Gates seems to have his head on straight. Gates is an innovator and not a gambler and crony capitalist like Trump.  

Quote:Hmmmm.  I wonder if he takes jet planes?  I wonder if his mansion has
a bunker for surviving a war?  Enquiring minds want to know.

Uhhh... if you work for a living in Sao Paulo and want to visit relatives in Recife (Brazil is getting into the age of mass travel by air, and it is not a rich country), then you probably take the long trip by jetliner even if you took the bus to Sao Paulo to go from a shantytown in Recife where there are few jobs in a classic world of Third-World poverty to a shantytown near Sao Paulo which seemed like New York City, Paris, or Tokyo by contrast except for not having a language barrier.

Intercity buses are largely for people too poor (unemployment) to have a car or prohibited from driving a car due to DUI convictions.

As for mansions -- I would rather have the super-rich spending money on mansions, art, and horses than on buying the political process.

[John J. Xenakis]

** 24-Oct-2019 World View: Great Man Theory

Higgenbotham Wrote:> Among other attributes, to be a wildly successful entrepreneur it
> helps a lot to be super smart and super, super optimistic. Bill
> Gates and Jeff Bezos are both super smart and super, super
> optimistic. But being overly optimistic never helps when
> attempting realistic analysis applied to complex societal
> problems.

> https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/01/jeff-bez...space.html

I've been thinking a lot lately about the "Great Man Theory of
History," which says that great historical events occur because they
are brought about by great leaders, and further that these leaders are
born with these leadership skills (as opposed to learning them through
life experience). The theory was advanced by 19th century historian
Thomas Carlyle, and has been adopted since then by many historians,
who write histories as a series of stories told through great leaders.

So, for example, this theory might claim that Adolf Hitler was born as
a great leader who caused World War II and the Holocaust, and Winston
Churchill was born as a great leader who save the world from Hitler.

It's hard to overstate how thoroughly Generational Dynamics rejects
this theory. WW II and something like the Holocaust would have
occurred with or without Hitler, and the world would have been saved
from Hitler with or without Churchill.

However, there is a part of the Great Man Theory which is true -- that
politicians who are born with great visionary and leadership skills
self-select themselves to become the leaders to implement things that
are going to happen anyway.

So applying this, Hitler was a great visionary and born with great
leadership skills foresaw that public opinion was turning towards
genocide of Jews (a trend that Hannah Arendt documented in her 1950
book The Origins of Totalitarianism), and decided to implement
the genocide through the Holocaust. It's easier to make the argument
that Churchill was in the right place at the right time, and someone
else would have defeated Hitler without Churchill.

Many of Barack Obama's supporters believed that he was a Great Man who
would "heal the world" and remake society through his policies from
gun control to curing global warming. But in the end all his policies
failed. He couldn't even get the "simplest" of his policies
implemented -- closing Guantánamo prison. So what went wrong? Obama
was clearly born with exceptional leadership skills and great vision,
but he was stopped because his policies were opposed by huge masses of
people and generations.

Now look at Mao Zedong's Great Leap Forward. He was also born with
exceptional leadership skills and great vision, and he used those
skills to implement the Great Leap Forward which was the stupidest
agricultural and economic policy of any nation in the history of the
world, and resulted in the deaths of tens of millions of Chinese
through torture, executions and starvation. So what went "right" for
Mao's policies that let them be implemented? Mao was clearly born
with exceptional leadership skills and great vision, but he could not
be stopped because he was dictator, in control of the army, and able
to torture, jail and kill anyone who opposed him, a privilege that was
never afforded to Obama.

Donald Trump is often called a "dictator," but he's the same as Obama
in that all his policies are constantly being challenged, whether by
the courts or Congress or agencies.

So Mao Zedong, Barack Obama and Donald Trump are similar in that they
all had exceptional leadership skills and great vision, but the
difference is that Obama and Trump could be stopped, while Mao could
not be stopped.

And now, of course, China has a new dictator, Xi Jinping, who also has
exceptional leadership skills and great vision, and who is a dictator
who cannot be stopped, and he's going to bring disaster not only to
China but to the entire world. The interesting observation about
dictators is that they're as stupid as you and me, but they have no
one to challenge their stupidity, with disastrous results.

In an interview in 2014, Obama admitted failure: "I just wanted to add
one thing to that business about the Great Man Theory Of History. The
President of the United States cannot remake our society, and that’s
probably a good thing. Not probably. It’s definitely a good thing."

And of course the reason that it's a good thing is that even Great
Men make stupid mistakes.

So now let's circle back around to your point about Jeff Bezos and
Bill Gates, and their being "overly optimistic."

The "Great Man Theory" could apply equally well to government
leadership and business leadership, and Great Men in this category
self-select themselves to build successful businesses. So Jeff Bezos
and Bill Gates both have exceptional leadership skills and great
vision, and they built Amazon and Microsoft with those skills.

In many ways, a business leader is like a government dictator, because
a business leader often has dictatorial powers within his own company.
Using those skills, he can push the company to disaster (as is
happening with WeWork, and may be happening with Tesla), or he can
push his business to major success.

So business leaders and government leaders who are "overly optimistic"
might be very successful, but they might be stopped by the people,
one way or another.

