I will never grow tired of this image.

This blog was originally going to have a strict “No Omarosa” policy, because it seemed to do otherwise was embarrassing. Why are we talking about this reality show washout who didn’t have a real job in the administration? Of course, we have a reality show President, and live in the dumbest and tackiest of all possible timelines, so there is a non-zero chance that fucking Omarosa will have a world-historic impact.

But until then, I want to ignore this sickening and degrading enterprise, and focus on another sickening and degrading enterprise: Politico’s little brief on what they laughingly call “Trump’s Diplomatic Learning Curve“, which accidentally implies that our President is learning.

By now, you’ve read most of the highlights: he had no idea that there were countries called “Nepal” and “Bhutan”; he doesn’t understand that foreign leaders might not always want to take his rambling and gormless call at all hours; he doesn’t quite grasp the idea that other countries have delicate relations with others, and don’t base their every move around Trump.

But what’s interesting in the piece is that while some of the interpretations are bandied about, few of the specifics are disputed, even by sources who are still, for no apparent reason, anonymous.

A White House official said Trump, as a former jet-setting global businessman, understands how time zones work but doesn’t dwell on such details when he wants to talk to a foreign leader. “He’s the president of the United States. He’s not stopping to add up” time differences, the official said.

I really like this quote, because it isn’t denying that he fails to take time zones into account, or to care that someone might be asleep. That Japan is on the other side of the world is just “details”. The implication is that only nerds stop to add, and the President is a man of action. Stupid nerds.

This sentiment is backed up beautifully by James Carafano, a big Washington muck-muck elite, who also advised the State Department transition team.

“If people are looking for more polish and more kind of conventional statecraft and that’s their metric for Trump learning, I think they’re going to be disappointed,” said Carafano, vice president for foreign policy at the Heritage Foundation. “I don’t think he sees those as faux pas; I think he sees them as, ‘Look, I do things differently.’ If you say, ‘That’s not how things are done,’ he says, ‘Who says? Where is it written down that I can’t do that?’”

Here’s a man who ostensibly is dedicating his life to foreign policy, who is an important member of a top think-tank, a man of great influence in Washington, who is basically saying that sure, the President might not “know stuff” or “be smart” or “have basic human decency as the basis for diplomacy”, but that’s ok. He does things differently.

(It’s also important to note that “differently”, for Trump supporters, is synonymous with good. It’s a de facto assumption, and a totem for the initiated. It’s how they maintain their faith in the face of overwhelming incompetence.)

But that’s not even my favorite quote. This one is.

At times, he wings it with unfortunate results. Meeting with a group of African countries at the United Nations General Assembly last September, Trump, in public remarks, referred to the country of Namibia as “Nambia.” (Trump did impress some of his own aides in the meeting, however. “He did a very good job of saying Côte d’Ivoire,” said one.)

Ah, but I could be bound in the nutshell of that parenthetical and consider myself the king of infinite flopsweat! Just imagine being impressed by that, or I guess being professionally bound to convince yourself that this was, indeed, impressive! Imagine being in that position. Imagine thinking that a metric of success is for your boss to not botch literally everything.

I wish I could just hear the surely-strong-but-intensely-patronizing lilt in how this aide pronounced “very”. I honestly could listen to that on an endless loop for the rest of my life.

This is all fun and stuff, but what we have is an army of enablers for the fake king. They spin his intense ignorance as strength and virtue, and are terrified of offering even the most gentle corrections. It would be one thing if we had a genial dipshit in office, some kind of holy dummy who just floats along on a cloud of their own regard, but we don’t. We have a volcanic manchild at the seat of immense power.

The thrust of this article, read between the lines, is that anyone close to Trump, including every foreign leader beside Trudeau, is too scared of setting him off to correct him or to push back. Everyone, for reasons of self-protection or hoping for the greater good or sheer craven careerism or maybe just broken cognitive dissonance and faith-based acceptance, let’s him operate in a bubble of selfish incompetence and unlettered self-regard.

Politico refers to Trump’s “learning curve”, but it is obvious he isn’t learning everything. The only curve is the rapid bending of light as all of us are getting sucked into his dark gravity. The world is warping around the single dumbest man of his time and contorting themselves to try to stay upright. It’s not working. We’re all increasingly deformed, and this November is our last best chance at straightening up.

I just spent a blissful week in Adirondack splendor, during which, save for a quick trip to town on Tuesday, I was entirely without any internet connection. My phone stayed in my bag, dead as Dillinger, unmoored from the world and silent. Along with the clean fresh air, the endless trees, and the quietude of the lake, it made for a week of incredible relaxation.

That’s not to say that we were entirely disconnected. The week was spent with my wife’s extended family, a more wonderful group of people you’ll likely never meet, and papers were brought back anytime someone went into town for supplies (i.e. beer and wine). So there were local papers, but also the NYTimes. 

Now, I know that the Times isn’t exactly the go-to paper of the so-called common man or anything, but it is still a print edition, finite in what it can cover. While it may or may not be “all the news that’s fit to print” (spoiler: nope), it can literally only fit so much. The local papers, concerned as the should be with local news and weather, with farming updates and conservation debates, with the day-to-day fabric of what directly impacts people’s lives, can fit even less.

