Way back on 7 January 2005 (ARMOR CAN NO LONGER BE AN ISSUE…) I wrote a story about reports that insurgents in Iraq had successfully destroyed a heavily armored M2 Bradley fighting vehicle with an improvised explosive device. This, for me, was the turning point in the Iraq war. When irregulars can take out the best vehicle we have, we were no longer fighting a war we could hope to win, and of course, we couldn’t and didn’t.

This morning I’m reading a similar story that changes the cyberwar equation. Sam Biddle, writing in The NSA Leak Is Real, Snowden Documents Confirm for The Intercept, reports:

On Monday, a hacking group calling itself the “ShadowBrokers” announced an auction for what it claimed were “cyber weapons” made by the NSA. Based on never-before-published documents provided by the whistleblower Edward Snowden, The Intercept can confirm that the arsenal contains authentic NSA software, part of a powerful constellation of tools used to covertly infect computers worldwide.

The provenance of the code has been a matter of heated debate this week among cybersecurity experts, and while it remains unclear how the software leaked, one thing is now beyond speculation: The malware is covered with the NSA’s virtual fingerprints and clearly originates from the agency.

The evidence that ties the ShadowBrokers dump to the NSA comes in an agency manual for implanting malware, classified top secret, provided by Snowden, and not previously available to the public. The draft manual instructs NSA operators to track their use of one malware program using a specific 16-character string, “ace02468bdf13579.” That exact same string appears throughout the ShadowBrokers leak in code associated with the same program, SECONDDATE.

SECONDDATE plays a specialized role inside a complex global system built by the U.S. government to infect and monitor what one document estimated to be millions of computers around the world. Its release by ShadowBrokers, alongside dozens of other malicious tools, marks the first time any full copies of the NSA’s offensive software have been available to the public, [Emphasis mine, JH.]providing a glimpse at how an elaborate system outlined in the Snowden documents looks when deployed in the real world, as well as concrete evidence that NSA hackers don’t always have the last word when it comes to computer exploitation.

When our most sophisticated cyberwarfare agency is subject to intrusions, from any source, then our nation is at grave risk.

Donald Trump filed tax returns. Hillary Clinton gave speeches. The content of both could tell us much about the two plutocracy party candidates for president, but neither candidate thinks that information would be helpful to their campaign.

Fair enough, no law requires them to release that information, but in this age of faux transparency, what you hide is many times more important than what you reveal.

Ralph Nader, in Hillary’s Hubris: Only Tell the Rich for $5000 a Minute! writes:

There is a growing asymmetry between the media’s mounting demands for Donald Trump to release his tax returns (Hillary has done so) and their diminishing demands that Hillary Clinton release the secret transcripts of her $5000 per minute speeches before closed-door banking conferences and other business conventions.

The Washington Post, an endorser of Clinton, in its August 18 issue devoted another round of surmising as to why Trump doesn’t want to release his tax returns—speculating that he isn’t as rich as he brags he is, that he pays little or no taxes, and that he gives little to charity. Other media outlets endorsing Hillary have been less than vociferous in demanding that she release what she told business leaders in these pay-to-play venues.

When asked last year about her transcripts on Meet the Press, she said she would look into it. When the questions persisted in subsequent months, she said she would release the transcripts only if everybody else did. Bernie Sanders replied that he had no transcripts because he doesn’t give paid speeches to business audiences. Nonetheless she continues to be evasive.

We know she has such transcripts. Her contract with these numerous business groups, prepared by the Harry Walker Lecture Agency, stipulated that the sponsor pay $1000 for a stenographer to take down a verbatim record, exclusively for her possession. .

The presidential campaign is moving into a stage where it will be harder for reporters to reach her. Except for a recent informal gathering with some reporters, Hillary Clinton, unlike all other presidential candidates, has not held a news conference since last December. This aversion to media examination does not augur well should she reach the White House. Secrecy is corrosive to democracy.

Why wouldn’t Hillary tell the American people, whose votes she wants, what she told corporations in private for almost two years? Is it that she doesn’t want to be accused of doubletalk, of “gushing” (as one insider told the Wall Street Journal) when addressing bankers, stock traders or corporate bosses? On the campaign trail Hillary only mimics Bernie Sanders’s tough, populist challenges to Wall Street. The Clintons are not known for answering tough questions or participating in straight talk. Dodging and weaving is what they do and too often they get away with it.

