rainblog

[rainblog]

What’s the hurry, Donald?

Everyone has their favorite theory about why Donald Trump abruptly decided to fire FBI Director James Comey, doing it with so little warning that Comey himself learned of it from television while he was in the middle of delivering a speech.

Front and center, of course, is the theory that it's to do with the FBI's investigation into Russian involvement in the 2016 election. Trump will now, it is assumed, appoint some friendly partisan as director to ensure that the investigation goes nowhere. At worst, the investigation will sanction a few pawns -- the luckless Michael Flynn would be a good choice -- while firmly exonerating Trump.

Certainly, this is an issue of importance to Trump. The letter of dismissal to Comey even includes a bizarre paragraph in which Trump thanks Comey for telling him "three times" that he is "not under investigation". Trump would have known that the letter would be reprinted verbatim in all the newspapers, so the inclusion of this irrelevant information is presumably intended to establish 'Trump not under investigation' as a 'fact' in the minds of his supporters. I suspect that whatever Comey actually told Trump was very much more nuanced than that, and may well have included the words 'at this time'.

Trump and others of his inner circle would certainly like to see any investigation into the Trump campaign's Russian ties suppressed or diverted. And it has to be said that there's an awful lot of smoke there. Even if any eventual FBI report stops short of proving that Trump is absolutely compromised -- as many liberals assume -- it's unlikely to make easy reading for Trump or his inner circle. But leave Russia aside for the moment. What else has happened recently that might have prompted Donald Trump to fire James Comey in such a tearing hurry?

There was Comey's testimony to the senate subcommittee. The testimony was supposed to be about Russian interference, but the Republican members of the committee did their best to turn it into an extended exercise in shooting the messenger before joining together for another rousing chorus of their perennial favorite number, "But her emails!"

As we know, during the last days before the election Comey suddenly dropped the bombshell that the FBI was investigating new evidence related to mishandling of classified information, this time involving emails apparently forwarded by Clinton aide Huma Abedin to a laptop owned by her then-husband, compulsive sexter Anthony Weiner. The information that the FBI had re-opened the investigation gave new life to the email scandal, which had begun by then to fizzle somewhat (except in the hearts of true believers, of course).

Comey's rather oddly-timed -- and unusual -- November disclosure certainly hurt Hillary Clinton. It's hard to say whether it had a bigger impact on the outcome of the election than Republican voter suppression, or abstention by angry Bernie supporters, or any one of a number of other factors. But Comey's revelations undoubtedly had an effect.

Those revelations served Trump well. Comey's actual letter to Congress was vague, but as details began to emerge, voters were left with the impression that some vast volume of classified material had been shared. The FBI was said to be reviewing some "650,000 emails", a figure that Donald Trump was quick to seize on.

In his testimony to the Senate subcommittee in May, Comey walked things back slightly, but he still claimed that "hundreds and thousands" (which partisans then re-rendered as "hundreds of thousands") of emails had been sent, and that Abedin had made a "regular practice" of forwarding emails to her husband to print. Again, this fits well with the narrative that the Clinton team were not just sloppy but arrogantly so in their handling of classified information. The Trump administration had little reason to be seriously dissatisfied with what Comey told the Senate.

But now we get to what I think is the crux of the matter. Shortly after Comey's testimony, the FBI assistant director for Congressional affairs, Gregory Brower, wrote to say that Comey's testimony had been incorrect, that rather than forwarding "hundreds and thousands", Abedin had sent just two that contained classified information (another ten had apparently been transferred during automatic backups of her Blackberry). Other sources 'familiar with the investigation' (code for insiders speaking off the record) reported that none of the emails were classified at the time.

So with regard to Abedin and the emails, there's almost no 'there' there. As a smoking gun demonstrating the Clinton team's criminal disregard for security, this one's a damp squib. You could make a case that it's part of a general pattern of sloppiness that could have led to serious breaches, but it would be hard to call it actual 'wrongdoing'. But that's by the way.

Let's get back to Comey. He's made a desperate muddle of things all along. There's definitely a case to be made that his flailing is grounds for questioning his fitness to be FBI director. But that apparently never bothered the Trump administration before. Generally speaking, Comey's disclosures always served their narrative. Trump had even praised Comey's handling of the investigation into Clinton's emails. So what changed?

What changed is that Comey's own people spoke out against him publicly. Brower's message contradicted what Comey had told the senate. And the message that the Trump administration got was that Comey had lost control. As FBI director, he was no longer able to stop anti-Trump elements within the FBI from saying what they know, both officially and -- potentially -- through unofficial channels.

And that is why Comey had to go. So long as he was keeping a lid on things, he could stay. But once it became clear that he couldn't do that, the administration had to act fast. Now they want a new FBI director, someone loyal to them, who can silence the dissidents in the Bureau. The first job of the incoming director is going to be to clean house. Any FBI employee suspected of not being pro-Trump is going to be moved as far as possible from any investigation that touches on the Trump administration's special interests. That includes not just the Russia investigation(s) but also any potential future investigation into, in particular, traffic of influence. If Donald Trump intends to use the office of President to enrich himself and his family -- and we've seen some early signs of this -- the last thing he wants is the FBI looking over his shoulder.

If Trump wanted to fire Comey because he wasn't competent to do his job as FBI director, the evidence has been on the table since day one. If Trump wanted to fire him in order to kneecap the Russia investigations, he could do it any time. But -- assuming that the Feds aren't about to produce a smoking gun with Vladimir Putin's fingerprints on the butt -- the unseemly haste with which they moved to get rid of Comey suggests that other factors are in play.

Comey is known to be loyal to the agency and to his employees. If those employees are starting to talk out of turn, then the last thing that the Trump administration needs is a Director who is going to protect them. They want to stop the bleeding right now, putting in a director who can silence or exile any hostile voices in the bureau. So Comey had to go. Yesterday afternoon, only hours after Brower's letter was released, he went.

[rainblog]

Between living and Tomahawk Cruise

As predicted, it didn't take too long for Donald Trump to make a hard right turn into belligerence, and to no one's great surprise it was Syria that was the first beneficiary of a presidential tantrum. So let's think about that for a moment.

To begin with the 'how' of it, the choice of weapons is classic enough. Tomahawk cruise missiles are always a nice option for presidents who don't want to get too involved: dependable killer robots that can be dispatched to do your bidding with no risk of getting US service personnel killed, something that never plays too well back home. And while the immediate cost of Donald Trump's little exercise in gunboat diplomacy probably came in at around $50-60M, that's small change compared to the cost of potentially losing a manned aircraft to Syria's efficient Russian-made air defenses. With a B-1 costing somewhere north of $100M, and even an F-15E going for about $30M, using cruise missiles is a no-brainer. (Or, put another way, the whole strike probably cost less than five months worth of presidential weekend golfing trips to Mar-a-Lago).

The next question is a 'why': why did the US strike? Ostensibly, this particular fireworks display was supposed to send a message to Syria's president Assad that the US is not prepared to tolerate his use of chemical weapons. The Syrian government has made the usual half-hearted attempts to claim that they weren't responsible for the apparent use of sarin nerve gas against civilians in Khan Sheikhoun, but the plausibility of their denials never rises much above the level of "a big boy did it and ran away." Conspiracy theories aside, it seems reasonable to assume that they were responsible and that the Khan Sheikhoun attack bears the fingerprints, if not of Assad himself, certainly of someone in his inner circle.

Nerve gas is a vile weapon. People, especially children, die horribly and in large numbers. But then barrel bombs -- improvised explosive devices dropped from helicopters -- are horrible too, and Assad has been unloading those on mostly-defenseless civilian populations for years now without anyone doing much more than shaking a disapproving finger in his direction. With his talk of 'red lines', Trump seemed to confirm that he'd have been content for Assad to continue raining barrel bombs and more conventional munitions on people's heads indefinitely. It's only the use of war gases that is a step too far.

For what it's worth, Obama apparently felt the same way. When the Syrian government allegedly used war gases in Al-Ghouta in 2013, Obama leaned on the Russians to rein Assad in. The pressure apparently worked, after a fashion: the Syrians agreed to turn over their chemical weapons stockpiles, and 600 metric tons of chemical agents were handed over and destroyed. But then Assad went back to slaughtering people with barrel bombs and tank shells, and nobody in the administration seemed too bothered.

But there are more 'why' questions to be answered. As a banned weapon, war gases are seen as a particular challenge to the presumably global authority of the US president. A president who ignores the use of war gases looks weak. Trump -- who urged Obama not to attack Syria in 2013 -- has also been happy to portray Obama's alleged inaction then as a sign of weakness. It was inevitable that, given the provocation of a nerve gas attack, Trump would feel compelled to demonstrate his 'strength' by taking muscular military action in response. Donald Trump is not a fan of negotiated solutions, such as the US-Russian deal brokered by Obama, which apparently kept war gases out of the Syrian arena for four years. Nothing less than a salvo of rockets will do. So last night's action was pretty predictable.

