Maddow, Mueller and the dems push a dare at McConnell

First announcements: On December 18, my friend Robert Kuhn became only the second American to receive the China ReformFriendship Medal, said to be China’s highest award; it was given by President Xi Jinping and Chinese leaders at the 40^th anniversary of 'opening up' in the Great Hall of the People.  Robert is also the host of the future-oriented TV series Closer toTruth, that had me on for topics ranging from SETI to philosophy of science, religion, ESP to human destiny in the cosmos.  See his optimistic appraisal of the likelihood of a positive deal with China over matters like state subsidies and IP protection.

Alas, the PRC is now pushing an initiative for Trump to get crowing points over what doesn't matter -the trade deficit - to distract from what does matter, theft of he West's innovation and invention. And hence -- this is by far the most important article you can read about China's leadership caste, by an Australian diplomat/journalist of immense insight. Join the site (free) in order to read it. Follow this with my own insights, which dovetail with Garnaut's, about Chinese PRC mythologies about central planning and AI. More on this at the end.

And scroll down for links to my latest podcasts.

== An open letter to Rachel Maddow… ==

Dear Ms. Maddow,

Now that your ratings have surpassed Sean Hannity’s, may I offer a suggestion? One that could both devastate Fox and spur another ratings boost for you? It’s simple: challenge Hannity to exchange rebuttal segments! Offer him 2 minutes, three times a week, if he’ll reciprocate.

First, it would be a profound statement of confidence that you are the one with facts on your side. 

Second, Hannity and his Fox masters know your mere six-minutes-per-week on Fox would be far more deadly to them, hence they will refuse! Whereupon you can call “chicken!” (Note: Fox led the charge to end the old version of the Rebuttal Rule: I wonder why?) 

If you had done this in the past, Ol’ Sean (or O’Reilly) would sneer “She’s trying to chase our ratings.” Now you can say – with a sly wink - “I’m taking pity on a failing competitor.”

If they accept, you’d torch Fox to the ground, in just 360 seconds. (It’s also one way to get Donald Trump to watch some of your stuff.) But far more important would be spreading the concept of rebuttal, even challenging opponents to wagers, and the thing that terrifies the Murdochians most… the very notion of “fact.” 

Which is why they now wage war on every single fact-using profession, from scientists, teachers, journalists, doctors, economists, civil servants and skilled labor...all the way to the professionals in the FBI, intelligence agencies and Military Officer Corps, whom the cult now derides as "deep state" monsters. (More on this, below.)

Yes, you’d have to be short and punchy. I could offer some one-line zingers. But it won’t come to that. They’ll refuse, in desperate panic. So the only thing you’ll have to say is: “Chicken! B’b’bkaw!”

== What Mueller is really targeting ==

I predicted it will all turn out to be about money laundering. This article by Michael HIrsch - How Russian Money Helped Save Trump's Business -   begins your education about what will soon be emerging as much bigger than anything so far: “in the aftermath of Trump’s earlier financial troubles" (three bankruptcies that stiffed his U.S. creditors) “he could not get anybody in the United States to lend him anything. It was all coming out of Russia.” Officially, his comeback was financed by two German lenders, Deutsche Bank and Bayerische Vereinsbank. But the EU is sifting the former, tracing vast flows of Russian money from Putin allies.

Seriously, don’t skim this. Each paragraph makes clear it’s worse than you thought. Then it gets worse. Then it goes downhill. And somewhere along the way, it stopped being about “deals” or even a “swamp” and almost certainly became about leverage, even blackmail.

“Russian efforts either to recruit somebody as an asset or effectively coerce them into becoming an asset historically typically rely on compromise of either a financial nature or a sexual nature,” said David Kris, a former assistant attorney general in charge of the Justice Department’s National Security Division. And no, a "pee tape" would not suffice.

Find someone, anywhere, who was talking about "leadership subornation" and "blackmail as a war weapon" in the 1990s.

== Democrats pick (almost) the right first priority ==

Yes, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) nailed it with #WheresMitch? This was not Trump's Shut Down! He can't veto a government re-start that doesn't reach his desk. This is all stage managed by Putin's real asset in the U.S. Mitch McConnell. (Lefty or not, I'm starting to think AOC may be more than just faddish hype. Pace yourself. But you go.)

As for legislating? The Democrats’ HR1 anti-corruption bill is a litany of desperately needed reforms… their equivalent of a “Contract With America” that I wish were sold half as well as that historic work of razzle-dazzle. 

