Buckle your seatbelts... October surprises, cheating, and the things Clinton won't say...

This posting will be hurried, geting it in before the final debate. Like the rest of you, I am both fascinated-addicted and so, so, so eager for it to end.

First off, Trump challenged Clinton to take a ‘blood test” before the next debate. She should reply: 

“Sure Donald, we’ll both do that. But in return, you have to accept one of MY challenges! You (Trump) must appoint five sages to a fact-checking commission you’d accept as non-partisan. Including fact checking claims of electoral fraud. I’ll appoint five and Sandra Day O’Conner can appoint five.” 

If HC did that, she’d corner him, even if he refused! Refusing would look awful. And he’d know that accepting would eviscerate him.

== An October Surprise? ==

All my life there’s been talk of October Surprises, before any big U.S. election.  Ronald Reagan pulled one on Jimmy Carter and there were others in the small to intermediate range.  Today, the Trumpists are proclaiming such timing for the Access Hollywood “locker room” video and subsequent accusers of Trump's sexual predation. (See: Donald Trump self-sabotage gambit in Salon.) 
     Certainly, Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks collusion with Russian state hackers is aimed at knifing Hillary Clinton. Will there be more?

In this election cycle? Count on it! Assange is doubtless saving the worst for November. And Trump is already railing that the Iraqi assault on Mosul has been timed to give Barack Obama a big victory over ISIS, just before the election. (DT spent minutes in the 2nd debate pre-criticizing the Mosul assault for not being done ‘by surprise’ and thus allowing ISIS leaders to escape… proving that he has the military expertise of a 9-year old video gamer.)

Seriously, buckle your seatbelts.  There will be revelations of electoral hacks and sexual matters and foreign meddling and maybe a spilled Trump tax return.  These are Heinlein’s “crazy years.” 

Oh… one of you in the comments section suggested a scenario: “that the "Jail Hillary" bit was a stroke of genius! ‪Not for the election but for after, when the Donald's crows come home to roost. ‪Rape, tax evasion, fraud ....  Only now all of the "sensible" voices have said that you can't jail the losing candidate. ‪Donald now has a "get out of jail free card" - just before he needs to use it.”

Hm.

== Cheating at the polls?  Really? And WHO will do it? ==

If the election is rigged, who is doing the rigging? 

Trump never says. But note: in most battleground states – those he and HC are fighting over – elections are run by Republican politicians or appointees. In Florida, Arizona, Colorado, North Carolina, Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, Ohio and Utah, the chief elections officer of the state is a Republican. (In Pennsylvania, Minnesota and Missouri it’s a Democrat.) 

        

Republican-run states do far more gerrymandering and voter suppression. The voting machines that do not offer audit ability with paper-backups are supplied by companies with GOP connections. So if there’s any fire under this smoke, Trump supporters should aim their ire at the GOP establishment.

Indeed, the presidential race is too closely watched for anyone to risk sneaky tactics. But I would bet you a dollar and a swallowed-bug that there will be tons of cheating down at the level no one is watching – state Assembly and Congressional races, where the Fox cabal is sweating real bullets, right now. (More on this, below.)

  

== How Might Trump Pull it out? ==

That’s the question some trumpist shill asked on Quora, in what must be the brashest and most delightfully impudent political move I have seen.  Almost no one on Quora supports Trump (since they have curiosity and ask questions.) Yet this prize challenge dares folks to compete (for a measly $250) offering the best suggestion how the GOP candidate might improve his flagging chances.  And plenty could not help themselves!  They answered.

I did too! * Though I deem it nearly impossible that DT will actually follow my advice. And here it is:

First and foremost, Donald Trump should stop with the damned rallies. The rallies have destroyed him. They cater to his frail-huge ego, feeding it with cheers for every outrageous thing he says, encouraging him to both ramp up the outrageousness and to gather a spectacularly unrealistic view the U.S. population, convincing himself that the narrow slice of Americans who attend his rallies is actually representative of the nation.

