Contemplating the pain Trump’s going to lay on the most vulnerable among us (and yeah, some of them voted for him, but hurt is hurt), I found this song, imagined as being addressed directly to the Shitgibbon, a perfect expression of my mood:
Buried deep in the lyrics Reed talks of the Trumps being ordained. But the real tell is when he sings “They say the President’s dead/But no one can find his head.” That last line is truer than he ever knew. Man was a prophet.
One of the signal failures of the media throughout the Trump dumpster fire of a campaign was to focus on his words — parsing, shifts in terminology, trying to distinguish between lies and hyperbole, or simply providing theater criticism on his performances, connections to audience and so on. All the while, the critical information: what the combination of his ample history, the (few) clear positions he staked, and the people he hired revealed about what Trump would actually do as President.
That basic error is still with us, nicely diagnosed in this post by Robinson Meyer over at The Atlantic:
It works like this: Donald Trump, the president-elect himself, says something that sounds like he might be moderating on the issue. Then, his staff takes a radical action in the other direction.
Last week, Trump told the staff of The New York Times that he was keeping an open mind about the existence of climate change.
This was, as Meyer notes, treated as a major shift, given Trump’s earlier claim that global warming was a Chinese hoax. As a result, many slow learners touted this story (Meyer self-indicts here.) But, of course, Trump’s almost certainly intentionally vague statement —
“I think there is some connectivity” between human activity and the warming climate, Trump said. “There is some, something. It depends on how much.”…
both grants him almost unlimited freedom of maneuver and was almost immediately belied by what his transition team is actually doing:
A day after Trump talked to the Times, The Guardian reported that the Trump administration plans could cut all of NASA’s Earth science research….
…which, as many have already noted, is vital for ongoing climate monitoring and ongoing attempts to study the implications of human – driven global warming with the resolution needed to inform action.
Then there’s this:
Politico reports that the Heritage Foundation senior research fellow, Steven Groves, has been added to Trump’s State Department transition team. Just last week, Groves called for the United States to leave the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, the overarching treaty that governs how the world organizes itself to address global warming. Groves also said the U.S. should move to “dismantle” domestic climate regulations.
Thus, a picture of a Trump administration policy on climate change: destroy the research infrastructure needed to study climate, and wreck both national and international prospects for action to address what a true existential crisis.
The moral, to use Meyer’s phrase, is that Trump is a master of the two-step, baffling the unwary (aka, seemingly, the entire New York Times staff) while proceeding behind that verbal smokescreen towards the worst possible choices. We need a much more vigilant press, and a brave one.
Image: Hieronymous Bosch, The Temptation of Saint Anthony (left panel detail), 1495-1515. Not an exact match to the post, but I’m kinda just looking for apocalyptic images these days, and this certainly works for that.
...it’s you:
Again and again, President-elect Donald Trump presented himself as the coal miners’ candidate. During the campaign, he promised to bring coal back into the economy, and jobs back into struggling Appalachian towns.
But now some in coal country are worried that instead of helping, Trump’s first actions will deprive miners — and their widows and children — of the compensation they can receive if they are disabled by respiratory problems linked to breathing coal mine dust.
That’s because buried in the Affordable Care Act are three sentences that made it much easier to access these benefits. If Trump repeals Obamacare — as he vowed to do before the election — and does not keep that section on the books, the miners will be back to where they were in 2009, when it was exceedingly difficult to be awarded compensation for “black lung” disease.
This is by no means a done deal, given that at least some coal-country legislators (Joe Manchin, for one) have declared their support for retaining this in whatever comes out of the health care catastrophe the GOP is determined to commit. But McConnell is, as usual, mum on the matter, and if I were a coal mining family depending on the pittance they do get (top payment for a miner with three dependents: $1,289/month), I’d be getting ready not for hard times — they’re already here — but worse.
update — obligatory post soundtrack:
The key change the ACA implemented in black lung cases was to shift the burden of proof: instead of a miner having to prove that the work caused the disease, under the new rules,
If a miner has spent 15 years or more underground and can prove respiratory disability, then it is presumed to be black lung related to mine work, unless the company can prove otherwise.
