Category Archives: Trump

Regulations Stink

Fat Opinions, politics, Social democracy, Trump

Many Americans in the west hate government regulations. That is one of the reasons Donald Trump is so popular, he has declared war on government regulations. He said that for everyone added, 2 would have to be removed. He seems to think most of them are bad because they interfere with the God-given right of American businesses to despoil the earth and exploit their workers and everything else in sight.

On a small scale–but a stinky one–that has become an issue in San Tan Valley where we live here in Arizona for 3 months.  Johnson Utilities a corporation I assume is connected to the company that developed much of this area including the community we live in, controls things like water and sewage. Water is an important asset in the desert and it controls it here. They have just announced that they are raising water rates by 23%. What would you do? Would you pay or go without water? They do have a pubic utility board here like we do back in Manitoba, but I am not sure how much clout they have. I will have to wait and see.

There is another related issue however that has many residents riled up, particularly those who live close to the water treatment plant run by Johnson Utilities. The locals can’t stand the smell. They say it is so bad they often have to stay inside. Reminds me of complaints back home about hog farms. It seems though that that the objectors are out of luck even though Johnson Utilities had been found to have violated regulations for emitting hydrogen sulfide more than 100 times. It was fined $20,000. Unfortunately, the people living next to the plant have not been helped, even though as one resident described the situation in a local newspaper, “the stench is like the inside of a porta-potty in the heat of summer at the end of a 3 day music festival.”

It seems that it is not just government regulations that stink. Maybe not all regulations are bad.

Are you Scared Yet?

reason, Travel, Trump, , ,

 

Some of my friends are scared of coming to Arizona. They think that ever since Donald Trump entered on to the political scene, and then shockingly became President, the USA has gone mad and therefore they want to give it a wide berth. I thought that was going a bit far. Is it?

Journalist Michael Wolff, for some strange reason, was allowed to occupy the Whitehouse for weeks. He sat around and interviewed as many people as he could. He had a couple of conversations with President Donald Trump, talked frequently with Trump’s strategic advisor Steven Bannon, and numerous other Whitehouse officials. He learned a lot about Trump and his administration. During this time he gathered enough material for a book that is now on the bestseller lists, because of all that he revealed about that administration and all the people that work inside it.

One of the things that Wolff revealed hardly seems controversial. This is that Trump reads absolutely nothing. He has probably only read one book in his entire adult life and that was his own book, which he co-wrote with his ghost author–The Art of the Deal. No wonder he said this was his favorite book after the Bible of course. Can you imagine naming your own book? Trump has no shortness of ego. To call him a narcissist seems wildly understated.

By itself this is scary. After all one would expect the leader of the richest, most powerful, most influential country in the world to be a person of wide experience and learning. But not only does Trump not read, he does not listen either. He won’t listen to what anyone has to say (except the pundits on Fox News and some other similar thinking Internet sites and blogs.) He only listens to complements about himself. He does not even listen to his own advisors. He has the attention span of a young teenager totally incurious about anything that does not deal with him directly. He loves to learn what others think and say about him. That’s it. That is the man with his finger on the nuclear trigger–and it is “big” and “it works.” Excuse my bad language, but is it surprising that his own Secretary of State called him “a fucking moron?”[1]

He has been President now for a year and has still not appointed a science advisor. The science advisor is the person who gives impartial advice to the President on issues that either affect science or would benefit from scientific input. For example, he has had to deal with what many have called the most important issue of our generation–climate change. If ever there was an issue that cried out for scientific advice this it. Yet President Trump has made the important decision to pull the United States out of the Paris accord without the benefit of independent scientific advice. He is entitled to the best of scientific advice and has chosen not to seek it. Presumably he gets his scientific advice from the media pundits on Fox Channel instead. Can you imagine choosing to follow an empty-headed bombastic political pundit rather than a person of science? That is exactly what Trump has done.

In the meantime in April of 2017 the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere reached a record 410 parts per million when for decades scientists have known that anything amount beyond 350 parts per million is dangerous. This level is higher than anything the world has experienced in 3&1/2 million years!