Had it not been for the rallies, DT would likely have done the expected veer to center. He could have - as a 'maverick’ - stunned us all and destabilized Clinton by behaving well at the debates and by abruptly dropping the most-insane GOP stances inflicted on the party by Murdoch-Ailes-Fox.

He could have dropped: (1) the war on science, (2) climate denialism, and (3) Supply Side never-once-right-voodoo economics.

Back in the spring he showed some hints he might! Had he done this, he’d have done a judo grab of moderates and college educated whites and even some women and some minorities, while keeping most of the rest of his conservatism.

This would also have done the nation a great service, by trashing those three insanities forever. Even in losing, he would have been credited for that.

Too late. His addiction is now in full fury. The tougher things get, the more he relies on the drug high he gets at the rallies, which in turn encourage him to behave in public and at debates in the same way that gets cheers at those testosterone-fests.

Watch one some time: you’ll see an addiction, playing itself out. (I can relate - slightly - as a public speaker. Audience response is a huge high.) Alas, he is not just torching himself and the GOP; he is also stoking maybe 15% of the population - his most zealous followers - with a frothing-volcanic hate that we’ve not seen since Timothy McVeigh, or perhaps the 1930s Nuremberg rallies.

They share his feedback loop. They will rage that he could only have lost by rigging. They will - at his urging - turn this civil war hot. Except for the rallies, he might have had a lining that was silver, and not flaming horror.

* (Go to that quora contest and vote for me! I'll spend the prize on a party at the 2018 worldcon! ;-)

== Back to the Cheat Below ==

Time to reiterate a point that no one else – I promise you – is making. Paul Ryan is discrediting Donald Trump’s allegations that the election will be “rigged.” And yes, that serves Ryan well, because it makes him look like an adult next to the tantrum-threatening Donald. Ryan is lining himself up for 2020.  And yet… the sci fi thriller side of me has another explanation.  That Ryan is pooh-poohing the likelihood that the PRESIDENTIAL election will be rigged… so that no one will look to closely at the election he really cares about…

…which is the equally important panoply of races for Congress and state assembly, all over the nation! Think about it.  Assume for a moment that the voting machines in many red states - which have no paper receipt systems for precinct count auditing (paper-audits exist in most blue states) - can be altered almost at-will. And why not? Without auditing, what is to stop the mostly-republican owners of voting machine companies from having a back door and using it?

Then they will not use that power to try to fix an already lost election for the White House.  They do not want scrutiny or attention focused lower down.  Even though those lower down races are where the real power in the nation (and corruption) can be found.

== Why evangelicals support Trump? ==

Given that he’s a philandering, twice divorced gambling lord with mob ties, who has ripped off his employees and contractors and bragged about abusing women… there truly is no other explanation for evangelical support than “he hates the same enemies that I hate!” In this exploration-article, it becomes clear that’s why fundamentalist Christians are rallying to Trump.

There is also an apocalyptic current. “For Trump, it’s not morning in America, it’s just a few seconds before midnight on the doomsday clock…. He’s been slouching toward just about every kind of Armageddon imaginable, except the genuine planetary ones that are — or should be — almost unavoidable these days.” 

(In the Trump-Ryan vision of America, fervidly believed at those nuremberg-style rallies - "crime is running wild, inner cities are war zones, and hordes of violent immigrants are pouring across our open border. In reality, murder is at a historic low, we’re seeing a major urban revival and net immigration from Mexico is negative. And the counterfactuals go on and on...)

His “un-Christ-like” behavior contrasts with Clinton’s -- a church-going United Methodist who has long ties to leaders in the evangelical community. She taught Sunday school and, as a senator, attended weekly prayer breakfasts. ‘But white evangelicals’ anger toward Clinton, while at a fever pitch now, has been building for decades.’

