#because she kept complaining about George W Bush

[shitty-check-please-aus]

ughhh I checked out an audiobook for a book that I already read 

[brajeshupadhyay]

President Donald Trump delivered his most extensive remarks on the QAnon conspiracy theory Wednesday, defending followers as ‘people that love our country’ and going out of his way not to condemn some of the most bizarre claims associated with the movement. ‘I’ve heard these are people that love our country,’ Trump said at the White House. He was asked about the group hours after issuing a tweet backing Florida Republican primary winner Laura Loomer, who has pushed conspiracy theories that deny the school shootings in Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings in 2012. ‘I don’t know much about the movement other than I understand they like me very much,’ President Donald Trump said Wednesday when asked about the QAnon movement Trump has also congratulated Marjorie Taylor Greene, who won a Republican primary in Georgia, calling her a ‘future Republican star,’ even as retiring and centrist Republicans issue warnings about the rise of the movement gaining a foothold in the party.   Trump, who has backed other QAnon supporters and retweeted its followers in the past, gave the impression he had only a general understanding of the movement. ‘I don’t know much about the movement other than I understand they like me very much,’ Trump said.  He connected the movement, which like Trump raises alarms about a ‘Deep State,’ to his own concerns about violence in Democratic-run cities. ‘These are people that don’t like seeing what’s going on in place like Portland and places like Chicago,’ Trump said. He didn’t flinch when asked about the most far-fetched views of some QAnon followers, that he is saving the world from a satanic cult of pedophiles and cannibals. In this Aug. 2, 2018, file photo, a protesters holds a Q sign waits in line with others to enter a campaign rally with President Donald Trump in Wilkes-Barre, Pa. Facebook says on Wednesday, Aug. 19, 2020, it will restrict QAnon and stop recommending that users join groups supporting it, but the company is stopping short of banning the right-wing conspiracy movement outright Save The Children hold a demonstration in Tucson against child trafficking and peodophilia. #Save Our Children is a national advocacy group that believes child trafficking has reached pandemic proportions and that politicians, establishment elites, and Hollywood celebrities are part of an organized conspiracy to aid, protect and participate in peodophilia and child trafficking Conspiracy theorist QAnon demonstrators protest during a rally to re-open California and against Stay-At-Home directives on May 1, 2020 in San Diego, California Marjorie Taylor Greene with Laura Loomer – two GOP primary winners who earned online plaudits from President Trump Attendees gather before the start of a rally with U.S. President Donald Trump in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, U.S., on Thursday, Aug. 2, 2018 ‘Well I haven’t heard that. But is that supposed to be a bad thing or a good thing?’ he asked. ‘If I can help save the world from problems I’m willing to do it,’ he continued. ‘I’m willing to put myself out there. And we are actually. We are saving the world from a radical-left philosophy that will destroy this country.’ Trump then during his response attacked calls to defund the police, ‘open borders,’ touted his border wall, and said poll numbers are ‘extraordinary’ on the border issue. ‘But I will say this. We need strength in our country, not weakness.’  Some QAnon followers also believe a ‘Deep State’ is behind an underground child sex trafficking ring. Among the group’s claims are that there is a Satanic cult of pedophiles and cannibals led by some of the world’s most famous names and covered up by the media and ‘deep state,’ with Trump claimed to be secretly dismantling it. Among its wilder claims are that children are being kept in tunnels under major cities, that they are being trafficked on popular consumer websites such as Wayfair, and that JFK Jr. is alive and has been spotted on Marine One.    The central figure in the conspiracy is Q, supposedly a high-level government official who leaves clues – or ‘drops’ – on message boards about the imminent ‘great awakening,’ when the pedophile cabal will be ended. Followers have speculated that Trump is Q and are only likely to be encouraged by his answers at the White House.  Another key figure is Mike Flynn, Trump’s first national security advisor, who is said to both be the victim of the deep state and central to the cabal’s imminent downfall. Followers often put three gold stars on their social media profiles and Flynn himself took part in the ‘pledge’ in which QAnon believers recite the Pledge of Allegiance then add at the end ‘where we go one, we go all.’ Followers wrongly believe the slogan was on the bell of the ship John F. Kennedy served on in the Navy, and abbreviate it to WWG1WGA on social media profiles and in hashtags. Q’s success is at best mixed: he predicted that JFK Jr. would be Trump’s 2020 running mate after emerging from hiding on July 4 2020, a moment known as ‘the storm’; that there was going to be an unsealing of 25,000 indictments in November 2017 followed by a period of military control, while Hillary Clinton was going to make for the border as a result, but would be extradited; and that members of the cabal were arrested at National Cathedral in Washington D.C. during George H.W. Bush’s funeral in January 2019.  QAnon followers have held up their signs at Trump rallies, and former National Security Advisor Mike Flynn last month posted a video where where said the QAnon slogan: ‘Where we go one, we go all’ at the end of an oath. NBC has reported that Facebook groups connected to QAnon have millions of followers. Illinois GOP Rep. Adam Kinzinger released a YouTube video last week calling on party leaders to ‘denounce’ the conspiracy theory now that it has gained a hold in the party.  ‘The president hasn’t fully denounced it or denounced it at all. Now, it’s time for leaders to come out and denounce it,’ he said, while calling on people to try to persuade followers. House Minority Leader Rep. Kevin McCarthy of California has said he will seat Greene despite past racist statements, and declined to wade into her primary.  According to Travis View, who has researched the group, its followers believe that a ‘worldwide cabal of satanic pedophiles” run “all the major levers of power,’ USA Today reported.  The FBI warned in May 2019 lays out the threat of ‘conspiracy theory-driven domestic extremists.’ “The FBI assesses these conspiracy theories very likely will emerge, spread, and evolve in the modern information marketplace, occasionally driving both groups and individual extremists to carry out criminal or violent acts,’ according to the memo, reported by Yahoo News. It mentioned QAnon as well as the Pizzagate, a debunked conspiracy theory that Clinton associates were running a child sex ring out of the basement of a popular Washington, D.C. pizza restaurant. The restaurant does not have a basement.   Earlier Wednesday White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany backed up Trump’s tweet about Loomer while providing some distance, saying the president hadn’t done a ‘deep dive’ into the Florida GOP primary winner. The 27-year-old right-wing activist is known for pushing conspiracy theories about school shootings and making anti-Muslim statements – and won the GOP primary Tuesday for the Florida Congressional district that includes Trump’s Mar-a-Lago.   Loomer celebrated Wednesday by talking to fellow right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, calling the hoaxes she’s pushed ‘factual stories that we have been ahead of the curve on for years,’ as J.T. Lewis, a gun rights activist who supports Trump and whose brother died in the Sandy Hook shooting, called for Loomer to be pushed from the party.  Donald Trump congratulated Laura Loomer (pictured) on winning the GOP primary for the district that covers his Mar-a-Lago estate. The White House said Wednesday the president hasn’t done a ‘deep dive’ on Loomer’s statements  White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said Wednesday that the president ‘routinely congratulates people who … get the Republican nomination for Congress’  Loomer called into Alex Jones’ Infowars show and said that the conspiracy theories and hoaxes they’ve been pushing are ‘factual stories that we have been ahead of the curve on for years’  ‘Laura Loomer is a Parkland and Sandy Hook hoaxer. She has no place in the Republican Party!’ Lewis tweeted.       Despite Loomer’s controversial views, Trump tweeted congratulations to her late Tuesday.  ‘Great going Laura. You have a great chance against a Pelosi puppet!’ Trump wrote.  She also has the backing of Jones, Donald Trump Jr., Trump’s former political adviser Roger Stone and Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz, a diehard Trump supporter.  Speaking to Jones on his InfoWars show, she complained, ‘I was told that if I wanted to win my race … that I could never do InfoWars again and that I could not speak to you because they say that you are toxic, just like they say about me, and I said screw you, Alex Jones is a freedom fighter, he’s a patriot, he’s fighting for the First Amendment and I am never going to sideline any of my friends.’  ‘We were the people who led the culture revolution in 2016 when President Trump was nominated and elected,’ Loomer told Jones Wednesday. ‘That is what the Republican Party is missing now.’  Loomer will face Democratic Rep. Lois Frankel in the fall. The four-time congresswoman is expected to win easily in the deep blue district. She ran unopposed in 2018 and beat her Republican rival in 2016 by 27.6 points.  McEnany said Trump’s support for Loomer was standard protocol. ‘Well, the president routinely congratulates people who have officially – get the Republican nomination for Congress, so he does that as a matter of course,’ she said at the White House briefing Wednesday.  McEnany was asked about Loomer and about Marjorie Taylor Greene, a GOP candidate from George for the House of Representatives who prescribes to the QAnon conspiracy theory and has also made anti-Muslim statements.  ‘He hasn’t done a deep dive into the statements by these two particular women, I don’t know if he’s even seen that,’ McEnany said. ‘But he supports the Muslim community, he supports the community of faith more broadly in this country.’      The president tweeted in a show of support for Loomer late Tuesday after she defeated five candidates to win the Republican primary for the US House of Representatives seat that includes Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach WHO’S BANNED LAURA LOOMER   PLATFORMS  Twitter Facebook Instagram PAYMENT SYSTEMS  PayPal Venmo GoFundMe  RIDESHARES  Uber  Lyft  TECH FIRMS XFinity / Comcast processing of her campaign mass texts EVENTS CPAC – Conservative Political Action Conference in 2019  Courtesy of Ali Alexander Loomer took the lead in the Republican primary with 42.7 percent of the vote, with nuclear engineer turned professor Christian Acosta coming in second with 25.5 percent. Other candidates in the race included a former burlesque dancer who now runs an exotic animal business and a former IRS investigator. Trump cast his vote by mail in Florida’s 21st District primary election, after changing his official residence from New York to Palm Beach back in October 2019.  He and Melania’s ballots were returned to Palm Beach officials Monday in time for their votes to be counted, reported the Washington Post.   The president’s decision to cast his own vote by mail comes after he has repeatedly claimed mail-in ballots lead to widespread fraud and even threatened to redo the election if he loses through what he has blasted a ‘rigged’ system.  It is not clear if the president voted for Loomer but his social media post confirmed he approved of her victory. He’ll be able to vote for her in the November election, which he plans to do absentee.   Loomer has been a high-profile figure on the fringes of the alt-right since working for Project Veritas when she was a college student. While working with Jones of InfoWars she went to Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School and accused students there of ‘reading a screen or notes.’ ‘It’s obvious these kids are reading a screen or notes someone else wrote for them. Notice how media is only talking to the same group of students. They aren’t talking to the pro gun ROTC students who actually saved lives, unlike these students,’ she tweeted. She also pushed a theory that there was a second gunman in the Las Vegas massacre in September 2017 and went to a press conference a month later to harry the Las Vegas county sheriff with her claims. ‘All of the evidence that is being leaked is further showing how the Deep State is covering it up,’ she said.   The controversial 27-year-old has been slammed for making anti-Muslim comments on several occasions in recent years.  She called the FBI the ‘Federal Bureau of Islam’ as she pushed deep-state conspiracy claims. In November 2018 she was accused of hate speech when she called Representative Ilhan Omar ‘anti-Jewish’ – which led to her being removed from Twitter.   ‘Isn’t it ironic how the twitter moment used to celebrate ‘women, LGBTQ, and minorities’ is a picture of Ilhan Omar?’ Loomer tweeted about the Democratic Minnesota congresswoman.  ‘Ilhan is pro Sharia Ilhan is pro-FGM Under Sharia, homosexuals are oppressed & killed. Women are abused & forced to wear the hijab. Ilhan is anti Jewish.’  Trump cast his vote by mail in Florida’s 21st District primary election, where Loomer (pictured) took the victory The controversial conspiracy theorist has been accused of hate speech on more than one occasion. In November 2018 she was accused of hate speech when she called Representative Ilhan Omar (left) ‘anti-Jewish’. She slammed Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey (right) for suspending her account over the incident Far-right activist Loomer, who has the backing of Trump’s friend and former adviser Roger Stone, Representative Matt Gaetz and right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, will now take on Democratic Representative Lois Frankel (pictured) in the November general election When she was banned from Twitter over the incident, Loomer handcuffed herself to Twitter’s New York offices.  That same month, she was removed from a congressional hearing on social media when she hit out at CEO Jack Dorsey for ‘shadowbanning’ conservatives and accused him of trying to sway the midterm elections toward the Democrats.   This came after she was banned from using Uber and Lyft in November 2017 for tweeting that ‘someone needs to create a non Islamic form of @uber or @lyft’ and complaining that she was late to a meeting because she could not find a ‘non-Muslim’ driver. In June 2017, Loomer rushed the stage during a Shakespeare In The Park production of ‘Julius Caesar’ in New York to accuse the cast of normalizing ‘political violence against the right’ and calling them ‘Isis’.  ‘Stop the normalization of political violence against the right!’ she shouted. ‘Shame on the New York Public Theatre for doing this! You guys are ISIS! CNN is ISIS!’ She also ambushed actress Alyssa Milano at the 2018 Politicon conference in Los Angeles, suggesting she was in cahoots with Linda Sarsour, a Muslim co-founder of the Women’s March.  ‘I want to ask you right now to disavow Linda Sarsour because she is a supporter of Sharia law. And under Sharia law, women are oppressed, women are forced to wear a hijab,’ Loomer said, identifying herself as a ‘conservative investigative journalist.’   ‘My question is, will you please disavow her because she is advocating for Shariah law,’ Loomer yelled at Milano, who was seated onstage.  As Loomer was ushered out of the room, she yelled that #MeToo was a ‘sham movement.’   THE VIRAL STAR BANNED FROM SOCIAL MEDIA WHO IS GETTING A SHOT AT CONGRESS  Laura Loomer burst onto the conservative stage in 2015 when she, a Jew, was a student at Barry University, a Catholic University run by nuns near Miami. Loomer, one of a few Republican students in an overwhelmingly liberal school, participated in a ‘gotcha’ video at the urging of Project Veritas, a right-wing group that uses hidden cameras to expose what it sees as Liberal bias in colleges, non-profits and government.  Loomer surreptitiously taped her encounter with school officials during a meeting where she asked permission to set up a new club called Sympathetic Students In Support Of The Islamic State. The footage seemed to indicate school officials were in favor of starting such a club on campus but appeared to suggest she drop the ‘Islamic State’ from the name. The footage went viral, and school officials suspended Loomer for what they saw as her attempt to embarrass the school. The story made Loomer an instant celebrity in the Alt-Right’s cyber-world, but it also launched her anti-Muslim reputation. Loomer is a polarizing personality and took this photo with self-proclaimed ‘dirty trickster’ and one of the most notorious Republican insiders Roger Stone  Loomer has been banned from several social media platforms for promoting speech labeled as hate speech targeting Muslims and posted for this photo with Donald Trump Jr. and Kimberly Guilfoyle ‘I’m not anti-Muslim,’ she said, ‘I study Islamic terrorism.’ With video cameras in tow and a huge distribution network online, Loomer continued with higher-profile gimmicks to expose what she saw as the Left’s corruption. In the summer 2017, she and other conservative activists stopped the Shakespeare play in Central Park. In January 2019, she was back in the news when she got three alleged illegal immigrants from Mexico and Guatemala to set up their tents on the lawn of Speaker of the House Pelosi’s Napa Valley home in her home state of California. In time, Loomer and her crew were kicked off Pelosi’s lawn by police, and Loomer was handed a warning for trespassing.  Loomer has also been at war with mainstream social media platforms. One November morning in 2018 in Manhattan, she chained herself to the door of the local Twitter headquarters to protest her banishment from social media for hate speech. At first, Loomer worried the moves by Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and others would make it impossible for her to make a living and raise campaign contributions. Now, Loomer proudly describes herself as The World’s Most Censored woman, and she has managed to find other ways to conduct her political agenda and fundraising away from PayPal. She is, for example, active on Parler, where she has 89,000 followers, and Gab, where she has 27,000. Both are conservative platforms that allow a looser definition of free speech and, at times, have been accused of providing a haven for white supremacists and neo-Nazis. The post Donald Trump says QAnon followers ‘like me very much and I appreciate it’ appeared first on Shri Times News. from WordPress https://ift.tt/2Eh83q0

http://sansaartimes.blogspot.com/2020/08/donald-trump-says-qanon-followers-like.html

[berniesrevolution]

You will not be surprised to be told that Tucker Carlson’s new book, Ship of Fools: How a Selfish Ruling Class Is Bringing America to the Brink of Revolution, contains a series of attacks on diversity, immigration, feminism, and “identity politics.” You may, however, be surprised to be told that the book contains high praise for Ralph Nader, quotes from Studs Terkel, laments the disappearance of the anti-capitalist left, and presents Jeff Bezos as one of its central villains. Carlson has written a book that is as staunchly nationalist as one would expect. Yet it’s also a little bit socialist.