If it was so predictable, why did the Syrians do it? Nerve gases, for all their horribleness, are not really a strategic or tactical magic bullet. They're tricky to use: at Khan al-Assal in 2013, nerve gases killed 16 government troops in what there's good reason to believe may well have been an 'own goal'. They do, however, make great terror weapons, and this seems to be the way in which they're being used in Syria: to spread further panic among civilian populations in rebel-held areas.

It's hard not to suspect that the timing had something to do with declarations that the US had no plans to force the removal of Assad, a position stated by secretary of state Rex Tillerson in Ankara on March 30th. Perhaps the Syrian government was lulled into overconfidence by an apparent softening of the official US attitude, and thought they could safely go back to gassing people. It's even possible that the use of sarin was a deliberate provocation, intended to test the actual resolution of the new president.

It's also possible that no rational thinking was involved. There are vast stockpiles of hate on all sides in the Syrian conflict. Gas attacks seem to be an expression of particular loathing, and often seem to be favored for domestic enemies -- seen as 'traitors within' -- rather than foreign. Saddam's use of nerve gas against Kurdish civilians is typical. "Let's not just kill these people, let's gas them like rats," sometimes seems to be the thinking. The use of war gases may have been an emotional decision made somewhere in the Syrian hierarchy, perhaps influenced by perceived US indifference, but not ultimately strategic. If so, it's an impulse the Syrian government is probably now regretting.

Speaking of strategy, let's talk about the US strategy, or possible lack thereof. The US targeted the Syrian government airbase at Shayrat, assumed to be the home base of the aircraft used to drop chemical munitions on Khan Sheikhoun. It's safe to assume that the cruise missiles used were armed with a mixture of high-explosive warheads (to destroy aircraft, refueling facilities, and any equipment used to manufacture or prepare chemical munitions) and cluster munitions (to render runways unusable). As a tactical approach to preventing further chemical attacks, it seems superficially reasonable.

Except that if the Syrians do want to go on using chemical weapons, the damage to the Shayrat base probably won't stop them. Early information suggests that the US warned the Russians before the attack (because Russian personnel were probably present there). The Russians in turn are likely to have warned the Syrians, possibly in time for the Syrians to move aircraft and maybe even chemical production equipment or gas stockpiles -- if present -- elsewhere. If the Syrians really want to go on gassing people, they can probably even do it from helicopters, which don't need long runways. So the attack looks more like a message -- albeit one disguised as a reasonable measure -- than an effective tactical choice.

The strategic impact is likely to be small. In recent months, Russia has been doing a lot of the work of bombing the Syrian government's enemies on its behalf. That means that even if the US destroyed more Syrian aircraft and more Syrian airbases, airstrikes against enemies of the regime are likely to continue. The US is probably not ready to risk hitting Russian equipment or personnel in Syria; Russia has already expressed stern disapproval of the US 'act of aggression', and an attack that destroyed Russian assets would take us into new and very dangerous territory.

So what's not clear is where the US can go next. There's already reason to think that the US government may not have a coherent strategy. In the space of a few days, the official position has swung from 'Assad can stay' to 'Assad must go', a literal U-turn that was probably dictated by the impulsive and superficial chief executive. Now it looks as if their strategic and tactical options may also be limited.

Russia has made their support for Assad clear. They will oppose either military or diplomatic solutions aimed at forcing him from power. Nor are they the only power in the area with an interest in the fate of Syria. Juggling all the competing interests and either forcing or negotiating some kind of stable compromise would tax the abilities of a far better statesman than Trump.

There's no reason to think that the US has a drop-in replacement for Assad ready to go (and the US record of delivering suitable replacements for deposed tyrants is not good). The moderate Syrian opposition are mostly dead or fled. If the US launches a military campaign to weaken the Syrian government, the major beneficiaries are likely to be their remaining opponents -- which is to say mostly ISIS and an assortment of other Islamist factions, many backed by Al-Qaeda. These are not the people that the US -- or anyone else -- wants to see take control of Syria.

Not only does the US lack a clear endgame -- an achievable victory condition -- it may even lack suitable tools to engage the Syrian government directly. Committing ground forces to fight the Syrian army would most likely be a bloody affair and it could bring the US into direct conflict with Russia. Syrian forces are protected against manned airstrikes by an air defense system designed and maintained by Russia (and which the Russians have promised to upgrade). The Russians are currently claiming that less than half of the cruise missiles reached their target: if that's true and if it's a measure of the effectiveness of the air defense system, US pilots hitting government targets risk getting butchered.

So that leaves ... more cruise missiles. And while cruise missiles are great for hitting air bases and barracks, they're an expensive choice for striking at widely-dispersed ground forces (and you can bet that the Syrian army is scattering its tanks and probably tucking them away in civilian areas right now). While the US might consider going after Assad or other senior regime members with 'decapitation strikes', firing cruise missiles at major cities is not going to play well. A regime that doesn't care much about the fate of its people will thrive on TV images of apartment blocks toppled by US missiles with dead bodies in the rubble.

In short, it's unclear whether the Trump administration has a clear idea of what it wants to achieve or how to achieve it. It's possible that it even lacks real tools to do the job. If that's really the case, then last night's missile barrage may make Trump look more vulnerable than decisive. And it's likely that rather than bringing any kind of resolution to the conflict, it will simply make matters even more messy and intractable.

Now here's T.V. Smith to play us out.

[rainblog]

We never asked for any of this

As the ghastly farce of the Trump administration grinds on, I find myself repeatedly thinking of a song by veteran post-punk act New Model Army. Called "225", it's a hymn to modern alienation: ordinary people paralyzed by the fear of technology and job insecurity, ubiquitous militarization, pollution, the continual threat of corporate and government surveillance. And as the song puts it:

They tell us that it's all for our own protection But I swear we never asked for any of this. Oh I swear we never asked for any of this. ["225", New Model Army]

Some of the measures that the new administration has attempted to introduce since taking office enjoy a certain degree of popular support, however misguided that may be. Years of primetime hysteria about "the Muslim threat" have demonized Muslims so effectively that a significant portion of the population do support a ban on the entry of foreign Muslims to the United States (and many would eagerly go further than that). The 'Muslim ban' may be unconstitutional, immoral, and ineffective, but it doesn't lack for popular support.

Measures to gut the EPA and environmental protections are more debatable. Trump supporters are often in favor of doing away with 'regulation', which they view as a crippling drag on the economy and in particular that most iconically American of enterprises, the small business with its hard-working sole proprietor. On the other hand, even the most regulation-averse voters probably never called for oil and mining companies to be allowed to pollute at will. No one actually stood up and said "Let's make America's waterways dirty again".

Then there's global climate change. Again, there are plenty of people who've been persuaded that climate change is a lie cooked up by a sinister cabal of leftist scientists in order to hamstring American industry and allow Big Government to sink its filthy claws into every aspect of our life. These people are presumably happy with Trump's stance on the issue. They may be underinformed and misinformed, but at least they're getting what they want -- some kind of revenge on the purveyors of the 'inconvenient truth'. And if that means expunging everything we've learned, throwing away the data sets that prove that climate change is real, and backing out of every treaty we've signed, then at least some voters are apparently getting what they think they want.

On the other hand, it turns out that there wasn't a big constituency that wanted the government to make health insurance more expensive and harder to get, or to rewrite existing laws to the exclusive benefit of millionaires and insurance companies. What people wanted was what Trump promised -- better, cheaper healthcare for everyone. When the Republicans, after an agony of eleventh-hour fumbling, delivered a hastily cooked-up bill that promised to deliver worse, more expensive healthcare for everyone, they rebelled. Moderate Republicans panicked, and the administration was forced to back down.

Today, the House voted 215 to 205 to allow Internet service providers -- a handful of gigantic corporations -- to log and sell consumer browsing data. And this, unquestionably, is a case of something that no one (except those gigantic corporations) asked for. No consumer anywhere in the United States said "Why yes, I'd like my ISP to be able to track everything that I do and sell everything they know about me to the highest bidder." There is nothing whatsoever in this measure that benefits the ordinary Internet user. It improves no one's security, encourages no innovation, lowers no costs (do you really believe the ISPs will share their new-found revenue stream with subscribers?), lifts no burdens.

They can't even pretend that this is something voters asked for. It was done for the convenience of a few mega-corporations, at the expense of everyone else. Because this is the true face of the administration: it's crony capitalism writ large, government entirely at the service of corporate masters. Those chafing under regulations that deny them the freedom to pollute, to exploit, or to spy on us aren't virtuous small business owners trying to live the American dream; they are the multi-nationals, the big companies chasing ever higher profits for their investors, the apex predators of the capitalist food chain. And that's who has bought this government. That's who is dictating the legislation they need to fatten their bottom line, whatever the cost to the nation, whatever the cost to the world, whatever the cost to the people.

But you and I, we never asked for any of this.

[rainblog]

Here comes the war

Certain things seem obvious.

For example, in 2003, with the Bush administration gearing up for regime change in Iraq, it appeared obvious to me that the war itself would be over quickly, but that it would be followed by violent chaos, with the country -- and perhaps the whole region -- profoundly destabilized. I made this prediction without knowing at the time that the administration had essentially no plan for managing post-war Iraq. I certainly didn't know then that Bush's appointed viceroy, Jerry Bremer, would screw the pooch so dramatically as to set off an extended insurrection that eventually gave us ISIS, a gift that will keep on giving for a long time to come. But I could tell at a glance that Iraq was ripe for chaos and that the administration line -- that as soon as Saddam was out of the way, there'd be a sudden flowering of peace and love and democracy, even that the war would "pay for itself" (remember that one?) -- was purest bullshit.