The central pretext is, of course, abortion. Though here, yet again, the journalist misses a key point. HC has repeatedly said that her aim is to keep abortion, “safe, legal and rare.” The argument is that liberal actions like Sex Education, availability of contraceptives and family planning empower women and girls to control their choices and outcomes, resulting in fewer abortions.  The success of this approach is supported by facts and decisive statistics. For example, wherever the emphasis has shifted to “abstinence only” programs, the rates of teen sex, teen pregnancy, STDs and domestic violence go up. All have gone down in Blue America.

Refusal to face such blatant cause-and-effect outcomes comparison has become a hallmark of the re-ignited Confederacy’s culture war, especially the War on Science.

When confronted by the success of liberal programs at reducing the overall number of abortions, they respond with a purist stance, that “even one is too many.” Indeed, that might have been at least philosophically defensible, if it weren’t that every single anti-abortion measure taken in Red States – across the last decade – has been about making abortion incrementally more difficult for women experiencing a life choice.

In other words, using supply side methods to reduce the number and rate… as opposed to the democrats’ approach to achieving the same end, via the demand side.

(This supply-side/demand-side aspect just occurred to me!  You punctilious checkers out there, have you seen anyone ever raise this direct comparison between approaches to abortion policy and the two parties’ diametrically opposite economics? 

(As usual, the demand side approach seems to work, while supply side reduces to an insanely cruel methodology that has not ever – even once – correlated with reality.)

Note – though – the core hypocrisy. To maintain purism as a defense against the superior practical effects of liberal policy – incrementally reducing the overall number of abortions by educating and empowering women. Yet the pro-lifers have put forward only incremental means to make abortion more difficult, accomplishing nothing.

No. This is entirely about symbolism. The U.S. right once had an element that liked objective reality and pragmatism (e.g. post-1968 Barry Goldwater, often Richard Nixon and (at times) Ronald Reagan). Now it is 100% about symbolism, (exemplified by the GOP Congress obsessing on the naming of ships) and never on negotiated politics.

Symbolism-obsession also served the 1860s Confederacy well, for a while. At first. Till the America of science, pragmatism, negotiation and adulthood woke up and discovered its resolve. That same awakening is happening now. So dig this, dear red-neighbors. We will save the nation and planet and civilization for you folks.  In fact, I’ll bet that deep-down, it’s what you’ve been counting on, all along.

== A final direct appeal to Hillary Clinton ==

Seriously Madam Secretary, is your only aim to win the election and live in the White House again?  Maybe nominate a couple of Supreme Court justices?  If so, I'll still vote for you, but I am disappointed.  Because just running against Donald Trump will poison your term in several ways.

First, pundits and historians… certainly Republicans … will attribute your victory to the toxicity of your opponent.  They'll rationalize that you have no mandate and that the GOP deserves to come roaring back, in 2018, after shrugging off the ‘Trump Illness.’ 

Even worse, by focusing only on DT -- you mentioned the word “republican" only once in your first debate and hardly at all, in the second! And did not mention "Congress" at all — you are thus complicit if the GOP manages to hold onto their majority in the House of Representatives. With Paul Ryan then 2nd in line for the Presidency, you will experience four years of unrelenting hell. No “honeymoon' at all - and zero legislative accomplishment. Just ever-more nastiness from the laziest U.S. Congress in the history of the republic. Was that your goal?

It’s time to stop cozying up to fence sitters, hoping to peel away a few more presidential votes. All that will accomplish is to leave Trump-averse republicans pleased to split and vote for down-ticket GOP politicians. If you want your presidency to mean anything, you must:

- Cite Ronald Reagan, who famously (and effectively) said: "I did not leave the Democratic party, the democratic party left me." 

That was brilliant, effective and people remember it. Use that! You can say: "I did not agree with Reagan about that.  But there’s no way Reagan would be a Republican today. Blatantly the Republican Party leaders have abandoned all sense. They have ‘left’ Ronald Reagan and they have left *you*.”

