Boycotts and other weapons for the Union Side

Tactics and strategy.  

The Confederacy has taken Washington and -- as usual -- America (the Union) is slow responding to an all-out war against every logical or fact-using profession, against the Constitution and against common sense or decency.  Aware that they must act, leaders of the Democratic Party have announced a Better Deal, hoping to leverage in middle Americans a dim memory of the love that their parents -- The Greatest Generation -- had for FDR and his New Deal...

...and as usual, the Dems seem to be clueless.  None of this is about the economy. Nor will it be, until the Trump Recession begins. 

It is about memes. And psychology. And hate. And money. But most of all a deep, simmering confederate hate of all things urban, or scientific, or professional, or expert, or associated with despised universities... or the future.  In the face of such mindless, fevered hate, attempting to offer policy anodynes is just reinforcement of the nerd-wonky image that these folks already have, or democrats.

No, this will require adoption of a whole range of new tactics that directly deal with the psychology and money and the underlying hate.

Indeed some tactics should be blatantly obvious!  Like how to deal right now with a fragile-ego, prickly, mercurial, and flighty president. Earlier I proposed the "Short Straw Gambit"... how DP leaders should draw lots and the losers use flattery to end Donald Trump's dangerous isolation.  The flattery can be sardonic! It can be couched in ways that betray no principles and that are even obvious to Trump's cabal: Bannon & company! They'll scream: it's a trick! It won't matter. Even something as blatantly manipulative as this...

“I disagree with almost everything he says… but boy is our president good-looking for a man his age. Perhaps one of the most-handsome presidents in history.”
  
... will work! Even knowing he's being manipulated won't matter. Donald Trump likes people who flatter him. Period.  He will invite them to lunch, to golf. And those channels would then make a real difference. We are betrayed by those who refuse to use this! It could save all our lives.
 

== Ethics and Oversight ==

Who was (or is) on your side? The fiduciary rule, finalized by the Obama Labor Department in 2016, requires certain financial advisers to disclose potential conflicts of interest to clients. It also expands the types of advisers who are mandated by a “fiduciary” standard to act in their clients’ best interests, not their own. 

Read that twice. Until then, your “financial adviser” could legally steer you to investments benefiting her, not you, and not tell you. Democrats failed for decades to overcome Republican support for that system, by legislation, so Obama finally found a way to change it administratively, through the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. (Which Trump is trying to kill.)  Now the civil servants in Trump’s Labor Department appear to have prevailed in preventing DT’s people from rescinding that rule. An example of how we are being served, still, by a “United States Government.” Just not the Confederate preeners in Congress and the White House.  

For decades, POGO — the Project on Governmental Oversight — has worked with government insiders to expose wrongdoing that affects the public. I have long pushed for reliable, graduated and careful, but effective whistle-blower laws. 

You might think the independent Office of Government Ethics (OGE) would have authority to deal with this matter. But, it turns out, OGE not only lacks the proper authority to investigate ethics complaints, it also lacks the ability to discipline people for violations. POGO - the Project on Government Oversight - is urging Congress — specifically Reps. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) and Elijah Cummings (D-MD) — the respective Chairman and Ranking Member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee — to expand the law so OGE has independent authority to investigate ethics complaints and issue corrective disciplinary actions for noncriminal violations. Here’s how you can help.

At his confirmation hearing, President Trump’s pick for deputy secretary of Interior told a Senate panel that the president’s political positions will be prioritized over the science when deciding agency policy -- such as drilling offshore or on public lands. 

For 6000 years, autocrats and oligarchs ruled badly because (being human) they suppressed facts. Their reign of error and terror ended when we found a better way, actually arguing and negotiating based on evidence. But the oligarchs are swarming back, financing a War on Science and every other fact-based profession.

This is life-or-death people. Look at the endless chain of horrors called "history," run by self--indulgent, cranky asshole-babies called "kings" and "lords" and owner aristocrats. Do you want that era back, but armed with atom bombs and genetic engineering?

