Year: 2017

[With thousands homeless and millions without power, Trump calls for emergency… corporate tax cuts.]

Jim Burt: “I am a docent at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, and part of my introduction to the Rembrandt Peale portraits of George and Martha Washington goes like this:

Who was the most famous American general of the Revolutionary War?  That’s right, George Washington.  And who was the second most famous American general of the Revolutionary War?  Benedict Arnold.  Arnold’s early service in the Revolution was competent and even heroic, suffering painful wounds as well as winning battles, but in addition to feeling slighted by Congress concerning honors and promotion, Benedict Arnold had a spendthrift and socially ambitious wife whose grasp exceeded his reach, which is thought to have contributed to his decision to turn traitor.  (Turning to the portrait of Martha Washington.)  By contrast, George Washington had a faithful and diligent wife who brought him a large fortune and whose business management skills enabled their large property holdings – which included slaves, as well as land and a profitable whiskey distillery – to prosper while George spent eight years away as a general during the Revolution plus another eight as president.  It’s no exaggeration to say that without Martha George might well have been just another country squire trying to meet his mortgage payments.

“What I don’t typically mention, because we’re mostly talking about art and not politics, is that we don’t have any monuments in this country to Benedict Arnold, even though he was, part of the time, a hero and a good general.  Fast forward to the Civil War era, and we have one acknowledged anti-slavery traitor, John Brown.  Even though he was a hero to many abolitionists, he did take up arms against the United States government, and is therefore, by constitutional definition, a traitor.  There are two monuments to John Brown, one a historical marker at Harper’s Ferry noting the location of his ‘fort,’ where he defended his band of terrorists against the Army’s effort to retake the arsenal there, and one in an enclosure blocked off to the public at the Akron, Ohio zoo.  Neither glorifies John Brown, even though — unlike every Confederate soldier — he was a traitor in a good cause.

“If in the interests of ‘history, not hate’ we’re going to put up public monuments to traitors – defined in our Constitution as anyone who takes up arms against the government — we’ve got a lot of catching up to do, starting with Benedict Arnold and John Brown.  I’m sure we can find a few others to glorify along the way.  Nat Turner comes to mind, except that he and his fellow slaves did not take up arms against the United States, but against their masters.  Anyway, I’ll take the ‘history, not hate’ crowd a lot more seriously when they start promoting monuments to John Brown.  He was a traitor and a terrorist, but at least he was on the right side of history, unlike  Robert E. Lee, ‘Stonewall’ Jackson, Jefferson Davis . . . and Benedict Arnold.

“Worth a read:  What I Wish Democrats Would Say About Confederate Monuments. In a nutshell, Tomasky would like a major Democrat, preferably one in contention for the next presidential nomination, to say that the reason to demolish or sequester Confederate monuments is not that they depict racist or bigoted people – after all, until recently, everybody in public life was racist by contemporary standards, and certainly that was true of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and others — but rather that we should honor those who rose above their racism, or stood apart from it, and did good things for our country.  I’d like to hear that speech, too.  But I’d also like to hear people point out that not only were the Confederacy’s heroes traitors and losers, but they were these things in an evil cause.  Slavery is evil.

“The myth of the ‘Lost Cause’ mired the South in economic stagnation and racial oppression for more than a century.  Racial proportions varied by state and locale, but if we assume that 40% of the Deep South was prevented from full participation in the economy by the various manifestations of Jim Crow and the death squads and state-sponsored terrorism that enforced it, that means the Southern economy was operating well below capacity.  Only, it was worse than that, because Jim Crow was not just a method of oppressing and plundering black people, but a method by which the ruling class of the South kept everyone, white as well as black, in servitude to their interests.  Whites had it better than blacks to be sure, but real economic and social mobility was hard to achieve in the Jim Crow South, no matter how white your skin.

“De Tocqueville, who transited the Ohio River in the 1830s, observed that on the free bank, farms and towns appeared prosperous and well kept, while the opposite was true on the Kentucky side of the River.  He attributed this to the fact that in a free society labor was valued and respected, while the opposite was true in a society in which an entire class of people was confined to labor and deprived of the right of ownership of themselves or anything else.  Even today in the South generally, working people are not respected, and illegal tactics are still used by the owner class to put down attempts to organize unions. I’d like to see a truly free South.  The only thing the non-owner class of Southerners has to lose is their unearned assumption of superiority over black people.  But they can gain in self-respect, self-actualization, and self-ownership.”

There are tons of things to celebrate, love, and admire about the South.  Here’s one more: a Congressional candidate from Kentucky, Amy McGrath.  Take a minute to watch her story.