Carlson’s basic framework would commonly be described as “populism.” There are the people, and then there are the “ruling class” elites. The rich and powerful care only about themselves. They do not care about Middle America, and have presided over the opioid epidemic, the hollowing out of industrial towns, and exploding inequality. Meanwhile, ordinary workers suffer. At times, he almost sounds like Bernie Sanders. His analysis is persuasive, well-written, and often funny. It’s also terrifying, because elsewhere in the book, Carlson makes it clear: he wants a white-majority country, thinks immigrants are parasitic and destructive, misses traditional gender hierarchies, and dismisses the significance of climate change. Carlson’s political worldview is destructive and inhumane. Yet because it has a kernel of accuracy, it will easily tempt readers toward accepting an alarmingly xenophobic, white nationalist worldview. Carlson’s book shows us how a next generation fascist politics could co-opt left economic critiques in the service of a fundamentally anti-left agenda. It also shows us what we need to be able to effectively respond to.

First, let’s look at the parts that are most right, and perhaps most unexpected. In an analysis almost identical to that of leftists like Thomas Frank, Carlson says that Republicans and Democrats are now both beholden to corporate power. Sometime in the 1990s, Carlson says, he began wondering “why liberals weren’t complaining about big business anymore,” and had started celebrating “corporate chieftains” like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and the Google guys. Ralph Nader should be a hero to all liberals, spending his days “greeting a parade of awestruck liberal pilgrims” from a retirement home. Instead, he is “reviled,” even though “every point Nader made was fair” and “some were indisputably true.” Suddenly “both sides were aligned on the virtues of unrestrained market capitalism… left and right were taking virtually indistinguishable positions on many economic issues, especially on wages.”

The “prolabor” Democrats, Carlson says, were “empathetic and humane” and “suspicious of power.” But today they have disappeared, and the party of the New Deal is now a party of Wall Street. Carlson points out that Hillary Clinton won wealthy enclaves like Aspen, Marin County, and Connecticut’s Fairfield County (the hedge fund capital of the country). “Employees of Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon donated to Hillary over Trump by a margin of 60-to-1,” and while “Seven financial firms donated 47.6 million to Hillary,” they gave Trump “a total of $19,000, about the price of a used pickup.”

As a result, Carlson says, Democrats are now largely silent on labor issues: “When was the last time you heard a politician decry Apple’s treatment of workers, let alone introduce legislation intended to address it?” Corporations make vaguely “socially liberal” noises, like decrying gun violence and being pro-LGBT, and as a result escape criticism for mistreating their workers or contributing to economic inequality. Carlson cites Uber, which has prominent liberal Arianna Huffington on its board and has had to commit to reforming its “bro culture.” And yet it still treats its drivers like crap:

“[Uber is] running an enormously profitable business on the backs of exploited workers… An obedient business press [has] focused on the ‘flexibility’ Uber’s contractors supposedly enjoyed. … [But] Feudal lords took more responsibility for their serfs than Uber does for its drivers… Uber executives weren’t ashamed… They sold exploitation as opportunity, and virtually nobody called them on it.”

What happens, Carlson says, is that corporations “embrace a progressive agenda that from an accounting perspective costs them nothing.” They are, in effect, purchasing “indulgences from the church of cultural liberalism.” Sheryl Sandberg published Lean In and Mark Zuckerberg is floated as a possible Democratic presidential candidate, but Facebook is an evil corporation to its core. Sean Parker has admitted that Facebook was engineered to be addictive, that its designers thought: “How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?… We need to sort of give you a little dopamine hit every once it a while.. To get you to contribute more content.” Carlson notes that the company commits “relentless invasions of the public’s privacy,” and that epidemiologists have linked the product “with declining psychological and even physical health.” Carlson writes:

“Evidence has mounted that Facebook is an addictive product that harms users, and that Zuckerberg knew that from the beginning but kept selling it to unknowing customers. Those facts would be enough to tarnish most reputations, if not spark congressional hearings. Yet Zuckerberg remains a celebrated national icon.”

We know Facebook is manipulating people’s emotions to sell advertising, and yet we still get headlines like “How To Raise The Next Mark Zuckerberg.” Or look at Amazon. Jeff Bezos supported Hillary Clinton for president, yet “no textile mill ever dehumanized its workers more thoroughly than an Amazon warehouse.” Carlson asks: “when was the last time you heard a liberal criticize working conditions at Amazon?… “Liberals and Jeff Bezos [are now] playing for the same team.” Successful businessmen “pose as political activists,” and pitch their products as woke. That way: “affluent consumers get to imagine they’re fighting the power by purchasing the products, even as they make a tiny group of people richer and more powerful. There’s never been a more brilliant marketing strategy.” He goes on:

“The marriage of market capitalism to progressive social values may be the most destructive combination in American economic history. Someone needs to protect workers from the terrifying power of market forces, which tend to accelerate change to intolerable levels and crush the weak. For generations, labor unions filled that role. That’s over. Left and right now agree that a corporation’s only real responsibility is to its shareholders. Corporations can openly mistreat their employees (or “contractors”), but for the price of installing transgender bathrooms they buy a pass. Shareholders win, workers lose. Bowing to the diversity agenda is a lot cheaper than raising wages.”

Carlson mocks the “socially liberal” Davos elite who hand-wring about inequality while reaping its fruits. He points to the example of Chelsea Clinton, who talked nobly about her values (“I was curious if I could care about [money] on some fundamental level, and I couldn’t… That wasn’t the metric of success that I wanted in my life”) before buying a $10 million, 5,000 square foot apartment in the Flatiron District that spanned an entire city block. Chelsea Clinton’s career, for Carlson, shows how contemporary believers in “meritocracy” benefit from an unjust and nepotistic system: Clinton was paid $600,000 a year as a “reporter” for NBC despite appearing on the network for a sum total of 58 minutes. The bubble of privilege that many elites inhabit was exemplified in Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, which suggested that “Things in America are Fine.” (The slogan was actually “America Is Already Great.”) Carlson is not wrong here: Hillary Clinton herself was so out of touch that she is still saying things like “I won the places that represent two-thirds of America’s gross domestic product… So I won the places that are optimistic, diverse, dynamic, moving forward.”

Carlson also says that there has been a troubling tendency for both sides to embrace the military-industrial complex. Key Democratic figures supported the Iraq War (e.g. Feinstein, Kerry, Clinton, Biden, Edwards, Reid, Schumer). It was New York Timesreporters who contributed to scaremongering about Saddam in the leadup to the war, the New York Times op-ed page where you can find contributions like “Bomb Syria, Even If It’s Illegal” or “Bomb North Korea, Before It’s Too Late,” and New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman who said that Iraq War had been “unquestionably worth doing” because it told Middle Easterners to “suck on this.” Barack Obama (who was given the Nobel Peace Prize, Carlson says, for “not being George W. Bush”) killed thousands of people with drones, including American citizens, prosecuted whistleblowers, kept Guantanamo open, and failed to rein in the vast global surveillance apparatus. Hillary Clinton pushed aggressively for military action in Libya, which destabilized the country. There is a D.C. consensus, Carlson says, and it is pro-war. Some of the book’s most amusing passages come when Carlson flays neoconservative hacks like Max Boot and Bill Kristol, who have now become allies of the Democratic Party in paranoia about Russia. Boot’s career, he says, publishing articles like “The Case for American Empire” and advocating invasion after invasion, shows us how “the talentless prosper, rising inexorably toward positions of greater power, breaking things along the way.” The hawkish consensus is no joke, though, and Carlson says he misses the liberal peaceniks, who “were right” when they warned that “war is not the answer, it’s a means to an end, and a very costly one.”

To many on the left, everything Carlson says here will be familiar. The phenomenon he’s pointing to, by which Democrats and Republicans both became free market capitalists,  has a name: neoliberalism. Larry Summers was quite open about it when he said that “we are now all Friedmanites.” Carlson’s point about how corporations whitewash exploitative practices by appearing socially progressive is one leftists make frequently (see, for example, Yasmin Nair’s essay “Bourgeois Feminist Bullshit” and Nair and Eli Massey’s “Inclusion In The Atrocious“). The foreign policy stuff is a little off: it’s not that Democrats used to be pacifists, since the Vietnam tragedy was initiated by JFK and expanded by Lyndon Johnson. Empire has always been a bipartisan project, antiwar voices in the minority. Aside from the suggestion that this is new, it’s accurate to say that American elites have largely embraced the projection of American military power.

But Carlson is not going to be joining the Sanders 2020 campaign. His book has a dark side: a deep suspicion of cultural progressivism, inclusion, and diversity. Carlson believes that liberal immigration policies have been imposed because they serve elite interests (Democrats get votes and Republicans get cheap labor for Big Business). As a result, the fabric of the country is fraying. He writes:

Thanks to mass immigration, America has experienced greater demographic change in the last few decades than any other country in history has undergone during peacetime… If you grew up in America, suddenly nothing looks the same. Your neighbors are different. So is the landscape and the customs and very often the languages you hear on the street. You may not recognize your own hometown. Human beings aren’t wired for that. They can’t digest change at this pace… [W]e are told these changes are entirely good… Those who oppose it are bigots. We must celebrate the fact that a nation that was overwhelmingly European, Christian, and English-speaking fifty years ago has become a place with no ethnic majority, immense religious pluralism, and no universally shared culture or language.

To some people, what Carlson writes here may not seem racist. And like many conservatives, he resents having what he sees as common sense treated as bigotry. I don’t think there’s any way around it, though: Carlson’s problem is that the United States looks different, that it’s not “European” any more and has no “ethnic majority.” He’s explicitly talking the language of ethnicity: it’s destabilizing that we’re not a white-majority country anymore. This isn’t simply about, say, the “Judeo-Christian ethic” or embracing the “American idea.” If that were the case, then it would be hard to make a case for why we shouldn’t let in the Catholic members of the migrant caravan, who love American culture and want to march across the border saying the Pledge of Allegiance. The problem is that they are not European, that they change the look of the place, that they disrupt the “ethnic majority.” Europeans are the real Americans, the ones that hold the fabric of the nation together, and minorities, people who are different, threaten to undo that fabric.

(Continue Reading)

[keywestlou]

HAPPY BIRTHDAY CHARLIE BROWN

Missed Charlie Brown’s birthday. It was yesterday. Sorry. Never the less, the loving spirit of the Peanuts comic strip was born in effect when it made its appearance 70 years ago on October 2, 1950.

Happy Birthday Charlie Brown! Happy Birthday Peanuts! Happy Birthday Snoopy! Happy Birthday the security blanket! And most of all, Happy Birthday to Charles M. Schulz who penned the comic strip.

First named Li’l Folks, the strip was later renamed Peanuts.

Friend even to Presidents. Charlie Brown mentioned occasionally by John Kennedy, Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush.

Today, the comic strip has 330 million readers in 75 countries. It is published daily in 22 languages.

It is thought Charlie Brown has been such a continuing success for so long because of Charlie Brown getting up and trying again after being down. It is called perseverance.

Charlie Brown was a trendsetter in pet relationships. Snoopy.  Pets were members of the family and truly best friends and companions.

Schools are open in most parts of the country. I thought the schools were being prematurely opened. I was wrong.

The kids are going. Nothing coronavirus wise of any significance is happening.

In all of Monroe County, there have been only 3 confirmed cases. The 3 located in the northern part of the County.

I got into wearing masks with Robert. He is a Junior at the Key West High School. He said masks were no problem. Everybody wears one and no one complains. The only time they may remove the masks is during lunch.

I checked with an emergency room friend in one of the most northern cities in New York. She says she has not observed any problems. She mentioned a 7 year old who came  into the emergency room this week. Not for a coronavirus related problem.

She talked with the 7 year old. The little girl was wearing a mask. She asked her if she liked the mask. The girl nodded a shy yes and then proudly said, “We have a mask break for one minute every morning and afternoon.”

Adults should have adapted to mask wearing as children apparently are doing across the country.

Our President is in the hospital. At his age, coronaviirus could be very serious.

I don’t know what it is, but I feel bad that Trump is ill and may die. My writings clearly suggest I like neither the man nor the way he is running the country. Think he is a bad guy. Recommend everyone vote for Biden.

I must add I doubt Trump feels bad about anyone or anything. He is the original I don’t like prisoners, I don’t like Muslims. His feelings regarding Jews is obvious. He stands for all the bad things America has become.

Yet, I feel sorry for the man and wish him well.

Frank Bruni wrote in a New York Times Opinion piece yesterday about Trump. The column: The Pandemic Comes For The President.  Its thrust was no one is invincible. Not even the mighty Donald.

Bruni wrote: “The Presidency and the President are always national mirrors, in many different ways at once…..Trump has shown America its resentments. He has modeled its rage. Now he personifies its recklessness.”

He wrote America is “infected,” it has become a “morality case.”

Every day it is something new about Amy Coney Barrett.

CNN Politics reported yesterday that in the late summer she and her husband were diagnosed with coronavirus. Her husband was asymptomatic. The Judge “felt a little under the weather but recovered.”

My concern is her tendency to be secretive. She has failed in many respects to make full disclosure re professional matters and her religion. Forget not she is 48 and being considered for a lifetime job. Nothing is secret under the circumstances.

The fact that she and her husband had coronavirus may appear non consequential on its face. It probably is. However in today’s climate where the major issue in the election is coronavirus, she should have mentioned it.

Marsha is a long time reader of this blog. From Syracuse, New York. We have never met, except through the blog. We have become good friends.

Marsha sent me a lengthy column she came across. No author. The words intuitive. I share come with you.

“I wonder…..why we all seem to be Russians waiting in line for toilet paper, meat, and Lysol.”

“Why we all look like we are in bad need of a haircut or a facial or a reason to dress up again and go somewhere.”

“There are no images of the first family enjoying themselves together in a moment of relaxation.”

“We are rudderless and joyless.”

“We have lost our mojo. Our fun, our happiness.”

“We have lost the challenges and the triumphs that we shared and celebrated. The unique can-do spirit Americans have always been known for.”

“We are lost.”

October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month. Do whatever you can to help the cause. Few are they who are not touched by its curse.

There is an urban exodus. A return to the suburbs. A topic I have written about many times.

There are three reasons for the exodus.

The first involves technological improvements. People can work from home. The second the destabilizing threat of rising crime in the cities. Third and finally, people cannot make a living in the cities as they once did. Tied into the fact that city rents and living costs have failed to recognize that fact yet and make city living very expensive.

The urban exodus is expected to be an accelerating one over the long term.

A common example of the financial crush city living is causing, many live in flats with multiple roommates.

Key West is not the only City experiencing the dilemma.

Even great cities sometimes go away. They cannot seem to make it back. Goats were grazing in Rome’s Forum a few decades after the Empire collapsed.