I haven’t consumed news this way in years, not for any extended time, anyway. Looking at the papers, we didn’t see every latest Twitter war, every uttering of every two-bit grifter, every take and counter-take and thinkpiece on what counter-takes meant, jokes about what different memes initiating from the original counter-take mean, etc.

Then, when I came back on Saturday night, and reluctantly, but with fingers doing so almost autonomically, like a just-quit smoker flicking an imagined Bic, checked Twitter, it was to find that people were debating whether Alexandia Ocasio-Cortez should debate Ben Shapiro.

Now.

There is a world in which this matters. Bad-faith half-bright trolls like Shapiro, who is plumped up as the intellectual future of conservatism, which tells you all you need to know, do sort of matter. They are shaping the way we talk about things and the way the right reacts. That matters. The sneering attacks on AOC for not debating a Twitter troll trying to pump up his brand tells you everything you need to know about their dishonesty.

No one can honestly think that every political candidate should debate every jumped-up avatar with a book to sell. And there can’t be anyone who thinks that Shaprio would debate in good faith. He’s made a living off of not doing so, because he’s talented enough to spin any point into a “crushing” set of pre-determined talking points. Winning debates isn’t about being honest, it is about scoring points.

So this was never, ever going to happen. There was zero reason for AOC to do so. It was offered entirely so that she would look bad when ignoring it (“Why is socialist COWARD afraid to debate?”) and that Shapiro could go on Fox a few more times. It was a perfect example of the empty reality of our times.

It didn’t, as far as I could tell, make any of the local papers I was reading. There wasn’t a concern with these inane week-long nothings. That’s not to say that the locals never hear of this. They aren’t offline; they are busy living their lives in an economically challenged area, not there just for the raw and rugged beauty. They don’t have the luxury of a week off. And as we see in Qanon or any of Trump’s little Nitwit Nuremburgs, the ginned-up nonsense online seeps into the real world.

But on a daily basis, a very small number of people actually care about this, much less debate it. Twitter, and being Very Online in general, warps your perception about the things that matter, and the things that matter only to the Very Online. It turns out that not everyone knows who Ben Shapiro is. And not everyone has an opinion on whether AOC is or is not the future of the Democratic Party.

But there are other things that most people in this country don’t know and don’t care about.

Dozens were killed and wounded in an airstrike on a bus carrying children in Yemen’s northern Saada province, according to the International Committee for the Red Cross and eyewitnesses.

On Thursday, a Saudi missile or bomb slammed into a school bus filled with Yemeni children, killing 40 of them, and ripping them from childhood into death or something different, a world of pain and terror, of disfigurement and nightmares, and shattering families already pulverized by war and famine and disease.

There’s more, though. While it is not yet confirmed, there is evidence that the bomb was a Raytheon Mark-82, American-made, and sold to the Saudis who are only in one war. This bomb was manufactured and sold to be dropped on Yemen by Saudi Arabia, who since the start of their Yemeni invasion have shown no concern whatsoever for avoiding civilian casualties.

(Even if it turns out this wasn’t a Mark-82, they have consistently been used to kill civilians at weddings and in school and at the market.)

I’m not saying this didn’t make the Times. I don’t remember seeing it, but we might not have gotten it on Thursday or Friday. I certainly don’t remember seeing it elsewhere, in the local papers. I’m sure it was covered. I’m sure as well that, like the Yemeni wedding which Raytheon crashed, it will quickly go away.

This also matters. Our involvement in that war is a crime, unjustifiable except by the most twisted and bad-faith and hysterical and violence-wrecked interpretation of the AUMF, which people barely even bother to invoke, so used to war we all are. But in any reasonable world, this would be front page for days. The US is directly complicit with a sickening act of violence deliberately perpetrated against children, designed to shatter resistance.

I saw most coverage of this on Twitter. I saw scores of activists forcing us to pay attention, to understand. I saw consistent updates, outrage, and sober reporting of what was happening. I saw real journalism, in real time, interrupting the hourly inanity.

So getting unplugged can be great. Being not online can keep you away from having to have an opinion on Ben Shapiro, or even rudimentary knowledge of what exactly a “Ben Shapiro” is. But you can also miss the stories that matter. You can let US crimes slip by unnoticed. You can be wholly unaware of what a destabilizing presence we have become in this world. And that lets more crimes like this pass by unnoticed, become routine, become even unremarkable, for they are unremarked upon. It is brutalization by silence.

There’s obviously no prescription here. Being Online can wreck your brain and turn it into regurgitated, always-anxious mush. Ignoring local concerns makes everything national and has destroyed our politics. And local journalism is the true bulwark of democracy and accountability.

It’s just to say we still don’t know how to handle the times in which we live, and the way we consume information. It is altering our lives and politics in ways that are still not fully known, and are moving faster and faster, borne along by its own growing momentum. Getting unplugged for a week, and breathing the clean air, won’t ever change that.

The only good kind of Smog

(H/T to Official Blog Brother Kevin O’Neill for this)

The Foxconn plant being planned for just north of the Illinois border in Racine, Wisconsin, is a sort of Ground Zero for the labor and environmental arguments we’re going to be having in this country over the next few decades. It isn’t unique, and it isn’t the first, but it is emblematic of what we’re seeing and what is to come (and also close to home for this here blog, so we’ll focus on it).