- then deliver a zinger: "Did any of you notice at the recent Republican convention that they did not even mention the names of any GOP leaders between Reagan and Ryan?  Bush, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Hastert, DeLay, Ailes… "  (Emphasize Hastert and Ailes! Recently-confirmed sexual predators.) 

Yes, yes, I know you've been cozying up to the Bushes, lately, hoping to sway more ‘moderate’ republicans to defect. Stop it! They are of no use to you. Not compared to the possible chance of getting their grip off of Congress.)

- Talk about the sheer laziness of GOP Congresses! For 20 of the last 22 years, they have hardly met in session at all, or even held any hearings, except those that uselessly and futilely and obsessively hounded you!  Seriously.  Laziness is a charge that (1) is off-axis from usual politics, (2) is blatantly true, and (3) is a devastating attack on their character.

- Talk about the GOP war on science, education, medicine and every other profession that deals with facts and knowledge.

Seriously.  Stop making this about Trump!  That case has been made and 3/5 of Americans are sold on it.  Time to move forward!  It is time to get moderate conservatives to leave the undead elephant. 

You can do this.  Show us leadership and boldness.  In the next debate… mention the Republican Party!  It has ‘left’ America.

=====

* PS.  Some have realized how Reagan could be used against the hijackers of American conservatism. 

As we move forward...

Just returned from giving speeches about artificial Intelligence and other fututure wonders/fears, for GE and Viacom. But there's time to squeeze in - for the weekend - a posting that's not  about the U.S. political civil war.  And hence...

Lest the media's obsession with bad news suggest that the world is going to hell in a handbasket, Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker argues in an interview that things have actually gone a lot better over recent centuries, and at an accelerating pace. "A shift in the summum bonum, or the highest good, towards loose humanism, where life is better than death, education better than ignorance, health better than sickness," he says, "is what I believe we are seeing currently."

Why do more highly educated people veer toward liberalism? The Pew Research Center recently released a study showing that nearly a third of those who went to graduate or professional school maintain liberal views on social, economic and environmental matters, whereas this is true for just one in 10 Americans generally. "An additional quarter of postgrads have mostly liberal views. These numbers reflect drastic change: While professionals have been in the Democratic column for a while, in 1994 only 7 percent of postgrads held consistently liberal political opinions,” reports Neil Gross in The New York Times.

This might have been interesting as the introduction to an article about the topic. But the article failed to explore this thread in more depth.Though one thing is clear -- highly educated people are more cognizant of time horizons that encompass a recognition of change.  

The world was different in the past. That is not just a reason for nostalgia but also for recognition that change will continue. (The kind  of disruptive change that makes science fiction by far the most pertinent literature of our era.)

Liberalism is an attempt to harness and steer change. Hence it is not leftist per se... Marx thought that steering history was futile!  It is this belief that we can refashion ourselves and society using tools of discourse and/or science that makes the educated liberal.

Well... yes... compassion and empathy, too. But it is no accident that free enterprise, markets, entrepreneurship - all desiderata that supposedly the right cares about - do far better when liberals are managing the state. Sorry, it is a blatant and overwhelming fact, Jack.

== Looking to the Future ==

'Vessel' by Heatherwick Studios

Escher comes alive? An amazing concept for a structure to be built in New York’s Hudson Yards development. “Named ‘Vessel’, the interactive structure by Thomas Heatherwick is intended to be climbed, explored, and experienced. comprising 154 interconnecting flights of stairs.” Fascinating conceptual design.  And yet, I have to wonder about disabled access.  

And why each of the 80 landings could not subtly vary in theme?  Perhaps with gardens or planters or nano-display spaces for artists or science quirks? Sure, the architect would hate the “clutter.”  But there will be an elevator. Know that. And a spiral descent ramp. Two of them.  One for wheelchairs and one for skateboarders! I know how it could be done without much clutter.

The Journal of Posthuman Studies is a fully peer reviewed, multidisciplinary journal developed to analyze what it is to be human in an age of rapid technological, scientific, cultural and social evolution. Editors include James Hughes, University of Massachusetts, late of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies. 

