The U.S. Presidential election campaign offers a choice between a candidate of the status quo, and a candidate who represents a leap in the dark. Here are three good articles about why voters might risk a leap in the dark.
The dominant neoliberal economy sorts people into winners and losers. Brexit is a revolt of the losers.
The winners are the credentialed professionals, the cosmopolitan, the affluent. The losers are the uncredentialed, the provincial, the working class.
Losers are revolting across the Western world, from the USA to Poland, and their revolt mostly takes the form of nationalism.
The reason the revolt takes the form of nationalism is that the world’s most important international institutions—the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the European Central Bank—are under the control of a global financial elite that does not represent their interests.
I don’t fully understand the decision-making process in the European Union, but looking at its web site, my impression is that public debate is not a part of it.
The only vehicles for exercising democratic control, at the present moment in history, is through democratic national governments. I am in favor of international cooperation, and I don’t know how I would have voted on Brexit if I had been British, but I certainly can understand Britons who don’t want to be at the mercy of foreign bureaucrats and the London governmental, banking and intellectual elite.
Democratic nationalism is the only form that democracy can take until there is a radical restructuring of international institutions. Without a strong progressive democratic movement, the only alternative to neo-liberal globalization is right-wing anti-democratic populism as represented by Donald Trump, the United Kingdom Independence Party, Marine le Pen’s National Front in France, Greece’s Golden Dawn and others.
I think the vast majority of highly successful people have talent and grit. But not everybody with talent and grit succeeds.
Louis Pasteur once said, “Chance favors the prepared mind.” Somebody else said, “The harder I work, the luckier I get.” Both sayings are true. Both sayings also recognize the element of chance.
We Americans admire successful risk-takers and think they should be rewarded. The reason we do that is that, by definition, most risk-takers fail.
Srinivasa Ramanujan Iyengar was a poor Hindu with only a basic mathematical education who, as a young man, made important mathematical discoveries. He impressed the great British mathematicial, G.H. Hardy, who invited him to join him at Cambridge University in England, where the two had a brilliant and fruitful collaboration, cut short when Ramanujan died young.
I read Robert Kanigel’s The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan after seeing the movie based on the book. The movie does justice to the spirit of the book and mostly conforms to fact, but cannot duplicate Kanigel’s richness of detail.
Both the movie and the book gave me food for thought on the nature and sources of genius. I once thought of mathematical discovery as a logical, step-by-step process, but I now realize it depends as much on inspiration as anything else.
Some of Ramanujan’s theorems came to him in dreams, sometimes on scrolls held by Hindu gods.
Since I do not believe in the Hindu gods myself, how do I explain the fact that Ramanujan’s visions of the gods have him true mathematical theorems and also good advice on major life decisions.
I have to believe that his visions were manifestations of his subconscious mind. Brain scientists tell us that most cognitive activity takes place below the level of consciousness. I believe that most inspiration and creative thought arises from subconscious sources, and that the conscious mind performs an executive function—deciding which intuitions have a basis in reality.
I recently finished reading MIND & COSMOS: Why the Neo-Darwinist Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly Wrong by Thomas Nagel. If I only read or thought about politics, I’d go crazy.
The book reminds me of a saying of the late, great H.L. Mencken, who once wrote that when you try to combine science and religion, you wind up with something that isn’t really scientific and isn’t really religious.
While Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection explains the origin of species, including the human species, Thomas Nagel pointed out that it does not explain the origin of life, consciousness, human reason or morality.
He hopes for a new theory that will not only explain all these things, but give them meaning. He is not a religious believer, and he looking for things in science that are to be found in art, literature and religious and spiritual practice.
His basic argument is the improbability and implausibility that human life as we know it could ever arise from the blind working of physical and chemical laws.
The problem with the argument from improbability is that in an infinite, or near-infinite, universe, anything that is possible, however improbable, will happen not once, but many times.
And the problem with the argument from implausibility is that most modern people already accept scientific conclusions that are highly implausible in terms of common sense—for example, I would find it hard to believe the earth goes around the sun, let alone the Big Bang and expanding universe, if I had not been taught so in school.
