A Trumpocalypse? Oh do grow up

A Trumpocalypse? Oh do grow up

It is the anti-Trump set that is trading reason for emotionalism.


10 NOVEMBER 2016

There’s a dark irony to the somewhat swirling media response to Trump’s victory. For months now, observers have been telling us that Trump’s army is motored more by feeling than reason. Trumpism is a movement based on ‘untrammelled emotion’ over ‘reason [and] empiricism’, said Andrew Sullivan. Trump makes ‘sly appeals to… human irrationality’, said Scott Adams, creator of the Dilbert cartoon. Like all of history’s demagogues, Trump conjures ‘vivid images and intense emotions’, said a writer for the Conversation. Especially in relation to security: apparently he plays on people’s feelings of ‘uncertainty or instability’.

Yet now, as Trump’s victory shocks the world, or at least that portion of it that lives in its own echo chamber, who is it that’s exhibiting ‘untrammelled emotion’? Who’s conjuring up ‘vivid images’ and ‘intense emotions’, particularly with regard to security? It isn’t Trump’s supporters, most of whom went from the ballot box back to their everyday lives. It’s the anti-Trump set. It’s those who spent months claiming Trump supporters lack the mental and moral equipment necessary for ‘reasoned deliberation’. Many of these rather elitist politicos and observers are behaving in a way that makes even the most hot-headed Trump cheerer look perfectly rational in comparison.

The emotionalism of their response has been intense. ‘“I feel hated”, I tell my husband, sobbing in front of the TV in my yoga pants and Hillary sweatshirt’, said an American columnist in the Guardian. Former UK foreign secretary Margaret Beckett says Trump’s victory feels like ‘the end of the world’ (bit rich coming from a woman who voted for the Iraq War in 2003). Emotion over reason is widespread: the Washington Post reports that ‘mobs of tearful students’ are protesting against Trump’s win; some American universities are providing counselling for those ‘traumatised’ by Trump; celebs including Miley Cyrus and Perez Hilton have issued videos of themselves weeping over Trump’s victory, which have been shared hundreds of thousands of times by similarly frazzled Hillary backers.

Even worse than the emotionalism is the apocalypticism. Trump conjures up ‘vivid images’ to exploit people’s feelings of ‘uncertainty’? Yes, he does, but not as intensively as anti-Trump observers have been doing. British historian Simon Schama said Trump’s victory will ‘hearten fascists all over the world’ and is reminiscent of Hitler’s rise. Trump’s victory is the ‘greatest calamity to befall the West since World War II’, says Guardian columnist Owen Jones, clearly having never experienced the deprivations of 1970s recession or 1980s class conflict. Cheap, history-exploiting Hitler comparisons are rife: protesters hold up pictures of Trump with a Hitler moustache while celebs cry over America becoming like ‘Germany in the 1930s’.

The deployment of emotion over reason, the eschewing of empiricism in favour of ‘vivid images’ designed to scare people, is coming primarily from the chattering class, not the ‘Trump mob’. The marshalling of Hitler and the Holocaust to denounce Trump is especially low. Lacking a coherent outlook or even language through which to understand the Trump phenomenon, far less cogently critique it, anti-Trump observers rummage through history in search of moral authority, seeking to mobilise the great crimes of the past as stand-ins for their own ill-formed feelings, a cover for the disorientation they feel as they look around the 21st-century West.


This demeans history. The unique barbarism of the Holocaust is severely cheapened when it is talked about in the same breath as a politician who simply says intolerant things. Trump-Hitler talk also makes it harder to gain a true and grounded understanding of what is driving the Trump phenomenon and what is happening in Western politics. This is not the 1930s; ideology across the board is weak, not strong; Trump has no plans whatsoever to destroy an entire group of people. And the promotion of such historically illiterate ‘vivid imagery’, the ‘untrammelled emotion’ of crying ‘Trump is Hitler!’, muddies the present and our ability to understand it as much as it empties historical events of their meaning through prostituting them to the political needs of the present.

