Perspectives and politics

Today is a roundup of some wider perspectives that've piled up.  After a couple of news blips:

1-  Jared Kushner was in Riyadh, consulting for a whole day with the Crown Prince, just days before the latter staged a major putsch, toppling every power rival in Saudi Arabia. No one in media seems to consider this as a precursor to the long-planned war vs. Iran. See how many forces want this, from the Saudis and Trump/Breitbart to Putin and even the Iranian mullahs, themselves.

Still, the image of an orthodox Jew dickering with the Saudi leader... might a silver lining to this be an Arab-Israeil rapprochement? I'll discuss all this in a future missive.

2- The Democrats' sweeps in Virginia, New Jersey, Washington State and elsewhere  show not only Trump's unpopularity and liberal vigor, but the vital importance of down-ticket races.  Finding candidates to take on "safe-seat" incumbents has paid off. Hence leave no office - state assembly or even dog catcher - uncontested in 2018. In an earlier three-part series I described how to do this.

== Wider Perspectives ==

Steven Pinker - the rascal who uses facts to defeat defeatism - points out that 2016 was not as bad as it seemed:  

“War deaths have risen since 2011 because of the Syrian civil war, but are a fraction of the levels of the 1950s through the early 1990s, when megadeath wars and genocides raged all over the world. Colombia’s peace deal marks the end of the last war in the Western Hemisphere, and the last remnant of the Cold War. Homicide rates in the world are falling, and the rate in United States is lower than at any time between 1966 and 2009. Outside of war zones, terrorist deaths are far lower than they were in the heyday of the Weathermen, IRA, and Red Brigades.”

He admits that: “Several awful things happened in the world’s democracies in 2016, and the election of a mercurial and ignorant president injects a troubling degree of uncertainty into international relations. 

"But it’s vital to keep cool and identify specific dangers rather than being overcome by a vague apocalyptic gloom.”

Pinker adds: “More generally, the worldwide, decades-long current toward racial tolerance is too strong to be undone by one man. Public opinion polls in almost every country show steady declines in racial and religious prejudice­ — and more importantly for the future, that younger cohorts are less prejudiced than older ones. As my own cohort of baby boomers (who helped elect Trump) dies off and is replaced by millennials (who rejected him in droves), the world will become more tolerant.”

Yesterday I spoke to several classes at a nearby high school, and was impressed with the eye-contact, strong voices, confident attitudes and diversity. Though propaganda - especially Hollywood - has convinced them that the world is going straight into the toilet, when that's just not true. But back to Pinker.

He reiterates a distinction: “between complacent optimism, the feeling of a child waiting for presents, and conditional optimism, the feeling of a child who wants a treehouse and realizes that if he gets some wood and nails and persuades other kids to help him, he can build one. I am not complacently optimistic about the future; I am conditionally optimistic.”

Finally... Echoes of 2014: Margaret McMillan writes that we should fear one thing… a pattern that centuries begin their themes a decade and a half in. 

“I wish I could stop, but I find myself thinking of 1914. The world then had seemed so stable, so manageable…. That confidence was dangerous because it meant that people didn't take the warning signs seriously enough.”

See where I wrote about how the pattern of each of the last several centuries seems to have begun about a decade and a half in...and the election of Donald Trump, along with meme-war depredations by our enemies, appears to bear this out.  But which theme will prevail until 2115? The Putin-Saudi-Trumpist re-ignition of our civil war?  Or our sound and decisive rejection of this putsch, reclaiming pragmatic confidence?

== Semper Ubi Sub-Ubi ==

Universal basic income (UBI) is a concept that was pushed by - among others - Robert Heinlein in several of his novels. A century ago, JM Keynes predicted we would see so much automated production that the average work week would fall to twenty hours. He was a hundred years premature, but many harbingers suggest we’re verging on that era, at last. UBI could be a way to ensure that it happens with decency, keeping the spirit of an egalitarian civilization.  The snarl by cynics is that this is “welfare” encouraging a generation of lazy, demanding lotus-eaters, is a cliché that’s been tested in the last decade, when some experiments in the developing world have shown that giving raw cash to poor families can be more effective than closely supervised-paternalistic versions of aid. And almost none of the cash is used on fripperies.