On this day in 1995, O. J. Simpson was acquitted. “If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit.”

I watched the trial everyday for 3 months. Would not miss it.

I had rented a condominium at 1800 Atlantic for the season. Except for 2 days when I had to fly back to Syracuse for a sensitive hearing, I remained in Key West.

My days all the same. Up early. Walked the ocean along South Roosevelt Boulevard. Back to the condo. 1800 had a great pool. I took a cool refreshing swim and laid out on a lounge to sun dry.

Then my day really began. Watched the trial from the comfort of a barcalounge. Exciting! My eyes and ears remained fixed.

The evening was a late dinner somewhere. Generally at Square One. It had become a meeting place. We joined our local and snowbird friends most evenings there.

This is the fourth day in a row that Hackley has written in his 1855 diary about his piles. The poor guy had a real problem!

He wrote, “The piles will not stay up and are very sore. Bathed in the tub yesterday 3 times. Kept a piece of cotton with ointment on the parts and put some more Mustang Liniment on at night.”

I write about poor Hackley’s medical problem because I had a serious hemorrhoid problem twice in my life. Surgery for the first. The problem returned however.

Strangely, nothing seems to have changed as to how to medicate the problem. Every thing today as it was in 1855. I  lived in a hot bath, tried all kinds of ointments.

May Johnson continues to fascinate me. I make the following observation for the second time. Conservative school teacher May is not the quiet angelic type. She is not even good looking as the one photo I have seen indicates.

Yet she has the men here in Key West and away chasing her. Or maybe she is chasing them.

She went dancing at La  Brisa last night with Charlie and Fritot. They gave her a letter from Everest. He never comes home. Supposedly “her love.” They write and she goes out with others in Key West.

Even her mother appears upset with her meanderings.

After La Brisa, the three “went to Sybil Curry’s, lots of boys and girls there. Charles and I came home at 11 o’clock. KICKING TIRED.”

She warns that a “cyclone is brewing.” If it hits, it will be interesting to read about an 1896 hurricane from a person who was there. An

I have been self-quarantined for way more than 200 days. I gave up counting at 200.

Not a very exciting time.

Tonight is Cocktails at 7.

I met Cathy over the internet. Cathy lived in Key West in 1988. She read the blog and wrote me. We became friends.

A long distance romance, if anything. Cathy lives in Seattle, Washington.

Whatever, I have come to enjoy my one night a week having a drink via Skype with Cathy.

Her dog Lucy is part of the experience. Lucy always on Cathy’s lap. Lucy is blind.

Enjoy your Day!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY CHARLIE BROWN was originally published on Key West Lou

[stephenmccull]

Promises Kept? On Health Care, Trump’s Claims of ‘Monumental Steps’ Don’t Add Up

When it comes to health care, President Donald Trump has promised far more than he has delivered. But that doesn’t mean his administration has had no impact on health issues — including the operation of the Affordable Care Act, prescription drug prices and women’s access to reproductive health services.

In a last-ditch effort to raise his approval rating on an issue on which he trails Democrat Joe Biden in most polls, Trump on Thursday unveiled his “America First Healthcare Plan,” which includes a number of promises with no details and pumps some minor achievements into what the administration calls “monumental steps to improve the efficiency and quality of healthcare in the United States.”

As the election nears, here is a brief breakdown of what Trump has done — and has not done — on some key health issues.

Affordable Care Act

Trump has not managed to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, despite his claims that the law is dead.

But his administration, and Republicans in Congress, have made changes to weaken the law while not dramatically affecting enrollment in marketplace plans.

Congress failed to rewrite the law in summer 2017, but Republicans who controlled both the House and Senate at the time included in their year-end tax cut bill a provision that reduced the penalty for failing to have health insurance to zero. That change eliminated what was by far the most unpopular provision of the law.

It also sparked a lawsuit by Republican state attorneys general and governors arguing that the tax change undercuts the law and thus should invalidate it. The case is set to be heard by the Supreme Court the week after the Nov. 3 election. The Trump administration is formally supporting the GOP plaintiffs in that suit.

The administration also used executive and regulatory action to chip away at the law’s efficacy. Trump ended disputed cost-sharing subsidies to help insurers lower out-of-pocket costs for policyholders with low incomes. And the administration shortened the open enrollment period by half and slashed the budget for promoting the plans and paying people to help others navigate the often-confusing process of signing up.

Administration officials have complained that plans sold on the ACA marketplaces are not affordable, so they set new rules that allowed companies to sell competing “short-term” policies that were less expensive than ACA-sanctioned plans. But those plans are not required to provide comprehensive benefits or cover preexisting conditions.

Now, weeks before the election, federal officials are taking credit for premiums coming down, slightly, on ACA plans. “Premiums have gone down across all of our programs, including in healthcare.gov, which had been previously seeing double-digit rate increases,” Seema Verma, who runs Medicare, Medicaid and the ACA exchanges, told reporters in a Sept. 24 conference call.

Premiums have come down this past year, confirmed Sabrina Corlette, who tracks the ACA as co-director of the Center on Health Insurance Reforms at Georgetown University, but only after many of the Trump administration’s changes had driven them even higher. Insurers were spooked by the uncertainty — particularly in 2017, about whether the law would be repealed — and Trump’s cutoff of federal funding for subsidies.

“The bottom line is, rates have gone up under Trump,” Corlette said.

Women’s Reproductive Health

Before he was elected, Trump pledged his allegiance to anti-abortion activists, who in turn urged their supporters to vote for him. But unlike many previous GOP presidents who called themselves “pro-life” but pushed the issue to the back burner, Trump has delivered on many of his promises to abortion foes.

Foremost, Trump has nominated two justices to the Supreme Court who were supported by anti-abortion advocates. With the help of the GOP Senate, Trump has also placed 200 conservative judges on federal district and appeals courts.

While many of the policy proposals advanced by the Trump administration are tied up in court, the sheer volume of activity has been notable, outstripping in less than four years efforts by Presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush over each of their two-term presidencies.

Among those actions is a re-implementation and broadening of the “Mexico City Policy” that restricts foreign aid funding to organizations that “perform or promote” abortion. The administration has also moved to push Planned Parenthood out of the federal family planning program and Medicaid program. In addition, it has moved to make private insurance that covers abortion harder to purchase under the Affordable Care Act.

Trump’s efforts on women’s reproductive health reach beyond abortion to birth control. New rules would make it easier for employers with a “moral or religious objection” to decline to offer birth control as a health insurance benefit. Other rules would make it easier for health workers to decline to participate in any procedure to which they personally object.

COVID-19

Trump often claims that his decision in February to stop most travel from China was a critical factor in keeping the coronavirus pandemic in the U.S. from being worse than it has been. But the “travel ban” not only failed to stop many people from entering the U.S. from China anyway, scientists would later determine that the virus that spread widely in New York and other cities on the East Coast most likely came from Europe.

Although the White House has a coronavirus task force, the administration primarily has allowed states and localities to determine their own restrictions and timetables for closing and opening. The administration also had difficulty distributing medical supplies from a stockpile established for exactly this purpose. The president’s son-in-law and White House adviser, Jared Kushner, said at one point that the purpose of the stockpile was to supplement state supplies, not provide them.

Testing was also a problem. An early test developed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention turned out to be faulty, and despite continued promises by administration officials, testing remains less available six months into the pandemic than most experts recommend. Meanwhile, Trump has claimed repeatedly — and falsely — that if the U.S. did less testing there would be fewer cases of the virus.

But many public health observers say the administration’s biggest failing during the pandemic has been the lack of a single national message about the coronavirus and the best ways to prevent its spread.

More than 200,000 people in this country have died. Although the United States has only 4% of the world’s population, it has recorded 21% of the fatalities around the globe.

Prescription Drug Costs

Trump pledged to attack high drug costs as one of his main campaign themes in 2016 and again this year. But he has not had the success he hoped for.

In one of the administration’s biggest moves, the Department of Health and Human Services approved a rule last week that allows states to set up programs to import drugs from Canada, where they are cheaper because the Canadian government limits prices. Yet, it’s unclear if the program will get off the ground, given drug industry opposition and resistance from the Canadian government.

In his health care policy speech Thursday, Trump promised to send each Medicare beneficiary a $200 discount card over the next several months to help them buy prescription drugs. The initiative is being done under a specific innovation program and must not add to the deficit. Administration officials Friday could not answer where they will get the nearly $7 billion to pay for what is perceived by many observers as a last-ditch stunt to win votes from older Americans.

The president previously signed an executive order that seeks to tie the price Medicare pays for drugs to a lower international reference price. The administration, however, hasn’t released formal regulations to implement the policy, which could take years, and the policy is expected to be challenged in court by the drug industry.

In addition, Medicare will cap the price of insulin at $35 per prescription starting in 2021 for people getting coverage through some drug plans. More than 3 million Medicare beneficiaries use insulin to control their diabetes.

Trump also signed a law banning gag clauses used by health plans and pharmacy benefit managers to bar pharmacists from telling consumers about lower-priced drug options.

The administration’s plan to require drug companies to provide prices in pharmaceutical advertising has been beaten back in court.

The administration points to the increased number of generic drugs that have been approved since Trump was elected, but many of those drugs are not on the market. That’s because generic companies sometimes make deals with brand-name manufacturers to delay introducing lower-cost versions of their medicines.

At the same time, several bills the president supported to lower prices have stalled in Congress because of partisan differences and industry opposition.

“I don’t think there has been any meaningful action that has had meaningful effect on drug prices,” said Katie Gudiksen, a senior health policy researcher at The Source on Healthcare Price and Competition, a project of UC Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco.

Yet, she said, it’s possible Trump’s harsh criticism of the industry has had a chilling effect that led to lower prices.

Still, out-of-pocket costs for many individuals continue to climb as private and government insurance shifts more responsibility to the patient via higher cost sharing. Good Rx, an online site that tracks drug prices, noted this month that prescription drug prices have increased by 33% since 2014, faster than any other medical service or product.

Medicaid

The Trump administration has tried — but largely failed — to make many major changes to the state-federal health insurance program that covers more than 70 million low-income Americans.

Efforts by Republicans to repeal the Affordable Care Act would have ended the federal funding for the District of Columbia and the 38 states that expanded their programs for everyone with incomes under 138% of the federal poverty level, or about $17,609 for an individual. About 15 million people have gained coverage through the expansion.

Trump administration officials have argued that Medicaid should be reserved for the most vulnerable Americans, including traditional enrollees such as children, pregnant women and the disabled, and not used for non-disabled adults who gained coverage under the ACA’s expansion. Since Trump took office, seven states have expanded Medicaid — Idaho, Maine, Missouri, Oklahoma, Nebraska, Utah and Virginia.

In 2018, federal officials allowed states for the first time to require some enrollees to work as a condition for Medicaid coverage. The effort resulted in more than 18,000 Medicaid enrollees losing coverage in Arkansas before a federal judge halted implementation in that state and several others. The case has been appealed to the Supreme Court.

The administration also backed a move in Congress to change the way the federal government funds Medicaid. Since Medicaid’s inception in 1966, federal funding has increased with enrollment and health costs. Republicans would like to instead offer states annual block grants that critics say would dramatically reduce state funding but that proponents say would give states more flexibility to meet their needs.

When the congressional attempt to establish block grants failed, the administration tried through executive action to implement a process allowing states to opt into a block grant. Yet only one state — Oklahoma — applied for a waiver to move to block-grant funding, and it withdrew its request in August, two weeks after voters there narrowly passed a ballot initiative to expand Medicaid to 200,000 residents.

Medicaid enrollment fell from 75 million in January 2017 to about 71 million in March 2018. Then the pandemic took hold and caused millions of people to lose jobs and their health coverage. As of May, Medicaid enrollment nationally was 73.5 million.

The administration’s decision to expand the “public charge” rule, which would allow federal immigration officials to more easily deny permanent residency status to those who depend on certain public benefits, such as Medicaid, has discouraged many people from applying for Medicaid, said Judith Solomon, senior fellow with the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a research group based in Washington, D.C. 

Medicare

Seniors were among Trump’s most loyal voters in 2016, and he has promised repeatedly to protect the popular Medicare program. But not all his proposals would help the seniors who depend on it.

For example, invalidating the Affordable Care Act would eliminate new preventive benefits for Medicare enrollees and reopen the notorious “doughnut hole” that subjects many seniors to large out-of-pocket costs for prescription drugs, even if they have insurance.

Trump also signed several pieces of legislation that accelerate the depletion of the Medicare trust fund by cutting taxes that support the program. And his budget for fiscal 2021 proposed Medicare cuts totaling $450 billion.

At the same time, however, the administration implemented policies dramatically expanding payment for telehealth services as well as a kidney care initiative for the millions of patients who qualify for Medicare as a result of advanced kidney disease.

Surprise Billing

Trump in May 2019 promised to end surprise billing, which leaves patients on the hook for often-exorbitant bills from hospitals, doctors and other professionals who provide service not covered by insurance.

The problem typically occurs when patients receive care at health facilities that are part of their insurance network but are treated by practitioners who are not. Other sources of surprise billing include ambulance companies and emergency room physicians and anesthesiologists, among other specialties.

An effort to end the practice stalled in Congress as some industry groups pushed back against legislative proposals.

“The administration was supportive of the pretty consumer-friendly approaches, but obviously it doesn’t have any results to speak of,” said Loren Adler, associate director of the USC-Brookings Schaeffer Initiative for Health Policy in Los Angeles.

“At the end of the day, plenty of people in Congress did not really want to get something done,” he said.

Taking a different route, the administration finalized a rule last November that requires hospitals to provide price information to consumers. The rule will take effect Jan. 1. A federal judge shot down an attempt by hospitals to block the rule, although appeals are expected.

Brian Blase, a former Trump adviser, said this effort could soon help consumers. “Arguably, the No. 1 problem with surprise bills is that people have no idea what prices are before they receive care,” he said.

But Adler said the rule would have a “very minor effect” because most consumers don’t look at prices before deciding where to seek care — especially during emergencies.

Public Health/Opioids

Obesity and the opioid addiction epidemic were two of the nation’s biggest public health threats until the coronavirus pandemic hit this year.

The number of opioid deaths has shown a modest decline after a dramatic increase over the past decade. Overall, overdose death rates fell by 4% from 2017 to 2018 in the United States. New CDC data shows that, over the same period, death rates involving heroin also decreased by 4% and overdose death rates involving prescription drugs decreased by 13.5%.

The administration increased funding to expand treatment programs for people using heroin and expanded access to naloxone, a medication that can reverse an overdose, said Dr. Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association.

Meanwhile, the nation’s obesity epidemic is worsening. Obesity, a risk factor for severe effects of COVID-19, continues to become more common, according to the CDC.

Twelve states — Alabama, Arkansas, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee and West Virginia — have a self-reported adult obesity prevalence of 35% or more, up from nine states in 2018 and six in 2017.

Benjamin said some of the administration’s other policies, such as reducing access to food stamps and undermining clean air and water regulations, have made improving public health more difficult.

But the pandemic has been the major public health issue this administration has faced.

“We were doing a reasonable job addressing the opioid epidemic until COVID hit,” Benjamin said. “This shows the fragility of our health system, that we cannot manage these three epidemics at the same time.”

Kaiser Health News (KHN) is a national health policy news service. It is an editorially independent program of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation which is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.