This is part of a chapter-by-chapter review of THE ECOLOGY OF FREEDOM: The emergence and dissolution of hierarchy by Murray Bookchin
chapter eight – from saints to sellers
In this chapter, Murray Bookchin traced the history of peasant revolts, starting with one recorded in Egypt in 2500 BC and continuing through peasant revolts in ancient Egypt and Sumeria, helot revolts in ancient Sparta, slave revolts in ancient Rome and peasant revolts in the European Middle Ages.
Based on my reading, I can say that what he wrote was also true of peasant revolts in Russia, China and probably other civilizations as well.
He wrote that all these rebels destroyed, first of all, records of taxation, mortgages, other debt and legal records, and secondly, treasure.
The rebels deeply resented the transubstantiation of tangible wealth, such as grain, livestock, wine and cloth, into symbolic wealth, such as golden utensils, jewelry, intricate works of art and rich furnishings and palaces, which were manifestations of domination.
He devoted most of the chapter to the rebels of the European Middle Ages who, unlike the rebels of ancient times, had ideals of a better society which they derived from Christianity.
These ideals included (1) the tradition of the first Christians, who were poor and owned all things in common, (2) the ideal that all human beings are equal in the sight of God, (3) the idea that God’s law is superior to human law and (4) the hope of a better and more just world in the End Times.
Correction: I mischaracterized Michele Flournoy’s position, based on reporting by Michael Tucker of Defense One, which was quoted by Glenn Greenwald. For Michele Flournoy’s rebuttal, read her letter below the fold.
Hillary Clinton’s two likely choices for Secretary of State and Secretary of Defense are Victoria Nuland and Michéle Flournoy, both war hawks.
Nuland would intensify confrontation with Russia. Flournoy would send more U.S. troopsstep up military activity in the Middle East.
The U.S. is already dangerously close to war with Russia, and U.S. interventions in the Middle East have only made things worse.
A Hillary Clinton administration would not back off from these dangerous and counterproductive war policies. It would double down on them.
The Democratic National Committee’s computer system has been hacked by somebody calling themselves Guccifer 2, which somehavecharged is a front from the Russian security services.
I andothers speculated that this might be Vladimir Putin’s way of helping his friend Donald Trump. But “Lambert Strether,” posting on the naked capitalism web log, offers an alternate conspiracy theory.
Readers, as you know I’m always skeptical of digital evidence, arguing that “digital evidence is not evidence” absent a chain of provenance to a known and trusted creator; digital material is too easy to fake.
And I’m old enough to remember — summarizing the chain of events very tendentiously — that evil genius Karl Rove settled the controversy over Bush’s (Vietnam War-evading non-)service in the TANG (Texas Air National Guard) by (1) feeding CBS news true information (2) in discreditable form, and then (3) arranging for it to be discredited (by an Atlanta blogger named Buckhead, in a post that blew up from nothing to utter dominance in a single news cycle, an amazing achievement). So Rove used faked true evidence to impeach the story and saved Bush’s bacon. (The CBS reporter, Dan Rather, was later fired, along with his reporting team.)
So if I look at Guccifer, I’m seeing steps (1) and (2), and I worry about step (3). That is, if we suppose that the information on Clinton corruption is true, but the form is discreditable, and then imagine it is discredited, Clinton’s reputation would be laundered, at least until the impeachment hearings begin. That is, a sponsor at the DNC or from the HillaryLand would take on Rove’s role in the TANG play from Rove’s playbook.
The proposed New York DREAM Act would allow unauthorized immigrants who’ve earned high school diplomas in New York state to apply for tuition assistance to attend state colleges and universities.
The documentary film profiles six hard-working young people who might benefit from the new law.
State law doesn’t not protect them from deportation, but it gives them the same right to attend public school as citizens and legal immigrants. The proposed law would give them an equal right to apply for financial aid.
An estimated 4,500 undocumented students graduate from New York high schools each year. An estimated 90 to 95 percent of them do not pursue higher education.
Theo Jansen, a Dutch physicist turned artist, creates self-propelled kinetic sculptures he calls Strandbeests (Dutch for “beach animals”) out of yellow plastic tubing and other materials that can be bought at a hardware store.