Now such experiments are arriving in the US. Y-combinator is pursuing a UBI project. In a new blog post published on the company’s website this week, they reveal their plans to pick 3,000 individuals from two states at random to receive a monthly cash handout. 1,000 participants will receive $1,000 per month for a period up to five years, while the other 2,000 will receive $50 per month, serving as the control group.

== Free Speech ==

Who favors free and open speech? Who fought against the Fairness Doctrine and all the rebuttal rules requiring broadcasters to offer a few minutes of rebuttal each night?  

Rupert Murdoch howled over letting on-air anyone who might refute his hired gas-bags. At his urging -- and the radio hypnotists at Clear Channel - the GOP rescinded it, and Fox hollers at any hint of its return, knowing just 5 minutes per day of factual rebuttal would tear them open like a dim-witted matador.

Funny: the "fake news" mainstream doesn't fear a rebuttal rule. The UK still has one. The Murdochs are lobbying like hell to get rid of it.

== You’re kidding me, right? ==

I'm not always a fan, but Thomas Friedman; in the New York Times is very smart and he can be pointed: "Having just traveled to New Zealand, Australia, South Korea, China, Taiwan and now Hong Kong, I can say without an ounce of exaggeration that more than a few Asia-Pacific business and political leaders have taken President Trump's measure and concluded that - far from being a savvy negotiator - he's a sucker who's shrinking US influence in this region and helping make China great again.

"These investors, trade experts and government officials are still stunned by a... Trump's decision to tear up the 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) free-trade deal ... without having read it or understanding its vast geo-economic implications. (Trump was so ignorant about TPP that when he was asked about it in a campaign debate in November 2015 he suggested that China was part of it, which it very much is not.)"

== Miscellaneous! ==

The percentage of adolescents in the U.S. who have a driver's license, who have tried alcohol, who date, and who work for pay has plummeted since 1976, with the most precipitous decreases in the past decade. Teens have also reported a steady decline in sexual activity in recent decades, as the portion of high school students who have had sex fell from 54 percent in 1991 to 41 percent in 2015, according to Centers for Disease Control statistics.  “According to an evolutionary psychology theory that a person's "life strategy" slows down or speeds up depending on his or her surroundings, exposure to a "harsh and unpredictable" environment leads to faster development, while a more resource-rich and secure environment has the opposite effect, the study said."

Okay, put on your list of ways to help the Earth... limiting your subsidizing cow farts. One more reason to eat less beef. And to invest in these great new veggie-burgers they're developing. And vat-grown meat.

This fellow says we could cut methane from beef by 70% by adding 4% seaweed to their diet. He estimates that to farm enough seaweed to cover Australia's livestock, we'd need to establish roughly 6,000 hectares of seaweed farms, which isn't going to be easy to find. But let’s start a pilot study.

The good news? U.S. greenhouse gas production went down last year. Solar/wind have skyrocketed. And climate change is proved. And the denialist cult has been proved wrong about absolutely everything.

Oh. Peaktu San. The highest peak in Korea (and the alleged birthplace of Kim Jong Il in official state mythology) is also an active super-volcano, one which, if it erupted, would obliterate most of North Korea and China too. 

== Colorful Political Miscellany ==

Dang. Some of you thought I was a bit... fierce... in taking down that traitor-toady George F. Will. But I'm dry toast compared to Jim Wright. Go read his choice fury ... 

And yes, we will only end this phase of the American Civil War when several million residually sane American conservatives realize that enough is enough. That this is not the conservatism of Barry Goldwater – whose grave spinning now supplies most of the power to Arizona.  