This wasn’t a case of free money all around. As reporter Eric Boodman writes, “In 2009, 19 percent of claims for black lung benefits were successful; in 2015, that percentage had jumped to 28.” That’s a big jump — but hardly evidence that the black lung compensation process is a wild government grab of beleaguered coal company assets.
Those companies hate the rule, with a spokesman telling Boodman that it’s created “a supplemental pension program” rather than the compensation for occupational disease, which is as fine a bit of high priced turd polishing as I’ve seen in a while.
TL:DR? Think of this as Mencken’s rule in action:
Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.
Trump voters in coal country — West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Kentucky — were promised their country back.
What will they receive?
The shaft, deeper and darker than any hole miners have dug in the hunt for what will continue to kill them where they stand.
Image: Léonard Defrance, Coal Mining, before 1805.
If we can’t see it, it won’t happen, climate change edition:
Donald Trump is poised to eliminate all climate change research conducted by Nasa as part of a crackdown on “politicized science”, his senior adviser on issues relating to the space agency has said.
Nasa’s Earth science division is set to be stripped of funding in favor of exploration of deep space.
After all, we can’t have any of that nasty left wing bias that reality imposes:
There is overwhelming and long-established evidence that burning fossil fuels and deforestation causes the release of heat-trapping gases, therefore causing the warming experienced in recent decades.
[Trump campaign advisor Bob] Walker, however, claimed that doubt over the role of human activity in climate change “is a view shared by half the climatologists in the world. We need good science to tell us what the reality is and science could do that if politicians didn’t interfere with it.”
Walker is, as one expects from Trumpistas, simply lying. Half of the world’s climatologists do not doubt the fact of human-driven climate change, unless you include those who got their advanced degrees at the University of Exxon’s Koch School of Science. Ostriches and sand ain’t in it.
This is a hugely consequential move. There are two technologies that are essential to modern climate science: large scale numerical modelling made possible by the insane advances in computing power and associated computer science over the last several decades…and remote sensing, the ability to monitor earth systems on a planetary scale. That’s what NASA — and for the forseeable future, no one else, brings with its earth science programs. Kill that and we not only lose data going forward, we degrade a capability in an intellectual infrastructure that will take a long time indeed to restore:
Kevin Trenberth, senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, said as Nasa provides the scientific community with new instruments and techniques, the elimination of Earth sciences would be “a major setback if not devastating”.
“It could put us back into the ‘dark ages’ of almost the pre-satellite era,” he said. “It would be extremely short sighted.
“We live on planet Earth and there is much to discover, and it is essential to track and monitor many things from space. Information on planet Earth and its atmosphere and oceans is essential for our way of life. Space research is a luxury, Earth observations are essential.”
This is a call your representative kind of issue. It’s going to be difficult, certainly, if Trump really does go down this path, but NASA is enough of a pork barrel, and some GOP senators, at least, are not wholly clueless on this issue, so it might be possible to avoid the worst outcome. It’s necessary to try. If and as I hear of organized campaigns on this, I’ll bring the news here.
Feh.
PS: that laser like media focus during the campaign on issues like climate change sure was impressive, wasn’t it?
C. C. Pierce, Carl Eytel and George Wharton James in a horse-drawn wagon on the Butterfield Stage Road in the Colorado Desert, c.1903. (Eytel was a painter associated with the “smoketree school” of artists working on desert subjects; James was a journalist and photographer.)
Donald Trump has yet to meet with the prime minister of the United Kingdom — arguably the closest ally of the United States. He has found time to meet with representatives of Britain’s Lets-Play-Footsie-With-Fascists UKIP party including its well-dressed proto-fascist leader, Nigel Farange.