The War on science is waged by enemies of your children. Stand up. Add your name to call out Trump's anti-science nominees on 314 Action.

== Boycotting madness and treason ==

Speaking of economics, many are riled enough to start using America’s inherent economic power against this era’s plantation lords. The economic weapon with potential immediate impact?  Boycotts.  Oh, but boycotting whom?

It seems easy to target Trump properties.  But all that will do is make the family sell hotel rooms to foreign governments and lobbyists even more unctuously than before -- and foreign purchases of U.S. hotel chains has been found to be directly related to industrial espionage, the stealing of trade secrets, and honeypot blackmail traps. (Be careful who you bring to your room, the walls have eyes and ears! And never let your electronics out of your sight.)  Still, have a look at the new "Boycott Trump App"  as well as the #GrabYourWallet list. And if he's your bette noir, then fine. 

But I am unimpressed with DT as a heroically evil figure. Far more hapless and now rather neutralized.

No, skip the symptom and go for the disease. It remains up to the nation to find some way to make the Fox News hypnosis model less profitable. Sure the boycott of Fox News advertisers is much, much harder for an average citizen than saying: “I won’t buy any Ivanka shoes or stay in a Trump Hotel!” Keeping track of a long list of Fox advertisers – and favoring their competitors – is far more taxing of time and inconvenience. 

Moreover, there’ll be times when you just have no other good choice. Or picking the alternative will make a real price difference. Or when it would mean dropping your gym or AARP membership. So?  Perfection and purity aren’t the aim!  What matters is overall movement.  

This could be your most powerful tool as an individual American – after voting and political activism and helping to keep your own state and locality above the sinking U.S. average. Especially if you form a little boycott club among Facebook friends and share lists and help each other to stick to a diet.

This could also extend to the gambling dens of Sheldon Adelson, who funneled $5 million to the Trump Inauguration, a fund that took in over a hundred million dollars in blatant bribes from oligarchs. Did this bother and of those who screamed about Clinton speaker fees, that were a thousand times smaller?

== A Great Hero? Not. But possible an American ==

Senator John McCain faces an especially aggressive and nasty form of cancer that's generally a death sentence. And this indeed, saddens me.

For all his many faults, John McCain is an adult and an American and not totally allergic to facts. In other words - not a confederate cultist deliberately helping to hijack U.S. conservatism. Oh, he has helped it happen, over and over. But at least he has rationalized reasons to believe he was doing the right thing. And on occasion, he has even spoken out against the madness, earning him plenty of ire.

Recall how Donald Trump mocked McCain with: “I like people who don’t get captured.” That’s just the tip. This Koch-ist shill decries John McCain for saying that Vladimir Putin is more dangerous than ISIS. But let’s be clear: Vladimir Putin - who I do admit and avow to be a genius — is organizing an "axis" of like-minded autocrats that stretches from Ankara, Damascus, Minsk and Tehran through its pivot in Moscow through the Altaic region to include now Manilla, with much friendly cooperation by Beijing.  

The shared narrative across this axis - that democracy is decadent and useless and dangerous and that the Western Enlightenment must be brought down - is now the core and driving philosophy promoted by the right-wing oligarchy in America, as well.  Given that this campaign has achieved a principal goal of discrediting -- in the eyes of 1/3 of Americans -- every single profession that deals in facts, from, science and journalism to the U.S. military Officer Corps...then yes, this foe is vastly, vastly more dangerous than ISIS.

Still, it comes down to this.  With little time left to accomplish anything, might John McCain gather together the 6 or 7 GOP senators who still view themselves as sapient and loyal Americans, and admit that their party is now pure treason?  If that core started a new, Adult American Responsible Conservative Party, millions would flock to their banners and McCain would go down in history as a great man.

I began this missive with a suggestion for some brave Democrats, to carefully and cleverly reach out to a flighty and terrified Donald Trump.  I finish with a desperate wish that a few Republicans - led by a man who should live up to his "hero" rep - to turn their backs upon that madness.