[John J. Xenakis]

** 24-Oct-2019 World View: Ethnic massacres in Syria

utahbob Wrote:> John, I called this a few years ago, when I was in uniform. I said
> this happened in the past in other areas of the globe and it will
> happen again. These people have memories that go back generations
> and they will settle scores, real or imagined. I hate to say there
> will be ethnic massacres and with ISIS holed up they will fight to
> the death and their message will be perversely glorified.
> https://www.chicagotribune.com/nation-wo...story.html

There have been American troops in Syria for ten years. And yet, Bashar
al-Assad has been continuously committing genocide and ethnic cleansing,
using barrel bombs, chlorine gas, Sarin gas and all the rest of it,
millions of Syrians have fled into neighboring countries, including over
a million into Europe, and as you say there are ethnic massacres still
going on.

So what the hell was the point of sending troops in in the first place?
Well, I suppose we had to fight al-Qaeda and ISIS. But is there any
other purpose?

Are we really supposed to keep thousands of troops in Syria because
some Kurdish politicians are trying to gain leverage by referencing
an imaginary American commitment to protect them forever?

These groups have been killing each other for centuries, and will
continue to do so. American troops are not relevant. Why not just
let them kill each other?

[David Horn]

(10-23-2019, 11:23 AM)John J. Xenakis Wrote: ** 23-Oct-2019 World View: Trump's victory speech on Turkey and Syria

I just watched Trump's victory speech on the Turkey-Syria-Kurd situation, and have a couple of quick thoughts.

Trump said that the ceasefire would be "permanent."  When I heard this, I wondered, as I often do, what comes over almost all politicians to think that they're so brilliant that they can make impossible things happen.  (This is the discredited "Great Man Theory of History.") 

However, I share the view that this outcome was much better than if Trump had sent in thousands of American troops to stop Turkey's invasion, as many, many people said they wanted.  "Countless Kurdish lives have been saved, without the spilling of any American blood."  And: "Let someone else fight on this long bloodstained sand."

Trump said that the Kurdish generals were very pleased by the outcome, since the alternative was a massacre by the Turks.  He didn't mention the claim that the Kurds were betrayed.  Trump said that the ISIS prisoners were under control of the Kurds, and that most of those few who had escaped had been recaptured.

Trump did not say anything about the Syrian and Russian troops in the region.  In fact, he never once uttered the word "Russia."  This will continue to be a controversial issue.

Trump looked very tired, much more tired than I can recall ever seeing him.

I see you get your news from the Murdock News Empire, because large parts of what you wrote here have been thoroughly debunked.  Whatever you may think of the Kurds, they are far from happy.  As to Trump, I'm starting a "Trump for Prison 2021" effort.  Like to join?

[John J. Xenakis]

(10-24-2019, 12:37 PM)David Horn Wrote: > I see you get your news from the Murdock News Empire, because
> large parts of what you wrote here have been thoroughly debunked.
> Whatever you may think of the Kurds, they are far from happy. As
> to Trump, I'm starting a "Trump for Prison 2021" effort. Like to
> join?

I realize that reading comprehension is not exactly your strong suit,
and may be almost completely nonexistent, but I wasn't quoting Fox.
I was quoting Trump. It was a report on Trump's speech.

Enjoy your erotic prison fantasy.

[John J. Xenakis]

** 24-Oct-2019 World View: Mike Pence on China calls out NBA and Nike

• Nike ad in 2018, part of its laughable 'Social Justice
  Leadership' program, showing Colin Kaepernick saying, 'Believe in
  something. Even if it means sacrificing everything.
  Just do it.'

I watched Mike Pence's speech today on China. It was a very harsh
speech, criticizing the entire list of CCP activities that the
West considers to be criminal -- jailing Uighurs, jailing priests,
destroying churches, IP theft, South China Sea crimes, and dozens more.

The speech is sure to catch the CCP's attention and infuriate them,
presumably because an American vassal dared to speak back to the
leaders of the Master Race.

Pence also called out American companies that are kowtowing to
China:

Quote: "Some of the NBA's biggest players and owners, who
routinely exercise their freedom to criticize this country, lose
their voices when it comes to the freedom and rights of other
peoples.

In siding with the Chinese Communist Party and silencing free
speech, the NBA is acting like a wholly owned subsidiary of the
authoritarian regime. ...

Nike promotes itself as a so called 'social-justice champion,' but
when it comes to Hong Kong, it prefers checking its social
conscience at the door.

Nike stores in China actually removed their Houston Rockets
merchandise from their shelves to join the Chinese government in
protest against the Rockets general manager's seven-word tweet:
'Fight for Freedom, stand with Hong Kong.' "

The image above is from days when Nike was laughably claiming that it
wasn't just a cheap, pathetic sellout.

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/24/vice-pre...china.html

[David Horn]

(10-24-2019, 01:49 PM)John J. Xenakis Wrote:

(10-24-2019, 12:37 PM)David Horn Wrote: >   I see you get your news from the Murdock News Empire, because
>   large parts of what you wrote here have been thoroughly debunked.
>   Whatever you may think of the Kurds, they are far from happy.  As
>   to Trump, I'm starting a "Trump for Prison 2021" effort.  Like to
>   join?

I realize that reading comprehension is not exactly your strong suit,
and may be almost completely nonexistent, but I wasn't quoting Fox.
I was quoting Trump.  It was a report on Trump's speech.

Enjoy your erotic prison fantasy.

The reportage was fine; the spin, not so much.