Every one of HR1's many component measures would help restore American democracy and vastly improve accountability. We might quibble or negotiate this or that. But the intent of almost every measure is to restrict or eliminate cheating, from demanding paper ballots to prevent tampering and easier voter registration to applying pressure against gerrymandering (yes, even in Blue States like Maryland); from demanding transparency of large political donors to insisting presidents and candidates release their tax returns and restricting “emoluments; from keeping congressfolk off corporate boards to transparency in the “swamp” of lobbying. 

And yes, this utterly refutes any jerk out there who says “the parties are the same.”

DP leaders are right to prioritize these matters ahead of the things the party’s left salivates-for, like “Medicare for All.” Those desiderata should win or lose based on the merits of their case! But that case can never be made, so long as cheating (set up by a whole generation of Republican shysters like Dennis “friend to boys” Hastert and Mitch McConnell) prevails. My only complaints are:

1) Even more important than electoral and ethics reform is re-establishing the very concept of “fact” in American life. The core element of today's confederate cult is to wage war on every single fact-using profession, from scientists, teachers, journalists, doctors, economists, civil servants and skilled labor...all the way to the professionals in the FBI, intelligence agencies and Military Officer Corps, whom the cult now derides as "deep state" monsters. This pattern is perfect and utterly damning. And my FACT Act proposes 12 measures that might end the War on Fact.

2) McConnell’s corrupt GOP Senate majority will ignore HR1, of course. So the House should start sending over the provisions one-by-one, daring every Republican Senator to specifically oppose each, individually. A dozen or so of these goppers will have to find one or two to support… they might do so together, for their own electoral survival… and McConnell may decide to let Trump take the heat, with his veto pen. Fine, this a ground game of yards.

3) Add a measure demanding that all of a president's foreign meetings be witnessed by trustworthy US officials. (See below.)

== Transparency, liberty… and blockchain… ==

I’ve been featured on several libertarian-themed podcasts, lately. This one, sponsored by AEI (American Enterprise Institute) and hosted by Jim Pethokoukis, focused on surveillance, transparency and the future of freedom. I challenge preconceptions, garrulously, of course. And it is always good to help sinners regain both light and loyalty to the Enlightenment.

Another is the “CoinSpice” podcast where I’m interviewed about blockchain, autonomous “semi-AI algorithms” already roaming the web, and advice for a new generation of “ICO” coin hotshots to stay out of jail.

How is it that I give so many interviews or speak at so many libertarian events, when they know I will poke hard at the mistaken directions taken by this once-promising movement? Two reasons. First, I think the underlying themes of individualism and liberty are important enough to try weaning these fellows off the current fad of oligarchy-worship. (Forbes and Koch have spent many millions, subsidizing orgs like Cato and AEI to achieve this hypnosis, kicking aside the once-important word “competition” in favor of idolatry of property.)

Second, they keep inviting me! Of all the political factions on today’s landscape, only libertarians seem passionately interested (well, some of them) in being challenged and facing tough questioning. And yes, I challenge.

==  Finally... Donald Trump, don't eat! ==

We’ve all seen reasons to oppose any further Trump private meetings with communist or ex-communist or mafia foreign leaders. First, nothing good ever came of it — and they stink of being blatant de-briefing sessions, issuing fresh orders to Putin’s agent. But there’s an added reason why Two Scoops should give up this filthy habit. Self-preservation. 

He still views himself (delusionally) as an Adonis. But Putin sees an asset turning into a liability, serving to unify the Union side of this civil war that Vlad cleverly helped Rupert to ignite. There comes a point where mafia dons start thinking cement overshoes, and how much more useful their raving “asset” would be, as a martyr. 

Close your eyes. Picture a silky-smooth President Pence reassuring and luring-back some of the officer corps, while riling the 33% confederates into fury over martyred dear-leader Trump. 

Fer crying out loud Donald, when you are with Kim DON’T EAT ANYTHING! Yes, you imagine it is only liberals and western-civilization types and smartypants who have it in for you, and despots are your pals. But remember how rapacious you were, in business, and consider that you may have outlasted your usefulness to your best pals. (God bless the US Secret Service. Pay them!)

Now consider how stupid this plausible scenario actually makes Don and the dons. He won’t be careful, thinking he’s still valuable to them. And they won’t consider the long range, lethal consequences. That there is nothing Mike Pence prays for, daily, more than - absolutely literally - the End of the World. 

Learn the true meaning of the political “F-Word”

Put aside distractions: Spicer, Priebus, the Mooch.... It's Steve Bannon who has drawn concerned attention lately from those seeking signs and portents. For example, Donald Trump’s Chief Strategist reads a lot and styles himself a supreme intellect. In this exploration of Bannon’s favorite books, you’ll find plenty to worry about, such as his cult-obsession with a coming apocalypse-like crisis foretold by inevitable “cycles of history.” (I'll append more about his favorite authors, below.)