Those were the days... When was America 'great'? And who has Steve Bannon reincarnated?

Have you heard of “Godwin’s Law?” It asserts that: “If an online discussion (regardless of topic) goes on long enough, sooner or later someone will invoke Hitler.” In practice, it is used to shame or chastise those who make any sort of comparison to the fascist hellscape of the mid-20^th Century.*  To be sure, an overused, hyperbolic cliché can be tiresome.** 

Mike Godwin must be going crazy, right now, amid the tsunami of post-election comparisons. For the record, I do not think Donald Trump wants to, or will, become a Hitler. Parallels with Mussolini are creepy though, starting with Il Duce’s fervid rallies and relentless slogans, calling on Italians to rebuild classical glories and — translated literally— “make Rome great again.” 

Sure, I’ve made my own parallels with 1933 Germany, and they remain apt. Just as the Prussian barons, or Junkers aristocrats, fostered the racist-populist brown shirts as a counterweight to socialists and communists, so Fox News, Breitbart-Limbaugh-Jones and the Kochs deliberately whipped non-college white male boomers into a froth… exacerbated by their grouchiness over getting old and seeing the world change around them.

As those so-clever 1930s lords did then, today’s oligarchs stare in disbelief that a gifted shaman leaped aboard their carefully-trained beast, threw off the intended jockeys and grabbed the reins for himself.*** Back eight decades ago, at least a few of the Junkers had enough honesty to proclaim: “Mein Gott, what haf we done?” Alas, do not expect any such honor or decency from Rupert Murdoch, or the Worst Man in America, George F. Will.

Yet, I take solace from history. Back in the 1930s, as today all over the planet, common folk were mesmerized by new communications technologies. Back then it was radio and loudspeakers, that amplified the hypnotic voices of gifted, polemical svengalis, who took over almost everywhere, plunging humanity toward an abyss.

But not in the English speaking world.  Our parents and grandparents were captivated by gifted orators, too. But here, and in Britain, those gifted speakers were on our side, urging us — as Pericles did in Athens — to make the most of our democracy. Which brings us to a question that blue Americans really need to ask their red neighbors:

When do you envision that America had its “great” golden age?  “Make America Great Again” implies a clear notion of a time. So when was that?

It would seem that generally folks are referring to the era of the Greatest Generation – the boomers’ parents -- who overcame the Depression and Hitler, contained communism, built a booming market economy and got us into space, while too-gradually, but deliberately, taking on so many longstanding prejudices and injustices they inherited from their parents and a thousand other generations. 

Oh, but a funny thing about those folks in the World War II generation. They voted high taxes on the rich, which the rich patriotically paid. And they admired labor unions.

Above all, that clade of Americans had one favorite living human, a man adored by his people, his fellow citizens.

No wonder the New Lords have spent hundreds of millions and decades portraying Franklin Delano Roosevelt as Satan, incarnate.  All while invoking nostalgia for the “great” American era of the 1940s and 1950s, sweeping aside one fact -- that every notable aspect of that period was Rooseveltean. A time - I must reiterate - when unions thrived, the rich paid taxes, science was admired, and moving forward was in our blood. 

Oh, you sour boomers, don’t you dare to invoke the Greatest Generation!  They were union men, democrats mostly, held no truck with foppish billionaires, preferred facts over assertions, built giant projects, gave the world its first general peace and… oh, yes, can I say it again? Their favorite living human was FDR. And do you know who followed Roosevelt in that slot? Who was the most-admired American during the 1950s? A fellow named Jonas Salk.

Oh, they were far from perfect, my parents and their friends. Their faults were monumental! But they emulated the American Founders, and the soldiers of a righteous, abolitionist blue Union, and others who pushed our fine Experiment forward, not wallowing in nostalgia.  (See how I answer right wing adoration of the 1950s.) Moreover, we are not lesser beings than the Greatest Generation. We benefit by living in the great civilization they built. But they raised us to launch from their shoulders. And yes, we have mightily amplified all of their accomplishments with creativity, science and compassion. 