To keep it short, about a year ago Foxconn, the tech giant that makes products for Apple, among others, when it isn’t too busy driving employees to suicide, announced that they would be opening a plant in southeastern Wisconsin, a poor and battered area, an area tossed around by the decline of manufacturing and the shifting of labor to cheaper areas overseas.

This could be seen as a blessing, of course. Although there are some signs of life in downtown Racine and nearby Beloit, both towns are still hurting, with shuttered factories and broken-curb streets just blocks away from cheery riverwalks and aspirational downtowns. These areas are the quintessential victims of capital flight and the attendant ills of post-modern capitalism.

The problem is that the Foxconn plant, while it might create jobs for 10,000 people, it won’t be hiring the uneducated of Racine and Beloit for long-term jobs, if at all. That 10,000 is illusory: most will come from short-term construction jobs (a good thing!), and the long-term will be engineers and other jobs recruited from around the country and around the world. And most of those will be “automation specialists”, since Foxconn Chairman Terry Gou dreams of a workerless factory.

So yeah…those jobs don’t seem like they’re really going to boost the region in the short or long term. Sure, there will be some security jobs, some minimum wage cleaning jobs, and I am sure there will be some mechanics, shoulders free from the burden of collective bargaining, making sure the robots are oiled and happy or whatever, but not jobs that carry the pride of work we as a nation rightfully celebrate.

And in order to create this robo-paradise, Scott Walker, who has already demolished the rights of workers in his state, an absolute prerequisite to attracting jobs for the vampiric business class, also gave away literal billions in tax incentives to a subsidiary of trillion-dollar Apple, broke the Great Lakes Compact, and stripped away environmental protections.

The latter, though, is where he might get tripped up.

Two lawsuits filed Thursday urge a federal appeals court to force southeast Wisconsin and northwest Indiana to comply with the latest limits on lung-damaging smog, targeting a Trump administration rollback intended to benefit Foxconn Technology Group and a handful of other big industrial companies.

The legal challenges — one filed by Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan and Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and another by two Chicago-based environmental groups — cite the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s own records and data in seeking to overturn the exemptions.

The lawsuits say that, according to the EPA’s own science, the pollution of SE Wisconsin is having a material difference in the life of the region, and the Foxconn plant will make it even worse. We know it will make it worse because, in order to get the plant approved, the Trump EPA had to carve out exemptions so that Foxconn, which again is really rich and has billions in tax incentives, wouldn’t have to make “improvements” to a plant which hasn’t even been built yet. 

That’s right: it would be too burdensome for a rich and powerful company to meet the very minimum of clean air requirements. At least that’s the argument. It is nonsense, of course, but a very particular kind of nonsense, and one that is among the central arguments in our era of capitalism.

Look at what had to happen in order for Foxconn to build a plant. First, they wouldn’t have even considered it is Walker hasn’t destroyed organized labor in the state. But then they also had to get massive tax cuts, have environmental laws rewritten for them, break treaties, and be able to refuse to comply with any regulations. All for a few jobs that won’t even pay very well!

It isn’t that Foxconn couldn’t pay workers more, or be forced to guarantee employment for human workers, or recognize the right to collectively bargain, or build a brand-new factory that wouldn’t poison the air. It’s that they don’t want to, because then they might not be quite as rich. And in late-stage capitalism, that matters more than anything else.

We’re at the point where a large number of people, including an entire political party and a substantial chunk of another one, agree that corporations should be able to do whatever they want, and that their prerogatives are far more important than those of workers or people who have to breathe or drink clean water.

The Trump administration is trying to do whatever it can to make this paradise a reality. It is fighting labor and rolling back any and all regulations. They’ve never made any secret of this. In one of his earliest post-election lunatic press conference, Trump made it very clear.

But you’re going to sell through a very strong border — not going to happen. You’re going to pay a very large border tax. So if you want to move to another country and if you want to fire all of our great American workers that got you there in the first place, you can move from Michigan to Tennessee and to North Carolina and South Carolina. You can move from South Carolina back to Michigan.

You can do anywhere — you’ve got a lot of states at play; a lot of competition. So it’s not like, oh, gee, I’m taking the competition away. You’ve got a lot of places you can move. And I don’t care, as along as it’s within the United States, the borders of the United States.

He wants states to race each other to the bottom, creating very few low-paying jobs without any regulations. He wants to see who can race each other to become Bangladesh. This isn’t pro-worker in any reality. It is “creating jobs”, sure, but only by making the lives of those workers as challenging and brutalized and meaningless as possible. It is nothing other than pro-capital, pro-corporation, and pro-boss.

That’s where we are. The Foxconn deal is a prime example of this, and the lawsuits might be the only way to gum it up. We can demand more. We can demand that states not take away our rights to a decent life so that Foxconn shareholders can get a little richer. We can redefine our relationship to power. In this new race, that might be the only way we can win.

Space Force!

You like making fun of Space Force. I like making fun of Space Force. Everyone likes making fun of Space Force. It seemed the only people who didn’t were die-hard Trump supporters, who gleefully embraced it with the fervor of new, thinking it showed a kind of real-world toughness, and loved the idea of whizz-banging around it starcrafts to own the libs.

A crowd chanting “Space Force! Space Force!” after a phony President said we’re “reopening NASA” (?) because our “beautiful ancestors” (?) won WWII is extremely on-brand for 2018. 