They are powered by the wind. His more advanced creations store up compressed air for when the wind dies down. They automatically turn away from water. And they automatically anchor themselves in the sand when the wind gets too fierce.
He said he thinks of them as a new form of life. He envisions herds of his creations, roaming the Dutch seashore years after he is gone. I think it is fair to call them at least a new form of artificial intelligence.
The video above shows Strandbeests in action. The two below show something of how they work.
The Democratic National Committee charges that Russian hackers penetrated its files on Trump opposition research. Some people also speculate that Hillary Clinton’s e-mails have been hacked.
If Vladimir Putin—I emphasize if—is intervening in the U.S. election on behalf of Donald Trump, this could backfire not only against Trump, but in a dangerous way against Putin and Russia.
Putin and Trump have repeatedly praised each other. Trump advocates better relations with Russia (which I agree with) while Clinton has compared Putin to Hitler, which is the worst thing you can say about a Russian leader.
Paul Manafort, Trump’s main campaign adviser, managed the comeback of the pro-Russian Viktor Yanukovitch as President of Ukraine in 2010. A Hillary Clinton protege, Victoria Nuland, helped engineer the overthrow of Yanukovich in 2014. A leaked phone conversation in which she discussed strategy may well have come from Russian intelligence services.
So you have an American election aligned with factions in a conflict in a foreign country. This is not good.
It is true that Russians, Chinese and other foreign hackers are attacking U.S. computer systems all the time, and that the CIA and NSA hack foreign systems. It is true that U.S. intelligence agencies have been interfering in foreign elections for decades. And it is true that foreign lobbyists actively try to influence American policy.
But this would be the first time a foreign intelligence service was caught intervening on behalf of a presidential candidate in an American national election.
We don’t know the full story yet. Maybe this is less sinister than it seems. But maybe Putin sees electing Trump as a way of crippling the United States without a nuclear strike. Or maybe somebody is playing some sort of double game. We’ll see how it plays out.
Bernie Sanders, in (sort of) conceding the primary election campaign to Hillary Clinton, gave an excellent speech Thursday night about what Americans need from their government.
And the decision to give priority to defeating Donald Trump is an honorable decision.
The problem with this speech is that he said nothing whatsoever about military intervention, the threat of nuclear war or the quest for peace.
I think that Sanders might be more hesitant than Clinton or Trump to go to war. But he said nothing, and nothing during his campaign, about the war system.
He criticized Clinton for voting to authorize President Bush to use military force against Iraq—which, by the way, was also supported by Al Gore and John Kerry. But Sanders has been much less critical of military interventions conducted under Democratic administrations.
I don’t oppose Clinton because of her vote on Iraq intervention, but that she has not learned anything from that mistake. She replicated the mistakes of Iraq in Libya, she supported radical jihadists trying to overthrow Assad in Syria, she supported the coup in Honduras, and she brought the United States into confrontation with Russia in Ukraine.
The main innovation of the Obama administration is to carry on the Bush administration policies without large scale use of American troops, by means of special operations teams, flying killer robots and subsidies to foreign fighters.
The killing of harmless people in foreign countries continues. Brown lives matter. All lives matter, not just American lives.
I don’t mean to deny Sanders credit for his courageous campaign, for rallying support for important domestic reforms and for enabling all sorts of disparate reform groups to join in a common cause. I am proud that I voted for Sanders in the New York primary. I recommend listening to the full speech, or reading it, because it sets forth the domestic agenda that Americans need.
But unless there is peace, it is hard to push domestic reform. If there is war with Russia, domestic issues will not matter.
An outfit called Black Box Voting, which has been monitoring U.S. election tampering since 2003, reports that a quarter of U.S. votes are counted by an electronic system that is designed to be tampered with.
The GEMS election management system … … counts approximately 25 percent of all votes in the United States. … … A fractional vote feature is embedded in each GEMS application which can be used to invisibly, yet radically, alter election outcomes by pre-setting desired vote percentages to redistribute votes. This tampering is not visible to election observers, even if they are standing in the room and watching the computer. Use of the decimalized vote feature is unlikely to be detected by auditing or canvass procedures, and can be applied across large jurisdictions in less than 60 seconds.