How does science free us from delusions? Reposted online, this podcast originally aired on February 14, 2013. Sci-fi author, David Brin, is the final guest in the Mendelspod series, Creating the Future. He says that everyone -- that civilization -- is creating the future. However, he concedes that if you were to compare civilization to a human brain, that "a few of us are the pre-frontal lobes . . . who poke sticks in the sand, in the trail ahead of us that we're charging into so that we can find the quicksand pits . . . before we step right into them." Quoth the Mendelspod folks: “Brin is an actor as well as writer and scientist. You're bound to be captivated by his command of science, history, politics, and by his entertaining wit.”

Some of the topics in this wide-ranging podcast:

 0:47 Who's doing the heavy lifting of creating the future?

 8:13 Imagination the great tragedy and boon of human nature

11:24 Science one of the four great pillars that freed us from the "Great Delusion"

15:35 When did you go from astronomer to writer?

24:23 Where are we going in the life sciences?

27:13 A contrarian on immortality

33:00 Renunciation, stopping the forward rush of science

37:46 "The American Revolution stuns me."

40:55 BONUS: The author reads from Existence

== Tools for the future ==

Looking toward a better future... education reformer Marc Prensky has an interesting new book out from Teachers College Press: Education to Better Their World: Unleashing the Power of 21st Century Kids.  “Marc Prensky offers us a lucid, inspiring, optimistic, doable, and crucial blueprint for how we can build a future with the schools that children desperately need.”

The Fidget Cube. This cube offers useless buttons designed to keep your hands busy. It seems to have struck a nerve... They asked for $15,000 on Kickstarter and got $6 million. Two more days to get one...

Wow… I’ve become pretty good at Power Point… it helps with half of my livelihood.  Still, this new Slidebot tool takes things to a new level, using quasi AI to find images on the web suitable for whatever text you are typing. Yeah. cue Twilight zone music.  But I intend to try it.  And you can export those slides into Power Point  or other familiar systems.

== not about the election! ==

The California legislature and Gov. Brown just approved legislation requiring a conviction prior to asset forfeiture. 

I often hold up California as the dynamic leader in U.S. governance… e.g having the best election laws in the country, that have reduced radical partisanship, encouraging pragmatism and negotiation and yes, even with the minority of moderate republicans. It helps that Gov. Jerry Brown – while liberal and dynamic and busy, is also skeptical of meddlesome over-reach for its own sake. He vetoes pretty often. All told, California is an utter refutation of the Foxite song that “divided government that does nothing is best.” Idiots. 

And yet… here’s a bill Jerry shoulda trashed. California's new 'Sale of Autographed Memorabilia' law requires a Certificate of Authenticity (COA) for any signed item worth more than $5. Failure to issue the COA could make the seller liable for ten times the value in damages. This will be hard on booksellers.... though I imagine it was targeted at Sports Memorabilia and Movie schlock and books may get a pass. 

The law is dumb and troglodytic. If provenance is a problem, some piece of paper won't solve it. Instead, take a PICTURE each time you sign an item and file the jpeg using a correlation app that will find that specific item by the shape of your signature - different each time! Much easier to do and to comply with the law and it can actually work! Correlating and verifying. Best of all it is not a stone-age 20th century "solution." Dingbats.

Fortunately, this is California. The law will be amended next year. Then amended again till the public and stakeholders care too little to make much noise. It is called real, functioning democracy. Democrats do it. Imperfectly! And it helps to have a Jerry Brown!

What this kind of bill demonstrates is that the Democratic-Republican divide is not left-vs-right… dems often DE-regulate much more than GOPpers do. 

No, it is manic-vs-depressive. The Democratic run CA legislature rushes about in a frenzy, adapting the state's laws to 21st Century conditions (it’s their job!), then modifying the modifications under comment/complaint from citizens and companies… then getting more feedback in public hearings and modifying again… Busy, busy, busy. And sometimes drawing vetoes from the liberal-but-pragmatic chief executive. (For the most part, it's good or neutral stuff.) Sure, manic is vexing, sometimes, like this silly autograph bill. 