I’ve previously plugged The Americans — the first four seasons free on Amazon Prime — and am now 29 episodes into it . . . the story of two KGB spies in Ronald Reagan’s Washington, DC, when Russia was our enemy animated by a noble, utopian — but irretrievably flawed — cause.  (Communism sought to provide a good life for everyone — “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need” — that, humans being hard-wired to be fundamentally self-centered, inevitably has led everywhere it’s been tried to tyranny, repression, corruption, and what can be sum up by, “they pretend to pay us and we pretend to work.”)  Now Russia is still our enemy, minus the noble cause.  But watching The Americans from the point of view of the KGB protagonists, along with the FBI protagonists . . . it is completely absorbing . . . and eerily relevant today, when the FBI is investigating the KGB’s efforts (now called the FSB) to destabilize our democracy, and liberal democracies and alliances in Europe as well.

Russia is winning.

President Trump seems not to be alarmed as Ronald Reagan (say) would have been.  In some ways, Trump and Putin are alike — both dishonest billionaires.  In other ways, they are spectacularly different — contrast, e.g.,  Trump’s fake professional wrestling with Putin’s black belt and other martial arts. One presumes Putin privately holds Trump in contempt; Trump appears to admire the journalist-murdering Putin, the one person he never criticizes.

And so I commend the Sunday New York Times story a week ago about Russia’s “new theory of war” — winning without firing a shot — in case you missed it.  It’s long, but oh so relevant and important to our future.

“How the Kremlin built one of the most powerful information weapons of the 21st century — and why it may be impossible to stop.’

A snippet:

. . . In early 2013, Valery Gerasimov, a top Russian general, published an article in a Russian military journal called VPK. Gerasimov had observed Twitter and other social media helping spark the Arab Spring. “It would be easiest of all to say that the events of the ‘Arab Spring’ are not war and so there are no lessons for us — military men — to learn,” he wrote. “But maybe the opposite is true.” There were new means through which to wage war that were “political, economic, informational,” and they could be applied “with the involvement of the protest potential of the population.” Russia’s military doctrine changed its definition of modern military conflict: “a complex use of military force, political, economic, informational and other means of nonmilitary character, applied with a large use of the population’s protest potential.”

Military officials in America and Europe have come to refer to this idea alternatively as the “Gerasimov doctrine” and “hybrid war,” which they accuse Russia of engaging in now. When I asked Peskov about those charges, he shrugged. Everyone was doing it, he said. “If you call what’s going on now a hybrid war, let it be hybrid war,” he said. “It doesn’t matter: It’s war.” . . .

The Wall Street Journal adds this footnote: “Russian-backed messages in the 2016 election cycle had outsize reach, ad buyers say, because of the way Facebook rewards content that gets a reaction.”  As known so far, Russia’s Facebook ads reached only a few million people — a small piece of their overall effort. Will Facebook find more to reveal?  (For months, they knew of none.)

He’s just misinformed.

Click here to get a sense why Medicare For All is not a crazy idea.  If it can work throughout Europe, Canada, and the rest of the industrialized world, can’t we — who already pay far more for health care than any of them do — make it work here, too?

I.e., if their outcomes — spending just 9% to 12% of GDP on health care — can be as good as ours (and in many respects, they’re better), why can’t we do as well when we spend more than 17%?

And by the way? I’m no commie pinko: just as charging $1,899* for a wide seat in the front of the plane helps make cramped plan-ahead $139 seats available for everybody else, I have no problem with the wealthy paying a giant surcharge for single rooms or private nurses or even — when it’s not life-threatening — cutting to the head of the line.  For better or worse (depending on your perspective), this is America.

*$2,549 if you’re going last minute.  (And by the way?  Once WheelTug is widely deployed, the $139 folks in 36B will not only land at the same time as the folks in 1B, they’ll deplane just as fast, too, from the rear door.)

If you’ve ever read Catcher in the Rye or been intrigued by J.D. Salinger, check out Rebel In The Rye, now playing at an art house near you.

If you happen to be in Panama today, check out Jan Vanna’s 11am WheelTug presentation (after the coffee break) at IATA’s Maintenance Cost Conference.  The beat goes on.*

Here is a major piece exposing the disaster that are Michigan charter schools — of note because Trump chose their billionaire champion, Betsy DeVos, to be our Secretary of Education. Also because it drives home the point that charter schools can be ineffective or even awful.  Just like pills. (Cyanide, anyone?)  Knowing that something is a pill — or a charter school — tells you very little.  But when you find a pill — or a replicable charter school model, like Success Academy — that works spectacularly well, for heaven’s sake grab it.

OK. Can We Talk About Tom Brady’s Brain? That was Frank Bruni’s column in the New York Times.  Yet as terrific a columnist as Bruni is, he missed Brady’s secret brain sauce — my much-touted (because I own a piece) BrainHQ.