Hillary is the clear reported choice for president not just by the Wall Street crowd. The champions of the military-industrial complex love her variety of extreme hawkishness, which rings the cash registers for ever more military weapons contracts.

As the Sanders uprising dims, Hillary can be seen already returning to her former militarized foreign policy. On the last day of the Democratic Convention, the stage’s military presence foreshadowed her return to militarism. Her supporters shouted “USA, USA.” to drown out the Sanders shoutouts for peace and justice. Hillary’s supporters sounded like the jingoistic Republicans. She’s been endorsed by numerous retired Pentagon, CIA and NSA officials who find Trump’s “Why can’t we get along with Russia and China?” statements disturbing to their world views.

Where Trump’s White House is seen as utterly unpredictable, Hillary’s White House is utterly predictable: more Wall Street, more military adventures. As Senator and Secretary of State she has never seen a weapons system or a war that she didn’t support. Remember her singular pressure to attack Libya over the objections of then Secretary of Defense Robert Gates who asked, “What happens after the regime is overthrown?”

Hillary’s judgement and experience regarding Libya resulted in an ongoing, spreading disaster of violence and chaos in that war-torn country and its neighboring countries to the south.

It is bad enough that monetized politicians and the mass media reduce voters to the status of spectators, excluded from injecting their issues, and their perceived injustices into the electoral campaigns. Now people are told to stop complaining when candidates such as Hillary Clinton tell the gilded few what she and they don’t want many of us to hear.

To help people prevail against the refusals to disclose by Hillary and Donald, I’ve made two videos [Hillary Clinton’s Transparency and Donald Trump’s Transparency, JH] you may wish to see and share.

We do have choices other than the two plutocracy party candidates. I’m supporting Jill Stein and Ajamu Baraka. You can too.

I got canceled once. A magazine project I was brought into shepherd ceased publication after two years and I moved on. I, and my great staff, accomplished a lot and, I like to think, we changed a tiny segment of the publishing industry and upped the game a bit. I worried about my people, but we did a little shuffling in-house and they were OK. I knew I would be all right, and I was.

Jon Stewart is right. Larry Wilmore changed the business and he and the people he shepherded will continue to make waves and keep the conversations they started going.

I’ll miss them all, for now.

Blaine Griffin’s charge that the basis of complaints about a $2-million dirt bike proposal by his boss are racist is pathetic.

Griffin, at $105,000 a year, heads the city’s community relations department.

That’s wonderful thinking for good community relations. Calling people racists.

And it’s 20 to 30 years out of date.

There’s plenty of real racism to call out without creating straw man issues.

Mayor Frank Jackson wanted the $2 million deal passed quickly. Naturally. Don’t look closely at where the money is going or, as a number of council members noted, why pools that needed repairs to be open weren’t attended. It seems repairing pools in this hot summer would have been a no brainer.

To back up his claim Blaine, also vice chairman of the Cuyahoga County Democratic Party, in a Face book post question the lack of outrage for millions of dollars for skateboard parks, boat docks, rowing sports and bike trails, though he named none nor their cost.

He conveniently overlooked the hundreds of millions spent by the city and county on pro sports facilities, their parking structures, and improvement costs that add up to a billion dollars at least.

He conveniently didn’t mention these other recent and far more expensive subsidies—and not for public purposes but for PRIVATE, MONEY-GRUBBING businesses called sports—Larry Dolan’s Indians (given $37 million as of May), Dan Gilbert’s Cavs (given $60 million as of May) and Jimmy “Cheat ’em” Haslam’s Browns. The $2 million track story appeared in the PD the same day as a story in the paper noted Cleveland paid $20 million for another Browns stadium fix-up.

Want to cry about something?

If he really wanted to call out racism he have chased them and the fact that they pay no property taxes, which since their facilities are all in Cleveland, come at Continue Reading »

Marc Lamont Hill, writing in For real progressives, Jill Stein is now the only choice for The Guardian, makes his case:

The stakes of Wednesday night’s CNN Green party town hall were high—third-party candidates are rarely allowed entry into the corporate media universe, which thrives on the false narrative that only two parties exist here in the United States.

This was perhaps the only opportunity the presidential candidate I have endorsed—Jill Stein—and her running mate, Ajamu Baraka, to have the ear of a large portion of the mainstream American electorate. There was little room for error.