Indeed, when the President first announced it in June, it seemed almost like a tossed-off joke.

“We must have American dominance in space,” Trump said during a speech at the National Space Council meeting, held at the White House on Monday. “I’m hereby directing the Department of Defense to immediately begin the process to establish a space force as the sixth branch of the armed forces.”

“We are going to have the Air Force, and we are going to have the space force,” Trump said. “Separate, but equal. It is going to be something so important.”

Only Trump could create a new branch of the military that seeks to control the vastness of space and manage to invoke Jim Crow, before benedicting it with the elegance of “so important.”

I think most people assumed this was a Trump nonsense statement that would go away, but that’s not really how it works. We’ve seen time and time again that Trump says something, we all laugh and cringe, and then a few weeks or months later it turns into policy. Because it isn’t that he has a short attention span. He has no personal follow-through to do anything, but he demands his words become, if not real, at least a simulation of reality.

And this wasn’t just a Trump idea. It seems like it is, because the off-hand creation of a new force coupled with the grandiose-yet-tacky name of “Space Force” is perfectly Trump. But it wasn’t his idea, and there have been a lot of people agitating for a new branch of the military, with all the procurement, office space, badges, ranks, and awards that would come with.

So when the military plan for Space Force was leaked yesterday (absent the approval of Congress, who are supposed to see it today), it seemed…almost normal? Considering the circumstances, anyway.

The military would move quickly, creating a US Space Command by the end of 2018 that watches over space operations across the armed forces. The Pentagon would recommend that the leader of Air Force Space Command also head up this new division. Simultaneously, officials would establish a Space Operations Force that would include personnel (including civilians) from the whole military. It’d be ready quickly — “space experts” would go to the European and Indo-Pacific Commands by summer 2019.

The proposal, crafted by Deputy Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan, would also lead to a major overhaul in how the military buys, develops and launches satellites, including (surprise) a larger role for private space companies. A new Space Development Agency would gradually take over the acquisition processes that are currently handled by individual branches. As their existing programs wrapped up, their resources would shift toward the new agency.

This isn’t new starfighters. These aren’t units designed to conquer Mars. These aren’t even really combat units, as we understand them. It’s giant new equipment-based bureaucracy based nearly entirely on the acquisition and deployment of technology.

But there is something real here, and in his own way, Trump stumbled upon it. He said America must “dominate” space, which is really the ultimate in colonialism and great power conflict. There are areas of space where there is tension, especially in the deployment of satellites, both civilian and military, spy technology, and missile/futuristic weapons systems.

There is also the need for international cooperation, since any debris that can come from these weapon systems can destroy our entire technological infrastructure. Indeed, the amount of junk floating in near orbit, the smallest piece of which can destroy, say, the world’s existing GPS system, demands that space not be an area of conflict, but one of mutually-assured success.

I don’t think Space Force, as conceived by the pros, is designed to be rapacious. But as we leave a very short window of cooperation among powerful nations, and as new leadership in Russia, China, and the United States seeks to revive power politics, space is becoming, well, a new frontier in this. It’s the next arena. Creating a defense of space, but one that seeks just to protect American interests, will inevitably promote conflict, especially if it is based largely on procurement. Quick gains for some, huge losses for everyone else, as we get stuck in moral entropy.

That’s why Space Force is more than a farce. We see new conflict brewing in a melting Arctic Circle, as Russia, the US, Canada, and others seek to exploit a thawed fortune (before, I guess, disease from the permafrost kills us all). That’s a result of our inability to sacrifice short-term gains for long-term stability and a livable climate.

And we see the same thing in space. It’s not just that it is grotesque to look into the stars and want to militarize them, although it is certainly that. It’s that this is an arena that needs intense cooperation and the ability to think beyond our lifetimes. Unfortunately, all signs point to us as a country, and a species, completely unable to do so.

Bulletin.org

AP:

LAGOS, Nigeria (AP) — Nigeria now faces a deadlier threat than its own Boko Haram insurgency, with fighting between farmers and herdsmen over scare resources killing far more people this year, a new report said Thursday.

The violence “threatens to become even deadlier” and could undermine national stability ahead of elections next year, the International Crisis Group report says, adding that the conflict “has taken on dangerous religious and ethnic dimensions.”

More than 1,300 Nigerians died from the farmer-herder conflicts in the first half of this year, while the death toll from the Nigeria-based Boko Haram’s insurgency was about 250.

Now, no one is saying that these groups wouldn’t be fighting if it were not for climate change. The battle over resources is the story of most wars, at least when you get down to its essence. And the Nigerian conflict between herders and farmers is replayed over and over again throughout history (just take a look at Range Wars in the US). And given that, in Nigeria, the herders tend to be Muslim and the farmers Christian adds even more fuel to that fire.

But that’s sort of the point. If most wars are about resources, and those resource wars are exacerbated by and also exacerbate ethnic-religious-whatever-else tension, then it should be pretty clear that having fewer resources will just make everything worse.

As arable land starts to vanish and coastal areas are increasingly flooded, as wildfires rages and intense heat pulverizes huge swaths of the world, and as water dries up in rich and poor countries alike, the battles over scant resources and livable space will become more intense. Divisions will become calcified as people retreat to the relative security of clan and confession. And areas that still have the resources, or the money to artificially overcome shortages, will be dominated by walls both physical and moral.