Here’s how the Boston Herald covered it:

You can now train your brain like Tom Brady. No, this isn’t the plot of a satirical sci-fi flick: TB12 has apparently teamed up with Posit Science to make the G.O.A.T.’s personal regimen of BrainHQ exercises and assessments available to the public.

Brady’s reportedly been doing BrainHQ exercises online over the past four years — during which time he’s lead the Pats to two Super Bowl championships. And he claims that the cognitive training has made a difference in how he thinks on the field.

“I’m not a brain scientist,” Brady said in a statement, “but I can tell you about my experience after using the exercises — I could feel myself seeing more, seeing things more quickly and accurately, and making better decisions, faster.”

. . . [H]ere’s what the real brain scientists are saying: More than 100 published, peer-reviewed studies point out the benefits of TB12 BrainHQ — from improved speed and executive function to better balance and gait. The research has actually revealed that the mental workouts can prompt chemical and structural changes within the brain.

Check out the special version of BrainHQ featuring Tom’s regimen at TB12.BrainHQ.com.

BrainHQ is also featured in Tom’s The TB12 Method: How to Achieve a Lifetime of Sustained Peak Performance, out next week.

There is a connection here:

The proven, replicable Success Academy charter-school model — at no additional cost to taxpayers — has the potential to dramatically improve outcomes for millions of our most vulnerable kids, breaking the cycle of poverty, teenage pregnancy, and all the drag that puts on their lives and our nation as a whole.

The proven BrainHQ exercises could dramatically reduce the incidence of dementia, with all the drag that puts on families and our nation as a whole.  Indeed, as argued here, Medicare should in effect pay folks to do BrainHQ. (Want to live healthy to 100?  Parade has some tips that include BrainHQ.)

This is big stuff, no?

*You laugh: but television was invented in 1926 and by 1946 — 20 years later! — no one had made a dime from it.  Yet it did catch on.

From Shelly Palmer a few months ago:

First.  (Journalists?  Really?)

Last.  (He forgot to include bed-makers and masseurs, hair stylists and a whole lot of others — ichthyologists spring to mind.)

But however one might dispute the specifics of his lists, the larger point is that we face rapid change that could make life amazing for 8 billion people — the sun powering all manner of machines that relieve us of most traditional work, leaving us more time to love and learn and laugh.  But that would require agreed-upon means to share the benefits of all this great technology, while also retaining incentives for excellence and hard work.  (Here’s an idea: how about the incentive being a bit more about applause and self-esteem, a little less about money?).  Universal Basic Income is an idea that deserves ever more consideration.

The alternative is a massive unemployment, demoralization, strife, and even-greater inequality.

Or not?

The Wall Street Journal recently offered, “Workers: Fear Not the Robot Apocalypse,” contending that “Automation commonly creates more, and better-paying, jobs than it destroys.”

But I’m not so sure.  Technological progress may now be accelerating-faster than we can find new things to need or want (at least new things that require human labor to provide).

There’s lots of jobs only humans can fill — caring nurses, cheerful servers, stand-up comics.  But once we’ve switched to sun-powered self-driving vehicles there will be no truck, bus, cab or limo drivers; no meter maids, toll takers, gas-station or parking-lot attendants.  And that’s just transportation. Just as agriculture — that once employed 60% of us — now requires fewer than 2% to meet our needs, the hundreds of animators who used to be required to make a film are largely replaced by a couple.  How many accountants will we need?  How many diagnosticians?

With our basic needs someday so easily satisfied, powered by free energy from the sun, Universal Basic Income (and universal health care) may be required to underpin the happy, healthy society of tomorrow

And is still just 17.

And has just published We Rise: The Earth Guardians Guide to Building a Movement that Restores the Planet . . . that begins when he was fifteen, addressing the United Nations General Assembly on climate change.

Have I got your attention?

You may have seen him this past Sunday on Bill Maher.

He is Xiuhtezcatl (“shoe-tez-caht”) Martinez.

If you don’t become one of his Earth Guardians yourself, perhaps suggest it to your kids or grandkids?  While you, dear reader, do your part by eating less meat and dairy.

You can do it, argues Arti Patel.

Here’s a guide to meat and dairy substitutes.

The father of a young man I know is fine with his son marrying a vegetarian — and fine that the vegetarian he’s marrying is a guy — but draws the line at his own consumption: he insists on meat at every meal.  I very much hope he is not a reader of this page, because it turns out his son and future son-in-law have been serving him fake meat.  They just lie to him, and he can’t tell the difference.

Not all fake meat is that good, but it’s time we all gave it another try.

Which alone will not halt climate change.  But it will help.