In other words, the vote counting system can be set so that every vote for candidate Jones counts as a full vote and every vote for candidate Smith counts as three-quarters of a vote or half a vote.
This is damn disturbing. What legitimate purpose could there be for such a feature?
Global Election Management Systems are a product of the Diebold company, whose voting machines have previously been shown vulnerable to undetectable hacking.
Investigative reporter Greg Palast claims that results of all national elections starting in 2004 have been falsified. I wish I could say I believe this is impossible.
The danger of a U.S. nuclear war with Russia is real and growing.
The risk is not that an American or Russian President would deliberately start a nuclear war. The risk is that U.S. policy is creating a situation in which a nuclear war could be touched off by accident.
During the Obama administration, the U.S. government has cancelled the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, installed a missile defense system in Rumania and is in the process of installing a system in Poland.
What is the harm of a defensive system? It is that the ruler of a country with a missile defense system might be tempted to launch a missile attack, in the hope that the enemy’s retaliatory missiles might be stopped.
A defense system that is not strong enough to stop an enemy’s first strike attack might be strong enough to defend against retaliation from an attack, since much of the enemy’s weapons will have been destroyed. So, strange as it may seem, setting up a missile defense system can seem like an aggressive act.
Trump’s Castle casino on the Atlantic City Boardwalk
Last September I wrote a post speculating that Mitt Romney and Carly Fiorina may have been responsible for more human suffering than Donald Trump. I take that back. Based on what’s come out about Trump University and a New York Times report on Trump’s casino operations, I have to say that Trump’s business record was by far the worst of the three.
I assumed that Trump’s failures were honest business failures, such that most business owners and investors experience over the course of their careers. Since then I have learned better.
Basically Trump set up businesses with other people’s money that were so loaded with debt that they were doomed to fail. But he extracted a lot of money for himself before that happened. Here are highlights of what the New York Times reported:
His audacious personality and opulent properties brought attention — and countless players — to Atlantic City as it sought to overtake Las Vegas as the country’s gambling capital. But a close examination of regulatory reviews, court records and security filings by The New York Times leaves little doubt that Mr. Trump’s casino business was a protracted failure. Though he now says his casinos were overtaken by the same tidal wave that eventually slammed this seaside city’s gambling industry, in reality he was failing in Atlantic City long before Atlantic City itself was failing.
But even as his companies did poorly, Mr. Trump did well. He put up little of his own money, shifted personal debts to the casinos and collected millions of dollars in salary, bonuses and other payments. The burden of his failures fell on investors and others who had bet on his business acumen.
In three interviews with The Times since late April, Mr. Trump acknowledged in general terms that high debt and lagging revenues had plagued his casinos. He did not recall details about some issues, but did not question The Times’s findings. He repeatedly emphasized that what really mattered about his time in Atlantic City was that he had made a lot of money there.
Donald Trump’s Trump University scam was despicable. He scammed 7,611 people who trusted in his same into giving him thousands of dollars for something he knew was worthless.
He’s being sued on behalf of students, and his attack on the impartiality of Judge Gonzalo Curiel, one of the judges in the case, based on Curiel’s Mexican ancestry, has created an uproar among both liberals and conservatives.
Actually the knee-jerk reaction to Trump’s attack on Curiel serves Trump’s purpose, because it shifts attention away from the major issue, which is the Trump University scam.
Donald Trump in 2005
Trump University, which operated from 2005 to 2010, recruited students by offering free 90-minute real estate seminars in 700 cities from 2005 to 2010. The purpose of the seminars was to sell them on signing up for $1,495 three-day seminars. From there the next step was to sign up students for a $9,995 “silver” or $34,995 “gold” program.
Even after that, students were asked to spend more for books, additional courses and other materials.
Donald Trump said students who enrolled at Trump University would learn the secrets of getting rich in real estate from hand-picked instructors.
None of these things were true. The instructors had no qualifications or expertise in real estate. Trump himself barely knew them. They were chosen for their ability to sell students on signing up for more expensive courses.