What has Trump done about this in one year in office? Nothing positive. Who is advising him? No scientists that’s for sure. He has removed restrictions on coal production when the use of coal is a major cause of greenhouse gas emissions. He has removed restrictions on transporting bitumen from the Tar Sands of Alberta that were imposed by President Obama who had a first rate science advisor when Tar Sands production is massively worse for the atmosphere than conventional oil production. All of this was done by a man who does not read without the benefit of the best scientific advice.

Perhaps we should stop worrying about what Trump and Kim Jong-un are doing with their nuclear weapons. Are you scared yet? If we are not scared perhaps we “a fucking morons.”

[1] I might apologize for the bad language, but I think the actual words have to be included to give the true flavour of the incident

Sand Box Diplomacy

politics, Trump, War,

While we live in Arizona, everyday we wakeup in the morning and wonder what crazy things Donald Trump will say or do. Pretty well everyday there is something.

Recently, like almost every day, we have been “blessed” with stories about tweets from the so-called ‘Leader of the Free World.’ I don’t consider him that, but he does. The latest brings tweeting to a whole new level. The tweet was part of an exchange of sorts with Kim Jong-un the leader of North Korea i.e. the leader of the unfree world. Kim had reported earlier that at his desk was a button that he could press to launch nuclear weapons that could reach the United States. That did not sit well with Trump of course.

Trump responded with a tweet that said, “Will someone from his depleted and food starving regime please inform him that I too have a nuclear button, but it is a much bigger one and more powerful one than his, and it works.” It is  almost inconceivable that two grown men would act this way. What is even more inconceivable is that both of them have control of nuclear weapons that could kill millions of people. We see childish schoolboys with nuclear weapons threatening each other and risking the lives of millions of people, both with very limited intelligence. This is what the world has come to. How did it happen? At least North Korea had no choice in a leader. That is their excuse. What is America’s excuse?

Fantasyland for Real

Death of Truth, Philosophy/Ideas, Trump

Fantasyland for Real

 

I listened to a short but fascinating interview  conducted by the tireless Charlie Rose on PBS. He interviewed someone I had never heard of before. His name is Kurt Anderson. He was flogging a book he has just written that is only being published next month called Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire–A 500-year History. I must buy the book

Anderson talked about modern America and how it got to be as it is–whacky. That is my word, not his. He laid some of the blame for the bad state of America on religion. Religion and the blue smoke and mirrors of American business. America was always a country of big dreamers and true believers in the fanciful and dubious. That gullibility was always combined with practically, pragmatism, and Yankee clarity, said Anderson. This is an interesting combination.

According to Anderson things started to go seriously wrong in the 1960s. That was my time. The time of music, love and flower children. It was also the time when everyone was permitted to find their own truth and create their own reality. People were not allowed to be judgmental however. Everything was permitted. Everything was permitted except judgmentalism.

Anderson claimed that these ideas of the 1960s came from academia and New Left. Yet interestingly, these ideas empowered the far right! This kind of thinking permeated America from top to bottom. It was dangerous because “it allowed preposterous thinking all over the map,”[1] said Anderson.

Contrary to such thinking Anderson recommended we think like Patrick Moynihan who famously said, “You are entitled to your own opinion, but you are not entitled to your own facts.”

Anderson admitted there was probably no going back to the days of Moynihan. It is too late. In fact, Anderson acknowledged that there might not be any light at the end of this tunnel. He, at least, saw no hopeful end. Instead we now live in the age of Donald Trump. This is very different from the time of Moynihan. Trump in effect says that anything that is inconvenient to me or that I disagree with is, fake news. Don’t trust any “truth” you don’t believe in. That is dangerous thinking especially for a person who gets to appoint the leader of the CIA, or uses intelligence sources to determine what to do with the most powerful armed forces with the most awesome weaponry imaginable. That is outright scary. If there are no objective standards for truth we are dangerously bereft.