It doesn’t have to be that way. Not only is it still just barely not too late to avoid some of the worst-case scenarios, but global leadership can actually create a system for fair distribution of goods and resources to mitigate the coming disasters. Recent history has shown that leadership to be in short supply, however. In fact, it could be easily argued that nationalism in the US and Europe have been spiked by the long-tail impacts of climate change.

We don’t need then to look at a heat map or conflict in Nigeria to know that climate change, with all its attendant ills, is already upon us. We just have to open up Twitter.

One of the recurring themes of the Trump Administration has been for people to play a game called, essentially, “Evil or Stupid”, which asks whether the Current Occupant has a grand plan for carrying out the full expression of his malice, or if he just blunders into always doing the wrong thing because he can’t see beyond himself.

As of late, I think, the consensus is what many had been saying the whole time: it’s both! His innate cruelty, avarice, ignorance, and a self of sense that is both all-encompassing and entirely hollow line up perfectly with the worst policy plans of the far right, and, as we increasingly see, with the overarching strategy of Vladimir Putin to give Russia a relative by degrading the Western Alliance.

This tweet sums it up, and opens up a terrifying new phase of our stunningly precipitous decline.

At first glance, this is totally laughable. Everybody knows the Russians wanted Trump. Vladimir Putin said so at your press conference just last week, you dolt. This is clearly a kind of grandioise ass-covering, a desperate attempt to make people see things his way. It’s 100% at odds with reality.

It would be easy and probably correct to say that he is running this play in the same way he ran his dipshit reality show, where he portrayed himself as a brilliant businessman and the participants pretended to agree. It was a success, as far as TV was concerned, because he was able to entirely control the image. Having everyone buy into such an obvious lie made viewers participate in the lie as well, and believe it.

That’s how he ran his campaign, and how he has been running his administration. It’s entirely truthless, with a series of constant little lies and huge overarching untruths. This one, that he’s “tough on Russia”, is one of the latter. It’s a lie so big that it dares the cultists to believe it lest they are forced to throw away their faith. Throwing that away goes against human nature. Trump doesn’t know much, but he knows that.

Here’s an example: on her show yesterday, Rachel Maddow had a bombshell about Trump editing out the question where Putin was asked if he wanted Trump to win, to which Putin responds “Yes, I did”. That could be a signifier of this post-truth projection, because everyone saw the damn presser, but Uri Friedman at The Atlantic noticed this over a week ago, and has a slightly more nuanced take. It’s still goddamn weird to edit a question out of an official transcript because it is uncomfortable, and is more than a little authoritarian.

This innate truthless authoritarianism is how Trump’s malevolent cruelty lines up with the modern GOP, which has to lie about everything (defending democracy by limiting the right to vote, for example), but it is also how it matches and promotes Russia’s active campaign measures to throw American democracy into a state of higgedly-piggedly. Insane competing information becomes overwhelming and forces a tribalism based both on ideology and on post-modern ontology. Who you are is based on what side you’ve chosen, and every fact is filtered through that.

That’s why the first part of Trump’s tweet is more terrifying, and maybe a harbinger of what is to come. I don’t know how the Dems are going to in November. The map still favors Republicans, as does racially-based gerrymandering, dark money, and voter suppression. But Trump is entirely underwater in the polls, and a look at the map says the Senate is essentially a toss-up.

For a while, I was worried about the Russians engaging in some blatant, ham-handed interference that clearly favored the Democrats. When discussing the case for Trump as an asset, I wrote:

After all, if they just wanted to destroy American democracy, what better way? Why not have evidence that they are helping Democrats after two years of evidence they helped Republicans? Can you imagine the bloodbath? The fighting? Republicans who lost would refuse to give up their seats. Trump would order the arrest of every victorious Dem. The Justice Department would Captain Renault all over themselves. FOX would be outraged. We’d be sputtering about how it was a trap. To me, that is the smart Russian play.

Amazingly, in an article that was at best agnostic about whether or not the President of the United States was a Russian asset, I was still naive. Of course the Russians don’t have to actually do anything. If the Dems win, Trump will cry collusion regardless, and despite the very clear and obvious nature of Russia preferring him, despite his obvious fear/admiration of Putin, despite the undeniable fact that every action Trump has taken has been to weaken the Western Alliance and usher in a destabilized world of ethnonationalist states that strengthen Putinism, at least 40% of Americans will agree that IT IS THE DEMS WHO ARE IN LEAGUE WITH RUSSIA.

You’ll see, which we sort of already have, the word “collusion” become “fake news”, which was a real thing used to trick people during the election, but now is a slur to be cynically levied against the opposition. This country will tear itself apart. The very idea of truth could be completely undermined.

It’s scary how easy it would be for Russia to do this. All Putin has to do is drop a comment somewhere that he hopes the Democrats “wage a successful and fair election”, and every winger troll will go on about how that shows conclusively that Putin is helping illegal immigrants and Black Panthers flood the ballot boxes in East Jesus, TN. He could, as Friend of Blog Brett suggested, sacrifice an agent to be caught red-handed in something nefarious. It would be so easy to drop the final hammer, and I feel it coming.