(BTW, the next generation – millennials, especially – are so much better than us boomers that there’s no comparison. Calmer by far. Generally wiser, nicer, smarter. As a parent I’ll take some credit. The best thing we boomers ever did! And we so owe the kids an apology, right now. We need to get out of their way.)

== They built ‘great’ America. FDR merely summoned their wills. ==

No, fanatics, you don’t get the Greatest Generation, who would be appalled by your quiver-lipped wrath and shrill, drama-queen wails. No. You must flee farther back from their Rooseveltean era, in search of your earlier “great” time!

Here’s a candidate period for you -- one admired by the alt-right and Fox – lauded in a song you might recall:

“Mister we could use a man like Herbert Hoover again.

Didn’t need no Welfare State.

Everybody pulled his weight.

Gee our old LaSalle ran great.

Those were the days.”

Is it 1929 then, that alt-right and the folks at Trump rallies yearn for? Surely the oligarch-junker lords financing the movement would be pleased to crank-back before FDR.  And yet, we all know that’s not it. 

Forget 1929.

It’s 1861, they yearn for. Only this time a confederacy that’s victorious. Plantation lords and their fervid vassals finally overcoming the blue forces of science, facts and progress. (And let us admit that this round of the civil war, with help from the Czar, the Confederacy has taken Washington.)

Alas, stupidly, they ignore real history and where this can only lead.

Their conspiracy will carry us to Paris, 1789.

== Back to Godwin ==

Okay, we’ve drifted. Yes, it is vital to nail the Trumpists by demanding they say when they think America was Grrrrreat! ****  

Still, circling back to the beginning, we started with Godwin’s Law. Recall that I dismissed the likelihood that Donald Trump wants anything Hitlerian. So don’t exaggerate! It just harms your credibility. I doubt he’s personally very racist, while cynically egging on those who are. Though parallels with Mussolini seem apt.

No, I’ve taken you on this journey in order to convey a chilling moment of realization that I had today, when looking at Donald Trump’s White House appointments. A shiver of recognition that can only have come from watching way too much History Channel (before they became the Bigfoot Channel.)  Specifically…

…I looked at the epically prototypical brownshirt who is Donald Trump’s chief aid and ‘strategist’ — Steve Bannon, whose silver-spoon life and cushy parasitism at Goldman Sachs then subsidized a plunge into manipulative populist cant, raging against the civilization that benefited him for decades. (Forecast; no bills will be introduced to actually change Wall St. parasitism.)

I know him, you see. Not directly, but every howl against modernity. Every appeal to Cyclical History (the central incantatory touchstone of the reactionary right.) His contempt-drenched ragings against science and every other knowledge caste. I know the cult of neo-feudalists who aim for a return to the standard human condition of 6000 years, and his raves are identical to their calls for a return to kingship, to dominance by Aryan males, to Church and hierarchy and empire, stirring mobs to crush citizenship. 

Using populism to wreck government by-the-people.

Moreover, in all traits he seems eerily reminiscent of (may Godwin forgive me) a certain historical figure whose arc and ambitions and face strike chilling parallels. A fellow named --

Martin Bormann. 

The chief aid, factotum, ear-whisperer, private secretary and ‘strategist’ who controlled the flow of information and access to you-know-who. The Grima Wormtongue of humanity’s darkest time.

A stretch? Then photoshop-modify the hair. Ditch the peach fuzz. Hell, drawl the name. 

Now guess which of them said: ““Darkness is good… That’s power. It only helps us when they get it wrong. When they’re blind to who we are and what we’re doing.”

Okay, that was Bannon. Here’s the full paragraph: “Darkness is good. Dick Cheney. Darth Vader. Satan. That’s power. It only helps us when they get it wrong. When they’re blind to who we are and what we’re doing.”