So what will it take? Pence’s chief of staff floats ‘purge’ of anti-Trump Republicans to wealthy donors. Oh, please. Oh do this.  The moderate sane conservatives of America have been frozen in stunned disbelief and cowardly inaction for years, unable to do their duty – to America and to conservatism – and form a new party not defined by Rupert Murdoch. But this could do the trick.

Nothing signals Melania Trump’s effort at independence more than this. 

White House Senior Adviser Jared Kushner has used both a private email account and an official email address to communicate with other government officials, his attorney says.  So… the very worst thing that Hillary Clinton was ever confirmed to have done wrong… is the very smallest piece of almost daily insane-malfeasance pouring from this White House. 

Disturbing insights into anomalous voting patterns.

Do you doubt there’s a lot going on that runs below what we see bandied about?  A third of rural whites, and 40 percent of rural white men, are resigned to believing that their children will grow up with a lower standard of living than they did, a far higher proportion than people who live in cities (23 percent) or suburbs (28 percent), a survey by the Pew Research Center found.   In addition to other problems, rural areas contend with drug and mental-health issues, poverty, and a lack of high-speed access to the internet. “This has become a cultural phenomenon. It’s not an educational phenomenon,” Fluharty said. Encouraging a rural student to go to college instead of doing the same work as the adults in a community, he said, is like “suggesting that that child should not do what I have done…” Among other insights: “Disdain toward rural people, which he called commonplace on campus, “is the last acceptable prejudice in America.” 

== Finally... ==

Conservatives continue push for probes of Clinton and her campaign. And it’s the theater that matters!  24 years and half a billion dollars spent seeking "smoking guns" on the Clintons, the most thoroughly probed humans in the history of our species. Every document scrutinized, every micro assistant grilled. The Kochs offered rewards for whistle blowers to rat out the "secret deals and travesties." And what did we wind up with? Nothing but 

(1) a husband fibbing about some 3rd base consensual-adult infidelity in a hallway, and 
(2) a cabinet secretary making the same mistake with emails as all of her predecessors and the Bushes all made.

Face it. Either the Clintons are decisively proved to be clean... or else the lynch mob that wasted all that time and money is beyond incompetent.

Fairness on the Public Airwaves

In a previous political posting, we ran through a long list of political addictions – nostrums and catechisms that believers return to decade after decade, despite their having been relentlessly and decisively disproved. Like the notion that a seventy year Drug War can cure chemical dependency, or that a fifty year trade embargo on Cuba ever did a scintilla of good. Or an utter insanity called Supply Side (Voodoo) Economics, or SSVE, that never made a single successful prediction, not even one, ever...

...or – indeed – some of the almost-as-absurd incantations nursed by the much-smaller but still dangerous very-far-left. Like anti-vaxxing and other hostilities to science, that approach 5% as silly as climate denialism; (yes, that silly.)

Normally, even the most obstinate human would start to shift away from such disproved nonsense. That is, if they were exposed to the disproof!  Alas, so many of us scrupulously avoid looking in directions that might offer up such evidence we’re wrong!  And there are evil men who cater to this weakness in human nature.

Which brings us to today’s topic.

== Should we hear any disagreement… at all? ==

Probably the most destructive administrative act in the last 50 years, and the root cause of almost all of America’s current problems, was based in a Reagan era action: 

“It was called the "Fairness Doctrine" created to prevent the American people from receiving misinformation in the guise of fact. Over 60 years later, the Fairness Doctrine is a thing of the past and the American people are worse off because of it.” 

Take a look at: The Repeal of Fairness: How Ronald Reagan gave us FOX News and other Bias Sources from the Examiner.

This history of the doctrine shows that its elimination led to today’s utterly polarized media, in which our fellow citizens stare at hate-drenched lie-festivals … rallying the faithful… without ever catching even a glimpse of another side.

While the Left has its own echo chambers that strive to copy the lucrative Fox – captive audience – business model, there are no masters of propaganda better than the crew led by Roger Ailes.  Indeed, MSNBC teeters on bankruptcy, because dedicated leftists are only a small minority of the Blue Constituency. 