Their employee manual, which has been leaked to The Atlantic and other publications, gave extensive instructions on how to do that. Students were encouraged to dip into retirement funds, and told how to apply for increases in the limits on their credit cards.
At least one was a high school student. Many were veterans, retired police officers and teachers. In return, they got little more than motivational speeches.
Trump claimed that Trump University received more than 10,000 testimonials from students—which means a lot of them must either be fake or be signed by attendees at the free seminars.
What he doesn’t have is a testimonial from anyone who attended Trump University, succeeded in real estate and attributed it to Trump U’s instruction.
Steven Brill reported that legal records show that Trump University took in more than $40 million, of which Trump himself received $5 million.
Paul Krugman wrote that the defeat of Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primaries shows the fallacy of trying to appeal to a majority of Americans on the issue of inequality.
History shows that Americans don’t care about individual inequality; he wrote; what we care about is “horizontal” inquality—disparities between racial, ethnic and other groups. Politicians need to realize this in order to be successful.
Paul Krugman
Defining oneself at least in part by membership in a group is part of human nature. Even if you try to step away from such definitions, other people won’t. A rueful old line from my own heritage says that if you should happen to forget that you’re Jewish, someone will remind you: a truth reconfirmed by the upsurge in vocal anti-Semitism unleashed by the Trump phenomenon.
So group identity is an unavoidable part of politics, especially in America with its history of slavery and its ethnic diversity. Racial and ethnic minorities know that very well, which is one reason they overwhelmingly supported Hillary Clinton, who gets it, over Mr. Sanders, with his exclusive focus on individual inequality. And politicians know it too.
Indeed, the road to Trumpism began with ideological conservatives cynically exploiting America’s racial divisions.
Adolph Reed explained the problem with this kind of thinking in an interview on the Benjamin Dixon show.
Adolph Reed
We have a national politics now that has for 20 years at least, longer, given us two choices. And one of them is a party that’s committed to Wall Street and to neoliberalism and is deeply and earnestly committed to a notion of diversity and multiculturalism, and a party that’s committed to Wall Street and neoliberalism, and is deeply opposed to multiculturalism and diversity.
So, if we have to choose between those two, obviously for most of us who are committed to the ideals of justice and equality, the one that’s committed to multiculturalism and diversity is less bad than the one that’s opposed to them.
But the deeper problem is that they’re both actively committed to maintaining and intensifying economic inequality, and … that ideal of a just society is one in which one percent of the population can control ninety percent of the stuff, but it would be just if twelve percent of the one percent were black, fourteen percent Latino, and half of them were women, and whatever percentage were gay, and what that means, then, is that most Black people, and most Latinos, and most white people, and most Asian Americans would would be stuck holding like the end of the stick with the stuff on it that I assume I can’t call by its right name.
I saw this movie a week or so ago. I liked it a lot. It is about the untutored Indian genius, Srinivasa Ramanujan, and how the famous British mathematician, G.H. Hardy, invited him to study with him at Cambridge University in England.
It begins with an epigraph quoting Bertrand Russell:
Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty—a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show.
The movie shows the interesting and quirky characters of Ramanujan and Hardy as interesting and quirky characters, products of two very different cultures, and the backgrounds of life in Madras, India, in the early 1910s and in Cambridge during World War One.
The two men represented very different ways of knowing. Ramanujan, the deeply religious Hindu, saw things holistically, as a kind of mystic vision. The movie shows him in his job as clerk, writing in the sum of a column of numbers without adding them up, yet getting the correct figure.
G.H. Hardy was an atheist. He didn’t believe in anything that couldn’t be proved. Ramanujan didn’t want to bother with proofs. He thought Hardy should just be able to see that his mathematical discoveries were right.
After all, his theorems appeared to work. You can use the Pythagorean Theorum for estimating measurements without knowing Euclid’s proof. Except, according to the movie, there was at least one occasion in which Ramanujan was wrong.
Mathematics is an example of a reality that is intangible, yet real. For Ramanujan, the study of mathematics was a kind of spiritual discipline.