They spent little time directly criticizing Donald Trump. This was a wise move, since virtually no one among Stein’s potential base of support is considering Trump as a viable option. Instead, she focused on Hillary Clinton.

At a moment where the Clinton campaign is still attempting to secure the support of frustrated Bernie Sanders primary voters, Stein demonstrated that Clinton’s brand of liberalism does not represent the tone or spirit of the Sanders campaign. By highlighting Clinton’s pro-corporate politics and active role in hawkish foreign policy, Stein raised considerable doubt about Clinton’s leftist bona fides.

“I will have trouble sleeping at night if Donald Trump is elected,” Stein said. “I will also have trouble sleeping at night if Hillary Clinton is elected.”

Sit back, take notes, listen to a candidate who doesn’t represent an evil, lesser or greater, and then think what voting for someone you can believe, who represents a greater good, in might feel like.

(The question and response beginning at 37:38 may be the No. 1 question. I take exception, however to Stein’s response in that she allowed the myth—that Ralph Nader and the Green Party were responsible for George Bush’s victory—to persist. Al Gore has no one other than himself to blame for his defeat. If he had carried his home state of Tennessee Florida would not have been an issue.)

I’m sure that there are ignorant people who think that if all the ice disappears from the Antarctic that we will enjoy lots and lots of new land to build condos on. What Peter Wadhams, The former director of the Scott Polar Research Institute and professor of ocean physics at Cambridge Peter Wadhams, wants those people to understand is that the ice cap on our planet’s 7th continent is trapping vast quantities of methane, the green house gas that is between 28 and 37 times the Global Warming Potential of carbon dioxide. Melt the ice, release the gas and we stomp on the Global Warming/Climate Change accelerator.

John Vidal, reporting in Time to listen to the ice scientists about the Arctic death spiral for The Guardian writes:

The warming now being widely experienced worldwide is concentrated in the polar regions and Wadhams says we will shortly have ice-free Arctic Septembers, expanding to four or five months with no ice at all. The inevitable result, [Wadhams] predicts, will be the release of huge plumes of the powerful greenhouse gas methane, accelerating warming even further.

He and other polar experts have moved from being field researchers to being climate change pioneers in the vanguard of the most rapid and drastic change that has taken place on the planet in many thousands of years. This is not just an interesting change happening in a remote part of the world, he says, but a catastrophe for mankind.

All so that Exxon executives can buy more toys.

Previously in The Guardian emails…

Keep Carbon In The Ground…

In my lifetime we’ve gone from 100-year floods to 1,000-year floods; from hurricanes to super storms. How long will we put our homes and our families at risk so that Exxon’s executive can buy more toys?

350.ORG emails:

Friends,

This week, central and southwestern Louisiana have been slammed by unprecedented floods. Over the weekend, I watched heavy rains pour down on my community and my own home sink into rising waters.

Across the region, tens of thousands of people have been evacuated, thousands of homes damaged, and at at least eleven people killed. This fills my heart with both a deep sadness and deep anger—at the fossil fuel companies driving this ongoing crisis, and at an Administration that continues to sell them the right to do so.

Next Wednesday, on August 24th, the Obama administration is planning to sell off an area the size of Virginia for offshore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.

In the face of this climate emergency, we’re calling on President Obama to cancel the upcoming fossil fuel auction here in the Gulf.

We need to keep fossil fuels in the ground and stop treating the Gulf Coast like a sacrifice zone.

Offshore drilling endangers both the people of the Gulf and the climate we depend on. In the midst of this climate-driven disaster, moving forward with this auction is unconscionable. Doing it at the New Orleans Superdome—the site of one of the most visible and tragic instances of climate injustice in recent history—is nothing short of insulting.

We’ve been organizing and resisting for decades here on the Gulf Coast, but right now, we need to come together as a movement and support both the organizing and the relief efforts that are underway on the ground. Like all climate crises, this flood will most gravely impact the already marginalized in our society—poor people, people of color, the elderly.

This climate event is being called a “1,000 year flood” and a “truly historic event,” and according to the Red Cross, it’s the worst U.S. disaster since Superstorm Sandy. This type of storm is far from normal—but it could become normal if we don’t act now. This auction would enable the fossil fuel industry to do more of the very thing that is intensifying these floods in the first place.

Allowing next week’s fossil fuel auction to move forward is rubbing salt in the wounds of a region already in a state of emergency. Sign today and demand that President Obama call it off.