But we move forward. Unlike the depressive side, as the Republicans have made 20 of the last 22 years of the U.S. Congress utterly useless, unable to pass even a basic budget! Unable to hold hearings about pressing matters or even issue subpoenas… except In pathetically partisan-nonsensical witch hunts. The nastiest but above-all laziest Congresses in U.S. history. Except for trillions of gushing tax gifts to the rich, and awful wars, can you name any accomplishments? 

Sorry.  Politics again. I yearn for an odd numbered year.

Can elections be hacked? And the Russian gambit.

As the pace quickens, I'll use this political posting to catch up on side items... such as...

Hey Hill! Want a solution to all the fuss around the Clinton Foundation? Hand it all over to the Carter Center, lock stock and barrel. Analogous to Warren Buffett making Bill Gates his heir! Because the Gates Foundation is run so well. Likewise, the one thing all Americans agree about Jimmy Carter is his rectitude... and the effectiveness of his foundation. Just do it.  Carter will give Chelsea a job and no one will care.

Only note the difference in the way ex-presidents who are Democrats spend their time, vs Republicans. They are is diametric and perfect opposites. Oligarchs holding court vs. scurrying around trying to help the poor. 

== The KGB Connection ==

What gives with the crescendo of internet hacks and trolleries - of blatant Russian origin? This surge of activity - which has the cyber sleuths in our intelligence community scurrying - points to a fervid obsession with meddling in Western politics.

The sheer number of these attacks is quite boggling. They range from stealing and clumsily altering documents of George Soros’s Open Society Foundation to spreading anti-NATO rumors in Sweden to timing leaks of swiped Hillary Clinton emails for maximum effect on American elections.  

Former Central Intelligence Agency director Mike Morell – a lifelong leader in such matters, with no history of being political - describes Trump as “an unwitting agent” of Vladimir Putin, a view that is shared by many American intelligence personnel. 

John Schindler, a security expert and former National Security Agency analyst and counterintelligence officer, elucidates in an Observer article you must read. 'The case for Morell’s charge is circumstantial but impressive. We have Trump’s repeated business dealings in Russia, dating to the Soviet era, none of them very successful, though that didn’t stop the candidate’s son from declaring in 2008 of the Trump Organization: “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets. We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”'  And you wonder why he won’t release his tax returns? 

Sure, Fox News and right wing radio guys have been spreading a cult of adoration of Vladimir Putin for a decade, culminating in Donald Trump’s huge, bromantic crush on the (I’ll admit) very clever Russian President. But is it truly possible that the conversion of U.S. conservatism into confederate-ism is so thorough that no one in Red America can smell a rat?  Nothing else makes the conversion more clear. Russia used to be red. Now the color doesn’t even apply in Trump Country.

It’s Gray.

== But can American elections be rigged? ==

We keep returning to this question. The recent discovery of e-meddlings in Illinois and Arizona voter databases has raised chills. “U.S. elections are hackable, though it is much harder than some appear to believe. There are three main areas of vulnerability, according to Andrew Appel, a Princeton University computer scientist. Hackers could tamper with voter records, removing names from official rolls. They could attack electronic voting machines. And they could disrupt the proper tallying of voting results as they are collected from various precincts.”

The Washington Post Editorial Board recently reiterated a point I’ve been making for years: “In each case, one key to ensuring integrity is creating a paper trail that can be matched to the electronic records. Electronic voter rolls can be checked against paper ones; electronic vote counts can be compared to paper ballots filled in during the voting process; statewide vote tallies can be checked by examining and adding the results reported publicly in each precinct.”