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[bigyack-com]

Stephanie Grisham: Trump’s Press Secretary Who Doesn’t Meet the Press

It’s not every day that the White House press secretary is offered $200,000 to appear on camera and explain the president’s decisions — any of them — to the public.But as one of the most consequential weeks in President Trump’s tenure draws to a close, the world beyond the Beltway is beginning to notice that Stephanie Grisham — unlike her predecessors, colleagues and boss — does not appear to relish the talking-to-the-public part of her job.In six months as press secretary, Ms. Grisham has held zero briefings for reporters. When she does give interviews, she prefers to leave the West Wing via a side exit and is driven to a studio, rather than walk toward the cameras outside the White House and risk encountering a journalist along the way.Outside of appearances on Fox News, the One America News Network and the Sinclair Broadcast Group, she rarely goes on TV. Throughout her time in the job, Mr. Trump has wondered why she does not appear on television more often, according to two people familiar with his thinking.The country’s pre-eminent political spokesperson is virtually unknown to the public. And as the Trump administration scrambled this week to coordinate a public explanation for the killing of an Iranian general, Ms. Grisham kept mostly out of sight. The night that Iran launched missiles into Iraq, she surfaced on Twitter — after a briefing in the Situation Room with the president and other high-level advisers — to accuse CNN of fabricating sources.Even those sympathetic to the Trump administration seemed befuddled. “If ever there was a time for more briefings, it was the last few days,” said Ari Fleischer, a press secretary to President George W. Bush. He added, though, that briefings had become less useful, given the hostilities between the White House and its press corps.Ms. Grisham’s under-the-radar style has caused consternation in Washington, where protocol is prized. Now she is facing the kind of scrutiny she has tried to avoid.On Friday, 13 former White House and military officials — including press secretaries from the three administrations before Trump — published a letter calling for the restoration of press briefings. “Credible men and women, standing in front of those iconic backgrounds at the White House, State Department and Pentagon, are essential to the work the United States must do in the world,” they wrote.In response, Hogan Gidley, a White House spokesman, dismissed the letter writers as “D.C. establishment swamp creatures.”Ms. Grisham was not cited by name. But on CNN this week, Anderson Cooper devoted a prime-time segment to why taxpayers should pay her $183,000 salary. And in a viral Twitter post, the author Don Winslow pledged to donate $100,000 to charity if Ms. Grisham agreed to answer questions from the White House press corps. The novelist Stephen King tossed another $100,000 into the pot.Her response was curt.“If you have $200,000 to play with, why not just help children because it’s a good thing to do?” Ms. Grisham, 43, said in an email to Jake Tapper of CNN. Ms. Grisham did take questions on Wednesday from the Sinclair anchor Eric Bolling, a former Fox News personality. She accused the media of “mourning” the death of Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani and shrugged off skeptics of her low-profile style. “People aren’t sure of me because I’m not out at the podium, I’m not fighting with them, it’s not public, I’m not giving them their ratings,” she said, adding: “I’m as accessible as I can be.”It was vintage Trump White House: defiant, scorched-earth and unbothered about offending the journalists she is expected to interact with day to day.The view inside the White House is that Ms. Grisham — who also serves as communications director for both Mr. Trump and the first lady, Melania Trump — has improved her on-camera approach. In her early days as press secretary, Mr. Trump joked with aides that Ms. Grisham was “a studier,” and that “she learned that from the first lady,” according to a senior administration official who heard the exchange but was not authorized to comment on it publicly.“When it comes to certain topics I’ve certainly left much of the Q-and-A to subject matter experts,” Ms. Grisham said in an email. “They can answer technical questions and recognize the importance of classified information, which I believe better serves both the press and the public.”Mick Mulvaney, Mr. Trump’s acting chief of staff, was one of several White House officials who offered statements on Friday in praise of Ms. Grisham. “Stephanie has been doing exactly what the president wants and needs her to do,” he said. “I continue to be baffled by a press corps that fails to see access to the president as preferable to access to a 20-minute briefing from a spokesperson.”Mr. Mulvaney added: “We had a great week from a comms perspective.”Unlike her predecessors, Sean Spicer and Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who had relationships with the national press corps after years in high-level politics, Ms. Grisham is a relative newcomer to the world of Washington spin. An aide in the Arizona House of Representatives, she joined the Trump campaign as a “wrangler,” herding and feeding reporters on the trail. At the White House, she became Mrs. Trump’s spokeswoman.Representing Mr. Trump on the world stage is a different matter. Mr. Spicer and Ms. Sanders faced public scorn and savage “Saturday Night Live” imitations, not to mention the occasional ire of a president who believes he is his own best spokesman.Ms. Grisham was not spared such scrutiny: Reports surfaced of her two past arrests for driving under the influence. Later, she was praised for physically pushing for press access during a meeting between Mr. Trump and Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader, on the Korean Peninsula.Her allies say Ms. Grisham’s reluctance to expand her public profile is reasonable, given the way the job has evolved in the Trump era. “The job of the press secretary is to speak in the absence of the president,” Mr. Spicer said in an interview, noting that Mr. Trump frequently talks to journalists in informal settings like the Oval Office. “If the president is constantly engaging with the press, there’s not as much need to be out in front.”Still, Ms. Grisham’s lack of visibility has sparked speculation among allies of the president that she may modify or step back from her role at the conclusion of Mr. Trump’s impeachment trial in the Senate. She has said she has no plans to step back.Allies of Ms. Grisham said she spent a significant amount of her time working with individual reporters, and credited her with organizing an in-flux press shop. But some White House reporters complained that she was less accessible than her predecessors.Though Ms. Sanders sparred with the press corps, journalists often described her as helpful behind the scenes. Reporters helped organize a cocktail party in her honor when she took the job; after she was mocked at the White House Correspondents Dinner in 2018, journalists surrounded her at a reception to offer sympathies.Ms. Grisham has not cultivated that level of respect, but it is not clear she seeks it, either. Inside the West Wing, she is viewed as fiercely loyal to the president and his family — and willing to channel Mr. Trump’s slashing language and laissez-faire approach to facts.In an op-ed in September for The Washington Examiner, Ms. Grisham singled out The Washington Post for criticism and added a litany of complaints about coverage she deemed biased. “No wonder,” she wrote, with Trumpian flourish, “the national media’s popularity sits somewhere between smallpox and the plague.” Read the full article

[plusorminuscongress]

New story in Politics from Time: Former Rep. John Conyers, One of Congress’ Longest-Serving Members, Dies at 90

(DETROIT) — Former U.S. Rep. John Conyers, one of the longest-serving members of Congress whose resolutely liberal stance on civil rights made him a political institution in Washington and back home in Detroit despite several scandals, has died. He was 90.

Conyers, among the high-profile politicians toppled by sex harassment allegations in 2017, died at his home on Sunday, said Detroit police spokesman Cpl. Dan Donakowski. The death “looks like natural causes,” Donakowski added.

Known as the dean of the Congressional Black Caucus, which he helped found, Conyers became one of only six black House members when he won his first election by just 108 votes in 1964. The race was the beginning of more than 50 years of election dominance: Conyers regularly won elections with more than 80% of the vote, even after his wife went to prison for taking a bribe.

That voter loyalty helped Conyers freely speak his mind. He took aim at both Republicans and fellow Democrats: He said then-President George W. Bush “has been an absolute disaster for the African-American community” in 2004, and in 1979 called then-President Jimmy Carter “a hopeless, demented, honest, well-intentioned nerd who will never get past his first administration.”

Throughout his career, Conyers used his influence to push civil rights. After a 15-year fight, he won passage of legislation declaring the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday a national holiday, first celebrated in 1986. He regularly introduced a bill starting in 1989 to study the harm caused by slavery and the possibility of reparations for slaves’ descendants. That bill never got past a House subcommittee.

The Rev. Jesse Jackson said Sunday that without Conyers there would be no King holiday — “no doubt about that.”

“He was one of the most consequential congressmen,” Jackson said.

His district office in Detroit employed civil rights legend Rosa Parks from 1965 until her retirement in 1988. In 2005, Conyers was among 11 people inducted to the International Civil Rights Walk of Fame.

But after a nearly 53-year career, he became the first Capitol Hill politician to lose his job in the torrent of sexual misconduct allegations sweeping through the nation’s workplaces. A former staffer alleged she was fired because she rejected his sexual advances, and others said they’d witnessed Conyers inappropriately touching female staffers or requesting sexual favors. He denied the allegations but eventually stepped down, citing health reasons.

“My legacy can’t be compromised or diminished in any way by what we’re going through now,” Conyers told a Detroit radio station from a hospital where he’d been taken after complaining of lightheadedness in December 2017. “This, too, shall pass. My legacy will continue through my children.”

Conyers was born and grew up in Detroit, where his father, John Conyers Sr., was a union organizer in the automotive industry and an international representative with the United Auto Workers union. He insisted that his son, a jazz aficionado from an early age, not become a musician.

The younger Conyers heeded the advice, but jazz remained, he said, one of his “great pleasures.” He sponsored legislation to forgive the $1.6 million tax debt of band leader Woody Herman’s estate and once kept a standup bass in his Washington office.

Before heading to Washington, Conyers served in the National Guard and with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers during the Korean War supervising repairs of military aircraft. He earned his bachelor’s and law degrees from Wayne State University in the late 1950s. His political aspirations were honed while working as a legislative assistant from 1958 to 1961 to U.S. Rep. John Dingell, a fellow Michigan Democrat who, when he retired in 2014 at age 88, was Congress’ longest-serving member. That mantle then was passed onto Conyers.

Dingell died in February.

Soon after being elected to Congress, Conyers’ leadership at home — in the segregated streets of Detroit — would be tested. Parts of the city were burned during riots in July 1967 that were sparked by hostilities between black residents and Detroit’s mostly white police force, and by the cramped living conditions in black neighborhoods.

Read more: Rep. John Conyers on Detroit in 1967: ‘I Couldn’t Stop It’

Conyers climbed onto a flatbed truck and appealed to black residents to return to their homes, but he was shouted down. His district office was gutted by fire the next day. But the plight of the nation’s inner cities would remain his cause.

“In Detroit you’ve got high unemployment, a poverty rate of at least 30%, schools not in great shape, high illiteracy, poor families not safe from crime, without health insurance, problems with housing,” he told The Associated Press in 2004. “You can’t fix one problem by itself — they’re all connected.”

He was fiercely opposed to Detroit’s finances being taken over by a state-appointed emergency manager as the city declared bankruptcy in 2013. Conyers, whose district included much of Detroit, sought a federal investigation and congressional hearings, arguing it was “difficult to identify a single instance” where such an arrangement, where local officials are stripped of most of their power, succeeds.

Conyers was the only House Judiciary Committee member to have sat in on two impeachment hearings: He supported a 1972 resolution recommending President Richard Nixon’s impeachment for his conduct of the Vietnam War, but when the House clashed in 1998 over articles of impeachment against President Bill Clinton, Conyers said: “Impeachment was designed to rid this nation of traitors and tyrants, not attempts to cover up an extramarital affair.”

Conyers also had scandals of his own. In 2009, his wife Monica Conyers, a Detroit city councilwoman largely elected on the strength of her husband’s last name, pleaded guilty to bribery. The case was related to a sludge hauling contract voted on by the City Council, and she spent nearly two years in prison.

Three years earlier, the House ethics committee closed a three-year investigation of allegations that Conyers’ staff worked on political campaigns and was ordered to baby-sit for his two children and run his personal errands. He admitted to a “lack of clarity” with staffers and promised changes.

But he couldn’t survive the last scandal. An ethics committee launched a review after a former longtime staffer said Conyers’ office paid her more than $27,000 under a confidentiality agreement to settle a complaint in 2015. She alleged she was fired because she rejected his sexual advances, and other said they’d witnesses inappropriate behavior.

Conyers initially said he looked forward to vindicating himself and his family, but he announced his immediate retirement in December 2017 after fellow Democrats called for his resignation. The chorus included Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, the House’s top Democrat.

Conyers became chairman of the House Judiciary Committee when Democrats regained the House majority in 2006. He oversaw 2007 hearings into the White House’s role in the firings of eight federal prosecutors and 2009 hearings on how the NFL dealt with head injuries to players.

Conyers frequently swam against the prevailing political currents during his time in Congress. He backed, for example, anti-terrorism legislation that was far less sweeping than a plan pushed by then-Attorney General John Ashcroft in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

He was also an early supporter in 2007 of then-Sen. Barack Obama, who was expected by some in the Congressional Black Caucus to push public health insurance, sharp funding increases for urban development and other initiatives long blocked by Republicans.

“We want him to stand strong,” Conyers said in 2009.

Conyers enjoyed his greatest support back home in Detroit — except when he tried to venture into local politics. Conyers took on 16-year incumbent Mayor Coleman A. Young in 1989, launching his bid with the statement: “Look out, Big Daddy, I’m home.” But a poorly organized campaign helped him finish a mere third in the primary. He ran again for mayor when Young retired in 1993, and lost again.

Along with his wife, Conyers is survived by two sons, John III and Carl.

___

Associated Press writer Ed White in Detroit contributed.

By COREY WILLIAMS / AP on October 28, 2019 at 12:11PM

[libertariantaoist]

If the New York Times is to be believed  – a problematic proposition – then it looks as if Trump  Derangement Syndrome has gone international. In a front page article  headlined “As Trump Era Dawns, A Sense of Uncertainty Grips the World,” we are  told:

“The Germans are angry. The Chinese are downright  furious. Leaders of NATO are nervous, while their counterparts at the European  Union are alarmed.”

Oh heavens-to-Betsy,  whatever shall we do?

So what’s the source of this latest Trumpanic?  It’s an  interview with Tory mandarin Michael  Gove and Kai  Diekmann, a former editor of the German newspaper Bild, in which  the President-elect reiterates what he’s been saying to the American people  for the past year, and on the basis of which he won the election: US foreign  policy is going to change, and in a big way.

However, to Times reporter Steve Erlanger,  this all comes as a big revelation, evidence that “Trump has again focused his  penchant for disruption on the rest of the world.” Oh, the poor babies! Perhaps  they need to find a safe space in which to park themselves for the next four-to-eight  years.

This being the Times, there’s the requisite  Russia-baiting:

“No one knows where exactly he is headed  –  except that the one country he  is not criticizing is Russia and its president, Vladimir V. Putin.  For now. And that he is an enthusiastic cheerleader of Brexit and an unaffiliated Britain. For now.”

If this reads like a paragraph torn out of one of the Hillary Clinton campaign’s  strategy memos, well then consider the source. And speaking of the source, what  exactly did Trump say in this supposedly “disruptive” interview that has the  Powers That Be in such a tizzy?

They ask him about Brexit, and he endorses it, as he has in  the past. They ask him if he’d vote for Angela Merkel in the upcoming German  elections, and he demurs: “I don’t know who she’s running against.” Besides  which, isn’t it a bit unseemly for an American President-elect to endorse a  candidate for office in a foreign country? It surely would be in bad taste if  the situation were reversed. They press him on Merkel’s open invitation to the  entire nation of Syria to emigrate to Germany: was it “insane,” as he said during  the campaign? Or has he changed his mind for some reason? He reiterates his  often-stated view that “it was a big mistake for Germany,” and then broadens  out his answer to include an analysis of the regional chaos caused by the administration  of George W. Bush, whom he doesn’t mention by name but it’s clear where he places  the blame:

“Look, this whole thing should never have happened. Iraq should not have  been attacked in the first place, all right? It was one of the worst decisions,  possibly the worst decision ever made in the history of our country. We’ve unleashed  – it’s like throwing rocks into a beehive. It’s one of the great messes of all  time. I looked at something, uh, I’m not allowed to show you because it’s classified  – but, I just looked at Afghanistan and you look at the Taliban – and you take  a look at every, every year its more, more, more, you know they have the different  colours – and you say, you know – what’s going on?”

Those pathetic Republican “foreign policy experts” who are now complaining  about being on an “enemies list” kept by the Trump transition team deserve to  be on that list: they, after all, were the architects of the ongoing disaster  described by Trump, and he clearly doesn’t care to reward failure. This is precisely  why the GOP foreign policy Establishment campaigned so hard against him: that  these losers are now locked out of the administration is good news indeed.