I wish now I'd put my gloomy predictions in writing, instead of muttering them darkly to a few friends. Then I'd be hailed as a brilliant political analyst, and I could go on talk shows and get paid a zillion dollars an hour for sharing my wisdom.

Or maybe not. Because a lot of other people were saying the same thing. Why? Because it seemed obvious to them too.

It was also obvious to me that the election of Donald Trump would be followed by ... well, pretty much exactly what we've seen so far: an eye-watering level of cronyism and corruption, institutionalized xenophobia, the end of science- and evidence-based decision-making, policies favoring the very rich at the expense of everyone else, and an administration charging through American public life like a gameshow winner doing the supermarket dash, throwing everything Grover Norquist ever dreamed of into their cart with both hands. Plus, of course, a wildcard factor making everything even worse: Donald Trump, Tweeter-in-Chief, the loathsome cherry on top of this shitty cake, mining the public purse for free perks and sowing intermittent chaos with his ignorant posturing.

You didn't have to be a genius to see this coming. You didn't even have to be much of a cynic. You just needed to know a little about the people involved, and to have a basic understanding of human nature. It was obvious that this was the only way it could go.

So what's in the magic crystal ball today, then? Well, try this prediction on for size: there's going to be a war.

I don't know when. I don't know where. But I'm pretty sure it's coming.

For all the noisy American admiration for the military and for military heroes, three of our last four presidents might be described as successful draft-dodgers. The exception, Obama, didn't serve either, but the draft was a thing of the past by the time that he was of military age. But like many other sons of wealthy families, Clinton, Bush and Trump all allegedly made use of family connections or procedural wrinkles to make sure that they stayed out of the firing line. Bush's vice-president, Dick Cheney, also benefited from repeated deferments.

Why is this relevant? Because, generalizing from a small number of examples, it seems that hawkishness and a personal history of avoiding combat are a bad, bad combination.

Whatever Bill Clinton's faults, he doesn't generally seem to have felt the need to prove anything by 'acting tough'. Not all Serbs would necessarily agree, but the relatively low level of bombast associated with Clinton's actions on Kosovo make me believe that his ego wasn't too much on the line.

Bush and Cheney, on the other hand, men who had been careful never to get any closer to the front line than they absolutely had to, were gung ho for military solutions. Between them they presided over not one but two significant 'boots on the ground' shooting wars, gleefully sending other people's children out to fight and die. Take a look at George W. Bush, playing dress-up in a borrowed flight-suit, striking a pose in an arranged photo-op aboard the Abraham Lincoln with a backdrop of cheering sailors and airmen, and tell me that that didn't have something to do with the inner conflict between living in a culture that reveres military violence and knowing that you skipped out on a war with a little help from daddy's friends. As commander-in-chief, George Bush could finally get to be the warrior hero that he never was in real life.

Now we come to Donald Trump. Like others from his social class, he used his student deferments for as long as he could, then got a friendly doctor to sign a note when they ran out. Everyone was doing it (except the poor kids). And like Bush and Cheney, Donald Trump does love him some military. He demanded a flyover of military aircraft for his inauguration, the first president in more than 60 years to do so. He was only talked out of having a tank parade (reminiscent of the Soviet Union or North Korea) because the army was worried about what a line of 100-ton main battle tanks might do to the fragile streets of the capital.

Forty days into his presidency, he's already given his first speech on an aircraft carrier, dressed up for the occasion in the obligatory flight jacket. Social services and other 'inessential' spending face slashing cuts, but Trump's budget still throws the military a bone in the form of $50 billion in additional spending -- a 10% increase. This money is needed, he says, because our armed forces are in a sorry state, and urgent measures must be taken if we're to regain our former status as a military power. I would suggest that if we're spending more money on our military than the next seven countries combined and that's still somehow not enough to make us a credible military power, then there's a problem here that can't be addressed simply by throwing more money at it.

It's hard not to suspect that Trump and George W. Bush both felt a similar internal conflict: an inner tension between the people their histories show them to be and the tough-talking, hard-hitting heroes they like to imagine themselves as. And the balm for that particular itch is to be 'commander-in-chief': not just a president, but a wartime president.

Donald Trump, of course, loves to talk tough. He has all the authoritarian's love for uniforms and for violence as a solution to problems. He's also almost supernaturally thin-skinned; a whisper of criticism from a B-list celebrity will keep him up all night sending angry tweets. The moment that some foreign leader -- other than his close friend Vladimir Putin -- does anything he sees as a challenge to his authority, he's likely to feel a burning urge to show himself 'strong'.

But there's more than just Trump's own ego involved here. There's also a worrying institutional shift away from anything that would favor negotiated solutions.

Trump and his entourage aren't big fans of diplomacy. The State Department, whose main job is making sure that Americans don't have to fight wars, will have its budget cut by around 30%. Not everyone considers this a good move: General James Mattis, Trump's secretary of defence -- oh, did I mention that Trump has appointed more generals to his cabinet than any president since WWII? -- has gone on record as saying "If you don’t fund the State Department fully, then I need to buy more ammunition ultimately." When the career soldiers tell you 'more talking, less fighting', but the civilians in the administration don't see any value in diplomacy, that's a bad, bad sign.

Even before the cuts, the State Department was reported to be in a mess, with key personnel resigning or forced out, and the survivors left shocked and disoriented. The posts left empty by experienced veterans will, of course, be filled in time, but if current practice is any indication, they'll be filled by people whose chief quality is loyalty to the administration, not experience or knowledge. And it may not even matter who they appoint to State: some of the functions of the State Department seem to have been taken over by Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner, who brings his extensive knowledge of New York real estate to the thorny problem of international diplomacy in an increasingly fractious and fragile world.

So, to sum up: consensus contempt for diplomacy, a State Department in disarray and an impulsive and emotionally-fragile leader who worships the trappings of military power. That's not an infallible recipe for armed conflict, but the prognosis certainly doesn't look good.

Guessing where the fire will start is harder. Trump has ordered the military to take down ISIS, so we can expect more US support for Iraqi troops fighting ISIS. The writing is probably pretty much on the wall for ISIS inside Iraq, but Syria's a tougher nut to crack. The Syrian government is unlikely to welcome a major deployment of US troops inside Syria (although marine artillery are already in place and US aviation is now bombing targets within Syria). So we may have to leave that one mostly to our new friends the Russians. If Trump wants to take credit for the eventual defeat of ISIS (which he certainly does), he'll need to spin it as one of the payoffs of his cosy relationship with BFF Vladimir Putin. A shared victory may leave him still hungry for more opportunities to prove his strength.

How about North Korea? Rex Tillerson, Trump's Secretary of State, recently said that diplomacy has failed and "a different approach is required", hinting that policy might be about to change there. Given that North Korea has nuclear weapons and a near-psychotic world view, and is ruled by the third in a line of genuinely insane autocrats, that's not a cage I'd be eager to rattle. But if the president wants results, he'll get them.

Iran? The deal negotiated with Iran under Obama looks likely to go up in smoke, leaving the possibility that the US may use the threat of force to try cow Iran into abandoning its nuclear energy program. Iran is also backing the Houthis in Yemen, putting them on the opposite side in that war from US allies such as Saudi Arabia and the UAE. If relations with Iran sour further, the existing proxy conflict may become a more direct confrontation.

Maybe China? Trump's evil Svengali, Steve Bannon, has said "We're going to war in the South China Sea ... no doubt". That may be a minority view, but Bannon's unusual position as Chief Strategist could give him the means to make it a self-fulfilling prophecy. If the idea of a war with a nuclear-armed North Korea gives you a sick feeling in the pit of your stomach, the idea that we could end up fighting China over the Spratlys isn't going to make you feel any better.

So there's no shortage of locales, and no lack of reasons to think that the Trump administration might not be averse to a fight. Given Donald Trump's notably poor understanding of nuclear weapons policy, things could get pretty interesting.

When they do, I just want you to remember that I told you so.

[rainblog]

No hope, no change

Back when the Orange Monster first reared its hideous head in the Republican primaries, I felt a moment of uncharacteristic optimism. Like others, I thought that we might be about to witness a terminal meltdown in the Republican party. Surely, no political party could survive being devoured from within by a Know-Nothing populist cancer of this kind. The result would have to be some kind of fission, with the party disintegrating into its component parts: crazed xenophobes going one way, crypto-libertarians another, the old-school conservatives and the Christians yet another. Split the party badly enough, and it would take them years to regroup enough to mount a challenge to the Democrats.

I say this not because I'm a fan of the Democratic party. They are not my party of choice, but in the Tweedledum-Tweedledee world of American politics, they do have a plausible claim to being the lesser of two evils. It's been hard to fight a growing impression that the GOP is actively at war with the American people, a malicious would-be occupying power with neither integrity nor scruples. The Democrats, while often despicable in their own ways, seemed just a fraction less overtly hostile, a fraction more disposed to listen to evidence and reason, a fraction more inclined to compromise and negotiation instead of eternal war with everyone, a fraction less bent on obtaining power at all costs and by any means.