And now some of you are mumbling: "Brin are you insane?  Bannon will surely see this! It will stand out and get you on a list." To which I answer, well... ******

I do have to ask: has any member of this generation actually read Mein Kampf? Anyone? At all? Read it! Or at least skim -- look past the screeching racism and rage at the deeper threads of romanticism and the incantations of cyclical history. The calls for not improvement or progress, but restoration of a spectacular purity and glory that never, ever existed in the past.

Then note while flipping through those pages, it isn’t Donald Trump whose voice you can hear, speaking the lines. (Trump is more like Huey Long or Father Coughlin or yes, Il Duce.) But Bannon is there. His voice.

Oh my Godwin.

== Best friends ==

Do I exaggerate?

Check out who are Donald Trump’s most fervent foreign admirers.

---

Enough...

---------------------------

* I was a participant in a long-ago, early-primitive message group, when attorney Mike Godwin coined his famous ‘law.”

** Speaking of clichés, it can be apt to swap the phrase “Godwin’s Law” into Godwin’s Law: “If an online discussion (regardless of topic) goes on long enough, sooner or later someone will invoke Godwin's Law.” 

*** As DT eagerly toes the line of Koch orthodoxy, I have to wonder if he experienced recently a moment like that in the film NETWORK, when Howard Beale meets Ned Beatty's wonderful mogul, Arthur Jensen. Watch it. Watch Network, including the classic "Mad as Hell!" scene... and then my response to it.

**** Tony the Trumpeter Tiger?

******  Will I be put on lists? Oh, sillies, of course I'm already on lists. And other lists of people whose 'accidents' would be probed. I do have some courage and sense of duty to a civilization, planet and species that I love, and so willingly take some risk. But probably foremost is the fact... that I wrote the character Nathan Holn, in The Postman. And there are some tough hombres out there who don't care that I portrayed Holn as a villain. They adore him, anyway. And me as Holn's 'creator. And hence, I've been offered shelter in places where... let's just say it would take an army. Martin Bormann would have envied these 'redoubts.'  Of this I have little doubt.

******* Oh! Late breaking development. I'm not the first to notice the resemblance!  Aw shucks.  And also... relief. 

As the campaigns heat up...

Congress closed out 2015 bragging that they actually negotiated a pragmatic and executable budget bill, for the first time in about a decade. Even though it contained more GOP-demanded tax gifts for the rich, the fact that any bill passed at all still enraged the far-right.  But don't worry, culture warriors. The House & Senate did manage to adjourn without voting on a slate of finance- or banking-related nominees put forward by the Obama administration, a stalemate with no recent precedent that is hobbling work at some government agencies that try to prevent the financial sector from doing the kinds of foolish things that led to the Great Recession.  

This obstructionism – unprecedented in the history of the republic – was so extreme that even the Murdoch owned Wall Street Journal denounced it, calling President Obama’s nominees “qualified” and their tasks “necessary.”

One more reason to note that Rupert Murdoch and the Saudi co-owners of his media empire have lost control of the radicalization hysteria that they deliberately stirred on the American right.  Chillingly similar to when the 1920s and 1930s German business moguls and Junker-class lords stoked populist-radical fervor in order to suppress socialists – and wound up reaping a whirlwind they had sown.

Have the lords given up?  Never! The political network overseen by billionaires Charles G. and David H. Koch plans to spend close to $900 million on the 2016 campaign.  And the tally has gone way up, since this article was published. Yep. A. Billion. Dollars. That's how much the aristocracy intends to lavish, in order to buy a continuation of their lock on America.  I'd draw more parallels with 1932... but we need to look forward and just prevent it.

What can you do about this? 

You can do plenty, like helping to get out the vote in 2016.  But for some of you, there will be opportunities to act on the front lines by peeling away just one or two members of the cult.  Seek out - as if you are proselyte-missionaries - those otherwise-intelligent men and women who are clinging -- barely -- to their lifelong loyalty to an American conservatism that has been brutally hijacked.  "Ostrich republicans" who refuse (so far) to admit what lies before their eyes... the utter demolition of a movement that once featured towering intellects like Buckley and Goldwater and Hayek, all of whom denounced (before they died) the trend toward know-nothing anti-science dogmatism.