Elsewhere, I’ve written about this fellow’s obsession to give Trump, Putin, the Ayatollahs and Saudis the one thing that they most want in common, a U.S. war against Iran. (And in today's news, ever-more risky encounters between US Navy ships and Republican Guard vessels in a waterway we no longer need to defend or care much about. Can anyone spell T-O-N-K-I-N?)

Oh, but folks will clutch at hope. Might the crazy be limited? For example, people ask if I am shocked (shocked!) that Dark Lord of the West Wing floated a trial balloon proposal to raise taxes on the rich, to a 44% top rate on incomes above $5 million.

Shocked? Um, not. Let me remind you that Steve Bannon is not a member of the plutocracy that has long owned the Republican Party, controlling its policies through lickspittle politicians, pulpit pounders and mouthpiece shills like George F. Will.

Yes, for decades that oligarchy had its way, feeding lip service to social conservatives on issues like racism, xenophobia, abortion, religious litmus tests and so on, without ever delivering on any of those hot-air promises, least of all doing anything for lower middle class (LOMIC) whites, economically. GOP Congresses have been by far the laziest in the republic's history, concentrating only on legislation that benefits the oligarchy.

That hasn't mattered, till recently. By Fox-steering populism into a confederate know-nothing cult, those cynical manipulators were able to turn LOMICs against other elites — the smartypants know-it-alls and fact-using professions like scientists, teachers, journalists and now FBI, Intel and military officers …  much as 1860s plantation lords got poor, white Southerners to march against their own best interests. 

Distraction-distraction; they thought it would work forever. Alas, those lords are ignoramuses, when it comes to history. Take what eventually happened to those slave-owning plantation lords. Or French aristocrats, when the populist masses got fed up. 

A more frighteningly germane example is the Junkers-caste 1930s Prussian nobles, who thought they could control a populist beast they helped stir into hydrophobic frenzy. They subsidized and riled up Nazi fever as a weapon against communists, only to see gifted Robspierres leap into the saddle of their frothing horse, sending it charging in directions that brought their own ruin.

Enough context; how does Steve Bannon fit into all this? Despite his stint at Goldman-Sachs — a job requirement in the Trump Administration — Bannon has never been a plutocrat. He is a fascist. 

The genuine article. Not any of the ersatz things that silly-cursing-ignorant lefties call by that name, but in the dictionary sense of the word — romantic-nostalgic, utterly dedicated to symbolic and ritualistic purity, terrified of complexity and even the thought of positive-sum, hostile to expertise, obsessed with fore-ordained destiny and cyclical “history,” thrilled by regimentation of a sacred, uniform, race-centered 'nation' and convinced of the sub-humanity of any opponent. That is what the political F-word actually means.  

Bannon's heroes, like Julius Evola and Mussolini and Vladimir Putin, have been icons of this pattern. And, while fascists go easier on plutocrats than communists do (witness Putin’s oligarch mafiosi), the rich had better toe the line, and surrender however much lucre the populist movement demands. Only those Junkers and German industrialists who clicked heels to the swastika got to keep their estates - and heads - under the Nazis.

Now, the key question: how much is our time like 1934? Short of a Reichstag Fire, I don’t see Bannon’s LOMIC white populists and fundie-dominionists and true-fascists being able to overwhelm the plutocrat GOP-owners quite yet. Yes, the firing of Reince Priebus certainly is a step in that direction. But mainline, old-money pols like Lindsey Graham have already drawn lines in the sand. This is our party, say the plutos and their shills, we paid good money for it.

No, the brown-shirted GOP wing daren’t stage their Reichstag fire, their Gleiwitz or Tonkin Incident, until first they’ve purged the FBI, intel agencies and officer corps of brave adults.  Till then, lobotomized lords — like the Kochs and Murdochs — will remain ‘in control’ of the Republican Party.  And till then, Bannon’s tax hike trial balloons will be made of lead.

But he’s biding his time. And unlike the Kochs and Murdochs, Steve Bannon actually knows some history. He has studied what errors were made by his heroes — Robspierre, Rasputin, Lenin, Evola, Mussolini, Röhm, Goebbels, Borman, Stalin and the rest.  This time, meticulously, he intends to get it right.

==  What's on his book shelf? ==

See Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump and the Storming of the Presidency, by Joshua Green. For those of you who have the stomach to dive into this noxiously recurring world view - Guénon’s The Crisis of the Modern World (1927) and Evola’s Revolt Against the Modern World (1934) are what drew Bannon’s interest to Traditionalism, both of whom were certainly influenced by Oswald Spengler’s 1922 The Decline of the West. All eagerly forecast the imminent shattering of a western enlightenment that - disappointingly - never collapsed. Instead, our pragmatic-scientific-mongrel renaissance proved rather more resilient, dynamic and creative than they expected, skyrocketing into a Golden Age. 