More good news: Trump is  taking direct and very public aim at their patrons, the Military-Industrial  Complex that Dwight David Eisenhower so presciently warned us  against. Even as he pledges to upgrade the US military, the President-elect  clearly knows who his enemies are:

“Boeing and Lockheed Martin are you know big contractors for this country  and we have an F-35 program that has been very, very severely over budget and  behind schedule. Hundreds of billions of dollars over budget and seven years  behind schedule. And, uh, they got to shape up.”

Employees of both Boeing and Lockheed-Martin  gave record  amounts to the Clinton campaign: indeed, the entire industry went for Hillary  in a big way.

Asked about his top priority as commander-in-chief, Trump had one word to say:  “ISIS.” Asked how he’d deal with ISIS, he demurred. Yet it isn’t at all hard  to imagine what his strategy will be: he’s not saying we should “get along with  Russia” because he’s a secret Putinite, as our crazed conspiracy theorists would  have it. Clearly he means to enlist Russia’s support in what he envisions as  a short but effective campaign to eliminate ISIS entirely, at least when it  comes to the Syrian “Caliphate.” After all, Russia is already in Syria in a  big way: and Trump’s hostility to the Obama administration’s campaign to overthrow  Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad indicates he’s likely to align with both Syria  and Russia to restore some sort of order to the region. As to what degree he’ll  farm out this task to the Russians and the Syrians, we’ll see. We’ll also see  how “quick” this joint campaign will be: history does not bode well, in any  case. Yet it’s clear he wants to minimize our involvement.

This segues into what is the most controversial  part of the interview:

“Q: Talking about Russia, you know that Angela Merkel understands Putin  very well because he is fluent in German, she is fluent in Russian, and they  have known each other for a long time – but who would you trust more, Angela  Merkel or Vladimir Putin?

“Trump: Well, I start off trusting both  –  but let’s see how long that lasts.  It may not last long at all.”

Oh, how the “experts”  and the political  class went ballistic over that one! How dare Trump equate our “ally”  Germany with our evil “adversary,” the perfidious Putin! And yet the reality  is that neither Germany nor Russia is inherently either friend or foe: they  are simply actors on the world stage whose relations to the US are based entirely  on what is in America’s interests. As George Washington warned in his Farewell Address:

“[N]othing is more essential than that permanent,  inveterate antipathies against particular nations, and passionate attachments  for others, should be excluded; and that, in place of them, just and amicable  feelings towards all should be cultivated.”

Trump’s “realist” value-free characterization  of our relations with the leaders of both Germany and Russia represents a return  to the foreign policy of the Founders, from which we have strayed to our great  detriment. It is, as Trump proclaimed so often during the campaign, a foreign  policy that puts America first.

As he’s being interrogated by a Brit and a German,  much of the interview deals with Europe, and specifically policy toward Russia.  Asked if he can “understand why eastern Europeans fear Putin and Russia,” he  says “Sure, oh sure,” and then goes very quickly into a critique of NATO, which  he says is “obsolete.” It’s obvious he thinks the fears of the east Europeans  are vastly overblown, as indeed they are. Trump complains that “the countries  aren’t paying their fair share. So we’re supposed to protect countries but a  lot of these countries aren’t paying what they’re supposed to be paying, which  I think is very unfair to the United States. With that being said, NATO is very  important to me.”

Yes, but how important is “very important” in TrumpWorld? Europe’s welfare  cases shudder as they contemplate the answer.

Gove avers that “Britain is paying,” and Trump agrees, but says: “There’s five  countries that are paying what they’re supposed to. Five. It’s not much, from  twenty-two.” And as Trump no doubt realizes, the costs of NATO involve more  than money: we are obligated to defend twenty-two countries in case they are  attacked. That’s twenty-two tripwires that could set off a major war: the price  of that is incalculable. Is it worth it?

Trump clearly has his doubts, and it’s this that has the Euro-weenies in an  uproar. After all, they’ve been coasting along on Uncle Sam’s dime for all these  years, financing extensive welfare programs for their own citizens as well as  a horde of migrants: the idea that the gravy train is going to dry up has them  up in arms.

And of course the issue of NATO is really about the Russian question – is Putin  really intent on annexing his “near abroad” and re-establishing the Soviet empire?  This nonsensical fantasy, based on nothing but rejuvenated cold war hysteria,  is clearly doubted by Trump and his advisors. So when he’s asked if he supports  the continuation of European sanctions against Russia, Trump replies:

“Well, I think you know – people have to get together and people have to  do what they have to do in terms of being fair. OK? They have sanctions on Russia  – let’s see if we can make some good deals with Russia. For one thing, I think  nuclear weapons should be way down and reduced very substantially, that’s part  of it. But you do have sanctions and Russia’s hurting very badly right now because  of sanctions, but I think something can happen that a lot of people are gonna  benefit.”

In short: sanctions can be ended as part of a grand bargain with Russia to  reduce nuclear weapons arsenals on both sides and guarantee European  security. Ambitious? – Yes. Praiseworthy? – Certainly. Can he do it? Only by  overcoming the War Party’s opposition in Congress, led by Mad John McCain and  joined by the now-Russophobic war-crazed Democrats out to obstruct anything  and everything Trump does, even at the cost of world peace.

It’s absolutely wonderful how Trump’s offhand remarks rub the commentariat  the wrong way, especially because what he says is indisputable. Asked which  number he dials if he wants to talk to Europe – a riff off a remark by Henry  Kissinger – he names Merkel on the grounds that “you look at the European Union  and it’s Germany. Basically a vehicle for Germany. That’s why I thought the  UK was so smart in getting out.”

Zing! Poor Angela Merkel – she can’t get no respect!

Elaborating his view of the EU, Trump averred:

“People, countries want their own identity and the UK wanted its own identity  but, I do believe this, if they hadn’t been forced to take in all of the refugees,  so many, with all the problems that it, you know, entails, I think that you  wouldn’t have a Brexit. It probably could have worked out but, this was the  final straw, this was the final straw that broke the camel’s back.

“I think people want, people want their own identity, so if you ask me,  others, I believe others will leave.”

We can’t forget that the interviewers are Europeans who have been sucking at  the American teat since the end of World War II, as one of the final questions  makes all too clear:

“Your policy platform of America First implies you’re happy to see the rest  of the world suffer. Do you?”

Spoken like a true dependent, and yet Trump lit right into them with the unvarnished  truth:

“I don’t want it to be a disruption – I love the world, I want the world  to be good but we can’t go – I mean look at what’s happening to our country  – we are $20 trillion [in debt] – we don’t know what we’re doing – our military  is weak – we’re in wars that never end, we’re in Afghanistan now 17 years …  it’s the longest war we’ve ever been in.”

Endless wars, endless payments to feckless “allies,” endless hectoring by these  ungrateful wretches who accuse us of wanting to “see the rest of the world suffer”  – Trump would put an end to all this, and I have no doubt that the American  people support him wholeheartedly. Shall we take a poll on the popularity of  the US bearing the brunt of Europe’s “defense” against an enemy that disappeared  in 1989? Shall we have a national referendum on the prospect of going to war  over whether Montenegro – a nation the size of the metropolitan New York area  – shall have a “pro-Western” government?

If you wonder why our “intelligence community” is waging open warfare against  the forty-fifth  President of these United States, you have only to look at  this interview. He is challenging the “liberal” international order which has  paid out liberal amounts of moolah and unearned prestige to a whole class of  government contractors, thinktank poobahs, useless spooks, and their ancillary  business enterprises for decades.

Without this “international order,” we’re told, the world will be plunged into  “uncertainty,” if not complete chaos. This is a lie. The only uncertainty that  Trump’s America First foreign policy imposes is uncertainty as to where the  war profiteers’ next meal ticket is coming from. And that, dear reader, is a  cause not for panic but for celebration.

[mattkennard]

Guns for hire in Hereford: inside England's unlikely global security hub

Published: Guardian (10 January 2017)

There is a mysterious feel to Hereford, the picture-book English cathedral city on the border with Wales. When I stop people in the street to ask if they know the city houses a massive private security industry that operates in conflict situations all over the world, some say they don’t even know what private security is.

But many other residents have military or intelligence connections themselves. One man tells me: “I am local but I don’t want to say what I do.” He continues: “A lot of stuff goes on in Hereford; it’s a right little hub. There’s a lot of very deep stuff here, but it’s kept very hush hush.”

The world’s private military-security industry is always controversial, with critics arguing that it operates in a lawless regulatory climate and undermines the very fundamentals of democracy: the idea that only an accountable state has the right to the legitimate use of force.

Many Hereford locals remain unaware that this burgeoning industry is being developed on their doorstep. There is very little in the local newspaper, The Hereford Times, on the subject, and even less in the national media. But with new groups emerging to represent the security and defence industries in the city, that could be about to change.

A recent report from War on Want called the UK the globe’s “mercenary kingpin”, and found that no fewer than 14 private military and security companies are based in Hereford. That number is growing, and has made this 60,000-strong city a major hub for an industry which has boomed during the “war on terror”.

The business model involves providing “soldiers for hire” to companies and governments around the world, to protect assets and important people from criminals and terrorists (and sometimes dissidents). It is a multibillion dollar industry operating in virtually every country in the world. Few outsiders, however, would expect quaint old Hereford to be a key player.

As the rain comes down and evening descends, it starts to feel like we’re in a Kafka novel, and there’s a conspiracy going on: everyone is part of this strange ex-military, ex-intelligence milieu, but no one can speak about it.

One man who won’t give his name says he “used to work for the Ministry of Defence in the security business … Hereford has become a private military centre because of the SAS,” he explains. “There’s other units too, and a lot of them tend to settle here after they’ve finished their time, so they go into that sort of field.”

Another woman I speak to doesn’t know what a private military company is, but agrees: “There’s a lot of people involved in the SAS or military here, so yes, people will know what is happening. On the private military industry, lots of people here are probably profiting from it – so they wouldn’t be complaining about it, and it wouldn’t be in the newspaper.

“You don’t see soldiers around in uniform here,” she adds, “but they are all over the place in their civilian clothing. And if there’s a pub fight, it’s always shut down pretty quickly by the SAS guys ...”

Walking around central Hereford, with its thatched-roof houses and grand Edwardian offices, it’s hard to believe there are companies here that are intimately involved in many of the most dangerous regions in the world, from Somalia to Iraq.

On St Owen’s Street, in the heart of the city opposite its grand registry office, two private security companies, Octaga and GardaWorld, have offices in a twee redbrick set of houses. The latter has work in places as diverse as Haiti, Libya and Yemen – yet on a frosty winter evening standing outside their headquarters, it’s hard to feel further away from those places.

The main reason for Hereford’s position at the centre of global conflict is its location right next to the village of Credenhill, where Britain’s Special Air Service – the SAS – is based. There is, of course, no official acknowledgment of this fact, but when you drive into Credenhill and pass the RAF base, you see the layers of armed police and military manning the entrance.

Signs invoking the Official Secrets Act and banning photos are tacked to the walls of buildings here. In 2010, the undercover nature of the base became controversial when Google Maps refused to take off images of it on the maps of the area.

The War on Want report noted that “at least 46 companies [throughout the UK] employ former members of the UK Special Forces”. Since George W Bush launched the war on terror in 2001, it has become the UK’s – maybe even Europe’s – principal location for private security and military companies, or PMSCs, as they are known in the business. Now, there is a move to formalise and consolidate this community of security services in the city, under the banner of the Herefordshire Security & Defence Group (HSDG).

“If someone had said to me that British private security companies have ex-intelligence or special forces in their membership, obviously I wouldn’t have been surprised by that,” says Sam Raphael, a senior lecturer in International Relations at Westminster University and author of the War on Want report. “But what is surprising is the extent to which that’s the case; the sheer number of operations and outfits [in the UK] that are employing ex-special forces, who have operated in a shadowy world working for the state, and now continue to operate in a shadowy world.”

Hereford’s military history

The military imbues Hereford. In the local Waterstones, SAS books get pride of place in the main display; there are shops selling military gear, and leaflets everywhere advertising the Military Wives Choirs’ “Home for Christmas” concert at the cathedral.

The city has a long military history and always adapted to the changing nature of war. The SAS base at Credenhill was previously RAF Hereford. In the first world war, the Herefordshire Regiment was a Territorial Force – but it was one of the first to volunteer for overseas service, and went on to serve in Egypt, Palestine and France.

On 27 July 1942, the Luftwaffe bombed the Rotherwas Munitions Factory on the outskirts of Hereford: a site which is now an industrial estate housing a private security company.

The SAS was formed in North Africa in 1941 by David Stirling, who had grown weary of the failures of large operations and wanted to switch to faster-moving, four-man patrols. Since 1960, 22 SAS, the regular army unit, has been based in Hereford. In 2000, the regiment moved to the RAF base at Credenhill. It is thought to have four operational squadrons, each comprising around 60 men.

Most of the private security companies in Hereford have been started by ex-special forces soldiers. The PMSCs offices are located all around Hereford, from quaint old houses to industrial estates on the edge of the city.

The walk from the centre of Hereford to the offices of Ambrey Risk – a private security company focused on maritime protection against modern-day pirates, for example – is a full-on country affair. About five minutes of walking outside the city brings you to a bridge jutting across the River Wye, with greenery as far as the eye can see. This continues until you reach the Thorn Business Park.

Inside Ambrey’s nondescript office, 40 people are manning the phones, working on securing the assets of some of the biggest companies in the world in some of the most dangerous places in the world, from Somalia to Nigeria. When they look outside their window, however, all they can see is freight lorries standing on a rainy, windswept industrial estate on the outskirts of Hereford. It’s a bizarre juxtaposition of worlds.

John Thompson was in the parachute regiment from 2003 to 2009, working within the special forces support group for most of that time. He then worked for a big international security company in Africa, before setting up Ambrey Risk in 2010. Thompson says he set up shop in Hereford because it’s where he is from (he’s a local boy), but also because “there is a small pool of security companies here that are born out of people being in the regiment, and there is a small mini-hub of security and defence companies in Hereford. It’s a good place to be if you want to be in this line of work; one of the few areas in the country where there is a small cluster of companies that do what we do.”

Thompson is now pushing to bring the private security companies in Hereford tighter together. He recently helped set up the HSDG, which will meet regularly to create coordination and synergies between the industry in the city. The group calls itself “an association of security and defence companies”, formed by local Herefordshire companies with the aim of “raising significantly the commercial and industrial capacity of this niche and specialist sector in Herefordshire, for the benefit of group members and the wider community”.

“There are 15 companies locally,” Thompson says. “We are probably the biggest in terms of these companies – but we know pretty much all the others, and the HSDG is our first attempt to get everyone talking, and working together both to win work and to share our ideas and information.”

Guns for hire

Hereford is a particularly attractive location because office space is cheap and readily available, and because the city sits in the middle of huge expanses of countryside, where residential training courses can be easily organised. One of these training centres lies on the outskirts of Hereford in the sleepy village of Madley: population 1,200. It’s the closest thing to the Postman Pat bucolic idyll one can imagine, with the Red Lion pub, parish church and post office the only signs of life outside of the grazing cows in the surrounding fields.

But nearby stands an unremarkable, converted barn which, every six weeks, is filled with prospective recruits for the global private security industry from places as diverse as Eastern Europe, the US and Latin America. Here’s where some of the next generation of “guns for hire” start their journey – from those guarding VIPs in war zones to corporate assets in the developing world. Madley and Baghdad couldn’t seem further away, but they are intimately linked by conflict.