The editorial board is a bit too blithe for my taste, suggesting that most U.S. counties do have auditable paper trails and that our voting machines are hard to hack.  I’ll believe that when a truly thorough and scientific study is done. There are states where the politicians will stop at nothing.  If you’d gerrymander – and suppress voter participation without helping poor folks to get the ID they need – then you are the kind of person who would ease the way for corrupt machines to be used.

Still, they make a cogent point: “At the moment, the biggest threat to the integrity of U.S. elections appears to be that politicians, Mr. Trump in particular, will use anecdote and innuendo to stoke a crisis of confidence. Given that Mr. Trump has already indicated he will not accept the legitimacy of an election that ends in his defeat, even a well-functioning electoral system in which any attempted hacks and other frauds are caught and corrected could look to many like a sham.”

This is so important that I will say it in several postings:

Hillary Clinton needs to declare this as a crisis! She should demand that Donald Trump put up or shut up, on electoral fraud. 

Insist that he appoint 6 friends who are “sages beyond reproach” to join six she would appoint, plus six chose by retired US Supreme Court Justice and GOP appointee Sandra Day O’Connor. And have that commission investigate electoral rigging charges right now!  No delays. No excuses. And they should look at everything from voting machines to voter suppression to gerrymandering. And no time for sage perfection. Report back in two weeks!

It would be an aggressive, assertive action and she’d look decisive, presidential. And it is utterly necessary, lest her presidency begin less valuable than a bucket of tepid spit.

== Trump is not an anomaly ==

Don't for a moment entertain the delusion that Donald Trump is some weird, side-canker on U.S. Conservatism.  Sure, hundreds of prominent Republicans have fled from the current, pyrotechnically-offensive ravings of their party's standard-bearer. Many of these defectors openly avow that Hillary Clinton is an acceptably "solid" statesman worthy of support.

Don't believe a word of it. This hemorrhage of conservative adults is still filled with rationalizers who call Donald Trump a "special case," while urging support for down-ticket GOP candidates. Even as they declare acceptance of HC's acceptable solidity, most declare their intention to fight for a GOP led Congress that will wage war upon her from her very first day as Commander-in-Chief. 

No, no. You do not get to do that, and I will repeat my counter-nostrum over and over. Trump is not the "disease."  He is a symptom of a virulence that you guys helped to spread. Yes, even the sage, nodding heads and professionals, and intellectuals who doubted WMD lies and tried to break the Hastert Rule against ever negotiating. Even you who pursed your lips and frowned silently over the tsunami of Fox lies.

Case in point. Donald has just appointed conservative eminence grise Ed Feulner to join Chis Christie heading his Transition Team… to prepare for a (shudder) Trump Administration. Feulner is a former head of the Heritage Foundation, the top right wing "think tank" that gave us neoconservatism, Iraq Wars, Supply Side never-once-ever-right-ever-even-once "Economics," and… (surprise) the general outlines of Obamacare. Feulner is credited with building the Heritage Foundation from a small, struggling policy think tank in the 1970s to the influential behemoth that prepares a majority of GOP policy positions. (Generally in close collaboration with Rupert Murdoch.) 

Sure, DT has emphasized the Tea Party, Breitbart, confederate-treason, screeching-nitwit wing of the party, finishing the decades-long task of driving-off every skill and knowledge profession, from scientists to the military officer corps. A War on Expertise. But to call him (and them) "aberrant" is to ignore the fact that he won the GOP primaries convincingly. And that half of the Republicans in Congress are bilious, raving loonies, who sabotage science and research and investment and who refuse to negotiate even a basic budget for the United States.

So no, you "grownups" who are defecting to Hillary Clinton temporarily, you do not get to feel virtuous and bipartisan while helping to carve out the Trump tumor. The surface mole grew up top out of a metastasized disease. And American conservatism needs chem and radiation and cauterizing therapy to burn out the Murdochian confederatism. Rip it out, and there's a chance the movement might survive Even thrive.

Oh, interesting note: Both Trump and Clinton have taxpayer-funded office space provided for a transition effort, the result of a 2010 law that moved up the availability of such money to just after the party conventions, rather than after the election.