But in the end, he doesn’t have to. We can do it to ourselves. Trump is already actively trying to make it happen. Putin’s final genius wasn’t to destroy America. He didn’t create anything. He just knew how weak and divided we were, staring at each other across a hot, trash-blown street, fingers itching toward holsters. He just tossed a firework in the middle and watched us draw.

It’s sobering that after two years of this, the real shooting might just be getting started.

To close the last post, I wrote “…it is clear that Trump is running cover for a foreign government credibly accused of committing crimes against individuals, organizations, and the electoral system of a whole, and is subsuming the interests of the country to his own vast, dark emptiness. That can no longer be denied…” But even I was writing that, I remembered the man for whom the phrase “shameless cynicism” was coined, Mr. Newt Gingrich.

Dig this crazy shit.

This is brilliant. It lets Newt seem tough, like he’s holding the President to account. That “immediately” is certainly a big boy thing to say. But look at the language. “Trump must clarify”, as if it isn’t absolutely 100% clearly what Trump meant to say because he’s been saying it every single day of his Presidency.  Newt is still pretending there is a Trump there that isn’t the Trump we see.

That’s also clear in saying that this is “a mistake”, as if it isn’t what Trump was trying to do. Saying “this was a mistake” plays into the “Trump’s just rough around the edges because he’s not a real politician” nonsense.

It’s obvious to see why. Trump is still extremely popular among Republicans, and Newt, who is a spineless coward, can’t criticize him. He also can’t really do so because Newt has been propping Trump up as an avatar of courageous Republicanism, out of a combination of self-serving greed and unctuous sycophancy.

It’s easy to say that Newt is out of it, of course, though he probably still thinks he should be President. But no one can deny he doesn’t know which way the wind is blowing, and doesn’t know in his black cynical heart just how to connect with the base.

But it’s deeper than that. It’s been clear to everyone paying attention–which is to say, everyone except those paid to talk about this on TV–that the republican Party has zero interest in reining in Trump, so long as he deregulates air and water, crushes unions, helps suppress votes, turns the country into a grist mill for the rich, and puts enough justices on the bench to overturn Roe.

This isn’t an aberration. It’s long been clear that Trump is the apotheosis of conservative thought, even taking into account his own tacky absurdities. There’s no real reason to stop his authoritarian, right-wing white nationalism, or his groveling toward Russia. Hell, most of the party is already ok with all that stuff, but at long as he keeps doing what right-wingers want, he’ll most likely be fine.

One more piece of evidence? Here’s the tweet Gingrich sent not one hour later. 

Party’s still on, boys.

It’s weird for the shorter man to be towering above

One thing that gets lost in the increasingly closed-case argument of whether or not the President of the United States colluded with Russian intelligence to win his election is that he won’t actually be charged with “collusion”.

There are many crimes that can come down from the Mueller investigation, including possibly Conspiracy to Default, various stages of election fraud, and possibly even treason. But not “collusion”, per se, which is more a collected state of events than a prosecutable crime. It’s why it is sort of smart for the Trump team to say “there’s no proof of collusion!” because, legally speaking, there won’t be. There will just be a series of indictments, pleas, and convictions on charges that, added up, make it clear vast swathes of the Republican party, including the Trump campaign, worked with the Russian government to help steal and election and then cover up the crimes.

Actions also add up to collusion. And the Helsinki press conference yesterday was the most obvious action yet.

My people came to me, Dan Coates, came to me and some others they said they think it’s Russia. I have President Putin. He just said it’s not Russia.

I will say this: I don’t see any reason why it would be.

…

I have great confidence in my intelligence people but I will tell you that President Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial today and what he did is an incredible offer.

Look, if you’re reading this blog, you’ve already read 30,000 words on the insane disgrace of the press conference, and how the President stood there and took the side of Russia’s brutal autocrat over his own intelligence services. You read how he ranted about insane conspiracy theories, using them as a dodge to what actually happened in 2016. He talked about the electoral college and about Hillary’s emails, asking about “the server”, even though, 1) as the indictment made clear the server was digitally copied and so didn’t need to be “taken”, and 2) Donald Trump has no idea what a server is.

You don’t need me to tell you why that was horrible. You don’t need me to tell you that, on every level, it was a show of abject humiliation, in which STRONG MAN FUCK YOUR FEELINGS DONALD THE DESTROYER TRUMP was intentionally kept waiting 45 minutes by Putin. That’s an unmistakable display of dominance, about which Trump, who spends four hours a day rehashing something mean Liza Minelli said to him in 1979, made not a peep or protestation.

Still feel good about this one, Ben?

Everyone knows what happened, and even the FOX-heads, for the most part, pronounced it a terrible disgrace, although we’ll see how it is spun today. Along the corners of Twitter and the far fringes, we started to get to the point of “It’s totally cool if they colluded, because they saved us from Hillary”, and we’ll see if that gets traction. My guess is it will get some, though not officially, as the GOP play seems to be “if no one suffers any consequences, then any actions are by definition ok.”

But one thing should be made clear, every day: there is no longer any question of collusion. That press conference, in and of itself, was an attempt by the the President of the United States to provide cover for the government of Russia’s direct, indictable actions against the US electoral system. He obfuscated and flat-out lied in the service of Putin and the Russian military-intelligence complex about matters relating to his own election. With all of his answers, he was working hand-in-hand with the people who broke laws to get him elected. In doing so, he also gave them cover, and essentially permission, to continue to do so in 2018 and 2020.