Sure, most of the new wave of confederates are immune to facts, by now.  But when you come across one whose frenzied denial seems fragile have at hand the facts that will yank their heads out of the sand. And oh... facts are now so biased.

== This is why they hate science, so ==

All politicians lie: some worse than others: This article by the editor of PolitiFact makes an earnest effort to explain how fact-checking works and offers optimism that large swathes of the public are now taking seriously the fact-checking of politicians.  The bad news? That fiercely partisan people leap to dismiss any fact-checking service as partisan, just as soon as their favorite shiboleths are exposed. 

This sad state of affairs is worsened by the blatant way that outright and openly-proud lying has taken wing in one of the two US political parties, where radical narratives no longer even need a figleaf or string-tether to objective reality. Under these conditions, the most assiduously neutral fact-checking service is going to seem partisan-titled, as you’ll see in the article’s accompanying chart.

There are potential solutions! Here's just one proposal: Let every candidate pick three “sages” from their home states or districts — with criteria that the choices must be “widely accepted as mature, smart, wise and minimally political.” These nominees of all major candidates - from both parties - would serve on the Board of Supervisors of a new political fact checking service.  

Sure, some candidates will pick rabidly partisan supporters.  But that fact will be clear and it will harm them, and will insult their home state. It will say: “where I’m from, there are no folks who are mature, smart, wise and minimally political.” What an insult to your home district.

No, it won’t happen — unless a debate moderator extorts a pledge, on-stage.  And so? Then we must use the facts as we can.

For example, when I show folks the starkly huge difference in Actual Outcomes - measurable metrics of US national health - across the spans of Republican vs Democratic administrations.  A difference so amazingly diametric, and so free of “left-right” dogmas, that — thinking only about pragmatic outcomes — any citizen would have to be delusionally insane to trust one of those two parties with a burnt match.

But let’s zoom in one of the best of the new breed of “screw-the-truth” masters. Alas for poor Ted Cruz. His prime (cheating-lying) talking point is unraveling. This year is going to smash 2014 as the warmest year on record. Nine out of the 11 months last year were the warmest in history for that month. 

November’s average temperature across land and ocean was an exceptional 1.75 degrees above the 20th century average, exceeding the previous record set in 2013 by 0.27 degrees. The November temperature departure — 1.75 degrees — was the second highest out of any month in NOAA’s 136-year period of record. The highest was just set one month before in October, at 1.79 degrees.

To be fair, Cruz isn't the only GOP pol to use Roger Ailes's (Fox) trick -- pegging the "before" comparison on 1998 - the previous record holder. That let them claim "there's no warming!" ("since 1998"), which was an El Nino spike. Comparing oranges to apples, a wretched trick that they can no longer pull off. In fact, the trends have ALL been sharply upward.

Meanwhile -- the Greenland Ice Sheet has lost about 9,013 gigatonnes of water ice from 1900 to 2010 – and it’s dropping mass today at an increasing rate, an international team of scientists say. From 2003 to 2010, the ice sheet lost mass at a rate more than twice the rate during the entire 20th century, a new study shows.

No wonder science is so unpopular among fools. And let there be no mistake. Members of the Denialist Cult are far, far beyond being fools.  They are frantic.

== So outcomes matter == 

Are Americans getting poorer?  Is there increased wealth disparity?  Is it dangerous? This simple chart shows you that the answer is – “it’s complicated.”  

Deep, grinding poverty has inarguably declined, though less than we had hoped, across the last 40 years. The definition of “middle class” has spread widely across a huge range. But the very top-earning fraction of a percent have done spectacularly well, truly skyrocketing. And this is where human temptation can lead to cheating and the re-imposition of the class systems that almost all our ancestors knew. Indeed, our parents in the Greatest Generation knew this very well.