== Russian sabotage ==

The Russian ruling clade is doing what I would do — were I a member of a cabal dominating an underdog world power that is deeply opposed to democracy and the Western Enlightenment experiment. They are doing what underdogs always do — innovating. Finding ways to undermine and sabotage and mislead their bigger, stronger, but less-focused adversaries.

Never mind that they are only “adversaries” because of reflexive paranoia.  From that psychological perspective — then yes, one can see how Vladimir Putin and his cronies perceive themselves being “surrounded” and threatened.  And hence their emphasis on “D&D methods” of waging cold-war… Disproportionate and Deniable… emphasizing small investments that yield larger outcomes while letting the Russian leadership say “who me? I had nothing to do with that!”  The aim? To defeat their lumbering adversary with the Death of ten Thousand Cuts.

Cyber sabotage is the most famous of these D&D methods.  Another is disinformation — the spreading of false rumors through far-left and far-right gullible paranoia groups and sites, as described in this article where Sweden’s closer cooperation with NATO has been undermined with untrue narratives.

“A prime Kremlin target is Europe, where the rise of the populist right and declining support for the European Union create an ever more receptive audience for Russia’s conservative, nationalistic and authoritarian approach under Mr. Putin. Last year, the European Parliament accused Russia of “financing radical and extremist parties” in its member states, and in 2014 the Kremlin extended an $11.7 million loan to the National Front, the extreme-right party in France.”  Then there is Trump, over here. “The Russians are very good at courting everyone who has a grudge with liberal democracy, and that goes from extreme right to extreme left.”

“The role of non-military means of achieving political and strategic goals has grown, and, in many cases, they have exceeded the power of force of weapons in their effectiveness,” Gen. Valery V. Gerasimov, the chief of the general staff of the Russian Armed Forces, wrote in 2013.

We can only hope that this does not devolve into the scenario described in Frederik Pohl’s chillingly plausible novel The Cool War, which envisioned a horrid era when great powers deliberately and relentlessly sabotage each others’ infrastructure, causing power and water systems and bridges and highways and factories to collapse, leading to a general decline of all sides and all human civilization into a downward spiral of shabbiness and decay.

== Any proportion?  Any at all? ==

        

Finally. Just to be clear about the "30,000 emails" that Donald Trump wants Russia to find for him - there aren't even assertions of any concealed misdeeds in them! Only that HC made a dumb procedural mistake and tried to shrug it off.  Sorry fellahs. But that… is… it. The sum total of your trumped-up case.

Contrast this to 22,000,000 (yes, million) Bush emails that went "missing" when Congress sought information about the firing of 8 federal prosecutors who were sniffing at Bush-Cheney corruption.  Read that sentence over again, as many times as it takes, for the hypocrisy to sink in.

In 2014, e-sleuths managed to recover a bunch of those bushite erasures, though getting them sorted could take more years.  But the issue is both the amnesia and weird sense of scale displayed by our republican friends. Like spending 6 years of relentless hearings screaming over 4 volunteers who took an ill-advised risk in Benghazi... versus thousands who died on 9/11 because Bush re-assigned agents away from terror duties. Which of these got endless, endless hearings?

 Millions of deliberately deleted emails pertinent to blatant abuse of power in evading a corruption probe vs. a few thousand personal emails that no one even suggests were pertinent to any malfeasance? Which got hearings?


Cheney companies making billions off the Iraq wars and more billions sent by Cheney into Iraq as raw cash on pallets, that promptly disappeared...

... vs. a few hundred thousands in speaking fees with no known quid pro quo and those banks who paid for speeches are due anyway to get broken up by Hillary Clinton?  Which of these tales of corruption gets a lynch mob? 

I could go on and on.  But you see, those would be FACTS.  And now you see why Fox and its wholly owned party have declared war on science.

No. We want only five words from you scoundrels.


“OMG, what have we done?”