In that meeting Hair Führer focused on what really matters in the trans-Atlantic alliance.
Offshore wind farms in Scotland [h/t TPM]:
[Andy] Wigmore, who coordinated the communications effort for the push for Britain to leave the European Union, told The Express and the New York Times that Trump asked them to oppose new wind farms….
Wigmore told The Express that Trump “is dismayed that his beloved Scotland has become over-run with ugly wind farms which he believes are a blight on the stunning landscape.”
Rich guy doesn’t like looking at windmills. Rich guy manages to grasp real power. Rich guy starts f**king with other nations’ energy policy, land use decisions and the rest because…he can.
Welcome to the post policy presidency. Trump has no idea what energy mix makes sense and he doesn’t care. Just doesn’t like looking at turbines. So lose the buggers, amirite!
Apparently, Trump’s intervention appears to have worked, sort of:
Wigmore said that Trump “did suggest that we should campaign on it” and that the conversation “spurred us in and we will be going for it,” according to the New York Times.
Going for it, in this case, meaning that a party and a leadership roundly loathed in Scotland will argle bargle pwfft or something. But gotta stroke the ferret-heedit shitgibbon, and talk is cheap.
The lagniappe, utterly unsurprisingly, is that the default position of the Trump crowd to any challenge is to lie:
Trump spokeswoman Hope Hicks denied to the New York Times that Trump discussed wind farms during his meeting with Farage. When the Times told Hicks that Wigmore gave an account of the wind farm discussion, Hicks did not respond with further comment, according to the Times.
With every passing day it becomes yet more clear that there is no way that Donald Trump can handle the presidency. With each passing day his presidency draws closer.
WASF.
Image: Paul Gauguin, The Queen’s Mill, Østervold Park, 1885.
Masha Gessen knows from vicious fascist dictators. Here’s what she has to say under the headline “Autocracy: Rules for Survival“:
I have lived in autocracies most of my life, and have spent much of my career writing about Vladimir Putin’s Russia. I have learned a few rules for surviving in an autocracy and salvaging your sanity and self-respect. It might be worth considering them now:
Rule #1: Believe the autocrat. He means what he says….
Rule #2: Do not be taken in by small signs of normality.…
[See Betty’s post below]
Rule #3: Institutions will not save you….
Rule #4: Be outraged…
Rule #5: Don’t make compromises…
Rule #6: Remember the future….
This is one of those read-the-whole-thing deals. Masha has lived what she’s talking about here. I have had the good fortune to spend some evenings talking with her, and she is at once one of the sharpest, most un-bull-shit-able political thinkers I know and among the most courageous people I’ve ever met.
If you don’t have time, or, like me, have only a finite tolerance for looking straight at the beast looking back at us, here’s the short form, as stated in Rule 4:
If you follow Rule #1 and believe what the autocrat-elect is saying, you will not be surprised. But in the face of the impulse to normalize, it is essential to maintain one’s capacity for shock. This will lead people to call you unreasonable and hysterical, and to accuse you of overreacting. It is no fun to be the only hysterical person in the room. Prepare yourself.
That leads to the logic of Rule 6:
Nothing lasts forever. Donald Trump certainly will not, and Trumpism, to the extent that it is centered on Trump’s persona, will not either. Failure to imagine the future may have lost the Democrats this election. They offered no vision of the future to counterbalance Trump’s all-too-familiar white-populist vision of an imaginary past. They had also long ignored the strange and outdated institutions of American democracy that call out for reform—like the electoral college, which has now cost the Democratic Party two elections in which Republicans won with the minority of the popular vote. That should not be normal. But resistance—stubborn, uncompromising, outraged—should be.
I expect we will lose most battles for years to come. Perhaps all of them. But I keep coming back to Masha’s conclusion and it makes sense.
I’ve more to say, as I think towards what specific forms my resistance may take, but none of that’s really formed yet, beyond giving some money to some of the most obvious targets. More later. In the meantime, what Gessen says: Trump will not last forever, and resistance is many things — but not futile.