Is he doing this because he’s an asset? Because he’s compromised? Because he actively worked with them in 2016, along with his dull adult sons? Because he’s deeply in debt to Russian billionaires? Because he laundered money for them? Or simply because he can’t accept that his win could in any way be tainted?

It doesn’t matter which one of these it is, and it is probably most of them in a swirling combination of decades-old greed and selfishness. But whatever it is, it is clear that Trump is running cover for a foreign government credibly accused of committing crimes against individuals, organizations, and the electoral system of a whole, and is subsuming the interests of the country to his own vast, dark emptiness. That can no longer be denied, and anyone who fails to live up to times in which they live is entirely complicit.

Let’s talk about sort of nice things today, ok? 

As I write, a former game show host is meeting with a ruthless KGB spy in private, which is fine, I guess, and maybe even the plotline of an offbeat movie, like Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, except in this case the failed steak pitchman is actually the President of the United States and no one can tell anyone why they need a private 90 minute meeting.

My thoughts on whether Donald Trump is a compromised asset have been made clear before, and they are: maybe? We won’t be learning too much today. Trump’ll say he asked about extraditing, and Putin said they weren’t guilty, and anyway it is a witch hunt, etc. There’ll probably be a compromise over something, Ukraine will be sold out, and the admin will declare a victory. That’s sort of their whole game, since the heart of Trumpism is that America is a terrible shitty stupid country unless he’s the one doing things.

Patriotism! 

We’ll have a lot more on this as the week goes on, but I’d rather point out a really cool article about the way the world works outside of summits and circumstance, outside of fools and liars and rich thieves in luxury jets. It’s about the inexorability of water, about the women and men who work to balance our place in the natural world, and the inevitable tradeoffs that come from living on a planet whose continued existence is not in any way dependent on our survival.

I’m generally loath of link to the Chicago Tribune, since its management seems determined to destroy journalism in this city, but it still has some damn fine reporters, and their work should be highlighted.

“What happens when Lake Superior has too much water? It dumps it into an already overflowing Lake Michigan“, by Tony Briscoe, is such a piece. It’s a long, well-reported, in-depth look at the balances and compromises that come with trying to maintain and control the vastness of the Great Lakes, these ancient giants that can dominate the weather on a continent. And the result? Not easy.

For nearly a century, a dam at the head of the St. Marys River near Sault Ste. Marie, Mich., has been used like a faucet, controlling the amount of water flowing from Lake Superior into lakes Michigan and Huron.

In the past five years, following a swift rise in lake levels, the relatively obscure Lake Superior board that regulates the amount of water released has stepped up these discharges, raising an outcry from a group representing property owners along the shoreline of Lake Michigan and potentially harming seasonal tourism.

…

U.S. officials say the elevated discharges aren’t simply an attempt to drive down Lake Superior’s levels, highlighting the need to accommodate hydropower plants, downstream fish-spawning habitat and commercial shipping.

As someone who spends not a little time wandering the southern shores of Lake Michigan, I can confirm that the water seems unusually high, and can provide on-the-ground analysis of whether or not, as the article claims, the Evanston dog beach is missing (Answer: yes).

Briscoe’s article points out that there are obviously other factors, but the sheer enormity of Lake Superior water is enough to raise the levels of both Michigan and Huron. So who controls this? People you have probably never heard of. I’ve never heard of them, that’s for sure.

The St. Marys River runs between Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and Ontario, passing through a network of canals, hydropower plants and a dam with 16 steel control gates, which are regulated by the Lake Superior control board, a binational entity that determines how much water is released into the rapids. The board assumes the daunting responsibility of balancing the socio-economic and environmental interests of Lake Superior with those of lakes Michigan and Huron, which are considered one body of water because they are connected at the Straits of Mackinac.

First off, I want to express anger at Tony Briscoe for including that last clause about them being, hydrologically and geologically, one lake. That’s one of my favorite bits of “actually…” trivia. You should watch me when I tell people this. Their minds are blown with the quiet resignation that I am, in fact, going to keep talking about this. It’s awesome. But I guess I’m grateful this is in here.

But back to the Lake Superior control board, which is where bureaucracy meets nature. The Board, such as it is, consists of two people, and American from the Army Corp of Engineers and a Canadian with similar credentials. They have small staffs that analyze regulations, but it is really way more than that. These aren’t just recitations of a rule book. It’s an attempt to harness almost unfathomable power and weight into something manageable.

To me, this is nearly heroic. Laboring in essential anonymity, they look to balance the interests not just of two countries, but of a half-dozen states and two provinces. And in each of those areas, there is a complex web of commercial and recreational (not to mention environmental) interests, which compete not just with each other, but also amongst each other. Industry and commercial fishing, for instance, rarely go hand-in-hand.

It is an unenviable position, and Briscoe’s article goes admirably in-depth about what the interests are and the near-impossibility of finding a balance. Honestly, I don’t think there is one. I don’t think there can be, even with the best intentions and hard work and intelligence of smart and dedicated people.

The Lakes exist on scales we can hardly imagine. They are not as inhuman as the ocean, but they still are too vast and too old and too deep and cold and tempestuous and unpredictable and unconcerned to be truly managed. They can pluck a person from life in the blink of an eye, with a rolling, erasing wave or the freezing downward pull of 10,000 winters.