The larger portion — moderate liberals — get bored by constant uniformity and wander off to find a variety of news sources. Indeed, their guru - Jon Stewart - swivels and skewers assumptions in all directions, while welcoming smart opponents on his show.

They are the ones who do not need a Fairness Doctrine.  They feel an itch on their own, to sample from a range of perspectives. 

But the far-left and entire-right are dogma junkies. Those portions of the populace need to be exposed to occasional rebuttals, lest they become shambling zombie-marrionettes to the hypno-lobotomizing propaganda puppet shows they stare at, endlessly nodding as stoked-up hate and fear levels just keep on rising.

There is a reason that the merchants of fear-and-loathing despise any talk of a restored fairness doctrine. Indeed, they would fight against it more furiously than anything else, even fair tax rates for oligarchs...

...because even just one minute of rebuttal per hour… would destroy their scam.  

Oh, we would still disagree, debate and fuss… there would still be liberals and conservatives and libertarians and such… but the purity of utter spite might give way to argument, comparison of evidence, some concessions in both directions, and even the horrible thing that the puppet-masters fear most. 

Negotiation. 

== How bad is the lie tsunami? ==

A new survey by the Tampa Bay Times’ PunditFact, looking at the veracity of cable networks, found that Fox News won (or lost) first prize for having the most falsehoods studied.  According to PunditFact, Fox News’s on-air talent were mostly-false, false, or “pants on fire” 60% of the time.  

MSNBC ranked second in falsehoods, at 46% of the time.  

And CNN ranked a lowly (or uply) 18% level of falsehoods – meaning, CNN did a pretty good job getting it right.  

As validation, the Economist, also a generally conservative journal, did its own survey of truthfulness, coming to very similar ratings. 

And hence this open challenge. Do you doubt I could do that one-minute rebuttal, myself?

I’m quite serious. Give me one minute per hour on Fox… or one per three hours… hell even one minute per week… and I would leave the Fox lie machine a smoldering ruin. You know I could do it. So could many of you. 

Want an equal chance at liberal media? Well, rebuttals already happen over there. Even on MSNBC. But sure… have at!

Alas, the masters of propaganda will fight to the death against any “fairness” on publicly owned airwaves, even though the principle was deemed totally righteous by our parents, in the Greatest Generation. The puppeteers know that the Ailes-heimers sickness they impose on millions would dissipate like a bad dream, and so would this phase of our re-ignited Civil War...

...setting us back on the path of non-demonizing, practical negotiation and vigorous, but reasonable argument. 

On that day when the fever breaks, we will regain a conservatism of intellect (I want it back!) and on that day, Barry Goldwater and William F. Buckley can stop spinning in their graves.

== Don't even pretend that truth evasion is equal ==

Oh, for those of you preaching the cynical line that “the parties are just the same, equally captured by Wall Street and equally corrupt,” dig this well.  

Democrats have long supported the Fairness Rule… meaning that they do not fear rebuttal...

...while Republicans sought to destroy it, and would go into actinic fury if they saw any hint of its return.

 Let's reiterate: one side does not mind its partisans hearing contradicting views and evidence.  The other side desperately dreads it.

Think about that. WHY is the right terrified of letting their troops hear any rebuttal at all?

Nothing better shows that the matter now is not “left-vs-right”... but honest/sane versus dishonest/insane.

Go on, spin out the rationalizations! It’s “freedom of speech” to keep half of a country hypnotized and hate-stoked with relentless, easily disproved lies. Just like the way southern whites, before the Civil War, had only newspapers to read that were owned and run by the plantation caste, having burned-out every other voice, loyal to Union and reason.

Go ahead and cry out “it’s simple competition and supply and demand!”  As you defend the same monopoly-oligarchy that was the top enemy of flat-open-fair enterprise for 6000 years. The exact and diametric opposite of "competition."

Sorry, these flailings may reassure you. But deep inside you know. 

This deliberate lobotomization of American political discourse is nothing less than treason.