Image: the Ozymandias Colossus — Raames II, mistakenly identified as the mythical king Ozymandias. This ruin inspired Percy Bysshe Shelly to write this.
I’ve got some brewing thoughts about what comes next, in line with and in some cases following on from what others, made of stronger stuff and able to drag words out rage and despair more quickly than I, have already written.
But we do not live by politics alone, however much we may have to over the next months and years. So here’s advance warning of a little bit of wonder, ours for the having:
But this month’s Supermoon is special. The eccentricity above is calculated based upon the Earth-Moon system, but other celestial bodies also influence the Moon’s orbit through gravity. The Sun plays the largest role, but so too does Jupiter and even some of the smaller planets. When factoring in these other influences, the eccentricity of the Moon’s orbit can actually vary by as little as 0.026 and as much as 0.077.
A more eccentric lunar orbit brings the perigee [its closest approach] nearer the Earth, and when this perigee occurs during a full Moon, we get an extra-Supermoon. That is what will happen on Nov. 14, when the Moon will come to within just 356,509km of Earth, which is the Moon’s closest approach since Jan. 26, 1948. The Solar System won’t line up this well again for a lunar approach until Nov. 25, 2034.
That sucker is going to be big, really big –a “normal” Supermoon is 14 % larger and 30% brighter than a full moon at apogee — the point on an elliptical orbit farthest away the focal body. It’s actually hard to perceive the effect as a casual observer, but it is naked-eye detectable. The absolute peak of the phenomenon comes at 8:25 a.m. ET this coming Monday, but if you’re up early and/or catch the rising moon Monday evening, you’ll get a fine approximation. As they say: check local listings.
One of the consolations/delights I take from nature is the sense of connection to something larger than myself. That’s the same feeling I get from the acts we take to make the world better, from the kindness we show to one person at a time to the actions we’re stumbling to figure out right now, here on this blog and at every turn.
I’m going to stare at that moon Monday (sky permitting) and think of the world I want the next time this particular geometry rolls around, twenty eight years from now. My son will be thirty four then. If I’m fortunate enough to be here with him, I’ll be seventy six. It will be a better world then, if we make it so.
And if it makes me a lunatic to think so, I’ll take that label gladly. Beats the alternative.
Image: Joseph Wright of Derby, A view of Vesuvius from Posillipo, Naples, between 1788 and 1790.
To get things out of the way: the way I feel right now is exactly the sensation — body and mind — I’ve only felt before when I got news that someone close to me died unexpectedly. I’m basically paralyzed, and my brain is moving…not much, and not in any coherent sequence.
That said, I’ve only one thought to add to those I’ve been reading at Balloon Juice, the group blog to which I contribute. I’m completely down with the core themes others have already written about there: la lucha continua, the struggle continues, and in days like these the kindness we show each other is paramount. And I agree with the hints at a post-mortem below.
My sole notion is that whatever her formidable strengths and her evident vulnerabilities, Hillary Clinton ran right into an absolutely familiar trap. American politics is hostile to women. We saw it in Massachusetts recently enough. Martha Coakley was all kinds of not-great (read, terrible, especially her first time out) as a candidate for senator and governor. But in both cases she started up with a sixty pound rock on her back male candidates don’t have to carry. Massachusetts had, until Elizabeth Warren came along, never elected a woman to the top offices. (And it’s notable that Warren also seems to face a woman tax as measured in approval ratings, at least as compared with her perfectly solid but unspectacular male colleague, Ed Markey.) Several tried, but it’s clear that while women can aspire to state treasurer or AG or a House seat, gunning for the top slots engaged the fear/loathing-for-powerful-women, leading to the results we see.
That’s true nationwide, I believe. The old line goes white men before everyone else (got the vote in 1783); then other males (black men got the vote in 1665); then women (who got the vote in 1920), with, of course, white women gaining access to power and agency ahead of women of color.