I certainly don't want a Democratic one-party state, or even a liberal one-party state (not the same thing: anyone who watched the eagerness with which that nice Mr Obama seized the controls of the imperial war machine and the security state built by his predecessors knows that there's a yawning gulf between the values that the Democrats claim to hold dear and the way they behave once they're actually in office). Political monoculture, however enlightened, does no one any good. I want conservatives and libertarians around to keep liberals honest and administer the odd down-to-earth corrective when liberals lose touch with reality (that actually seems more like a 24/7 task; someone get them all some Red Bull and a strong mug of black coffee).

But I hoped that if the GOP imploded, then the Democrats might have a chance to shore up some of the actual progress they'd made over the past eight years: governance based on evidence rather than ideology, concern for environmental issues, civil rights for everyone, baby steps toward a healthcare system that delivers healthcare instead of shareholder dividends, a less jingoistic approach to foreign policy, and more besides. Maybe if the Republicans just took a powder for a decade or so, some of these good things would become entrenched in the culture too deeply to shake off.

And maybe all the virulent toxins washing around in the GOP would drain off into a pocket of black pus somewhere and the revived Republican party would come back better and more honest, having rediscovered the value of actual integrity. Self-destruction, I thought, might make them a better party. They would pass through the fires and emerge nobler and finer than before.

I don't know why I thought that could happen. Looking back, it seems absurdly naive. However ...

It quickly became clear that this was not the way it was going to go. Far from expelling the intruder, the Republicans embraced him. Any hopes I had that the GOP would recoil in horror from this affront to everything they claimed to hold sacred vanished quickly as one high official of the party after another stooped to kiss Trump's malodorous ring. He walked in reeking of power and, like the junkies they are, they all crowded round him demanding their share. If I was hoping for integrity, I was looking in the wrong place.

Still, if the Republicans weren't about to have their moment of agonizing re-appraisal, then maybe the Democrats would. Perhaps the Trumpocalypse would shake up the party, put some steel in their backbone, drag them back to the grassroots. I didn't really want to see the party go Sanders-wards: Bernie's heart is surely in the right place, but I don't think he's the right man for the job. It will take someone with a much more nuanced understanding of both American politics and the necessary evil of capitalism to create a workable social democracy in the United States. With most Americans liking the idea of socialism about as much as they'd like the idea of a piñata full of yellowjackets, anything that even hints at the S-word will always be a hard sell. I don't think there's anyone in the current crop of Democrats with the chops to actually pull it off.

But perhaps, I thought, defeat might push the Democrats to re-evaluate their methods and their priorities. Maybe they would come back as a real party of the people, not just a party of the people who live in the Beltway.

Let's be quite clear on this: I think that both major American parties -- oh, and the whole two-party system, come to that -- are overdue for a profound shake-up. I don't believe that either one truly serves the interests of the people of the United States, nor do I think that either has the maturity and wisdom to live up to the awesome responsibility of managing the world's pre-eminent superpower on an increasingly fragile and fractious planet. But if we couldn't strip the Republican Party down to its essential elements and start over from first principles, then maybe the Democrats would get a much-needed overhaul and lube job. Some good had to come out of the whole catastrophe.

Wrong again.

Besides blighting Hillary's chances by stoking the boiler of the Republican innuendo machine (Benghazi! Emails! Pizzagate!), the strategically-timed disclosures of Wikileaks revealed what we all already knew: that the Democratic party protects its own. At its heart is a cosy coterie of career politicians who serve themselves first. No one in that crowd is about to press their hand to their heart and say "We got it desperately wrong, we have failed the American people, we have to change ourselves."

Currently, the Democrats in Congress are mostly keeping busy voting to approve the Trump administration's heinous cabinet picks. I'm not sure why -- with a vanishingly few honorable exceptions -- they won't even vote a token protest against his nominees. Maybe they're afraid that if they do the Republicans won't like them any more. On the rare occasions when the Democrats try to get sneaky, the Republicans simply do an end-run around them, changing the rules on the fly. As always, it's like the Republicans invited the Democrats to a rumble and showed up with spiked baseball bats and weighted pool cues, while the Democrats came holding armfuls of balloon animals. Nancy Pelosi is reportedly keen to find 'common ground' with the Republicans, presumably ground that they can lie down on while the Republicans walk all over them.

There's a lot of talk about 'the Resistance' or 'the Rebellion' lately (we've all been watching way too much 'Star Wars'). But the resistance is where it's always been, down at the grassroots. The people who are marching in the streets understand that the government has been overtaken by a hostile power, a power that needs to be fought tooth and claw for years on end if we're not all to be crushed, liberal and conservative alike. The Democratic Party (pace, again, those few honorable exceptions) is no part of this resistance. Rather, it's an obstacle to it. Come 2018, the Democratic party machine will fight with all its might to prevent the safe seats reserved for party insiders from being 'stolen' by anyone who might actually offer a principled opposition to the loathsome nexus of bigotry and special interests that is the Trump administration. The best thing they can do would be to get out of the way and let the people fight back. That's also the last thing they have any intention of doing.

So here we are. Donald Trump, the repellent 'face man' for corporate looting and Steven Bannon's sophomore experiments in timocracy, has taken a narrow Electoral College win as a mandate to embark on a scorched-earth hundred-day campaign aimed at devastating whatever's left of civil society, grinding the rule of law to dust and asset-stripping the nation. The Republicans, far from suffering the much-needed shock that might reform them, have been richly rewarded for abandoning their few remaining principles and have made total toxicity the new party standard. Congressional Democrats are the same spinelessly-compliant shambles that they've always been.

I have given up hope that either party will voluntarily change, except for the worse. The crisis of 2016 has not made either one better, as I once hoped it might. From now on, it's up to us. Put not your trust in princes. The Republic has to be saved from the bottom up, and protest and civil disobedience are the only tools we have left. "If power is blocked at the ballot box, we'll vote it in the open streets".

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The Breitbarting of America

During (and after) the 2016 US election, the term 'gaslighting' was thrown around a lot. Taking its name from the movie 'Gaslight', 'gaslighting' is the use of psychology to manipulate someone so that they question their own sanity. Lately, it seems to have acquired a broader meaning: to try to make people doubt what they know by creating an atmosphere of uncertainty in which every fact seems open to question. There's been a lot of this kind of gaslighting recently, but what's happening right now is something different. Let's call it Breitbarting.

Breitbart News is a far-right news and opinion service. It has always aspired to be controversial, deploying a well-tested suite of tactics to arouse reactions. The perfect Breitbart headline is something like "Birth control makes women unattractive and crazy" or "There's no hiring bias against women in tech, they just suck at interviews" (these are both genuine headlines from Breitbart). Headlines like this, which make the accompanying story almost superfluous, always have a double purpose. On the one hand, they pander to the beliefs of the base that Breitbart courts, 'confirming' what their supporters already think is true. On the other -- and just as importantly -- they are written to provoke a reaction from progressives. By goring the sacred cows of liberalism, the headlines generate an outraged, often disproportionate reaction. That reaction draws more attention to the story (not too incidentally increasing readership and bringing more ad dollars into Breitbart's coffers) and further stirs up Breitbart's right-wing readership, creating a self-sustaining reaction that whips both sides into a frenzy.

The former chairman of Breitbart, Steven K. Bannon, now acts as Donald Trump's chief strategist. As a campaign adviser, he played a crucial role in shaping Trump's successful election campaign, courting controversy and playing to the base with an almost record-setting mixture of lies and distortions. Now, as a special counselor to the president, he may be the key policymaker in the new administration.

To see how he is using his position, take a look at Donald Trump's so-called 'Muslim ban', apparently co-authored by Bannon and senior Trump adviser Stephen Miller. An executive order issued by the President temporarily bans travel to the US by citizens of seven selected Muslim majority countries. The countries in question -- Iran, Iraq, Syria, Sudan, Yemen, Libya and Somalia -- seem to have been chosen not because their citizens are particularly active in terrorism against the United States, but because they are mostly of limited commercial importance to Donald Trump and his backers. Currently exempted from the ban are wealthy Gulf states, most notably Saudi Arabia -- the homeland of fifteen out of nineteen of the September 11th attackers and the birthplace of the Wahhabi ideology that inspired Al-Qaeda and ISIS -- as well as other important Muslim-majority countries that have ongoing problems with militant Islamism, including Egypt, Pakistan and Indonesia.

Terrorism is a real problem, even if it's one that politicians and other opportunists have systematically inflated for their own ends over the last fifteen years. But as a measure against terrorism , it is clear that the ban will be almost completely ineffectual. If you really believe that terrorism is an urgent, critical threat to the United States, and that travel bans are an effective defense against this threat -- both positions taken by Donald Trump during his campaign -- why would you implement a ban so selective and porous as to be next to useless? And wouldn't you want to begin by targeting countries that might reasonably be seen as 'higher risk', instead of giving those countries a special pass? And wouldn't you work with those responsible for enforcing it -- DHS and ICE -- rather than simply springing it on them with no notice and no guidance on how to put it into effect? It seems almost as if it was designed not to work.