No more business as usual. My beloved Gulf coast is not for sale.

Love and liberation,
Cherri Foytlin, Gulf Coast Mother of six

Previously in The Guardian emails…

Keep Carbon In The Ground…

Back in 1978 I, and the rest of the crew of the USS Bainbridge, transited Australia’s Great Barrier Reef en route from Darwin to Tonga. Standing on the bridge wings we could look down at the reef and marvel at the teeming ecosystem that had taken thousands and thousands of year to form, nearly forty years later, that experience may not be possible much longer.

Bill McKibben, writing in The coral die-off crisis is a climate crime and Exxon fired the gun for The Guardian, explains why:

Vast swaths of coral were bleached this spring, much of the damage done in a matter of weeks as a wave of warm water swept across the Pacific and west into the Indian Ocean. The immediate culprit was clear: the ongoing rise in global ocean temperatures that comes from climate change. But that’s like saying “he was killed by a bullet”. The important question is: who fired the gun?

We know the biggest culprits now, because great detective work by investigative journalists has uncovered key facts in the past year. The world’s biggest oil company, Exxon, knew everything there was to know about climate change by the late 1970s and early 1980s. Its scientists understood how much and how fast it was going to warm, and how much damage that was going to do. And the company knew the scientists were right: that’s why they started “climate-proofing” their own installations, for instance building their drilling rigs to accommodate the sea level rise they knew was coming.

What they didn’t do was tell the rest of us. Instead, they – and many other players in the fossil fuel industry – bankrolled the rise of the climate denial industry, helping fund the “thinktanks” and front groups that spent the last generation propagating the phoney idea that there was a deep debate about the reality of global warming. As a result, we’ve wasted a quarter century in a phoney argument about whether the climate was changing.

All, of course, in the name of Exxon’s profits. Yes, Exxon is not the only culprit, but as McKibben has made, and continues to make, the case, Exxon is the Walmart of Climate Change/Global Warming. If you want to stop a wrong you don’t go after every offender, you go after the worst offender and work you’re way down the food chain.

Previously in The Guardian emails…

Keep Carbon In The Ground…

British Rail has The privatized railroads in Britain have cattle cars? Seems so.

Charles B Anthony and Karen McVeigh, reporting in Corbyn joins seatless commuters on floor for three-hour train journey for The Guardian write:

Spending a busy train journey without a seat, crushed up against other commuters in the aisle, or crouched uncomfortably in the luggage compartment is an all-too-common experience for many. But you don’t expect to spot the leader of the opposition on the floor of a train on your way to work.

Jeremy Corbyn, famed for standing up for his principles, sat down for them last week, along with 20 other seatless commuters on a three-hour train journey from London to Newcastle.

In a video shot as he was on his way to debate with Owen Smith in the Labour leadership hustings in Gateshead, Corbyn is seen sitting on the floor of the train, a coffee and brown paper bag at his feet, reading Private Eye. The freelance filmmaker Yannis Mendez, who has been following Corbyn and volunteers for his campaign, filmed the footage.

From his spot on the floor, which he chose rather than upgrading to first class, Corbyn turns to the camera and says: “This is a problem that many passengers face every day, commuters and long-distance travellers. Today this train is completely ram-packed. The staff are absolutely brilliant, working really hard to help everybody.

“The reality is there are not enough trains, we need more of them – and they’re also incredibly expensive.” He said the whole experience was a good case for public ownership.

If there’s not enough room to sit, what then?

Reading this story, and watching the video, made me wonder how many American politicians travel first class or even on private aircraft. I’ll allow an exception for the President and Vice President, and perhaps a tight inner-circle of those requiring extensive security that would make travel for others a nightmare, but members of Congress, let them drive/fly coach. Living the way your constituents live can be enlightening.

I’ve actually been looking for just this article for more than a few months. That the political phenomenon that is Donald Trump didn’t just rise from sea like Venus should be plainly obvious, but since Americans don’t do History all that well, someone had to sit down and connect the dots.

Timothy Shenk, writing in The dark history of Donald Trump’s rightwing revolt for The Guardian, carefully lines up all the dominoes that were set in motion by James Burnham in 1941 by his publication of The Managerial Revolution: What Is Happening in the World.

Shenk takes nearly a quarter of his 5,800-plus long read to get to Shenk, but he had a lot of groundwork to take care of first.

To understand Shenk and all the figures that followed, is to know Trump.