We’ve set up so much of our society around these Lakes, the heart of the industrial Midwest, with the idea that they could be tamed. We’ve done the same everywhere on this and every other continent. And to an extent, it has worked. It’s a testament to human ingenuity and brilliance that we can control the levels of water in the Lake Superior, and put what is basically a tap on this continent-defining freshwater system. To the engineers go all the glory.

At the end of the day though, we have to learn to live alongside the Lakes, and not dominate them. That’s impossible. The Lakes will submerge our dog parks and laugh while doing so. They’ll remind us that we aren’t in control. And I think that’s a damn good lesson. It’s good to see the eternal. It’s good to see that what seems outsized and omnipresent is still small and weak.

When walking along on a sunrise when things are seeming to spiral out of control, and the world is going off the rails, it’s nice to see the endless rolling waves, slapping unconcerned and eternal on temporary shores, trod by temporary feet.

“I said, ‘Angela, what the hell is OTAN?’ I don’t think anyone knows.”

I’m going to caveat most of this post by saying that I was watching Trump’s surprise press conference this morning with the sound off, closed-captioned at the gym, where I broke personal running records out of sheer boggled frustration and unhidden anger. So I am making certain assumptions about his tone and possibly even motivations, though at this point: come on. We know how he talks.

For me, the absolute lowest moment wasn’t when he switched topics to go on and on about how successful he was on North Korea, turning it over to Mike Pompeo to further praise how successful Trump was. It wasn’t even when he talked about how no Republican presidential candidate has won Wisconsin since Eisenhower, a lie that even if true isn’t 100% relevant to NATO spending levels.

No, it was when he was asked a question by a reporter who said she was from a “country in northern Africa, Tunisia”, and asked Trump about if there would be more wars in the region, vis a vis US policy. I don’t have a transcript, so I don’t know if she was more specific (again, relying on the closed caption), but I do know about Trump’s answer.

This is paraphrase, but “Africa, what’s happening in Africa is really bad. What I see in my intelligence reports, people don’t understand how bad it is in Africa. Vicious! Terrible what is going on there. We’d very much like peace. We have the best military, the best bombs, the best planes, it’s better than it ever has been. Peace through strength. But we hope we never have to use it. Wouldn’t that be great? To have the very best stuff and never use it. OK, thank you.”

It was clear that he has never heard of the “Tunisia” before, and only heard “Africa”, and was thinking, you know Africa. That the reporter was very light-skinned didn’t throw him off, to his credit, although I suppose his favorite people from Africa have been white.

“One thing that no one understands is that Tunisia is closer to Europe than to, you know, elephants.” Donald Trump, next week.

I don’t expect the President of the United States to know everything about every country. I do expect, and I hope it isn’t too much to ask, that the President should know that if a reporter from Tunisia is asking about regional peace she certainly means the Middle East/North Africa region. The sheer childish intensity of his ignorance can still stagger, and is indeed even more staggering as time goes on. He casually acts the squalling child, demanding that there are no demands made on his intelligence, after 18 months of the weightiest job on the planet. It’s yet another reminder that we shouldn’t elect our single dumbest citizen.

This isn’t incidental. Sure, the rest of the press conference was bad. Ostensibly, it was about how the allies had agreed to pay at levels they have never paid at before, and how he told them to raise their defense spending up to 4% of their GDP, since the US is at 4.2% (as if we only spend defense money in Europe, or as if most of that isn’t spent on boondoggles, and as if he doesn’t continually brag about how much money he’s spending on the military).

That’s of course a non-starter, and if it is a negotiating tactic, it is a dumb one, since he can’t win. If it is so NATO members raise their spending to 2%, as they already are, he can declare a somewhat-partially-accurate “victory”, it is pure mendacity. If it is so he can shrug his shoulders and leave NATO and continue breaking the western alliance and high-five Putin, well, that is a whole other (possibly extremely predictable) barrel of monkeys.

It also was maddening how he told us all that he “made a very strong point” (that’s a quote) about how immigration was a problem in Europe and it is ruining their countries and they had to do something about it. That’s first-order undisguised racism, doubled up by his gloating that he won his election in part because of immigration, as did the new Italian PM, as did the Brexiters. He also talked at length about how challenging things were in London, or in his words, “hot”, but that he was going to be able to spend a few days at his golf club, which was a magical place.

So yeah: it was the sundowning ramblings of a career liar and a professional racist. It was worse than that, of course, since it was another way to cause chaos in the west, setting unrealistic expectations for our still-maybe-allies. But the Africa thing really stuck with me.

We have a President who knows nothing about the world. We have a President who would be befuddled by maps. We have a President who hears “Africa” and has one single set of assumptions, not understanding anything about geography or geopolitics or what regions actually mean or the interplay between countries. We have a President with a child’s vision of the world, big blocky continents with no nuance, no subtelty, no imagination. We have a President who doesn’t know about the world because he can’t bother to learn about anything other than himself. Again, maybe we shouldn’t elect our very worst citizens. We’re seeing in full the national and global ramifications of installing into power our national id.

Although, I guess, we should be grateful he didn’t start talking about Kanye. But you wouldn’t have been surprised, would you?