John Geddes is the founder and owner of Ronin Concepts, a private security company set up in 2004. Geddes spent his long military career in the parachute regiment and SAS, before quitting and going to Iraq as a private soldier with British company Olive Group. He became disillusioned with the quality of those applying for jobs, and saw an opportunity to move into training.

“In 2004 I jacked in Iraq and came back to the UK, and threw all my money into creating Ronin Concepts,” he tells me as we stand inside the converted barn.

Geddes says Hereford is the kind of place where, if he goes out, he will see other people from PMSCs and say hello. It’s a community.

“For instance, we just did a venue in Glasgow, an executive protection job,” Geddes says. “I raised a team of six in Hereford and took them up to Glasgow; five days’ work, and we flew back yesterday – it was fantastic.” He then admits: “We’re all friends, but it’s a quiet competition.”

Inside the barn, dummies lie on the floor with plastic heads strewn around. The main wall has a big screen on which Geddes puts his training videos, showing live-fire training in Poland and the US (he has training properties in both countries as well).

Geddes explains the unlikely success of the UK in dominating this multibillion-dollar industry. “The answer goes back a couple of hundred years to the rise of the East India Company, which was a private military army. They occupied huge tracts of the globe, and mostly were ex-services patched throughout the empire.”

Now Hereford finds itself at the centre of this industry, whose continued growth carries deep significance for the future of global conflict. “Private security and military companies mean that being able to constrain the use of force and making sure it complies with morality and the law becomes increasingly hard,” says Sam Raphael, the academic who has highlighted the UK’s – and Hereford’s – leading role. “Holding states to account, and ensuring regular armies use force in proportionate and legal ways, is hard enough – never mind the number of different actors we see proliferating now.”

A number of these private-sector actors are using Hereford as the stepping stone into a world of hyper-violence and big money – to the discomfort of some locals, at least. As one exclaimed when told about the industry in the city’s midst: “How is that legal? That’s not legal, surely!”

While the legality of these industries is not at issue, there is no specific regulatory framework – and a visit to this sleepy cathedral city raises many questions in these turbulent times. 

[biofunmy]

Hostage Affairs Envoy Takes On an Unlikely Case: ASAP Rocky

It started with a cordial phone call to the Swedish prime minister. It escalated into a series of tweets that expressed disappointment, first with the prime minister, then with Sweden itself.

Now President Trump’s bid to rescue a rap star, ASAP Rocky, who is being held in a Stockholm jail, has spiraled into a situation the administration has apparently decided requires a diplomat typically used to free hostages from war-torn countries.

But the country in question has not been touched by war in more than 70 years, and Rocky is not a hostage — or, in any case, not by any commonly accepted definition of the term. He is a defendant in a criminal case, accused of assaulting a man on a Stockholm street a month ago.

[ASAP Rocky claims self-defense at his trial.]

Mr. Trump’s special presidential envoy for hostage affairs, Robert C. O’Brien, first appeared on Tuesday in the courtroom in Stockholm, where Rocky and two members of his entourage are standing trial. Mr. O’Brien said in an interview on Tuesday that President Trump had asked him to come to support the defendants.

“I’ll be here until they come home,” he said.

It’s an uncommon task for a diplomat whose job is to advise senior government officials on hostage situations overseas. Mr. O’Brien has spent his tenure trying to free Americans from places like Afghanistan, Yemen, Libya and Syria.

His unlikely path to Sweden is the result of two ultra-famous celebrities having a direct line to Mr. Trump, a commander-in-chief who has been otherwise shunned by the entertainment elite. Mr. Trump views the opportunity to free Rocky as a way to earn praise from critics and news outlets he feels treat him unfairly, as well as add another American to his list of released captives, according to two people familiar with the situation. The latest bruising news cycle includes widespread criticism of his Twitter posts that attacked several congresswomen of color and a veteran congressional leader who is black.

The mission in which Mr. O’Brien is now involved began in early July when the rapper Kanye West suggested to his wife, Kim Kardashian West, who has made frequent visits to the White House in the name of criminal justice reform, that she reach out to the White House on Rocky’s behalf, according to two people familiar with the process. In recent weeks, Rocky’s team has also had a direct line to Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser, who delivers progress updates to the president.

Embracing the rapper’s case, Mr. Trump deployed his diplomatic and social media influence. He tasked his secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, who oversees Mr. O’Brien, to work with the Swedish authorities; urged the Swedish prime minister, Stefan Lofven, to intervene in the case; and circulated the hashtag “#FreeRocky” on his Twitter account.

But Mr. Lofven declined to get involved, and so Mr. O’Brien, hostage affairs specialist, was in court to observe the trial of a 30-year-old Grammy-nominated rapper whose real name is Rakim Mayers and who says he and his entourage beat up a man on a Stockholm street because they feared he was going to attack them.

Whether appropriate or not, the framing of Rocky’s case as akin to a hostage situation appears to have taken hold at the White House. A senior administration official said the main motivation for Mr. Trump is continuing his track record of getting hostages freed. Mr. Trump has taken pride in the freeing of hostages from Iran, North Korea and Turkey, including Andrew Brunson, a pastor who had been held by Turkish authorities for years.

Engaging in Rocky’s case, according to another person familiar with Mr. Trump’s past hostage-release efforts, is less about getting attention from two celebrities who are kind to him and more about its being “something he can do that no one can really criticize him for.”

In the courtroom Thursday, as Rocky gave his account of the street brawl, saying he was acting in self-defense, Mr. O’Brien sat in a gray suit next to his chief of staff. Asked whether this case was appropriate for a hostage affairs envoy to oversee, he said, “The president sent me here, so it’s totally appropriate.”

“I also help free people that are held by governments,” Mr. O’Brien told reporters, “so unjustly detained Americans.”

When asked whether he’d ever previously been sent to monitor a criminal case, he responded: “When foreign governments hold Americans they always claim it’s a criminal case.”

He was more conciliatory in a Twitter post he sent Thursday.

Mr. O’Brien is the second person to serve as hostage affairs envoy, a position President Obama created in 2015 as part of an overhaul of how the U.S. government handled hostages. Starting in mid-2014 when the Islamic State was beheading captives, family members of hostages complained of confusing policies and dysfunctional communication by various government agencies and urged the government to create a single, senior-level “hostage czar.”

James C. O’Brien, no relation and the first person to hold the position, said in a phone interview that his successor’s efforts in Sweden did not fit the job’s original framework. The envoy, he said, should work to free Americans being held without good reason, oftentimes when there are no diplomatic alternatives.

There has to have been another way of handing the situation, James O’Brien said, especially since Sweden is an ally who could be a partner in working to release an actual hostage.

“The envoy’s presence in Sweden is a tweet come to life,” James O’Brien, the vice chairman of Albright Stonebridge Group, a global consulting firm, said.

On Wednesday, the United States Embassy in Stockholm asked that the three defendants be released from detention and allowed to reside at a hotel for the duration of the trial, according to a spokeswoman for the Swedish Prosecution Authority, who called the request unusual.

The prosecutors responded in a letter that the embassy will receive Friday, the spokeswoman, Karin Rosander, said.

“The letter states that this is not how it works in Sweden,” Ms. Rosander continued.

In an administration bent on unraveling many of Mr. Obama’s legacies, the hostage affairs envoy is one Mr. Trump has kept. Robert O’Brien and the Trump administration have managed to free about a dozen hostages held in captivity overseas, using diplomatic leverage or relying on countries such as France and the United Arab Emirates to carry out high-risk military raids in Africa and Yemen.

In working on the release of the U.S. Air Force veteran Jamie Sponaugle from Libya, Mr. O’Brien, 53, negotiated with Khalifa Hifter, commander of the Libyan National Army. He was also involved with the freeing of Luis Andrade, an American citizen who served as the head of the Colombian government’s infrastructure agency before he was put on house arrest.

Joe Miller, whose brother-in-law remains missing after his abduction in Afghanistan in 2016, said that he has dealt with Mr. O’Brien and that he appears to genuinely care about the hostages and their families. A central part of the envoy’s role is communicating with the family members of hostages to make sure they’re getting clear information about the status of their relative.

“He has a tough job,” Mr. Miller said. “He’s not only trying to negotiate with foreign powers and criminal organizations but he has to navigate his government’s bureaucracy.”

Mr. O’Brien, a founding partner of a boutique law firm based in Los Angeles, had served in various foreign affairs positions under other presidents. In 2005, President George W. Bush nominated him as a representative to the United Nations General Assembly, where he worked with John Bolton, Mr. Trump’s national security adviser, who was then the U.N. ambassador. Under both the Bush and Obama administrations, Mr. O’Brien worked on an initiative to train lawyers and judges in Afghanistan.

In his 2016 book, “While America Slept: Restoring American Leadership to a World in Crisis,” Mr. O’Brien details what he deems to be the foreign policy failures of the Obama administration and the potential for the Republican Party to regain power. Mr. O’Brien — who said he advised the presidential candidacies of Mitt Romney, Scott Walker and Ted Cruz — can sometimes sound like Mr. Trump in his prose, writing in the book, “The GOP is winning and will win in the future because it promotes freedom.”

Mr. Trump has been particularly sensitive to criticism over his hostage-negotiation methods. When a story in April said the administration had been billed $2 million for the release of Otto Warmbier, a student who died just days after being returned in a coma by North Korea in 2017, he responded on Twitter.

“No money was paid to North Korea for Otto Warmbier, not two Million Dollars, not anything else,” the tweet said.

The president added that the country’s “cheif” hostage negotiator — who would have been Mr. O’Brien at the time — had praised his abilities.

“‘President Donald J. Trump is the greatest hostage negotiator that I know of in the history of the United States. 20 hostages, many in impossible circumstances, have been released in last two years,’” Mr. Trump wrote on Twitter, seemingly quoting Mr. O’Brien. “‘No money was paid.’ Cheif Hostage Negotiator, USA!”

On Thursday, the State Department said Mr. O’Brien had indeed called the president the greatest hostage negotiator in American history.

“We confirm,” a spokeswoman said in an email.

Christina Anderson contributed reporting from Stockholm.

Sahred From Source link Arts

from WordPress http://bit.ly/2LWP9qW via IFTTT

[ionecoffman]

What People Really Say Before They Die

Mort Felix liked to say that his name, when read as two Latin words, meant “happy death.” When he was sick with the flu, he used to jokingly remind his wife, Susan, that he wanted Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” played at his deathbed. But when his life’s end arrived at the age of 77, he lay in his study in his Berkeley, California, home, his body besieged by cancer and his consciousness cradled in morphine, uninterested in music and refusing food as he dwindled away over three weeks in 2012. “Enough,” he told Susan. “Thank you, and I love you, and enough.” When she came downstairs the next morning, she found Felix dead.

During those three weeks, Felix had talked. He was a clinical psychologist who had also spent a lifetime writing poetry, and though his end-of-life speech often didn’t make sense, it seemed to draw from his attention to language. “There’s so much so in sorrow,” he said at one point. “Let me down from here,” he said at another. “I’ve lost my modality.” To the surprise of his family members, the lifelong atheist also began hallucinating angels and complaining about the crowded room—even though no one was there.

Felix’s 53-year-old daughter, Lisa Smartt, kept track of his utterances, writing them down as she sat at his bedside in those final days. Smartt majored in linguistics at UC Berkeley in the 1980s and built a career teaching adults to read and write. Transcribing Felix’s ramblings was a sort of coping mechanism for her, she says. Something of a poet herself (as a child, she sold poems, three for a penny, like other children sold lemonade), she appreciated his unmoored syntax and surreal imagery. Smartt also wondered whether her notes had any scientific value, and eventually she wrote a book, Words on the Threshold, published in early 2017, about the linguistic patterns in 2,000 utterances from 181 dying people, including her father.

[Read more: What it’s like to learn you’re going to die]

Despite the limitations of this book, it’s unique—it’s the only published work I could find when I tried to satisfy my curiosity about how people really talk when they die. I knew about collections of “last words,” eloquent and enunciated, but these can’t literally show the linguistic abilities of the dying. It turns out that vanishingly few have ever examined these actual linguistic patterns, and to find any sort of rigor, one has to go back to 1921, to the work of the American anthropologist Arthur MacDonald.

To assess people’s “mental condition just before death,” MacDonald mined last-word anthologies, the only linguistic corpus then available, dividing people into 10 occupational categories (statesmen, philosophers, poets, etc.) and coding their last words as sarcastic, jocose, contented, and so forth. MacDonald found that military men had the “relatively highest number of requests, directions, or admonitions,” while philosophers (who included mathematicians and educators) had the most “questions, answers, and exclamations.” The religious and royalty used the most words to express contentment or discontentment, while the artists and scientists used the fewest.

MacDonald’s work “seems to be the only attempt to evaluate last words by quantifying them, and the results are curious,” wrote the German scholar Karl Guthke in his book Last Words, on Western culture’s long fascination with them. Mainly, MacDonald’s work shows that we need better data about verbal and nonverbal abilities at the end of life. One point that Guthke makes repeatedly is that last words, as anthologized in multiple languages since the 17th century, are artifacts of an era’s concerns and fascinations about death, not “historical facts of documentary status.” They can tell us little about a dying person’s actual ability to communicate.

Some contemporary approaches move beyond the oratorical monologues of yore and focus on emotions and relationships. Books such as Final Gifts, published in 1992 by the hospice nurses Maggie Callanan and Patricia Kelley, and Final Conversations, published in 2007 by Maureen Keeley, a Texas State University communications-studies scholar, and Julie Yingling, professor emerita at Humboldt State University, aim to sharpen the skills of the living for having important, meaningful conversations with the dying. Previous centuries’ focus on last words has ceded space to the contemporary focus on last conversations and even nonverbal interactions. “As the person gets weaker and sleepier, communication with others often becomes more subtle,” Callanan and Kelley write. “Even when people are too weak to speak, or have lost consciousness, they can hear; hearing is the last sense to fade.”

I spoke to Maureen Keeley shortly after the death of George H. W. Bush, whose last words (“I love you, too,” he reportedly told his son, George W. Bush) were widely reported in the media, but she said they should properly be seen in the context of a conversation (“I love you,” the son had said first) as well as all the prior conversations with family members leading up to that point.

At the end of life, Keeley says, the majority of interactions will be nonverbal as the body shuts down and the person lacks the physical strength, and often even the lung capacity, for long utterances. “People will whisper, and they’ll be brief, single words—that’s all they have energy for,” Keeley said. Medications limit communication. So does dry mouth and lack of dentures. She also noted that family members often take advantage of a patient’s comatose state to speak their piece, when the dying person cannot interrupt or object.

[Read more: What good is thinking about death?]

Many people die in such silence, particularly if they have advanced dementia or Alzheimer’s that robbed them of language years earlier. For those who do speak, it seems their vernacular is often banal. From a doctor I heard that people often say, “Oh fuck, oh fuck.” Often it’s the names of wives, husbands, children. “A nurse from the hospice told me that the last words of dying men often resembled each other,” wrote Hajo Schumacher in a September essay in Der Spiegel. “Almost everyone is calling for ‘Mommy’ or ‘Mama’ with the last breath.”

It’s still the interactions that fascinate me, partly because their subtle interpersonal textures are lost when they’re written down. A linguist friend of mine, sitting with his dying grandmother, spoke her name. Her eyes opened, she looked at him, and died. What that plain description omits is how he paused when he described the sequence to me, and how his eyes quivered.

But there are no descriptions of the basics of last words or last interactions in the scientific literature. The most linguistic detail exists about delirium, which involves a loss of consciousness, the inability to find words, restlessness, and a withdrawal from social interaction. Delirium strikes people of all ages after surgery and is also common at the end of life, a frequent sign of dehydration and over-sedation. Delirium is so frequent then, wrote the New Zealand psychiatrist Sandy McLeod, that “it may even be regarded as exceptional for patients to remain mentally clear throughout the final stages of malignant illness.” About half of people who recover from postoperative delirium recall the disorienting, fearful experience. In a Swedish study, one patient recalled that “I certainly was somewhat tired after the operation and everything … and I did not know where I was. I thought it became like misty, in some way … the outlines were sort of fuzzy.” How many people are in a similar state as they approach death? We can only guess.