Pour yourself a stiff Bourbon and read.

If I had to clear my library of all other writers, Marge Piercy would remain. No writer has more deeply affected my education and my attitudes toward so many issues of social and political justice.

Yesterday I noticed an uptick in hits on a particular post I wrote back in December 2012. Today, only 84 days away from The Unblackening, I wonder if people may find some solace and even heart in Marge Piercy’s poetry again:

From The Hunger Moon, New And Selected Poems, 1980-2010 by Marge Piercy.

What can they do
to you? Whatever they want.

…How can you stop
them? Alone, you can fight,
you can refuse, you can
take what revenge you can
but they roll over you.

It goes on one at a time,
it starts when you care
to act, it starts when you do
it again after they said No,
it starts when you say We
and know who you mean, and each
day you mean one more.

[Update on 16 August at 0700: Dave Schilling, pondering in Larry Wilmore’s show was a victim of our reluctance to discuss race for The Guardian, writes:

After a year-and-a-half of finding the humor in some of the bleakest moments in American race relations in decades, Comedy Central is ending Larry Wilmore’s The Nightly Show. I hesitate to call a satirical half-hour talk show a “grand experiment”, but it was as close as one can get because the overriding topic of conversation was almost always race—a subject Americans aren’t always excited to discuss frankly.

Even if the network stressed that the show would have mass appeal, the very fact that black and brown faces dominated the program both in front of and behind the camera necessitated discussions of race, far more than on any other late-night talk show. As such, the format of The Nightly Show did not lend itself to the cocktail party vibe of the biggest late-night franchises: The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon and The Late Late Show with James Corden. A light-hearted, carpool karaoke-esque segment would jar viewers next to a conversation about the trials of the police officers involved in the death of Freddie Gray or the attacks on cops in Dallas. A Hollywood Reporter piece on the cancellation pointed to Wilmore’s de-emphasizing of so-called “viral hits”. “It’s not designed to have the type of things that [Jimmy] Fallon and [James] Corden do, like the [carpool] karaoke type of thing or lip sync battle and those types of things because those are such pure comic things,” Wilmore had told the Reporter.

Perhaps Wilmore was too serious, but when black men are being shot in the streets, when black women are thrown in jail after traffic stops, when a black woman is harassed by Trumpists for not behaving the way they think she should after winning a fucking gold medal, I for one, gave him plenty of room to work and never missed a show.

I will miss him and all of his cast members.]

So, this really sucks.

Comedy Central’s The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore is coming to an end.

The late-night humor and talkshow, which premiered in January 2015, will conclude its run Thursday, the network announced Monday.

The program, which filled the slot vacated by Stephen Colbert when he jumped to CBS, sought to explore current events and larger life issues as presided over by Wilmore, who previously had served as senior black correspondent on The Daily Show.

But audience acceptance of The Nightly Show never approached its Daily Show lead-in, neither during the regime of Jon Stewart nor that of his successor, Trevor Noah, who took over last September.

Comedy Central president Kent Alterman praised Wilmore and his team for “crafting a platform for underrepresented voices”. He said the show had steadily improved, “but unfortunately it hasn’t resonated with the audience in a way that it would need to for us to continue”.

I’ve watched every episode from the beginning and thought each was brilliant, but I have no doubt that crafting a platform for underrepresented voices (read people of color) killed the show. I imagine that the demographic sought by Comedy Central is vastly the overrepresented white males, 18-30, a group that probably felt threatened by Wilmore and his cast—especially the strong female comedians: Holly Walker, Grace Parra, Robin Thede and Franchesca Ramsey.

Since the show began, I have posted 56 pieces about the show.

I will miss Wilmore and his cast.

We have way over used the war metaphor—war on poverty, war on drugs, war on terror, &c.—to the point of fatigue. One of the reasons that Germany lost the literal war in 1945 was that Hitler and his generals tried to fight on multiple fronts and stretched the Third Reich’s resources too far.

Bill McKibben, gets that, but pushes the metaphor anyway, writing in a promotional email:

We’re used to metaphors: the war on drugs, the war on poverty. But in this case carbon and methane—without malice but also without mercy—are waging a war on the civilization that emitted them. This year we’ve lost huge swaths of the world’s coral; vast sheets of ice disappear daily. Our adversary is taking territory and taking lives.

McKibben wants, and rightly so, for people to read his cover story A World At War in the 15 August copy of The New Republic.