If anti-Trump observers really were given to ‘reasoned deliberation’, they would surely see how unhinged is their post-election apocalypticism. Even Trump’s more intolerant proposals, such as his promise to wall off Mexico and launch wars on Islamists overseas, are run-of-the-mill stuff, sadly. There’s already a vast metal fence between America and Mexico, and Hillary was one of the politicians that voted it into existence (with the Secure Fence Act 2006). Hillary – and Obama, and before him Bush – have already launched wars in the Middle East that have been disastrous for humanity. As for fascism coming to the US: America’s National Socialist Movement has around 400 members; other neo-Nazi groups have fewer than 100. These are, thankfully, tiny and tragic organisations, strikingly unboosted by Trump’s rise. But then, why use ‘reason [and] empiricism’ – values the Hillary side claims to adhere to – to understand the true nature of the far right in the US and the very different nature of Trump’s success, when you can simply and rashly say: ‘Hitler is back. The 1930s have returned. We are doomed.’

The weeping over Trump, the apocalypticism that greeted his victory, tells us something important about the political and media establishments. It reveals how utterly distant they are from ordinary people, especially those in the ‘dark heart’ of America, whom they look upon as aliens, Nazis-in-waiting, who hate minorities and women. There is a certain irony, no, in their denunciation of the Trump set as fascists even as they themselves dehumanise whole swathes of people? More profoundly still, their apocalypticism speaks to an elite that has no political or ideological anchor, and thus no means of making sense either of world events or of its own isolation. Sensing that its authority is under assault in an unprecedented way, at least in modern times, this elite has no way of responding other than through tears and fear and panic.

So the weeping is not really an act, not simply another example of emotional incontinence in these Oprahite times. It reveals something weirder, darker: an establishment whose lack of connection, lack of grounding, lack of conviction, means it finds it difficult to read the world or act on it in a rational, interested way. And then they wonder why some people think it can’t be any worse to give Trump a try.

Brendan O’Neill is the editor of spiked.

Trumping the Elites The American people said “no” to oligarchy and ruling classes

Trumping the Elites The American people said “no” to oligarchy and ruling classes.

Joel KotkinNovember 9, 2016

Politics and law


She had it all—the pliant media, the tech oligarchs, Wall Street, the property moguls, the academics, and the all-around “smart people.” What Hillary Clinton didn’t have was flyover country, the economic “leftovers,” the small towns, the unhipstered suburbs, and other unfashionable places. As Thomas Frank has noted, Democrats have gone “from being the party of Decatur to the party of Martha’s Vineyard.” No surprise, then, that working- and middle-class voters went for Donald Trump and helped him break through in states—Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa—that have usually gone blue in recent presidential elections.

Trump seized on the widespread sense that American life was destined to get worse from generation to generation. Americans wanted opportunity for the next generation, not a managed decline. Democrats—and I was one for over 40 years—once offered this to the working and middle classes that have now deserted the party.

More than anything, the Trump vote says “no” to oligarchies and ruling classes that not only hoard their wealth but also are convinced that they are morally superior. Trump may be as ostentatious as anyone in flaunting his own wealth, but compared with his garishness, the hypocrisy of the elites is infinitely worse. It’s one thing to be told that decline and future stagnation are your lot by, say, selfless monks wearing hair shirts or tough party cadres who live, like the pre-revolutionary Bolsheviks, with the common people. It’s quite another, when the message comes from trustafarians writing for the New York Times or people who fly their own planes and own numerous homes.

Concern about climate change galvanized the elites—Wall Street, Hollywood, Silicon Valley—but left Main Street cold. Wall Street placed its bets on Clinton and, like many blocs within the new “progressive” constituency, reacted with shock that the American people hadn’t bought in to their investment.

The map tells all. Clinton won by large margins in the Northeast and on the West Coast, and in states—Colorado, New Mexico, and Nevada—where Trump’s intemperate comments roused Latino voters. But outside of Illinois, a whole swath of the country, from the hills of Appalachia to the fringes of the Rockies, went solidly for Trump.

Why would that be? Start with basic economics. The economy in the nation’s interior relies on producing things—an endeavor that the coasts have largely abandoned. Energy, manufacturing, and agriculture still define these economies, and employ many white-collar as well as blue-collar workers. If you live in Texas and Oklahoma, “decarbonization” is a much less attractive concept than it might seem in Manhattan or San Francisco. Trump swept the areas that keep the lights on and the motors turning—Ohio, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Texas, Wyoming, Idaho, Louisiana, and especially West Virginia, where he won by a remarkable 68 to 27 margin.