Whatever else we may conclude about the Clinton campaign and this terrible outcome, one thing it reveals is that racism still powerfully motivates the revanchist white right, to a depth I certainly didn’t forsee. It also reminds us that misogyny strikes deep within our body politic. One more thing to deal with, as best we can.
One afterthought. Typing that sentence about racism above, I’m reminded of the ways privilege so subtly seeps into one’s bones. Y’all know my politics, I think, and I’ve come by them through life-long engagement from a childhood in Berkeley in the 60s. But I’m white, male, working in the elite, pretty secure, still pretty damn white-and-male setting that is an R 1 university. I’ve got a good friend , a Latino writer who has some of the same cocoon now, but certainly didn’t come up within those comforts and protections. He’d been freaking out about Trump’s rise, especially after the Comey ratfucking, and I kept reassuring him with the polling internals and the early vote stuff and all that.
I emailed him this morning to tell him the obvious: he’d been right and I wrong. He wrote back saying he’d known that disaster was looming — and that is was time to fight. On that last, of course, he’s right. It was the first half of that response that pulled me up, because I realized in that moment what should have been obvious: a nice liberal white guy like myself, whatever my politics and however deep my convictions doesn’t have the deep knowledge my friend does of just how much pure racial hate and resentment is out there. I can get glimpses, and through my friends can get to empathy (I certainly hope), but the truth remains: I don’t live in daily direct confrontation with that hate. And that, I think, as much as anything else, led me to miss whatever signs there might have been that our disaster was upon us.
As noted, that’s a penetrating glimpse of the obvious, of course. But it’s also key. I have no idea at this moment how to climb out of the deep hole we’re in. I hope its not a grave. But whatever else we do, we have to out work and out number the reserves of awful that have proved so potent this year.
And that’s all I got, rambling away, on this grim morning. Good luck to us all. We surely need it.
Image: John Singer Sargent, The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit 1882.
…Who keeps on sending me begging email, even (or especially) five minutes after I’ve dropped a few more bucks.
I care about politics. By all the noodly appendages of the FSM, y’all know that, right?
I genuinely believe this is an existential election, one in which it’s not enough (though vital) to take the presidency. We need the Senate, and we pretty close to need the House, which we are unlikely to get, alas. It takes dollars to do all that, I know. I understand that you don’t get if you don’t ask, which means the campaigns gotta try.
But I hit the breaking point yesterday. My wife and I had decided to drop our last contributions in a flurry of mixed support and magical thinking (this $10 bucks to whoever will propitiate the electoral gods…or this one…or this on…). I allowed all the emails from all the campaigns we’ve given to over the last year, plus all the campaigns and PACs folks who bought my info from someone I actually support, to accumulate over a few hours.
There were more than 200. I ended up sending off a cash to Hillary, the DSCC, the DCCC, and the top Senate races I’ve been following — PA, NC, NH, MO, NV. YMMV, but that’s where I completely unscientifically decided to put what final $s my wife and I figured we could spare. Deleted all the emails. Exhaled.
Within a few minutes — really — more rolled in. No surprise; why should the folks I didn’t give to stop — how could they know I’m tapped out? But still, I was getting tired of the whole thing when I noticed within not that long yet more email from some of the folks I’d just given to. I snapped.
I don’t want much. Maybe a three hour window between last contribution and next ask? (I’d prefer 24 hours, actually, but I’ll take what I can get.) And perhaps a little less agony in the subject lines? Every now and then, maybe a positive note — even something like “let me tell you how we’re going to put each new dollar to use”?
Anyway. Just ranting. Good news out of Nevada, and seemingly so out of Florida, which has me off the ledge. And I’ll further calm myself by getting out and doing something — GOTV tomorrow and Tuesday in New Hamster.*
But sweet Jeebus on a corndog, it’s not just the sheer awfulness of the campaign on the other side, nor the grotesque reality of racism, sexism and misogyny, anti-Semitism, the power of post-truth ideology, the failure of the elite media, and all the rest of the horrors the Trump freak show has dragged up from the shadows. I’m ready for this to be over so that all my first-name email friends quiet down. Just a bit.