The 'Muslim ban' is actually worse than ineffective. Not only does it offer no real protection against Islamist terrorism, it may even increase the threat. By reinforcing the idea that the US is implacably hostile to Muslims, it greatly helps Islamist terrorist recruiters and drives a further wedge between the United States and moderate Muslims throughout the world. So why do it?

View the ban as a Breitbart headline, and its logic immediately becomes clear. Just like a Breitbart headline, the ban simultaneously sends a signal to Trump's right-wing base -- Donald Trump takes action against terrorism, Donald Trump fulfills his campaign promises, Donald Trump dares to do what others won't -- even as it inspires an outraged reaction from progressives. The final, diabolical touch was hinting that visa applications from Christian citizens of Muslim countries would be prioritized: nothing arouses more fury on the left than the suggestion that Christianity should be given special treatment.

That reaction is an integral part of the package. It sends an additional message to Trump supporters that liberals want to let Muslims in to kill us all. To progressives, protesting the ban is a moral act, taking a stand in the name of an open, liberal and democratic society. To conservatives, it looks like conspiring with the enemy.

The executive order that created the ban has already been challenged in court, and may yet end up before the Supreme Court (a court which, thanks to Republican stonewalling in 2016, will not have a liberal majority). But whatever happens, Bannon wins. If the Court upholds the executive order, the power of the Executive branch to take arbitrary actions of this kind will be confirmed. If the ban is ruled unconstitutional, Bannon gets to paint a picture of 'activist judges' driven by 'political correctness' blocking Donald J. Trump's efforts to keep America safe. He cannot lose.

The so-called ban is a monstrous piece of political cynicism. The goal is not to increase security but to create chaos. Instead of reducing the risk of terrorism, it increases it. It has an immediate, measurable human cost, with ordinary people who have tried to enter the United States legally being treated like criminals and sent away. It sends a hateful message to Muslims and foreigners everywhere, discouraging immigration by letting would-be immigrants know that they can expect to be arbitrarily abused. And it further deepens -- as it is intended to -- political divisions within the country. It is a Breitbart headline played out in the public space.

This is what we all have to look forward to: a sometime Leninist and now hard-right professional agitator using all the power of the presidency for acts of political theater whose end goal is to undermine civil society and democratic institutions. Congratulations, America, you've just been Breitbarted.

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The Only Engine

A few days ago, just before the election, a friend said that she was starting a playlist to capture the mood of that moment. The first song she had chosen was Leonard Cohen’s brutal, apocalyptic song “The Future”:

Give me back the Berlin Wall Give me Stalin, and St Paul. I’ve seen the future, brother, it is murder.

I suggested instead “Democracy”, with its achingly-moving sense of the potential for hope inherent in even the most flawed of things or people:

I’m stubborn as those garbage bags that time can not decay, I’m junk, but I’m still holding up this little wild bouquet. Democracy is coming to the USA.

And yet after everything that has happened in the last few days, it's actually “The Future” that I find myself coming back to, for the following lines:

I’ve seen the nations rise and fall, I’ve heard their stories, heard them all, But love’s the only engine of survival.

The last line echoes, of course, a line from W.H. Auden, a line written at a time not too dissimilar to this, when darkness and ignorance and hatred threatened to swallow everything:

We must love one another or die.

Auden and Cohen both knew there were dark times coming, and both understood that there is only, that there has only ever been, one remedy.

We lost one poet today, but we will find others to guide us. And we will love one another, and so we shall not die.

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The misunderestimation of America

I never thought the Republican political establishment would stop Donald Trump. From the moment he crashed their party, pissed in the punch bowl and drank all the beer, it was pretty clear that they didn't know how to handle him. They obviously weren't going to stop him during the primaries: Trump plowed through the lineup of kooks and second-raters that were the best the GOP could offer like an eighteen-wheeler crashing through a preschool outing.

I had some vague hope that the party machine might kneecap him. After all, what's the point of having a cosy little political coterie if you can't hold a few members-only meetings in the backroom and come up with a strategy to head off the outsider? Don't tell me they've never done it before. And if the DNC can do it, they certainly can. But someone must have floated the fatal notion that they could ride Trump all the way to the top and then control him, and once that idea took root, it was all over.

In naive moments, I sometimes thought that maybe some Republican politicians would take a stand on the basis of principle. After all, here was this loud-mouthed boor who represented pretty much none of the things they claimed to stand for and many that they professed to hate essentially hijacking their party, cuckoo-in-the-nest-style, hitching the storied Grand Old Party behind the gold-plated Trump ego train as part of his latest vanity project. You'd think that that alone might have been enough to persuade them to break ranks in significant numbers.

In hindsight, I shouldn't have been surprised when that didn't happen. I am always on the lookout for signs of integrity in Republican politicians, and usually come up disappointed. My own politics lean left, but I do believe that there are good things in conservatism and I still expect good things of conservatives. Some occasionally deliver; John McCain is one who quite often shows not just a real moral backbone but an intelligent understanding of how a democracy should work. But in recent years, the majority of elected Republican representatives have been consistent only in their pettiness, venality, spitefulness and bigotry. Instead of asking what's best for their constituents, they seem to take a mean-spirited delight in spoiler tactics and obstructionism. 'The other side must lose' is their only real credo.

Naturally, I expected nothing of the Drudge and Breitbart crowd, the virulent new haters who are popping up like poisonous mushrooms to replace the superannuated audience of Fox News. Donald Trump is their personal chaos monkey, a two-hundred-and-seventy-pound shitbomb hurled into the American political arena to prove that nothing good should ever be attempted and that noise beats truth if you just turn up the volume far enough.

But the voters, the ordinary voters, the decent men and women of America: surely they would put the brakes on the runaway train?

As I said, I lean left -- way left, by American standards -- but I try to be aware of my own bias and try to seek information that would help me evaluate things honestly. I made a point of reading Donald Trump's own words rather than the things that his enemies wrote about him, trying to understand what he really represented, trying to keep my mind as open as possible. At times, I even conceded him a point or thought that he genuinely performed better than his opponent.

Overall, however, I found what I read deeply disturbing. It was all too familiar: content-free nationalist tub-thumping stitched together with transparently vague promises to "make everything better", all topped off with a few winking asides to the bigots. The only time he appeared truly sincere was when he was praising some dictator or tyrant for their 'strength'. If you happen to be the kind of person who craves a strong leader to put the Bad People in their place, it was squarely in your wheelhouse: comfort food for addicts of authoritarianism. We've seen people who spoke like that before, and we all know what comes next.

His own words defined his character more clearly than his enemies could ever have done. What I read were the utterances of a con-man and a bully. His arrogance and open contempt for anyone who didn't serve him were obvious for everyone to see. His archived words about women that so appalled everyone -- including even his running mate -- didn't surprise or shock me in the slightest. They only confirmed what I already knew.

His lack of subtlety and intolerance for complexity, his ignorance of everything relevant to the post he was aspiring to -- the economy, world politics, American democracy -- were all freely on display. He was not merely ignorant, but actively, enthusiastically so. His mind was closed; he had no interest in hearing conflicting viewpoints or even facts if they might disagree with what he had already decided. His absolute resistance to evidence would be bad enough in a politician who has good judgment, but Donald Trump's judgment is reliably terrible. A walking Dunning-Kruger case study, his confidence in his own abilities is in direct proportion to his actual ineptitude.

On the campaign trail, he threw temper tantrums. He reacted with hysterical fervor to any slight, real or imagined. It got so bad that eventually his handlers had to take his Twitter account away to stop him shooting himself in all the feet he could find.

Then there were the lies. He lied continuously, shamelessly. He never seemed to care that he'd be called on every lie before he'd climbed back aboard Trump Air to head for his next destination. They just kept rolling out, always there to serve his needs of the moment. He sourced his material direct from Alex Jones, a certifiably-unhinged conspiracy theorist, repeating Jones's wildest ravings as if they were stark fact.

I read the things he said and I came to the conclusion that he was more completely unfitted for the office of president than any other candidate in living memory. Above all, he came across as disordered: an obvious sociopath, someone that no one could think of trusting. If he were a used car salesman, you'd turn around and walk off the lot less than two minutes after he opened his mouth.

Someone like that couldn't possibly get elected, could he? The heartland of America, the 'red' states, are supposed to be the homeland of solid common sense. Those coastal liberals might think they're smart, but it's the middle of the country where you should look for decent, honest folks, the hard-working salt of the earth. Surely they wouldn't be taken in? Surely they wouldn't sign up for this festering carnival of lies and loathing?

We already knew that the political left couldn't find enough voices to stop Trump. Every election in recent years has been close and the right is more motivated when it comes to getting to the polls. The right is also more motivated when it comes to stopping other people getting to the polls: Republican-sponsored voter disenfranchisement measures such as gerrymandering and transparently-racist voter ID laws have all played their part in silencing or muting many voices. Stopping Trump alone was impossible.