Among other things, the media missed the fact that the middle of the country and the South continue to gain population. The “blue” model, for the most part, expels people, while, in contrast, the “red” one appeals, particularly to middle- and working-class families. Texas and Florida are now our second and third most-populous states. Once the pacesetter, New York is a mere shadow of itself as a determiner of elections, and California, no longer growing quicker than the rest of the country, has perched itself on the Left fringe, with obvious bad ramifications—high housing and energy bills, depressed blue-collar sectors—for middle-aged, middle-class families.

In contrast, Trump’s America presents an alternative model, which honors small enterprise, allows housing to meet demand, and does not see the United States as part of a global system to be managed. That there are xenophobic, and even racist, elements in the Trumpian ranks is undeniable—but for most Americans, the true “deplorables” have been the self-appointed regulators and financial masters who seem determined to halt their upward progress, and that of their children. If our governing elites want to know how Trump happened, they need only look in the mirror.

Joel Kotkin is the presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University and executive director of the Center for Opportunity Urbanism. His new book is The Human City: Urbanism for the Rest of Us.

UN bullies confirm conspiracy

Faith Goldy of TheRebel.media is trying to report on the UN "nanny state" conference in Delhi but they are being thwarted at every turn

Editor's Note: This is the unaccountable Globalism that many of us around the world are fed up with.  There is no liberty when unelected bureaucrats run roughshod over their citizens back home. We must restore national democracy and stop pretending that these unaccountable fools are actually representing us.

I hate cigarettes but I love freedom.  

How to protect yourself from Hacking

How to protect yourself from Hacking.

KAVEH WADDELL
NOV 10, 2016


The United States is one of the easier countries in which to be a journalist. Compared to countries with authoritarian governments in Russia, China, and nearly everywhere in the Middle East, a reporter can clash with the U.S. government and still go home from work feeling safe. Reporters without Borders, a nonprofit organization that advocates for reporters’ rights, has ranked the U.S. in the top 50 countries with the most press freedom since 2002.

Things are far from perfect. The Obama Administration has hotly pursued whistleblowers—especially those who leak information related to national security—and its attempt to force James Risen, a journalist for The New York Times, to reveal confidential sources was a major setback to press freedom.

But before long, these past eight years may look like summer camp for journalists. On Tuesday, American voters chose a new president, and he’s not a friend to the press.

Donald Trump has called for an “opening up” of libel laws in the U.S., which would make it easier to sue journalists who write unflattering things, and maintained blacklists of media outlets he didn’t want covering him. He’s got a penchant for surveillance, allegedly wiring up the phones in his Mar-A-Lago resort so that he could listen in on any call from the handset at his bedside. He’s called for boycotting Apple after the company refused to unlock the iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino shooters when asked by the FBI. He’s “keeping a list” of political figures who were disloyal to him, and he has a habit of singling out journalists he dislikes.

If you’re a journalist in the U.S., all this means that it’s time to protect yourself.

The government can ask technology companies to turn over information—like the contents of an email or instant message, for example—if they’ve got the appropriate warrant or court order. The best way to keep overreaching law enforcement from doing this is to use a messaging platform that, by design, can’t read the data it shuttles from user to user.

Here’s how: Tech-savvy reporters, including many who focus on digital privacy and surveillance, routinely use tools that encrypt their online communications end-to-end—that is, in such a way that not even the company delivering messages can read their contents. Signal, a smartphone app, is the medium of choice for privacy-conscious communicators, and is probably the easiest way to call or text securely. Encrypting email using PGP is also an option, but it’s far more cumbersome.

It’s also important to make up complex passwords—and never to reuse a username and password combination for more than one site. Password managers like 1Password, LastPass, and Dashlane can create a different randomized password for every website, and remember them all so that you don’t have to. Turning on two-factor authentication on every service that supports it—Google, Slack, Dropbox, Amazon, etc.—makes it much harder for hackers to get into your accounts, by requiring you to approve every login with a mobile device. And for those who need to browse the internet securely, a properly configured Tor browser allows users to poke around the web anonymously.