That is a reasonable and proper request, but just as we are not, nor were we ever, at war with poverty, drugs or terror—the enemies were (and are) in each case real people with real, self-serving agendas, not abstract concepts—we will not go to war on Global Warming/Climate Change.

Doing so would just be silly.

That is not to say that we are not facing an existential threat from the drumbeat of temperatures rising like a metronome gone haywire. We are, but the threat is not rising temperatures. The threat is from people who believe that profits, that business as usual, are more important than the consequences of continuing to pile up wealth in their chosen manner.

We are at war with a class of people and that is where the metaphor breaks down. In war you kill the people responsible for the threat. To paraphrase General George Patton: you don’t die for your cause, you make damn sure the other poor dumb bastard dies for his. We don’t do that outside of actual war.

We don’t need a bloody revolution fought in the streets with guns.

We need a social/political/economic revolution fought in our capitals with votes.

What we need is for free peoples, peoples who can actually vote and through their votes influence public policy, to shift their politicians off their asses and reverse or eliminate the policies responsible for Global Warming/Climate Change.

We have to keep carbon in the ground.

Another place that the war metaphor fails in how we perceive the shared suffering. In war, everyone suffers, everyone makes sacrifices. We aren’t good at asking people to make sacrifices for a cause that isn’t on their radar. We can’t even draft citizens to make the supreme sacrifice the way we did to stop world Fascism. Now we just ask them to volunteer (as I did) and promise them benefits if they live.

We need to ration energy. Higher prices won’t work because the people responsible for the problem can’t be priced out of the market.

Give the person working at Walmart and the CEO of Global Rapine Inc. the same gasoline ration.

Ration per-person kilowatts and cubic feet of natural gas so that the homeowner at Maple Lane, and the apartment dweller on 35th street, and the McMansion-owning White Middle Class Suburban Man, must each power, light, heat and cool their homes with the same amount of energy.

Do that and you can begin to talk about declaring war.

Previously in The Guardian emails…

Keep Carbon In The Ground

The phenomenon that is Donald Trump is as old as politics. There is a long line of strongman leaders stretching back through recorded history and certainly beyond that we can examine and learn from. The key, of course, is to learn.

Peter Beinart, writing in Trump’s Intellectuals: Why Are Some Conservative Thinkers Falling for Trump? for The Atlantic explores one facet of this political trope: how very intelligent people buy into tyranny.

This is a thread that, despite the oft repeated maxim of Benjamin Franklin that Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety, runs through American politics all the way back to the founders. There were those who wanted to create a locally ruled monarchy in the former colonies and crown George Washington as America’s first king.

Beinart begins in the 20th century, immediately after the end of WW II:

In his 1949 book, The Vital Center, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. observed that “against the loneliness and rootlessness of man in free society,” totalitarianism “promises the security and comradeship of a crusading unity.”

Beinart links that crusading unity to the intellectuals of post-war Poland:

In 1953, Czesław Miłosz published The Captive Mind, which described how a series of Polish intellectuals came to embrace Stalinism. Miłosz detailed the role that “coercion” and “personal ambition” played in their ideological transformation. But he stressed that he was concerned “with questions more significant than mere force” or material advancement. “To belong to the masses is the great longing of the ‘alienated’ intellectual,” Miłosz argued. “The gratifications of personal ambition … are merely the outward and visible signs of social usefulness, symbols of a recognition that strengthens the intellectual’s feeling of belonging.”

In 2016, Beinart sees the same longing in our own alienated intellectuals.

[L]ike the men who led [the Marxist and Fascist] movements, Trump offers intellectuals the chance to speak for the energized masses and thus to make themselves relevant beyond their salons. And now, as then, the desire for such relevance is strong enough to make some intellectuals question liberal democracy itself.

Read the intellectuals who are supporting Trump—or are open to supporting Trump—and you notice a few themes. First, they admire his campaign’s raw, unbridled energy. The Trump movement, according to the Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan, radiates “dynamism.” His supporters “are just about the only cheerful people in politics … They’re having a good time.” Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, an even more unabashed Trump booster, explains, “There is no model here … It is a Donald Trump unique, extraordinary experience. And you have to relax and take it for that kind of a unique experience.”

Who knew that Peggy Noonan, best remembered as President Ronald Reagan’s speech writer, was still a thing?