I am not a conservative. But I believe that many conservatives are thoroughly decent people, decent in the deepest sense of the word. I believe they are as smart as the next person. I even believed that there might be some truth to the idea that conservatives have more common sense than liberals (this comes from seeing liberals up close). Surely conservatives would recognize an obvious, flagrant scam artist when they saw one? And surely some would say to themselves "Well, I guess we don't get to win this one, but we need to think of the good of the country and stop this nonsense right here."

Didn't happen. Or it didn't happen in large enough numbers to make a difference. Whether they failed to see the conman for what he is, or they simply voted for Trump as a giant fuck-you to that 'coastal elite' that alternately ignores or condescends to the middle of the country, we don't yet know. But it doesn't matter. The people who could have saved us from a Trump presidency didn't, and here we are.

Donald Trump -- a blustering, bullying sociopath with an ego the size of Texas -- is our new president. Michael Pence -- a thin-lipped Evangelical apparatchik with a documented history of backing regressive legislation -- is his vice-president, the man who may run the show while Donald postures and preens. The Republicans control both houses and will shortly begin to implement their agenda of undoing everything Obama has done in eight years of office and then locking things down to prevent a liberal president getting elected ever again. The country is for sale to the highest bidder. The racists and xenophobes are high on the heady fumes of victory. The GOP has received a signal that Breitbartism is the way forward. Anything good that the Republican party once stood for is now marked 'not wanted on voyage'.

There are no possible words to describe how screwed we are, liberals and conservatives alike. The deplorables have taken over the asylum, and the consequences are going to be catastrophic.

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A post-Brexit reader

As the dust -- or some of it -- slowly begins to settle after the UK's referendum on EU membership, the question that most people are asking is "How the hell did this happen?" Not everyone is asking this. Boris Johnson is asking "When can I move my stuff into Number 10?", and the usual bigots are asking "Should I spend my afternoon telling Polish painters to fuck off back to Gdansk, or would it be more rewarding to go and shout obscenities at brown-skinned possibly-Muslim children at the local primary school?" But many people are genuinely shocked and puzzled as to how it could have come to this, and how a seemingly educated and relatively wealthy nation could have voluntarily chosen to do something so bewilderingly self-destructive.

If you're not yet caught up on the whole fiasco, the best summary of the immediate aftermath of Brexit was written by Nick Clegg. Mr Clegg actually wrote his piece more than 48 hours before the vote took place, but it is nonetheless accurate in every detail. At press time, South Yorkshire Police are still searching Mr Clegg's home to find out where he hides the time machine, but until they find it we have to assume that his prediction that no one has anything resembling a plan for the post-Brexit UK was simply an inspired guess. Of course, not even Nick Clegg foresaw that Nigel Farage and friends wouldn't even wait 24 hours to admit that they lied about giving £350M to the NHS, or that they would immediately begin lying anew about whether they had ever actually said such a thing, much less written it in letters five feet tall on the side of a bus.

So where should we look for an explanation? Probably not to US presidential hopeful Donald Trump, whose incoherent and jaw-droppingly uninformed response to questions about Brexit is likely to prove too baffling for all but the most advanced scholars of Trumpese. Reports that many Leave voters now regretted their vote may be true, but are probably a red herring. And while racism surely played a part, and there has certainly been an upsurge in racist incidents since the vote, I don't think that's the whole story either. It's too easy and comfortable to blame everything on the bigots and not look any deeper than that.

Chris Patten's analysis is sober and sensible and worth a read, but out of everything I've read, two articles struck me as the most illuminating. The first is Laurie Penny's eloquent and deeply humane appeal for sanity in the New Statesman. The other, far less compromising and comforting, is Glenn Greenwald's biting attack on elite institutions in The Intercept.

Briefly summarized, Greenwald's argument is this: Leave voters aren't cartoon racists or dupes; they are people who are deeply, legitimately angry with a status quo that offers them almost nothing. The elites who have spent the last few decades asset-stripping society in the name of increased shareholder value may even believe the oft-repeated lie that what's good for Big Money is good for the country. Those who have watched their communities and their futures fall apart, who find themselves staring down the barrel of 'necessary austerity measures' while their masters divide up what's left of the public sector among their fat-cat cronies aren't buying any of it. So when the chance came, many of them voted to blow the wheels off the wagon. It may have been the wrong thing to do -- a futile, wrong-headed, self-destructive gesture that will only deepen everyone's misery -- but let's not try to pass it off as nothing more than the product of ignorance and bigotry.

If Greenwald is right, this is bad news for Hillary Clinton. She is an elite candidate in every sense, and she cannot convincingly pretend to be anything else. And that's bad news for all of us, because the only alternative that the elite-run political system has deigned to offer us is the fake populist Donald Trump, a man unsuited to be president in almost every way imaginable. A Hillary presidency may offer next to nothing to the disenfranchised, but at least it is likely to be a slow-motion catastrophe. If the same kind of people who angrily voted for Britain to leave the European Union angrily vote to put Trump in the White House, then we're all screwed.

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The end of history

The neoconservative thinker Francis Fukuyama wrote a book called "The End of History and the Last Man", whose thesis is summed up in the following quote:

... we may be witnessing ... not just the end of the Cold War ... but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.

Fukuyama -- an adviser to the administration of George W. Bush -- was quite surprised to discover during the first years of the 21st century that, contrary to his claims, there was actually quite a lot of history left, and that the final victory of Western liberal democracy (in the turbo-capitalist form Fukuyama favors) was by no means as inevitable as he thought.

It's easy for me to say that I always knew Fukuyama was full of shit, but the truth is that I have been guilty of similar naivety. In my case, I have always liked to believe that we are moving -- slowly to be sure, but moving -- toward a world in which rationality, peace, openness, and tolerance would gradually become more and more widespread, and the dark forces of ignorance, racism, nationalism and superstition -- the wellspring of so many wars and so much suffering -- would slowly fade away. (This is not perhaps so very different from what Fukuyama claimed, but he places more faith in the almighty market as a universal panacea than I do).

Like Fukuyama, I have been forced to revise my opinions. A movement toward more enlightened societies has certainly taken place during my lifetime, and not just in Western democracies. But I no longer believe that this progression is in any way inevitable. There are no guarantees that the gains we have made are permanent or that they cannot be rolled back from one moment to the next.

The latest confirmation of my newfound pessimism comes from the United Kingdom's Brexit referendum. More than just a referendum on whether the United Kingdom should stay in Europe or not, it was a referendum on two opposing world views. On one side, the Leave campaign played on the keys of everyone's worst instincts -- distrust of 'the Other', petty nationalism, the fear that someone, somehow is taking advantage of you. It was a campaign based on fear and lies, a cynical scare-mongering, rabble-rousing exercise in manipulation. Against it, the Remain campaign could only offer sober appeals to rationality, to internationalism, to the slow and tedious business of making progress through peaceful collaboration. Remain campaigners had reasoned arguments, expert opinions and data to show why staying in the EU was to everyone's advantage, why Britain gained more by being in the EU than out of it. Leave countered with more distortions, with contemptuous dismissals of 'experts', with more appeals to nationalism and xenophobia. They trotted out spurious stories of preposterous EU regulations, they made extravagant promises that everything would be better -- promises that they have already started to retract -- and menaced Little Englanders with the spectre of a brown tide of immigrants sweeping over the country, bringing terror and joblessness in their wake.

Unsurprisingly, Leave succeeded magnificently. People vote with their emotions (and however much liberals may like to present themselves as rational and enlightened, this is every bit as true of liberals as conservatives). Against Leave's scare tactics, the dull, worthy, sensible arguments of Remain (not helped by the fact that they were often delivered by profoundly compromised spokespeople) hardly stood a chance.

Should we take comfort from the fact that almost half of voters nevertheless rejected the lies of the Brexiteers, rejected the appeal to hate and voted to express their faith in collaboration and cooperation? Not really; in a democratic society with an educated electorate there is no excuse whatsoever for half the voters to fall for something as transparently awful as the stew of lies served up by the UKIP and their fellow travelers.

The usual voices have already started to weigh in. Donald Trump and Marine Le Pen have both declared themselves delighted with the outcome: hardly surprising, given that their own appeal is based on exactly the same factors as the Leave campaign. They are nationalists and nativists, distrustful of complexity and cooperation, convinced believers in the value of fear and the Big Lie as political tools.

Meanwhile, the pound has nose-dived against other currencies, as the markets acknowledge Brexit for what it is -- a short-sighted, desperately self-destructive temper tantrum on the part of a population made angry and resentful by both real and imagined grievances. Some of the economic damage is short-term; much of it may not be. Farage's populist posturing has cost Britain part of its future.

I grew up in Britain, and I love it in my own way with as much fervor as any flag-waving member of the UKIP. I still believe that there is much that is good in Britain and the British. I also spent the first part of my working life in Europe, and saw first-hand some of the often maddening, wasteful, self-perpetuating bureaucratic mess spawned by the European Union. Despite that, I believe absolutely in the vision of a united Europe. Despite everything Farage and his supporters may pretend, the EU remains one of the most successful exercises in balancing national interests with joint progress, a real force for peace and stability in the world. For Britain to voluntarily withdraw from that courageous and far-sighted effort seems to me a tragedy of the first order.