He made a great sacrifice for his love of mathematics. As a high-caste Hindu, he was considered defiled for crossing the ocean. He separated from his wife, whom he deeply loved. He had a hard time sticking to his vegetarian diet, and he suffered from the damp, cold English winters. Eventually he caught tuberculosis and nearly died. In fact, he did die, at the age of 32, shortly after he returned to India.
One good thing about life today is that institutions such as Cambridge are sensitive to cultural differences. A contemporary Ramanujan would be provided with food that he could eat.
Bertrand Russell is a minor character in the movie, and it is interesting to see him in the prime of life, with dark hair and a dark mustache, and not the elderly, white-haired image I hold in my mind.
Thomas Frank, Elizabeth Warren, Noam Chomsky and others I respect intend to vote for Hillary Clinton in order to keep Donald Trump out of the White House.
I think this is an honorable position, provided that it is a one-time-only position.
The problem is that voting for bad candidates can be habit-foriming.
In defending bad policies in order to prevent worse, you risk losing sight of what good policy might be.
Lambert Strether, who posts on the naked capitalism web log, recently made a list of the things that you have to justify in order to defend Clinton.
1. Corruption. To protect Clinton, liberals have adopted the majority doctrine in Ctizens United: Only a quid pro quo is proof of corruption.
2. Transparency. To protect Clinton, liberals maintain that high government officials can, at will, privatize their communications to shield them from FOIA.
3. Militarism. To protect Clinton, liberals minimize her AUMF vote, ignore Libya, ignore Honduras, ignore Ukraine, and treat unwavering support for Israel as an unqualified good.
4. Health. To protect Clinton, liberals reject Medicare for All.
5. Working Class. To protect Clinton, liberals deny that there is or can be a working class electorate. The electorate is only to be viewed through the prism of identity politics.
Two category errors follow: The “white working class” is deemed to be racist, by definition, and the non-white working class is erased. Consequently, it’s impossible to think through the universal effects of the FIRE [financial] sector on the working class, nor its differential effects on particular working class identities. This is not an accident.
That’s quite a platform. And if you’re thinking the Democrat Party isn’t the Democratic Party you knew and loved, that’s not an accident either. This has been a wonderfully clarifying primary, for which I congratulate all the players.
Bernie Sanders’ insurgent campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination has the same significance as Eugene J. McCarthy‘s in 1968.
McCarthy was a moderate Democrat from Minnesota who chose to run against incumbent Lyndon Johnson on a platform of opposition to the Vietnam War.
Eugene J. McCarthy
He didn’t have an especially distinguished record, and he wasn’t the best possible candidate. But he was the candidate who had the nerve to run while all the other war opponents held back. He provided an outlet for all the pent-up anti-war sentiment.
He won a plurality of the votes in the New Hampshire primary, against two slates of delegates both pledged to President Johnson. His victory emboldened Senator Robert F. Kennedy to run, and Johnson decided not to seek re-election.
Even if Kennedy had not been assassinated, he probably would not have been able to defeat the entrenched Democratic Party organization or to prevent the nomination of Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey.
What McCarthy and then Kennedy did do was to open the door for a peace faction which was a continuing force in the Democratic Party independent of McCarthy himself. I think, or at least I hope, Bernie Sanders has opened the door for a Democratic Party social justice faction that will outlive the Sanders campaign.
I don’t fully understand the decision-making process in the European Union, but looking at 
I read Robert Kanigel’s The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan after seeing the movie based on the book. The movie does justice to the spirit of the book and mostly conforms to fact, but cannot duplicate Kanigel’s richness of detail.
While Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection explains the origin of species, including the human species, Thomas Nagel pointed out that it does not explain the origin of life, consciousness, human reason or morality.
Putin and Trump have repeatedly praised each other. Trump advocates better relations with Russia (which I agree with) while Clinton has compared Putin to Hitler, which is the worst thing you can say about a Russian leader.
During the Obama administration, the U.S. government has cancelled the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, installed a missile defense system in Rumania and is in the process of installing a system in Poland.
Thomas Frank, 
Phil Ebersole's Blog 