Is a steeply rising aristocratic oligarchy conspiring to re-install inherited feudalism? Are they human? Then of course some of them are doing that! On the other hand, note the rising upper-middle class. The smartest of the uber rich must know that the upper middle class, especially the knowledge professions, will resist when feudal trends become clear. Those knowledge castes, only some of them scientists or civil servants, are the inherent obstacle that will make returning to a pyramidal power structure difficult. And hence the biggest reason for trumping up a war on science. For the war on all knowledge castes.

So again I ask: do actual outcomes matter? In December the EPA announced that fuel economy is at record highs and carmakers have surpassed strict emissions standards for the third straight year. When the (briefly) democratic Congress passed new efficiency standards in 2009, the GOP shouted it would "end Detroit!" Instead. US auto makers are booming and long ago repaid their emergency loans. Drivers are saving billions at the pump while the air gets less polluted and US energy independence is secured.  

So will you listen again to the same screeching chicken-littles? Always wrong about everything? Is your dogma so strong that you'll pay no head to outcomes... at all?

(Like the fact that galls right-wing males more than any other... so much so that their minds eject it. The fact that Barack Obama killed... Osama.... bin... Laden. Mention that one, next time you argue with your mad uncle. Just for the dizzying carnival ride as he changes the subject.)

This comparison lays the matter of outcomes plainly… though only giving a sampler. And let’s make this clear.  Outcomes… actual-actual outcomes of governance… should be the number one thing that you weigh in politics, not whether one side or another appeals to your vanity or dogmas.

== More stuff... ==

Peter Thiel offers up an appeal for the resurrection of nuclear power as a way to reduce carbon-fuel use in the nearer term, getting us across the fairly long gap before sustainables truly take over.  Thiel isn’t alone.  Techno-modernists with deep liberal connections, like Stewart Brand, have been pointing out how vastly-better the newest reactor designs are, safe from the catastrophic failure modes like coolant failure meltdown. Thiel's appeal is cogent and - yes - a little right-of-center, but giving a respectful nod to the can-do New Dealers of the 1940s, Thiel calls for an alliance of adults to get this bridge to the 2050s built in time to help.

“Both the right’s fear of government and the left’s fear of technology have jointly stunted our nuclear energy policy, but on this issue liberals hold the balance of power. Speaking about climate change in 2013, President Obama said that our grandchildren will ask whether we did “all that we could when we had the chance to deal with this problem.”

Alas, it is precisely in order to prevent this kind of negotiation that cynical traitors have plunged us into phase 8 of the American Civil War, ensuring that politics — the art of building consensus/compromise/pragmatic attempts to solve problems — has been killed, and will stay dead in the U.S., until one side or another suffers a defeat deep enough to re-evaluate obstinacy.

== Snowden scores some points ==

My estimation of the intelligence and sincerity of Edward Snowden cranked up by a couple of notches after listening to his interview by Neil deGrasse Tyson on StarTalk... but only a couple.  Up to maybe 75% or so.  Those who reflexively call him "brilliant" and "hero" are too eager and premature. (As are those who blanket-condemn him.) Especially the brilliant part, as he clearly and vociferously buys into the most dangerous and noxious zero-sum game around -- the we must "choose" between safety and freedom.  

Sure, if there were such a dichotomy, I would agree that freedom comes first.  But the very notion of such a romantic, zero sum tradeoff is both counter to reality and in itself malignant to our Great Experiment in positive sum systems. Alas, almost everyone buys into it.

Dig it. We are living proof of the notion that a people can innovate to both have their cake and eat it... while sharing cake and watching it grow.  Only thus do we stand a chance.  It is called positive sum thinking and it is the one concept... the paramount concept... you need in order to exercise citizenship in this frenzied, hopeful and endangered modern age of transition.

Whatever else Edward Snowden is, he is what I long have called a "social T Cell." Part of our immune system against the kind of errors long made by hierarchical societies.  Individually, no T Cell is all-right. Indeed, sanctimony usually colors them and foils their accuracy.  But we need the TYPE.  And our civilization is good at making them.

And you... who are about to scream at me... you could not possibly exemplify this more.