Please. I’m begging.
*Yeah. I’m a Masshole. I wear it proudly.
Image: Edvard Munch, The Scream, undated drawing.
I’ve reached the point where my sleep patterns and the kindness I’m able to show my family demands that I step away from the election noise machine — staying off Twitter as near totally as possible, for example — but I haven’t yet given up one habit: checking the official campaign schedule pages for both Trump and Clinton.
At this stage of the race, the only absolutely equal resource the two sides have is time, and without having any deep insight into the workings of how professionals think about deploying their stock of hours and minutes, I still find it interesting to see what each side is doing. Right now, there’s quite a contrast.
The Republican ticket lists only what the two principals are doing. On a quick glance Donald Trump and Mike Pence have eighteen events on their docket between now and Monday evening. That’s deceptive, however, as the schedule includes two events at which both appear. So that’s sixteen headlined campaign rallies over the next four days.*
The Clinton/Kaine campaign is doing it differently. Hillary’s campaign lists not just the ticket’s events, but those of her top surrogates. Including those gives Clinton/Kaine sixteen events just today. Two by the candidate (compared to four Trump rallies today, btw), one Kaine-led farrago — to which add appearances by Obama, Biden, Bernie Sanders, Bill C., Chelsea C., and a Cleveland, OH concert headlined by Jay Z. (Props to Bernie, doing four events today, three in IA and one in Nebraska, and then two more tomorrow, in IA and CO. Not leaving it on the table is our Senator from VT.) Twelve tomorrow, without POTUS and Bill, but adding Katy Perry, Stevie Wonder and Jon Bon Jovi appearing in two concerts in PA (Perry and Wonder0 and FL (Bon Jovi). Sunday and Monday see fewer events, but with similar star power — Obama back on the trail, with Michelle joining him and Clinton, Bill and Chelsea for an election-eve rally in Philadelphia.
In all, and not counting some Cher-led fundraisers, the Democratic campaign has thirty eight events between now and election day.
In terms of geography, the two campaigns basically agree on what’s left to fight about. Both show up in all the usual suspects: FL, NC, OH, PA, MI, IA, CO, and NH. Trump, somewhat oddly, heads to NV for the rally that is half his Saturday schedule. (Odd, because early voting ends today in NV, so he’s missing a chance to give a boost to that process, which will finish with half, perhaps as much of 70% of all ballots cast.)
Clinton, Kaine and their surrogates will skip Nevada but add stops in Nebraska’s one gettable electoral vote (with a Sanders visit), in Colorado on (four rallies on two different days — three led by Bill Clinton, one by Sanders), and one Joe Biden visit to Wisconsin.
So there you have it: broad agreement on where this election will be settled (if it isn’t already), and very different deployment of publicly visible resources to fight those battles. None of this speaks to the ground game or any of the secret sauce which we believe (and I deeply hope) favors the more organized and technically skilled Democratic operation.
Make of it what you will. For me, this kind of thing helps me detox from election madness. YMMV. The effect won’t last that long, but I’ll get myself some help by heading to NH to GOTV on Sunday, and probably again on election day.
Open thread!
*An bit of strangeness: while Trump is indeed making good on his promise to fill a heavy campaign schedule, Pence only has three solo appearances slated. I’m not sure what that means, if anything — could be Trump doesn’t see the point of spending money on his number two; could be that Pence is dialing it back; could be what the goat’s entrails told someone.
Image: William Hogarth, Canvassing for Votes, from the Humours of an Election series, 1754-55.
The Inverse Square Blog 
.jpg){kind=link}
.jpg){kind=link}
.jpg){kind=link}
Recent Comments