What Noonan is really suggesting is that established politicians and commentators lack the moral standing to oppose Trump, because he can’t be any worse than they are. And besides, the people are with him.

In The Captive Mind, Miłosz argued that Stalinist intellectuals “present[ed] as demons the rather inefficient police and the sluggish judges” of Poland’s pre–World War II regime in order to suggest that Soviet domination could not possibly be worse. By condemning America’s current leaders as predatory and decadent, Trump’s intellectuals are doing something similar. “The natural arc of Obama-style progressivism is always anti-constitutional fascism,” writes Victor Davis Hanson, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and a frequent contributor to National Review. Ken Masugi, a former assistant to Clarence Thomas now at the Claremont Institute, a respected conservative think tank, argues that while Trump may not be perfect, he at least champions “the sovereignty of the people,” who are rising up against “American elites [who] have long abandoned the basic principles of constitutional governance.”

Where Beinart really made me sit up was his mention of what may be the greatest manifestation of troll culture yet: the totally anonymous and now shuttered Blogspot blog named, of all things, the Journal Of American Greatness.

During its four months of life, the “Journal of American Greatness”—which featured a collection of writers with classical pseudonyms and an affinity for the German American political theorist Leo Strauss—made a highbrow case for overthrowing America’s existing political order and replacing it with the raw, dynamic, intoxicating energy of Donald Trump. The journal shuttered itself in June after some of its contributors grew worried that their identities would be exposed. But the conservative author Steven Hayward, who knows several of its authors, predicts that they will continue publishing in other venues. Already, he says, they have received several offers for book contracts.

The “Journal of American Greatness” makes explicit what Noonan, Hanson, and Gingrich imply: that America’s current system of government is illegitimate. One article declares, “The digits of one hand suffice to count all of the truly committed defenders of American sovereignty, liberty, and nationhood in Congress.” A second asserts that the United States is “post-Constitutional.” A third accuses Washington conservatives of a “decadence so deep that it would take some Oliver Cromwell to puncture.”

Hence the America that needs Trumpists to become great again.

Does any of this matter? It depends on how close Trump comes to winning. If Hillary Clinton routs him, the intellectual argument being constructed on his behalf will fade. It will fade because Trumpism derives its legitimacy from its support among the people.

The threat will come if Trump’s popular support surges. For Trump, popularity equals truth. That’s why, when he’s ahead, he spends so much time citing polls. He understands that in American public discourse, it’s hard to say the people are wrong.

Except, of course, when people are wrong as we in America have learned time and time again. Democracy requires that good people stand up and exercise their First Amendment rights to assembly and free speech when energized masses led by the likes of Trump believe they can craft their own reality. To those who buy into magic.

Beinart concludes:

Miłosz called The Captive Mind “a debate with those of my friends who were yielding, little by little, to the magic influence of the New Faith.” Little by little, some American intellectuals are yielding to their faith in the supporters of Donald Trump. They must be challenged now, before that magic influence grows.

Just don’t look to Hillary Clinton to do the challenging.

This morning I got four copies of the same email to four different email addresses (two of which I don’t use) with the subject line: Order Confirmation 5487 1761689 20160815 455715 from someone at ESAB. Clearly the company’s email has been hacked in someway.

My spam filter stripped the email of all potentially dangerous links and attachments, but left this:

This communication and any files transmitted with it contain information which is confidential and which may also be privileged. It is for the exclusive use of the intended recipient(s). If you are not the intended recipient(s), please note that any disclosure, copying, printing or use whatsoever of this communication or the information contained in it is strictly prohibited. If you have received this communication in error, please notify us by e-mail or by telephone as above and then delete the e-mail together with any copies of it.

ESAB does not accept liability for the integrity of this message or for any changes, which may occur in transmission due to network, machine or software failure or manufacture or operator error. Although this communication and any files transmitted with it are believed to be free of any virus or any other defect which might affect any computer or IT system into which they are received and opened, it is the responsibility of the recipient to ensure that they are virus free and no responsibility will be accepted by ESAB for any loss or damage arising in any way from receipt or use thereof.

I think the spammer must be a reader of Non Sequitur: Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3.

Perhaps 15 years ago or so I had a friend who bought a car through J.D. Byrider. I was unfamiliar with the company but got a quick an horrible lesson from her experience. She bought a car that I might have paid $2,000 for if I was feeling generous, for about $7,500. I don’t know what her interest rate was or how long she had to pay off the loan, but I wouldn’t doubt that she got much the same kind of deal as the woman in the video.