Already, journalists and human-rights activists around the world operate under hostile governments that use surveillance to detect and disrupt their work. To understand what U.S.-based journalists might learn from them, I reached out to Ali Bangi, the co-director of ASL19, a non-profit organization that helps Arabic- and Persian-speaking internet users protect their privacy and anonymity online, and bypass internet censorship.

Bangi made two predictions based on his experience with the media landscape in Iran. First, he said, journalists will need to work harder to keep their anonymous sources safe. Electronic surveillance can make it easy for the government to determine the identity a whistleblower, if a reporter isn’t careful. A vindictive administration could deploy surveillance tools more freely in order to figure out who’s leaking information.

It’s also possible that more types of information will be considered sensitive and dangerous. That’s why people other than national-security reporters should think about communicating more securely: Even run-of-the-mill political reporting could make journalists a target.


“Activists and journalists working on hostile situations understand very well that, unless you take the necessary precautions, your online activities can have consequences for your physical safety,” said Daniel Bedoya Arroyo, the incident-response manager at Access Now, a digital-rights advocacy group. “For example, a mobile device can reveal with a decent level of accuracy your physical location, even if geolocalization services are disabled. And unfortunately, this increased risk and fear can cause self-censorship in many situations.”

A survey conducted by PEN America, an organization that promotes freedom of expression, found that 16 percent of writers in the U.S. avoided writing or speaking about a topic as a result of government surveillance, and that another 11 percent had “seriously considered” avoiding a topic for that reason. (The survey was conducted after Edward Snowden’s leaks first began to reveal the massive scale of the National Security Agency’s spying operations.)

“If the government is monitoring your communication, or if you even perceive that they might be, you are not going to say precisely what you think, particularly in repressive societies where there are consequences for critical expression,” said Joel Simon, the executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists.

The fact that the government’s spying apparatus will soon be under Trump’s control is causing panic among privacy advocates. Writing in The Guardian,Trevor Timm, the executive director of the nonprofit Freedom of the Press, argued that Trump could wreak havoc using President Obama’s secret drone program and a powerful NSA:

In a little over two months, Donald Trump—after his shocking victory last night—will control a vast, unaccountable national security and military apparatus unparalleled in world history. The nightmare that civil libertarians have warned of for years has now tragically come true: instead of dismantling the surveillance state and war machine, the Obama administration and Democrats institutionalized it—and it will soon be in the hands of a maniac.

It will go down in history as perhaps President Obama’s most catastrophic mistake.

Evan Greer, the campaign director for Fight for the Future, a digital-rights nonprofit, called on Obama to shut down the NSA’s mass-surveillance programs in next few months, before he leaves office.

Institutional checks and a strong first amendment will probably keep press freedoms in the U.S. from eroding too much in the next four or eight years. It’s certainly won’t approach the situation in countries like Iran, where a journalist named Yashar Soltani was thrown in solitary confinement in September for exposing corruption in the office of Tehran’s mayor. “Encrypt, encrypt, encrypt!” said Bangi when I asked him what an Iranian journalist might advise an American reporter working under Trump’s NSA. “And if it's not safe anymore, leave.”

Leonard Cohen dies at 82. Here are his songs.

Happy Veterans Day- Teen Documents World II veterans.

Teen Dedicates Life to Finding World War II Combat Veterans

For as long as he can remember, Rishi Sharma's heroes haven't been sports stars or movie stars or any other kind of stars. They've been the U.S. combat veterans who won World War II.


Alarmed that even the youngest of them are now in their 90s and dying each day by the hundreds, the Southern California teenager has launched a campaign to try to ensure each one's legacy.


"I'm on a mission to in-depth film interview a World War II combat veteran every single day," the earnest 19-year-old says after a recent afternoon spent in the living room of William R. Hahn of Los Angeles, where Sharma mined the 93-year-old's memories for hours.


His Canon 70D camera rolling, his long, jet-black hair tied back in a tight ponytail, the son of Indian immigrants listened intently as Hahn recounted how he received the Silver Star for bravery by charging through a hail of gunfire on Easter Sunday 1945 as Allied forces retook the German town of Hettstandt.