Since the 1960s the relativist position had become deeply embedded in American society. This attitude that there is no objective truth has seeped into a large portion of American thinking. As Anderson stated, “it is part of the American operating system.”[2]

Later with the advent of the Internet Anderson believes things got even worse. “The Internet gave the alternative fact universe its infrastructure.”[3]

Part of the problem, says Anderson, is that the Internet through its search engines “rewards the excitingly false.”[4] Wild conspiracy theories are just one example among many. “Like religion it is exciting to think that there is a puppet master out there pulling strings.”[5]

The Internet, like conspiracy theories, distorts.  That  makes the world seem simpler than it is. Anderson state, “Conspiracy theories make a tidy fiction in the way that reality is not tidy.”[6]

Donald Trump is of course the person who has taken massive advantage of the Internet. He has manipulated it. Anti-elite thinking and anti-establishment thinking has always been a part of America, Anderson said. It is not new. But Anderson believed that in the 1960s it got out of control like never before and America has never recovered. Rebels are good but they can go too far.

An interesting thing about Trump, Anderson said, is that he learned after studying him for many years, long before he became a big player in American Presidential politics, is that he has never met anyone who craves attention like Donald Trump. “Donald Trump needs attention like a drug addict needs drugs.”[7] And now he has the attention of the public in spades. In fact, Anderson pointed out, “perhaps now Trump has got more attention than anyone else in the history of the world.”[8] I hate to admit it. that is probably true.

In trying to understand America Anderson went back 500 years. He went all the way to Martin Luther. America has since the contact of Europeans been diffused with religion. According to Anderson, “America has always been exceptionally religious compared to the rest of the world.”[9] Among the first settlers to America were Puritans and others who had fled religious persecution in Europe, but they were themselves “theocratic religious nut cases.”[10] In fact, it has been said that they escaped religious persecution so that they would be free to persecute others. In any event, Americans are, as Anderson stated, “Outliers in our religiosity compared to the rest of world, not just a little bit, but a lot. We are not like the rest of the developed world, we are much more religious.”[11]

All of this, as I have been saying for some time, has serious consequences well beyond religion. Anderson put it this way, “Once as a culture you are more inclined to believe in magic, in supernatural events, it won’t stay in its religious realm. It will leach out into not believing in climate change say.” [12]

Anderson says that we are shaped by a “fantasy industrial complex.”[13] This includes not just organized religion but everything in the entertainment industry. In the US, he pointed out, everything becomes entertainment. Real estate business for example, become entertainment. Everything becomes part of show business. Religious leaders are show men. This fantasy industrial complex uses modern technology skillfully to convince us of dubious truths. Then the Internet comes along and compounds that effect massively. This is the age in which we live.

As a result we should not be surprised when ordinary people believe outrageous claims. Ordinary people are part of a culture that leads them to believe. When critical skills are lost and we learn to believe without evidence we turn ourselves over to fake news and the demagogues that take advantage of it.

[1] Kurt Anderson, on Charlie Rose, PBS August 7, 2017

[2] Kurt Anderson, on Charlie Rose, PBS August 7, 2017

[3] Kurt Anderson, on Charlie Rose, PBS August 7, 2017

[4] Kurt Anderson, on Charlie Rose, PBS August 7, 2017

[5] Kurt Anderson, on Charlie Rose, PBS August 7, 2017

[6] Kurt Anderson, on Charlie Rose, PBS August 7, 2017

[7] Kurt Anderson, on Charlie Rose, PBS August 7, 2017

[8] Kurt Anderson, on Charlie Rose, PBS August 7, 2017

[9] Kurt Anderson, on Charlie Rose, PBS August 7, 2017

[10] Kurt Anderson, on Charlie Rose, PBS August 7, 2017

[11] Kurt Anderson, on Charlie Rose, PBS August 7, 2017

[12] Kurt Anderson, on Charlie Rose, PBS August 7, 2017

[13] Kurt Anderson, on Charlie Rose, PBS August 7, 2017