Like the people in Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America, my friend had no savings and a job that paid little. The killer was that her job was in Canton and she lived in a small community about 45 minutes south. She had to have a car or she was out of work.

Some might ask, Well, why didn’t she move closer? Like people without savings she couldn’t come up with the cash—first month, last month and security deposit—to fund a new apartment and pay a mover (remember, she didn’t have a car) to get her up to Canton. Add in that she was divorced and still had a minor child living with his father in the community. If she moved to Canton, she would have to leave her son behind.

In the land we claim is filled with opportunity, there is damn little unless you’re a banker or have a wealthy daddy to pay your bills starting out. Self-made millionaires/billionaires are nearly as scarce as rainbow pissing unicorns.

From the U.S. Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division’s Investigation Of The Baltimore City Police Department:

Today, [10 August 2016] we announce the outcome of the Department of Justice’s investigation of the Baltimore City Police Department.

After engaging in a thorough investigation, initiated at the request of the City of Baltimore and BPD, the Department of Justice concludes that there is reasonable cause to believe that BPD engages in a pattern or practice of conduct that violates the Constitution or federal law.

BPD engages in a pattern or practice of:

(1) Making unconstitutional stops, searches, and arrests;

(2) Using enforcement strategies that produce severe and unjustified disparities in the rates of stops, searches and arrests of African Americans;

(3) Using excessive force; and

(4) Retaliating against people engaging in constitutionally—protected expression.

This pattern or practice is driven by systemic deficiencies in BPD’s policies, training,
supervision, and accountability structures that fail to equip officers with the tools they need to police effectively and within the bounds of the federal law.

I have yet to finish reading the full 164-page report, but I have to wonder when, if at all, the DOJ addresses the problem of recruiting and screening of police before they enter the academy. I have to wonder how many graduates, going back decades, should never have been allowed in the door in the first place.

Ah, here we go, on page 137:

The Department also appears to be confronting challenges in recruiting qualified officers—it has only met a fraction of its goals for the 2016 Academy class. At least one of the Department’s background check processes—its psychological testing—has been investigated for allegedly rushing those evaluations, sometimes conducting psychological evaluations for aspiring officers in as little as fifteen minutes. [Pass a 15-minute evaluation and you too can carry a gun! JH] The Department must ensure that in its efforts to recruit a sufficient quantity of officers, it does not sacrifice the quality of officers that the Baltimore community and current employees of the Department deserve.

To be fair, this is a deeper flaw in our society when we raise the issue of entrusting individuals with deadly force. A bit more than 40 years ago I reported on board the USS Bainbridge, (CGN 25) as a Gunner’s Mate, Missiles with a security clearance that allowed me intimate contact with tactical nuclear weapons on a daily basis. Now there were plenty of safe guards in place—drug screening, a two-man rule, &c.—but I was never formally screened for psychological fitness before I was allowed to do the work I did.

I hope, but sincerely doubt, that the situation has improved in 40-plus years. Won’t you sleep more soundly tonight?

Ralph Nader writes:

Taken as a whole, with exceptions, the American people have the strangest attitude toward the Congress. Our national legislature spends nearly a quarter of our income and affects us one way or another every day of the year. Yet too many people withdraw in disgust instead of making Congress accountable to them. Warren Buffett once said, “It’s time for 535 of America’s citizens to remember what they owe to the 318 million who employ them.”

People have a low regard for Capitol Hill. Polls show less than 20% of people approve of what Congress does and does not do. In April a poll registered a 14% approval rate. People know that Congress takes a lot of days off—all with pay. Senators and Representatives work over 100 fewer days than average Americans do. Specifically, members were in session 157 days in 2015 and 135 in 2014. This year the House is scheduled to be in session for only 111 days, with the August recess alone stretching nearly six weeks.

People also know that these politicians feather their own nests. At a minimum, members of Congress receive a $174,000 annual salary, plus a great pension, health and life insurance, assorted deductions and expenses. These are benefits that many Americans can only dream of getting.

Even when Senators and Representatives are in Washington, Congressional leaders expect them to spend about 20 to 30 hours per week dialing for campaign dollars – for their re-election and for their Party’s coffers. Asking for money in or Continue Reading »

No, not in the same video, but these two from Larry Wilmore’s The Nightly Show are brilliant.