But addicts will get their fix. Continuing this baleful-gleeful gloomcasting in the 1950s was émigré philosopher Leo Strauss, who taught the Bush era neocons like Wolfowitz and Kristol how to get absolutely every single thing completely wrong, often with pinpoint precision. Strauss is on Bannon's shelf, along with Allan Bloom, whose 1987 The Closing of The American Mind made him guru of those pouring hate at American universities, our one zone of overwhelming superiority in a fast-changing world. Also glimpsed there are the stunningly delusional works of David Gelernter, who would have been Donald Trump's 'Science Advisor,' if the confederate leader ever appointed one. (He hasn't, and for good reason: even Gelernter would occasionally have uttered the forbidden words "that's not exactly true, sir.") 

Sure, all these mesmerizing tomes on Steve's shelf proved not only wrong, but diametrically wrong in every way. But that never-true contradiction of all fact raises no qualms. Nor does relentless scholarly disproof of Bannon's favorite modern tome, Strauss & Howe's absurd but captivating exercise in pattern-seeking The Fourth Turning. But that's how cults work. It's not fact that matters, it is how the incantation makes you feel! If facts inconveniently contradict feeling, then that only makes fact-users the enemy.

== Scandals?  We got scandals. ==

Connect the dots to see what all the parties to the infamous Trump Tower meeting with Donald Junior have in common. Scan who was there and what they’ve been up to, for decades, and your blood will run cold.  Oh, they all say they were there (and had other meetings) to discuss “adoptions.” And POTUS said that was the content of his long, unannounced meeting with Putin – without any U.S. government officials present. “Adoptions.” Read here what the word “adoptions” is code for.

But the thing I find most shocking is how utterly amateur their spycraft was. Seriously? This is how you arrange secret meetings? Either these are morons… or their putsch to undermine the West is so far along that they feel confident enough to get sloppy.  (ASIDE: An experienced former 30 year US counter-intelligence expert asserts that “the clearest evidence that this was a Russian influence operation is the trail of bread crumbs the Kremlin seemed to have deliberately left leading from Trump Tower to the Kremlin. This operation was meant to be discovered.”)

Oh, but now Fox is shrilly calling the Clintons “Russian Stooges” for having done some paid speeches. Um, it ain’t the pay, guys, it’s the favors. Trump just ended U.S. support for the moderate rebels against Putin’s pal Assad.  “Adoptions” is code for ending U.S. sanctions against Russia’s elites for annexation of Crimea and the Donbass.

As for Hillary and Barack?  They were Enemies Number One and Two to Putin, who openly raged against them.  Clinton and Obama gave Russian hegemonism its worst setback since the fall of the USSR, when we supported the people of Ukraine chasing out their KGB-puppet president and turning to the west.  Putin and the Moscow press directly credit HC and BHO with that. Directly, and they declared vengeance.

Tell us, oh, Fox. How do you explain away that? Oh, you don’t have to. Your viewers do not care about verifiable “facts.”

== Halloween will be political!  And Snippets ==

Wardrobe decisions for Halloween: It’s not too soon to use your contacts to affect what we'll all be wearing, October 31. Let some novelty company know to produce millions of blue, civil war Union kepi hats. All right, I was premature, earlier years, but now? Wanna bet you’ll want one, in just 3 months?  Get those orders in.  Or find me an order site and I’ll publicize!

And just in time… a new parallel world sci fi show called “Confederate” seems a timely, provocative riff on our re-ignited American Civil War.  “The series takes place in an alternate timeline, where the Southern states have successfully seceded from the Union, giving rise to a nation in which slavery remains legal and has evolved into a modern institution. The story follows a broad swath of characters on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Demilitarized Zone — freedom fighters, slave hunters, politicians, abolitionists, journalists, the executives of a slave-holding conglomerate and the families of people in their thrall.”  I'll comment more on this, later.

Jim Wright's Stonekettle Station blog is always entertaining, on-target, lively and interesting. This born-rural military vet eviscerates the hijackers of American conservatism, especially those hand wringers who claim to be shocked by Donald Trump's antics. Drop in now and then! But today's missive is especially biting.

Trump marginalizes experts, debases expertise -- from The Washington Post.

To any Ayn Rand literates here, was there any significance that the lately lamented White House communications director - a veteran of Goldman Sachs - was named "Mooch"?

Oooog.  Enough, already.  Can I wake up now? I swear off whatever hooch I drank, to give me these DTs.