We have a rich picture of the beginnings of language, thanks to decades of scientific research with children, infants, and even babies in the womb. But if you wanted to know how language ends in the dying, there’s next to nothing to look up, only firsthand knowledge gained painfully.

Lisa Smartt at her father, Mort Felix’s bedside (Eliana Derr)

After her father died, Lisa Smartt was left with endless questions about what she had heard him say, and she approached graduate schools, proposing to study last words academically. After being rebuffed, she began interviewing family members and medical staff on her own. That led her to collaborate with Raymond Moody Jr., the Virginia-born psychiatrist best known for his work on “near-death experiences” in a 1975 best-selling book, Life After Life. He has long been interested in what he calls “peri-mortal nonsense” and helped Smartt with the work that became Words on the Threshold, based on her father’s utterances as well as ones she’d collected via a website she called the Final Words Project.

One common pattern she noted was that when her father, Felix, used pronouns such as it and this, they didn’t clearly refer to anything. One time he said, “I want to pull these down to earth somehow … I really don’t know … no more earth binding.” What did these refer to? His sense of his body in space seemed to be shifting. “I got to go down there. I have to go down,” he said, even though there was nothing below him.

He also repeated words and phrases, often ones that made no sense. “The green dimension! The green dimension!” (Repetition is common in the speech of people with dementia and also those who are delirious.) Smartt found that repetitions often expressed themes such as gratitude and resistance to death. But there were also unexpected motifs, such as circles, numbers, and motion. “I’ve got to get off, get off! Off of this life,” Felix had said.

Smartt says she’s been most surprised by narratives in people’s speech that seem to unfold, piecemeal, over days. Early on, one man talked about a train stuck at a station, then days later referred to the repaired train, and then weeks later to how the train was moving northward.

“If you just walk through the room and you heard your loved one talk about ‘Oh, there’s a boxing champion standing by my bed,’ that just sounds like some kind of hallucination,” Smartt says. “But if you see over time that that person has been talking about the boxing champion and having him wearing that, or doing this, you think, Wow, there’s this narrative going on.” She imagines that tracking these story lines could be clinically useful, particularly as the stories moved toward resolution, which might reflect a person’s sense of the impending end.

In Final Gifts, the hospice nurses Callanan and Kelley note that “the dying often use the metaphor of travel to alert those around them that it is time for them to die.” They quote a 17-year-old, dying of cancer, distraught because she can’t find the map. “If I could find the map, I could go home! Where’s the map? I want to go home!” Smartt noted such journey metaphors as well, though she writes that dying people seem to get more metaphorical in general. (However, people with dementia and Alzheimer’s have difficulty understanding figurative language, and anthropologists who study dying in other cultures told me that journey metaphors aren’t prevalent everywhere.)

Even basic descriptions of language at the end of life would not only advance linguistic understanding but also provide a host of benefits to those who work with the dying, and to the dying themselves. Experts told me that a more detailed road map of changes could help counter people’s fear of death and provide them with some sense of control. It could also offer insight into how to communicate better with the dying. Differences in cultural metaphors could be included in training for hospice nurses who may not share the same cultural frame as their patients.

End-of-life communication will only become more relevant as life lengthens and deaths happen more frequently in institutions. Most people in developed countries won’t die as quickly and abruptly as their ancestors did. Thanks to medical advances and preventive care, a majority of people will likely die from either some sort of cancer, some sort of organ disease (foremost being cardiovascular disease), or simply advanced age. Those deaths will often be long and slow, and will likely take place in hospitals, hospices, or nursing homes overseen by teams of medical experts. And people can participate in decisions about their care only while they are able to communicate. More knowledge about how language ends and how the dying communicate would give patients more agency for a longer period of time.

But studying language and interaction at the end of life remains a challenge, because of cultural taboos about death and ethical concerns about having scientists at a dying person’s bedside. Experts also pointed out to me that each death is unique, which presents a variability that science has difficulty grappling with.

And in the health-care realm, the priorities are defined by doctors. “I think that work that is more squarely focused on describing communication patterns and behaviors is much harder to get funded because agencies like NCI prioritize research that directly reduces suffering from cancer, such as interventions to improve palliative-care communication,” says Wen-ying Sylvia Chou, a program director in the Behavioral Research Program at the National Cancer Institute of the National Institutes of Health, who oversees funding on patient-doctor communication at the end of life.

Despite the faults of Smartt’s book (it doesn’t control for things such as medication, for one thing, and it’s colored by an interest in the afterlife), it takes a big step toward building a corpus of data and looking for patterns. This is the same first step that child-language studies took in its early days. That field didn’t take off until natural historians of the 19th century, most notably Charles Darwin, began writing down things their children said and did. (In 1877, Darwin published a biographical sketch about his son, William, noting his first word: mum.) Such “diary studies,” as they were called, eventually led to a more systematic approach, and early child-language research has itself moved away from solely studying first words.

“Famous last words” are the cornerstone of a romantic vision of death—one that falsely promises a final burst of lucidity and meaning before a person passes. “The process of dying is still very profound, but it’s a very different kind of profoundness,” says Bob Parker, the chief compliance officer of the home health agency Intrepid USA. “Last words—it doesn’t happen like the movies. That’s not how patients die.” We are beginning to understand that final interactions, if they happen at all, will look and sound very different.

Article source here:The Atlantic

[nancygduarteus]

What People Really Say Before They Die

Mort Felix liked to say that his name, when read as two Latin words, meant “happy death.” When he was sick with the flu, he used to jokingly remind his wife, Susan, that he wanted Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” played at his deathbed. But when his life’s end arrived at the age of 77, he lay in his study in his Berkeley, California, home, his body besieged by cancer and his consciousness cradled in morphine, uninterested in music and refusing food as he dwindled away over three weeks in 2012. “Enough,” he told Susan. “Thank you, and I love you, and enough.” When she came downstairs the next morning, she found Felix dead.

During those three weeks, Felix had talked. He was a clinical psychologist who had also spent a lifetime writing poetry, and though his end-of-life speech often didn’t make sense, it seemed to draw from his attention to language. “There’s so much so in sorrow,” he said at one point. “Let me down from here,” he said at another. “I’ve lost my modality.” To the surprise of his family members, the lifelong atheist also began hallucinating angels and complaining about the crowded room—even though no one was there.

Felix’s 53-year-old daughter, Lisa Smartt, kept track of his utterances, writing them down as she sat at his bedside in those final days. Smartt majored in linguistics at UC Berkeley in the 1980s and built a career teaching adults to read and write. Transcribing Felix’s ramblings was a sort of coping mechanism for her, she says. Something of a poet herself (as a child, she sold poems, three for a penny, like other children sold lemonade), she appreciated his unmoored syntax and surreal imagery. Smartt also wondered whether her notes had any scientific value, and eventually she wrote a book, Words on the Threshold, published in early 2017, about the linguistic patterns in 2,000 utterances from 181 dying people, including her father.

[Read more: What it’s like to learn you’re going to die]

Despite the limitations of this book, it’s unique—it’s the only published work I could find when I tried to satisfy my curiosity about how people really talk when they die. I knew about collections of “last words,” eloquent and enunciated, but these can’t literally show the linguistic abilities of the dying. It turns out that vanishingly few have ever examined these actual linguistic patterns, and to find any sort of rigor, one has to go back to 1921, to the work of the American anthropologist Arthur MacDonald.

To assess people’s “mental condition just before death,” MacDonald mined last-word anthologies, the only linguistic corpus then available, dividing people into 10 occupational categories (statesmen, philosophers, poets, etc.) and coding their last words as sarcastic, jocose, contented, and so forth. MacDonald found that military men had the “relatively highest number of requests, directions, or admonitions,” while philosophers (who included mathematicians and educators) had the most “questions, answers, and exclamations.” The religious and royalty used the most words to express contentment or discontentment, while the artists and scientists used the fewest.

MacDonald’s work “seems to be the only attempt to evaluate last words by quantifying them, and the results are curious,” wrote the German scholar Karl Guthke in his book Last Words, on Western culture’s long fascination with them. Mainly, MacDonald’s work shows that we need better data about verbal and nonverbal abilities at the end of life. One point that Guthke makes repeatedly is that last words, as anthologized in multiple languages since the 17th century, are artifacts of an era’s concerns and fascinations about death, not “historical facts of documentary status.” They can tell us little about a dying person’s actual ability to communicate.

Some contemporary approaches move beyond the oratorical monologues of yore and focus on emotions and relationships. Books such as Final Gifts, published in 1992 by the hospice nurses Maggie Callanan and Patricia Kelley, and Final Conversations, published in 2007 by Maureen Keeley, a Texas State University communications-studies scholar, and Julie Yingling, professor emerita at Humboldt State University, aim to sharpen the skills of the living for having important, meaningful conversations with the dying. Previous centuries’ focus on last words has ceded space to the contemporary focus on last conversations and even nonverbal interactions. “As the person gets weaker and sleepier, communication with others often becomes more subtle,” Callanan and Kelley write. “Even when people are too weak to speak, or have lost consciousness, they can hear; hearing is the last sense to fade.”

I spoke to Maureen Keeley shortly after the death of George H. W. Bush, whose last words (“I love you, too,” he reportedly told his son, George W. Bush) were widely reported in the media, but she said they should properly be seen in the context of a conversation (“I love you,” the son had said first) as well as all the prior conversations with family members leading up to that point.

At the end of life, Keeley says, the majority of interactions will be nonverbal as the body shuts down and the person lacks the physical strength, and often even the lung capacity, for long utterances. “People will whisper, and they’ll be brief, single words—that’s all they have energy for,” Keeley said. Medications limit communication. So does dry mouth and lack of dentures. She also noted that family members often take advantage of a patient’s comatose state to speak their piece, when the dying person cannot interrupt or object.

[Read more: What good is thinking about death?]

Many people die in such silence, particularly if they have advanced dementia or Alzheimer’s that robbed them of language years earlier. For those who do speak, it seems their vernacular is often banal. From a doctor I heard that people often say, “Oh fuck, oh fuck.” Often it’s the names of wives, husbands, children. “A nurse from the hospice told me that the last words of dying men often resembled each other,” wrote Hajo Schumacher in a September essay in Der Spiegel. “Almost everyone is calling for ‘Mommy’ or ‘Mama’ with the last breath.”

It’s still the interactions that fascinate me, partly because their subtle interpersonal textures are lost when they’re written down. A linguist friend of mine, sitting with his dying grandmother, spoke her name. Her eyes opened, she looked at him, and died. What that plain description omits is how he paused when he described the sequence to me, and how his eyes quivered.

But there are no descriptions of the basics of last words or last interactions in the scientific literature. The most linguistic detail exists about delirium, which involves a loss of consciousness, the inability to find words, restlessness, and a withdrawal from social interaction. Delirium strikes people of all ages after surgery and is also common at the end of life, a frequent sign of dehydration and over-sedation. Delirium is so frequent then, wrote the New Zealand psychiatrist Sandy McLeod, that “it may even be regarded as exceptional for patients to remain mentally clear throughout the final stages of malignant illness.” About half of people who recover from postoperative delirium recall the disorienting, fearful experience. In a Swedish study, one patient recalled that “I certainly was somewhat tired after the operation and everything … and I did not know where I was. I thought it became like misty, in some way … the outlines were sort of fuzzy.” How many people are in a similar state as they approach death? We can only guess.

We have a rich picture of the beginnings of language, thanks to decades of scientific research with children, infants, and even babies in the womb. But if you wanted to know how language ends in the dying, there’s next to nothing to look up, only firsthand knowledge gained painfully.

Lisa Smartt at her father, Mort Felix’s bedside (Eliana Derr)

After her father died, Lisa Smartt was left with endless questions about what she had heard him say, and she approached graduate schools, proposing to study last words academically. After being rebuffed, she began interviewing family members and medical staff on her own. That led her to collaborate with Raymond Moody Jr., the Virginia-born psychiatrist best known for his work on “near-death experiences” in a 1975 best-selling book, Life After Life. He has long been interested in what he calls “peri-mortal nonsense” and helped Smartt with the work that became Words on the Threshold, based on her father’s utterances as well as ones she’d collected via a website she called the Final Words Project.

One common pattern she noted was that when her father, Felix, used pronouns such as it and this, they didn’t clearly refer to anything. One time he said, “I want to pull these down to earth somehow … I really don’t know … no more earth binding.” What did these refer to? His sense of his body in space seemed to be shifting. “I got to go down there. I have to go down,” he said, even though there was nothing below him.

He also repeated words and phrases, often ones that made no sense. “The green dimension! The green dimension!” (Repetition is common in the speech of people with dementia and also those who are delirious.) Smartt found that repetitions often expressed themes such as gratitude and resistance to death. But there were also unexpected motifs, such as circles, numbers, and motion. “I’ve got to get off, get off! Off of this life,” Felix had said.

Smartt says she’s been most surprised by narratives in people’s speech that seem to unfold, piecemeal, over days. Early on, one man talked about a train stuck at a station, then days later referred to the repaired train, and then weeks later to how the train was moving northward.

“If you just walk through the room and you heard your loved one talk about ‘Oh, there’s a boxing champion standing by my bed,’ that just sounds like some kind of hallucination,” Smartt says. “But if you see over time that that person has been talking about the boxing champion and having him wearing that, or doing this, you think, Wow, there’s this narrative going on.” She imagines that tracking these story lines could be clinically useful, particularly as the stories moved toward resolution, which might reflect a person’s sense of the impending end.

In Final Gifts, the hospice nurses Callanan and Kelley note that “the dying often use the metaphor of travel to alert those around them that it is time for them to die.” They quote a 17-year-old, dying of cancer, distraught because she can’t find the map. “If I could find the map, I could go home! Where’s the map? I want to go home!” Smartt noted such journey metaphors as well, though she writes that dying people seem to get more metaphorical in general. (However, people with dementia and Alzheimer’s have difficulty understanding figurative language, and anthropologists who study dying in other cultures told me that journey metaphors aren’t prevalent everywhere.)

Even basic descriptions of language at the end of life would not only advance linguistic understanding but also provide a host of benefits to those who work with the dying, and to the dying themselves. Experts told me that a more detailed road map of changes could help counter people’s fear of death and provide them with some sense of control. It could also offer insight into how to communicate better with the dying. Differences in cultural metaphors could be included in training for hospice nurses who may not share the same cultural frame as their patients.

End-of-life communication will only become more relevant as life lengthens and deaths happen more frequently in institutions. Most people in developed countries won’t die as quickly and abruptly as their ancestors did. Thanks to medical advances and preventive care, a majority of people will likely die from either some sort of cancer, some sort of organ disease (foremost being cardiovascular disease), or simply advanced age. Those deaths will often be long and slow, and will likely take place in hospitals, hospices, or nursing homes overseen by teams of medical experts. And people can participate in decisions about their care only while they are able to communicate. More knowledge about how language ends and how the dying communicate would give patients more agency for a longer period of time.

But studying language and interaction at the end of life remains a challenge, because of cultural taboos about death and ethical concerns about having scientists at a dying person’s bedside. Experts also pointed out to me that each death is unique, which presents a variability that science has difficulty grappling with.

And in the health-care realm, the priorities are defined by doctors. “I think that work that is more squarely focused on describing communication patterns and behaviors is much harder to get funded because agencies like NCI prioritize research that directly reduces suffering from cancer, such as interventions to improve palliative-care communication,” says Wen-ying Sylvia Chou, a program director in the Behavioral Research Program at the National Cancer Institute of the National Institutes of Health, who oversees funding on patient-doctor communication at the end of life.