But even more than that, the Brexit catastrophe makes me fear for the future of my new home, the United States. The battle lines are drawn, and the opposing armies look frighteningly similar. On the one hand, Hillary Clinton -- not my first choice, but better than some -- represents the dull, practical option. She is experienced, deeply knowledgeable, highly capable, and possibly even sincere (or at least not very much more insincere than any other politician). Her campaign is based on facts, on reason, on a nuanced understanding of the world and America's place in it. I am far from happy with the status quo that she represents, but I have slowly come to admit that it is better than some of the alternatives.

Against her, Donald Trump is eerily, horrifyingly similar to the Leave campaigners. Like them, a mainstay of his platform consists of flag-waving nationalism. Like them, he lies deliberately, unashamedly, continuously and outrageously, confident that by the time his lies are challenged, they will already have done their work in the minds of his supporters. Like them, he appeals to people's fears, to their distrust of anyone not like themselves, to their sense of arrogant national pride. Like them, he makes extravagant promises without any clear indication of how he can deliver on them (with regard to practical implementations, Trump's proposals are usually either vague or absurd). Like them, he uses racism and bigotry to serve his purposes. Like them, he speaks to a population of increasingly resentful whites, people who believed that they were entitled to everything and are now appalled to find that they are expected to share everything that the one percent hasn't already stolen from them.

Trump is a master of the soundbite, of self-promotion, of the ad hominem attack. He is openly contemptuous of many of the cornerstones of liberal democracy -- a free press, the presumption of innocence, and non-discrimination, to name only a few. He is vain, greedy, arrogant, childishly vindictive, deeply hypocritical and determinedly anti-intellectual. He has a track record of walking away from his messes and letting other people clean them up. He is a crude, blustering, boastful, deceitful bully. He brings out the worst in people and he delivers it to the ballot box. He is, by any and every standard, a terrible candidate, utterly unsuited to be the president of the most powerful nation in a complex and continuously-changing world.

And after Brexit, there is no longer any reason to believe that he cannot win.

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Goodbye Spaceboy

Today is going to be full of people writing what David Bowie meant to them. Most of the people who can say their piece with any sincerity are going to be the Weird Kids who grasped early on that Bowie was the King of the Weird Kids, a walking, breathing proof that "It gets better".

I was a weird kid, but I wasn't sufficiently self-aware to realize that Bowie was the role model I needed. Not in the sense that I needed to imitate his appearance or his lifestyle, interesting though that might have been. But because the reason that Bowie matters is because he incarnated two very important truths.

The first is: if people think you're weird, don't try to conform. Do your own thing -- all out, balls to the wall -- until they finally realize how good it is. The last laugh consists of telling people "This is what I am -- and it fucking rocks!"

The second is: don't get stuck doing the same thing. Bowie, perhaps more than any other artist, continually reinvented himself. His work was a process of continuous experimentation, with each album exploring new ideas and new techniques. Sometimes it failed spectacularly. Not everything that he did was good. Much of it was silly (but that was part of the charm), and some of it was awful. But what made Bowie unique was that he was always ready to try something new. That meant moving on from the good as well as the bad. Knowing how to recover from your failures is one thing. Bowie knew how to move on from his successes as well. He never let himself get locked into a winning formula, cranking out the same-old same-old forever.

Even if I didn't understand these things until too late, Bowie's words and music helped to shape my own imagination. He was part of the soundtrack of my teenage years, opening the door to a particular world of ideas and images. Somewhere I still have an aged cassette of "Ziggy Stardust", doubtless stretched and squeaky from being played over and over again. Now his songs exist as MP3s on my computer. I no longer listen to them quite so obsessively, flipping the cassette over to start again at the beginning, but coming back to them is still a pleasure and a revelation and an inspiration.

Thank you, David. I owe you. We all do.

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Keepod: the Everywhere PC for everyone

Following up on my recent post about the CloudPC, I've just learned about a new project which is much closer to my original proposal, but with a twist. A very good twist.

The Keepod is a USB stick that contains a simple operating system and storage. As explained in this BBC article about the Keepod, the goal is to give people in the developing world their own personal and portable computing environment. They simply take their Keepod with all their programs and data on it, and plug it into any available networked computer. For the Keepod's target base, that's likely to be an old or recycled PC. When they're done using it, they unplug the Keepod and the next user takes their place.

No one needs to own expensive hardware, everyone gets their own private environment with all their own information on it. It has a lot in common with my original idea, except that where I was thinking about what a privileged Westerner (me) might need, the Keepod inventors are thinking about the needs of people in the rest of the world.

They had an Indiegogo project which has now finished, but maybe there'll be other opportunities to support what sounds like an excellent project in future.

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The CloudPC and the 'everywhere computer'

About four years ago, I wrote a post about my ideas for a CloudPC, which would be a small (very small) device that would let you carry your personal computing environment around with you. To use it, you'd just plug it into a 'dock', which would provide all the peripherals, processing power etc. My idea was that the device would be able to make use of the cloud but wouldn't be dependent on it. You could still get work done even if the Internet connection went away.

A recent TechCrunch article describes a new product called TangoPC, which it calls an 'everywhere computer'. The idea is quite similar: TangoPC is a tiny dockable unit about the size of a hard drive, equipped with a CPU, RAM, SSD and various ports and adapters. It plugs into an inexpensive desktop dock, which is used to attach keyboard, screen and other peripherals.

TangoPC differs from my proposal in that it provides a CPU. It is, in effect, an actual computer, whereas my idea was something less. In my proposed CloudPC, the base station would provide the computing horsepower, so that you could get more power by simply plugging your portable environment into a fatter, faster desktop. CPU and RAM were just another 'service' provided by the base station.

There are strengths and weaknesses to both approaches. The computing power of the TangoPC will always be restricted by the power of the CPU that you can fit into that little pocketable box (apparently cooling is a big issue, although the TangoPC makers believe that they've made major progress in this respect). The TangoPC tops out at about "ten times the power of a smartphone." You can't enjoy more power by plugging your portable device into a bigger workstation.

On the other hand, because it's a real computer, the dock can be made cheaper and simpler (an important consideration for a device that will depend on widespread availability of docks). Also, it can actually do useful work on its own: TangoPC will offer an adapter that lets you use it 'on the road' using an iPad as a display, which is a very smart idea.

The TangoPC is in some ways more practical than the CPU-less device that I proposed. The question is whether the available onboard processing power will be enough for all users. Things could go one of two ways. It may turn out that the computing power offered by a pocketable device will be sufficient for the needs of the vast majority of users. The other possibility is that enough users will find themselves limited by such a device that developers of devices like the TangoPC will work on ways to allow a portable device to leverage the additional power in a desktop (or laptop) dock, or even in a regular desktop computer. A standard will emerge allowing computation to be offloaded onto the host machine with its greater resources, through a kind of 'processor sharing' mechanism.

The other element that I expect to see in a CloudPC is a virtual filesystem, with the user's documents stored both locally and in the cloud. This is, in some senses, an evolution of services like Dropbox, but the virtual filesystem will have to go much further. Unless changes in storage technology allow near-infinite storage on a small device, the filesystem will need to intelligently juggle data between the device's own limited storage and a larger backing store in the cloud in such a way that the user is seldom aware of the limitations of the actual device. This means that the filesystem will need to do version management and conflict resolution, as much as possible without user intervention. It will also need to anticipate the user's needs, ensuring that documents or data that the user uses regularly or is likely to need in future are present on the actual device for faster or offline access, while moving little-used documents to the cloud to save space. Doing it right is challenging, but there's plenty of precedent in computer science for solving problems of this kind.

Ultimately, the 'everywhere computer' is likely to merge with a device that many of us already carry everywhere -- a smartphone. Smartphones already have the computing power to run basic applications at speeds that are acceptable to most users, and they have increasing amounts of onboard storage. The CloudPC or 'everywhere computer' may eventually turn out to be simply a powerful smartphone supported by processor sharing and a virtual filesystem. In the meantime, however, the TangoPC looks like an interesting step along that road.

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Death of RSS signals inevitable doom of humanity. Film at 11.

About a year ago, when Google announced that it was closing the doors on its popular (but not popular enough) Reader application, there was a momentary flutter of interest in RSS (used generically to mean all subscribable newsfeeds, whether RSS or Atom), with various commentators taking to the Internet to declare that RSS was doomed. For example, my old buddy Drew Olanoff opined that RSS had to go because it lacked consumer appeal, and Ben Parr spoke of the death knell for RSS.

Today, the publisher MacMillan announced a new MacMillan eDeals site. Being an ebook deal addict, I went to take a look, then looked around the page for a link to the RSS feed.

There wasn't one. Despite the fact that this -- a regularly updated list of deals -- is pretty much made to measure for delivery via some kind of feed, and despite the fact that -- because the site was built using WordPress -- it's practically a one-line code change to generate and offer such a feed, it simply wasn't there. Of course, because the site is built using WordPress, the feed is there if you know where to look (it's at http://macmillanedeals.com/feed/), but the content is minimal. Apparently MacMillan are counting on users to revisit their page every day to see what has changed. That seems optimistic to me, but what do I know?