Asked if he considers himself a hero, Hahn chuckled.


"Not really," said the retired metal-shop teacher who had a bullet come so close to him that it blew the canteen on his belt to smithereens. Other guys, he said, did similar things, and not all came back to talk about it.


Sharma wants to meet and honor every one who did, and he knows time is not on his side.


Of the approximately 16 million Americans who served in some capacity during WWII, some 620,000 survive, but they are dying at the rate of nearly 400 a day, according to the National Museum of World War II.


"I want to create this movement where people, where they just realize that we have such a limited time with these men who saved humanity," he says. "Let's try to learn as much as we can from them and give them a proper send-off and make them feel like their sacrifices they made were worth it."


He figures he's got about 10 years to do that so he's putting off college, putting off finding a job, putting off looking for a girlfriend, putting off just about everything except occasionally eating and sleeping between interviewing combat veterans.


Since childhood, Sharma says, he's been fascinated by the sacrifices men his age made during WWII, risking their lives for freedom, then returning home to raise families and take everyday jobs as they transitioned back to civilian life.


He read every book and watched every documentary he could find. But it wasn't until his junior year at Agoura Hills High School, just north of Los Angeles, that he became committed to meeting them.


He came across the name Lyle Bouck, one of the heroes of Germany's Battle of the Bulge offensive in Belgium, as he read historian Stephen Ambrose's book "Citizen Soldiers."


Fascinated, he looked up Bouck's phone number and called him, not realizing it was 1 a.m. where the 92-year-old war hero lives. A friendly voice on the other end of the phone told Sharma if he called back at a decent hour, Bouck would be happy to talk.



That's when the teen had an epiphany. "It made me realize these guys are really out there! And I could do this for all of them."


Soon Sharma was riding his bike to every retirement home within pedaling distance. After he interviewed every combat-hardened soldier there, he turned to veterans halls, then the internet.


Borrowing his parents' car, he traveled to Oregon over the summer, then back down the California coast, interviewing still more people. He's up to about 160, and has plans to expand his travels in the weeks ahead to Arizona and other states and, on next month's 75th anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack, to Hawaii.


He makes a DVD of every interview and gives it to the veteran. Some have passed on copies to the World War II museum.


"He's just totally dedicated and a very decent young fellow," says Howie Beach of Fullerton, whom Sharma recently interviewed. What he is doing is important, says Beach, another Silver Star recipient who at 91 sometimes speaks to high school groups.


"But a lot of them go on their merry way, just taking their lives and their freedoms and all that for granted," Beach says of those students. "So it's good to see a young man like Rishi with such a convincing way about him."


Such an effort doesn't come cheap, however, and Sharma quickly exhausted his modest life's savings carrying it out. He raised about $3,300 through a GoFundMe account and has spent most of that. To economize during the Oregon-Northern California trip, he limited himself to one meal every other day.


But Sharma, who also founded a nonprofit called Heroes of the Second World War, has huge dreams for his effort. He'd like to eventually recruit others to help conduct interviews, perhaps get the interviews to museums and allow others to get to know some of the people he says have become his closest friends.


"This one guy I interviewed in Oregon told me he hadn't been visited by anyone in over five months and that he was just waiting to die," Sharma recalled. "This is a 94-year-old who saw combat in the South Pacific, and now he has no one."

Changing the things I cannot accept

ABAG-MTC Regional Agencies are having a Party. Start a new Bank, Spend Billions, Plan Everybodys Future!

Disruptive Education (Is this a better approach to Marin public schools?)

Disruptive Education from Amanda Horvath on Vimeo.

Do You Understand the Electoral College?

Though I am glad the election is over, I think this video is a good review why the Electoral College was invented and is probably a good thing.  If a popular vote determined outcomes then people living in sparely populated states would be disenfranchised from the political process.

Damon Connolly gives a "state of the district" talk to Marin Coalition 11/2/2016

Damon Connolly gives a "State of the District" speech to Marin Coalition on November 2, 2016.  He is the supervisor for Marinwood-Lucas Valley, Terra Linda and parts of downtown San Rafael, CA (District One).