Despite the faults of Smartt’s book (it doesn’t control for things such as medication, for one thing, and it’s colored by an interest in the afterlife), it takes a big step toward building a corpus of data and looking for patterns. This is the same first step that child-language studies took in its early days. That field didn’t take off until natural historians of the 19th century, most notably Charles Darwin, began writing down things their children said and did. (In 1877, Darwin published a biographical sketch about his son, William, noting his first word: mum.) Such “diary studies,” as they were called, eventually led to a more systematic approach, and early child-language research has itself moved away from solely studying first words.

“Famous last words” are the cornerstone of a romantic vision of death—one that falsely promises a final burst of lucidity and meaning before a person passes. “The process of dying is still very profound, but it’s a very different kind of profoundness,” says Bob Parker, the chief compliance officer of the home health agency Intrepid USA. “Last words—it doesn’t happen like the movies. That’s not how patients die.” We are beginning to understand that final interactions, if they happen at all, will look and sound very different.

from Health News And Updates https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2019/01/how-do-people-communicate-before-death/580303/?utm_source=feed

[investmart007]

WASHINGTON | In Trump era, the death of the White House press conference

New Post has been published on https://is.gd/Sca9AL

WASHINGTON | In Trump era, the death of the White House press conference

  WASHINGTON  — The presidential news conference, a time-honored tradition going back generations, appears to be no longer.

More than a year has passed since President Donald Trump held the only solo news conference of his administration — a rollicking, hastily arranged, 77-minute free-for-all during which he railed against the media, defended his fired national security adviser and insisted nobody who advised his campaign had had contacts with Russia.

But there are no signs the White House press shop is interested in a second go-round. Instead, the president engages the press in more informal settings that aides say offer reporters far more access, more often, than past administrations.

“President Trump is more accessible than most modern presidents and frequently takes questions from the press,” says White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders.

The president often answers shouted questions at so-called pool sprays, in which a small group of rotating reporters is given access to events such as bill signings and Cabinet lunches. Trump has also taken to answering shouted questions on the White House lawn as he arrives at and departs the White House.

The frenzied exchanges — frequently taking place over the roar of Marine One’s rotor — often produce news.

But the format also gives the president far more control than he would have during a traditional question-and-answer session. Trump can easily ignore questions he doesn’t like and dodge follow-ups in a way that would be glaring in a traditional news conference.

On Friday, for instance, Trump answered several questions in the Oval Office about North Korea and Iran. But when a reporter asked about his threats regarding intervening in the Justice Department, Trump responded with a curt “thank you” that signaled to reporters that he was done with the Q&A session.

The president also holds joint news conferences with visiting world leaders, a format reporters call “two and two” because each leader selects two of its country’s reporters to ask questions. While the format looks similar to a solo news conference, the president more often than not calls on friendly reporters from conservative outlets and limits the opportunity for follow-up questions.

On Friday, during a joint news conference with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Trump called on reporters from Fox Business Network and the Christian Broadcasting Network. Fox News correspondent John Roberts has been called on so often that Trump once picked him and then changed his mind. “Actually, we’ll go somebody else this time, John. You’ve been doing enough, John,” he said to laughs.

Trump also submits to occasional one-on-one interviews with individual news outlets. Last week, he called in to “Fox & Friends,” his favored format during the campaign. And several times he has held longer, impromptu question-and-answer sessions, including one in the Rose Garden with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell that, for reporters, had the feel of a mosh pit.

Margaret Talev, a longtime White House reporter and president of the White House Correspondents Association, said the association welcomes Trump’s “openness to engage on a regular basis, in pool sprays in the Oval Office and less traditional settings such as South Lawn departures.”

But, she said, “We have been disappointed at his reluctance to engage in regular full-format news conferences and we will continue to encourage him and his team to return to the practice. Such news conferences help the public to gain a deeper understanding of a president’s thinking on an issue; show transparency and accountability; allow journalists to raise questions the public may be concerned about; and also allow a president to shape his message.”

Indeed, during his campaign, Trump often criticized his rival, Democrat Hillary Clinton, for failing to engage more with the press.

“Crooked Hillary Clinton has not held a news conference in more than 7 months. Her record is so bad she is unable to answer tough questions!” he tweeted in June 2016.

The pattern marks a dramatic departure from historic precedent, according to records kept by The American Presidency Project and dating back to Calvin Coolidge. In their first years alone, President Barack Obama held 11 solo news conferences, George W. Bush held five, and Bill Clinton a dozen. Trump held just one.

It’s part of a pattern reflecting Trump’s extraordinarily hostile relationship with a press he loves to hate.

“The White House isn’t legally mandated or required to hold press conferences, but it’s a tradition that’s been in place because it serves the public,” said Katie Townsend, the litigation director at Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. “And I think the idea that the media is the enemy of the American people and an enemy of the president itself … I think the unwillingness to talk to the members of the media is part of that.”

But Ari Fleischer, who served as press secretary for George W. Bush, said there is little benefit for a White House to hold solo new conferences anymore since the president can communicate with the public in other ways.

“So long as the president is held accountable as a result of frequent pool sprays, as a result of frequent press conferences with heads of state, one-on-one interviews, the public gets its accountability through other tactics beyond formal long-winded news conferences,” Fleischer said.

Bush, he noted, wasn’t a fan of the prime-time news conference, complaining that reporters would “peacock” at those events, making them more about themselves than the president.

Trump, however, seems to like the format, which he credited last year for his election win.

“Tomorrow, they will say, ‘Donald Trump rants and raves at the press.’ I’m not ranting and raving. I’m just telling you. You know, you’re dishonest people. But I’m not ranting and raving. I love this,” he said during his press conference last year. “I’m having a good time doing it.”

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By JILL COLVIN,By Associated Press – published on STL.News by St. Louis Media, LLC (Z.S)

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[newstfionline]

Trump the Disruptor

By Justin Raimondo, Antiwar.com, January 17, 2017

If the New York Times is to be believed--a problematic proposition--then it looks as if Trump Derangement Syndrome has gone international. In a front page article headlined “As Trump Era Dawns, A Sense of Uncertainty Grips the World,” we are told:

“The Germans are angry. The Chinese are downright furious. Leaders of NATO are nervous, while their counterparts at the European Union are alarmed.”

So what’s the source of this latest Trumpanic? It’s an interview with Tory mandarin Michael Gove and Kai Diekmann, a former editor of the German newspaper Bild, in which the President-elect reiterates what he’s been saying to the American people for the past year, and on the basis of which he won the election: US foreign policy is going to change, and in a big way.

However, to Times reporter Steve Erlanger, this all comes as a big revelation, evidence that “Trump has again focused his penchant for disruption on the rest of the world.”

This being the Times, there’s the requisite Russia-baiting:

“No one knows where exactly he is headed--except that the one country he is not criticizing is Russia and its president, Vladimir V. Putin. For now. And that he is an enthusiastic cheerleader of Brexit and an unaffiliated Britain. For now.”

If this reads like a paragraph torn out of one of the Hillary Clinton campaign’s strategy memos, well then consider the source. And speaking of the source, what exactly did Trump say in this supposedly “disruptive” interview that has the Powers That Be in such a tizzy?

They ask him about Brexit, and he endorses it, as he has in the past. They ask him if he’d vote for Angela Merkel in the upcoming German elections, and he demurs: “I don’t know who she’s running against.” Besides which, isn’t it a bit unseemly for an American President-elect to endorse a candidate for office in a foreign country? It surely would be in bad taste if the situation were reversed. They press him on Merkel’s open invitation to the entire nation of Syria to emigrate to Germany: was it “insane,” as he said during the campaign? Or has he changed his mind for some reason? He reiterates his often-stated view that “it was a big mistake for Germany,” and then broadens out his answer to include an analysis of the regional chaos caused by the administration of George W. Bush, whom he doesn’t mention by name but it’s clear where he places the blame:

“Look, this whole thing should never have happened. Iraq should not have been attacked in the first place, all right? It was one of the worst decisions, possibly the worst decision ever made in the history of our country. We’ve unleashed--it’s like throwing rocks into a beehive. It’s one of the great messes of all time. I looked at something, uh, I’m not allowed to show you because it’s classified--but, I just looked at Afghanistan and you look at the Taliban--and you take a look at every, every year its more, more, more, you know they have the different colours--and you say, you know--what’s going on?”

Those pathetic Republican “foreign policy experts” who are now complaining about being on an “enemies list” kept by the Trump transition team deserve to be on that list: they, after all, were the architects of the ongoing disaster described by Trump, and he clearly doesn’t care to reward failure. This is precisely why the GOP foreign policy Establishment campaigned so hard against him: that these losers are now locked out of the administration is good news indeed.

More good news: Trump is taking direct and very public aim at their patrons, the Military-Industrial Complex that Dwight David Eisenhower so presciently warned us against. Even as he pledges to upgrade the US military, the President-elect clearly knows who his enemies are:

“Boeing and Lockheed Martin are you know big contractors for this country and we have an F-35 program that has been very, very severely over budget and behind schedule. Hundreds of billions of dollars over budget and seven years behind schedule. And, uh, they got to shape up.”

Employees of both Boeing and Lockheed-Martin gave record amounts to the Clinton campaign: indeed, the entire industry went for Hillary in a big way.

Asked about his top priority as commander-in-chief, Trump had one word to say: “ISIS.” Asked how he’d deal with ISIS, he demurred. Yet it isn’t at all hard to imagine what his strategy will be: he’s not saying we should “get along with Russia” because he’s a secret Putinite, as our crazed conspiracy theorists would have it. Clearly he means to enlist Russia’s support in what he envisions as a short but effective campaign to eliminate ISIS entirely, at least when it comes to the Syrian “Caliphate.” After all, Russia is already in Syria in a big way: and Trump’s hostility to the Obama administration’s campaign to overthrow Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad indicates he’s likely to align with both Syria and Russia to restore some sort of order to the region. As to what degree he’ll farm out this task to the Russians and the Syrians, we’ll see. We’ll also see how “quick” this joint campaign will be: history does not bode well, in any case. Yet it’s clear he wants to minimize our involvement.

This segues into what is the most controversial part of the interview:

“Q: Talking about Russia, you know that Angela Merkel understands Putin very well because he is fluent in German, she is fluent in Russian, and they have known each other for a long time--but who would you trust more, Angela Merkel or Vladimir Putin?

“Trump: Well, I start off trusting both--but let’s see how long that lasts. It may not last long at all.”

Oh, how the “experts” and the political class went ballistic over that one! How dare Trump equate our “ally” Germany with our evil “adversary,” the perfidious Putin! And yet the reality is that neither Germany nor Russia is inherently either friend or foe: they are simply actors on the world stage whose relations to the US are based entirely on what is in America’s interests. As George Washington warned in his Farewell Address:

“[N]othing is more essential than that permanent, inveterate antipathies against particular nations, and passionate attachments for others, should be excluded; and that, in place of them, just and amicable feelings towards all should be cultivated.”

Trump’s “realist” value-free characterization of our relations with the leaders of both Germany and Russia represents a return to the foreign policy of the Founders, from which we have strayed to our great detriment. It is, as Trump proclaimed so often during the campaign, a foreign policy that puts America first.

As he’s being interrogated by a Brit and a German, much of the interview deals with Europe, and specifically policy toward Russia. Asked if he can “understand why eastern Europeans fear Putin and Russia,” he says “Sure, oh sure,” and then goes very quickly into a critique of NATO, which he says is “obsolete.” It’s obvious he thinks the fears of the east Europeans are vastly overblown. Trump complains that “the countries aren’t paying their fair share. So we’re supposed to protect countries but a lot of these countries aren’t paying what they’re supposed to be paying, which I think is very unfair to the United States. With that being said, NATO is very important to me.”

Gove avers that “Britain is paying,” and Trump agrees, but says: “There’s five countries that are paying what they’re supposed to. Five. It’s not much, from twenty-two.” And as Trump no doubt realizes, the costs of NATO involve more than money: we are obligated to defend twenty-two countries in case they are attacked. That’s twenty-two tripwires that could set off a major war: the price of that is incalculable. Is it worth it?

Trump clearly has his doubts, and it’s this that has the Euro-weenies in an uproar. After all, they’ve been coasting along on Uncle Sam’s dime for all these years, financing extensive welfare programs for their own citizens as well as a horde of migrants: the idea that the gravy train is going to dry up has them up in arms.

And of course the issue of NATO is really about the Russian question--is Putin really intent on annexing his “near abroad” and re-establishing the Soviet empire? This fantasy, based on nothing but rejuvenated cold war hysteria, is clearly doubted by Trump and his advisors. So when he’s asked if he supports the continuation of European sanctions against Russia, Trump replies:

“Well, I think you know--people have to get together and people have to do what they have to do in terms of being fair. OK? They have sanctions on Russia--let’s see if we can make some good deals with Russia. For one thing, I think nuclear weapons should be way down and reduced very substantially, that’s part of it. But you do have sanctions and Russia’s hurting very badly right now because of sanctions, but I think something can happen that a lot of people are gonna benefit.”

In short: sanctions can be ended as part of a grand bargain with Russia to reduce nuclear weapons arsenals on both sides and guarantee European security. Ambitious?--Yes. Praiseworthy?--Certainly. Can he do it? Only by overcoming the War Party’s opposition in Congress, led by Mad John McCain and joined by the now-Russophobic war-crazed Democrats out to obstruct anything and everything Trump does, even at the cost of world peace.

It’s absolutely wonderful how Trump’s offhand remarks rub the commentariat the wrong way. Asked which number he dials if he wants to talk to Europe--a riff off a remark by Henry Kissinger--he names Merkel on the grounds that “you look at the European Union and it’s Germany. Basically a vehicle for Germany. That’s why I thought the UK was so smart in getting out.”

Zing! Poor Angela Merkel--she can’t get no respect!

Elaborating his view of the EU, Trump averred:

“People, countries want their own identity and the UK wanted its own identity but, I do believe this, if they hadn’t been forced to take in all of the refugees, so many, with all the problems that it, you know, entails, I think that you wouldn’t have a Brexit. It probably could have worked out but, this was the final straw, this was the final straw that broke the camel’s back.

“I think people want, people want their own identity, so if you ask me, others, I believe others will leave.”

“Your policy platform of America First implies you’re happy to see the rest of the world suffer. Do you?”

“I don’t want it to be a disruption--I love the world, I want the world to be good but we can’t go--I mean look at what’s happening to our country--we are $20 trillion [in debt]--we don’t know what we’re doing--our military is weak--we’re in wars that never end, we’re in Afghanistan now 17 years … it’s the longest war we’ve ever been in.”

Endless wars, endless payments to feckless “allies,” endless hectoring by these ungrateful wretches who accuse us of wanting to “see the rest of the world suffer”--Trump would put an end to all this, and I have no doubt that the American people support him. Shall we take a poll on the popularity of the US bearing the brunt of Europe’s “defense” against an enemy that disappeared in 1989? Shall we have a national referendum on the prospect of going to war over whether Montenegro--a nation the size of the metropolitan New York area--shall have a “pro-Western” government?

If you wonder why our “intelligence community” is waging open warfare against the forty-fifth President of these United States, you have only to look at this interview. He is challenging the “liberal” international order which has paid out liberal amounts of moolah and unearned prestige to a whole class of government contractors, thinktank poobahs, useless spooks, and their ancillary business enterprises for decades.

Without this “international order,” we’re told, the world will be plunged into “uncertainty,” if not complete chaos. The only uncertainty that Trump’s America First foreign policy imposes is uncertainty as to where the war profiteers’ next meal ticket is coming from. And that, dear reader, is a cause not for panic but for celebration.