What indeed? I still like RSS. I check my newsreader daily. This apparently makes me a 'power user', where 'power user' means "someone who knows enough to click a 'Subscribe' button" or perhaps "someone who knows that the Internet doesn't begin and end with Facebook and Twitter". Power user? Feh. If I were a power RSS user, I would have some kind of RSS client that supported old-fashioned Usenet-style kill and highlight filters, something like Laurent Humbert's amazing NewsHopper client rewritten for RSS. The fact that no one -- as far as I know -- ever implemented such a thing may just bear out Olanoff and Parr's theory that RSS was always doomed.

But why was it doomed? Olanoff posts a screenshot of Google Reader and says "people don't want to read news like this", while Parr explains that once he got Twitter, Google Reader began to seem like "a chore". When I read these two statements it sounds to me as if they're both saying "People are really fucking dumb. And lazy too." And maybe that's the explanation.

Let's get something straight. Twitter is a woeful way to keep up on anything that interests you. It's a firehose. Every crumb of useful information comes submerged in a tsunami of kitten pictures, LOLs, and minute-by-minute re-tweets of "Downton Abbey" and "RuPaul's Drag Race" from everyone you have ever met in your entire life. If you think you're keeping up with anything on Twitter, you're deluding yourself. And your boss would probably like to know how you have quite so much spare time in your day that you can waste it combing through all this dreck.

And don't get me started on Facebook. Facebook's news feed seems to have been designed by Heraclitus to drive home the point that you cannot step twice into the same river. Every time you refresh it, it's different. Want to find something that someone posted an hour ago? The day before? A week ago? Good luck with that. Much of the time, it simply can't be done. Facebook seems to take a perverse pleasure in rearranging things and hiding things from you, probably in order to ensure that you spend as much time unproductively reading Facebook as possible.

Reading RSS through any half-decent reader, by contrast, is simple, elegant and efficient. You don't have to wade upstream through a tsunami of nonsense: you can check a single feed, or group of feeds (because it only takes 5 seconds to put your newly-added technology news feed into the 'Tech News' folder). You can bookmark things that interest you so that you can come back to them later. You can even search for keywords. And contrary to the claims of its detractors, nothing to do with using feeds is in any way rocket science.

So why is RSS dying (or dead)? Currently, we're in vicious circle territory: site owners don't provide feeds because users don't use RSS, and people don't use RSS because site owners don't offer feeds. Once begun, that downward spiral will continue until the technology withers away entirely, and I see no real chance of stopping it.

But why didn't it take off in the first place? I still believe that it's so clearly useful that the only reason why it didn't catch on -- except among geeks -- was because it was never really 'sold' the right way. For a long time, subscribing to feeds required a separate application, which was apparently an insuperable burden to people who spend their whole lives in Internet Explorer. When the browser makers belatedly added RSS capabilities to their browsers, it was still too obscure: the availability of a feed was shown only by a tiny icon at the end of the address bar, and even clicking the button to see the feeds that you had subscribed to was seemingly too much of a cognitive hurdle for most users. Reader features lasted a version or two and then vanished: Safari, for example, no longer supports -- or even acknowledges the existence of -- RSS.

I don't know how things could have been done better, but I think that the naysayers are probably right and that feeds are doomed. This is too bad. Some of us find them very useful, and the actual effort involved in providing a feed of your site is almost always minimal. Increasingly, however, fewer and fewer webmasters bother to make the effort.

There's nothing really complex about RSS: it is still simple, useful and efficient. It's trivial to provide, unchallenging to consume. The fact that it didn't flourish tells us an unpleasant truth: that the average Internet user is even dumber and lazier than we've always assumed. Any technology that isn't right there in their faces, serving up instant gratification in pre-chewed ready-to-swallow individual servings simply isn't going to make it.

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01/31/2007 -- Never forget

(from the wall of our old office)

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The weakest link

Today's cyber-security horror story comes from Naoki Hiroshima, whose rare Twitter handle was stolen from him by an extortionist. The thief used social engineering to obtain information from Paypal, which allowed him to reset passwords on Hiroshima's domains to take ownership of those domains. The thief then essentially held Hiroshima's websites to ransom in exchange for the coveted handle.

Analysis of the problem

So what went wrong? Both GoDaddy and Paypal seem to have dropped the ball dramatically here. Paypal released confidential information to someone claiming to be the account owner. GoDaddy then accepted partial (and easily obtainable) information as proof of identity, after which their 'security' procedures swung in to block the legitimate owner from fixing the problem.

From the account, it appears that GoDaddy accepted the last four digits of Hiroshima's credit card, plus the first two, as proof of identity. The last four digits are relatively easily obtainable -- even if Paypal hadn't happily handed them over, it's common practice for businesses to send out paper or electronic invoices that refer to "your credit card XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-1234". So now the attacker only had to guess the first two. But the first two digits of a card are part of the Issuer Identification Number. If the attacker knew who had issued the card (or even the type of the card), it would only take them a few guesses to get the right first two digits. And according to the attacker, the GoDaddy customer service representative was willing to let them go on guessing as long as they liked.

So GoDaddy's 'security check' offered no real security at all, but the problems didn't end there.

Once the attacker had changed Hiroshima's account settings, GoDaddy notified him with a message that said that the change had been made. He wasn't asked to confirm that he wanted to make that change: he was told that the change had been made, and he needed to act if he wanted to undo it. That's an 'opt-out' rather than an 'opt-in'. Moreover, undoing it turned out not to be an option, because GoDaddy's subsequent checks stonewalled Hiroshima's attempts to regain control.

To use an analogy, it's as if a thief broke into your house, changed all the locks, and the police refused to allow you to get back in because your key didn't fit the new locks. The difference here is that while the police can't compare your key to the old locks, GoDaddy should have been able to confirm that Hiroshima's credentials matched the previous settings on the account. If GoDaddy's procedures offered real security, that should have been sufficient grounds to revert the account to the previous settings and lock it pending resolution of the issue. But apparently that's not how they do things.

There are possible problems with prioritizing prior account information. An unscrupulous domain owner might, for example, sell a domain to someone else and then reclaim it by claiming theft. Nevertheless, the potential risks seem smaller than a system that essentially favors thieves.

Reading between the lines, it sounds as if GoDaddy's procedures are designed not for security, but for customer support. Their system is set up to help the customer who calls up and says "Oh, I've forgotten everything, can you get me back into my account?" And with a claimed 6.5 million customers, many of whom are probably not technically savvy, it's easy to see why GoDaddy might take this approach -- which minimizes support time and probably makes most of their customers happy -- rather than offering stronger security.

What can be done?

Hiroshima offers various suggestions for increased security (aside from not trusting Paypal or GoDaddy with anything). One is to increase the TTL on your domains -- the thief's initial attempt to gain control of the Twitter handle failed because delays in DNS propagation meant that emails sent to an address at Hiroshima's domain still went to his own mailserver rather than the thief's.

Another is not to use email addresses at your own domains for registration of anything valuable. If an attacker can gain control of the domain -- and Hiroshima isn't the first person to lose control of a domain registration in this way -- then they control the email address, and if they control the email address, they control anything registered with it.

That's sound advice, although I'm unconvinced by his recommendation to use Gmail instead. I'm not prepared to assume that passwords for webmail services such as Gmail, Yahoo or Hotmail are immune to theft. I've certainly seen plenty of stolen webmail accounts over the years, probably the result of phishing or keylogger attacks. Better security might come from ensuring that anything you want to protect isn't registered with a publicly-known email. If the attacker doesn't know which email they need to control in order to take possession of an asset, their task becomes harder. In the case of domain names, that's an argument for taking advantage of any 'private registration' service offered by your registrar, and setting it to auto-renew.

In Hiroshima's case, that wouldn't have saved him. The attacker's attempt to obtain the asset (his Twitter handle) via his email address failed, so he switched to plan B, which was simply to bargain one asset (Hiroshima's domains) against another (the Twitter handle). GoDaddy had given the thief leverage over the first asset; Hiroshima weighed up the risks and concluded that he had no option but to hand over the other, less valuable asset.

Intangible assets

Things that we own online have real value. The value can come from rarity (such as a Twitter handle consisting of a single letter) or from the potential to exchange for hard cash (Bitcoins, in-game currency or virtual artifacts), or because they're crucial to your business. Loss of control, even temporary, over a domain could be badly damaging to a small business, exposing it to anything from loss of revenue or customers to theft of secret information. Loss of an email account can have similar consequences: if you depend on an email address at a service such as Gmail to send and receive essential communications, you're hostage to anyone who can take control of it.

The weak link

The deeper bottom line is that our security is in the hands of others. You can use multiple email addresses and multiple dissimilar passwords (and you should) so that an attacker who gets hold of one of your assets doesn't get the set. You can store your access codes in an encrypted password safe rather than writing them on a Post-It note. You can use secure connections and shredders. But at the end of the day, if you share that information with someone else, then your security is only as good as their security procedures. And if their security procedures involve storing your password in plaintext, or letting malware run riot on their PoS terminals, or handing over your credentials to anyone who asks, you're essentially screwed.