So it turns out a lot of us were duped.  Read about Russian troll farms — Russians posing as Americans.  The former KGB — headed ultimately by a man who murders journalists and political opponents (but with whom our president has a special relationship) — invested in a massive operation to beat Clinton.  They came within just 3 million votes of pulling that off, enough to give Putin what he wanted.

There was a time when that would have bothered most Americans.  But that was before we all got great health care at a tiny fraction of the cost.

In small part:

. . . The Russian information attack on the election did not stop with the hacking and leaking of Democratic emails or the fire hose of stories, true, false and in between, that battered Mrs. Clinton on Russian outlets like RT and Sputnik. Far less splashy, and far more difficult to trace, was Russia’s experimentation on Facebook and Twitter, the American companies that essentially invented the tools of social media and, in this case, did not stop them from being turned into engines of deception and propaganda.

. . . On Wednesday, Facebook officials disclosed that they had shut down several hundred accounts that they believe were created by a Russian company linked to the Kremlin and used to buy $100,000 in ads pushing divisive issues during and after the American election campaign.

On Twitter, as on Facebook, Russian fingerprints are on hundreds or thousands of fake accounts that regularly posted anti-Clinton messages. Many were automated Twitter accounts, called bots, that sometimes fired off identical messages seconds apart — and in the exact alphabetical order of their made-up names, according to the FireEye researchers. . . .

I’ve previously plugged Parvez Sharma’s A Sinner In Mecca: A Gay Muslim’s Hajj of Defiance.  Now comes the first substantive review.  To 100 million LGBT Muslims, or to the rest of us who hope to see Islam modernize, it’s a book worth reading.

As hurricanes threaten many of our friends and neighbors, it seems silly, or perhaps even heartless, to write about anything else.

But as several of you asked why BOREF dropped from $5 to $2 yesterday, I thought I should respond.  The drop was on a volume of 1600 shares.  Presumably, some trusting soul — or perhaps the executor of an estate that held the shares — placed an order to sell those shares “at the market” and his broker, or some other dealer, paid $2.  Scandalous.  Had the seller placed a limit of $5, that’s the price he or she would have received.  And that remains the price at which shares are currently offered.  Nothing has changed.

Have a great weekend . . . as we all hope for the best for those in peril.

This New York Times op-ed by Lawrence Krauss is magnificent (if you ask me).

 . . . Even in our own solar system, we expected the moons of Jupiter and Saturn were merely dead lumps of rock or frozen snowballs, whereas we now understand that several have warm oceans underneath a coating of ice — ideal potential breeding grounds for what may be independent forms of life. . . .

It’s such a miracle that we’ve climbed out of the trees and come to this point where — in just the last 100 years, barely an instant in geological time — we’ve figured it all out (well, a crazy lot of it); can fly through the air while eating dinner and watching a movie (some birds can’t even fly) . . . even detect warm oceans beneath the surface of distant moons.

At the rate things are going, we have just a few decades — if that — to solve the ultimate mystery: how to live with each other.   Sustainably, without rendering our tiny planet uninhabitable — or otherwise going extinct.  There are so many ways this could go wrong.

But what a privilege (and responsibility) to be around to help make it go right.

Read the op-ed?

By Myriam Miedzian:  Never Again: Learning From The Trump Tragedy.

. . . How could so many working class and middle-class people be so stupid as to support this ignorant megalomaniac con artist billionaire demagogue whose deepest commitment was to huge tax cuts for the very rich including himself? . . .

. . .  the majority of Trump supporter are not stupid and not part of anti-Semitic and racist Nazi groups. Racism, opposition to abortion, clinging to traditional gender roles, play a part for some, but primarily they are enraged about what they experience as being pushed to the end of the line in terms of jobs and educational opportunities, being attacked by self-righteous left-wingers for being selfish, stupid, and racist . . .

Worth reading in full.

As is Clive Crook: Why People Still Support Trump.

“It’s not all about bigotry and ignorance,” he argues.

He’s right.

Yet, as you’ll see, he sets up a straw man when he says, “There are two main theories of Trump’s support. One is that a large minority of Americans — 40 percent, give or take — are racist idiots. This theory is at least tacitly endorsed by the Democratic Party and the mainstream liberal media.”

I don’t know anyone in the Democratic Party or mainstream media who believes 40 percent of Americans — i.e., everyone who voted for Trump — is a racist idiot.  Clearly there are some.  You saw racists marching with tiki torches. And if there are idiots who vote, it would not be surprising if they were quicker than non-idiots to believe Trump would get them “great health care at a tiny fraction of the cost.”

But to the extent Trump voters perceive the Party and mainstream media to view them this way — as the right wants them to, and as posts like Clive Crook’s tell them we do — it takes a toll.  Perception is reality.  Unless and until proven otherwise, we should assume that any individual Trump supporter is a core a smart, good person — the bill-of-goods they bought notwithstanding.