Cruz leading Trump

I see that Ted Cruz is now, in some polls, ahead of Donald Trump in Iowa.  That means the Trump media circus might be nearing an end (finally!), but on many issues Cruz is little better than Trump, though his public demeanor is certainly more serious.

On the Democratic side Hillary Clinton now seems to be walking away with the nomination, though it might all come unhinged if the FBI and Justice Department decide that having 999+ classified e-mails stored insecurely on one’s private server, against government security regulations, is enough for an indictment (that would be enough to put me in jail if I had done that).  But then, Washington insiders are almost never held accountable the way the rest of us are, and with a Democratic administration running things it seems likely they will brush this under the rug if they can – but it doesn’t make me happy to think of having Hillary for President.

The Trump Phenomena

Donald Trump made yet more outrageous proposals this week – this time proposing to ban all Muslims from entering the country – and the result (besides hysterical attacks from the liberals and the media) was that his poll numbers climbed even higher. Something significant is going on here.

I used to think that Trump was just a spoiled clown. Now I am beginning to think he is actually pretty clever.  He uses his outrageous statements (a) to preempt the daily news cycles, keeping all his opponents, Republican and Democrat alike, out of the news, and (b) to tap into a deep unease in the American public, the majority of whom (again, Republican, Democrat and Independent alike) think American domestic and foreign policy is on the wrong track, and that our political system is broken, run by an out-of-touch political elite in Washington who care more about keeping their seats and satisfying their corporate or union backers than about the good of the nation.

This is not a phenomena affecting just the Republicans. Hillary Clinton may well be the Democratic nominee in the end, but the challenge from Sanders shows that the Democrats aren't all that happy with their establishment leaders either. Nor is she particularly well liked, even among Democrats.

There is clearly something unusual going on here.  I wish I could read what political and social historians will say about this epoch fifty years from now, when it is clearer what is going on. Right now it is puzzling and murky.

Nat Silver, the most successful pollster in recent times, predicts that in the end, Republican primary voters will get serious and dump the Donald for a more “reasonable” Republican candidate (“reasonable” is a relative term here, since most of the other Republican contenders are not so reasonable on some issues, like climate change).  He argues that Trump’s high poll numbers are a result of having so many candidates in the field, and being still so far from the point when primary voters really begin paying attention to the candidates.  Thus far, he argues, Trump’s high poll numbers mostly just reflect his success at dominating the daily news cycle. He may be right, but the talking heads have been predicting Trump’s imminent decline for months now, and they are still wrong.

This is not a new rebellion – the election of a cadre of Tea Party candidates to the House is part of this populist rebellion against the Washington elite, and they have caused a good bit of havoc in Congress already. And the continuing success of conservatives in capturing governorships and state legislatures is also part of the rebellion. Clearly there is a significant political shift occurring in the country, but it is more subtle than just a move to the right. It is a rebellion against the political establishment, Republican and Democrat alike.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

Strongly Recommended: What ISIS Really Wants

Probably the single most important military doctrine is to “know your enemy”.  It is pretty clear that the current Western governments don’t understand ISIS.  The media, for the most part, seem equally in the dark, and so is the general public.

The left is blinded by its political correctness, its need to be “ecumenical”, and is unable to understand the depth of religious conviction that drives the core of ISIS (The left in general has trouble understanding religion conviction). The president continues to assert that ISIS is “not Islamic”, when in fact it is indeed VERY Islamic – hewing tightly to the medieval roots of Islam and the literal words of the Prophet. Fortunately most Muslims are not such fundamentalists, just as it is fortunate that most Christians are not fundamentalists. But a fundamentalist Christian is certainly a Christian – motivated by the literal interpretation of the scriptures - even if not our type of Christian.  Just so a fundamentalist Muslim is certainly a Muslim – motivated by the literal words of the Prophet -  even if not practicing the kind of Islam that most Muslims practice.

The right, on the other hand, is driven into a frenzy of mindless illiberal, un-American, and unconstitutional suggestions such as registering all Muslims, or refusing immigration by any further Muslims, none of which would have any impact whatever on constraining ISIS, and would probably be a major boon to their recruiting efforts.

The best, most coherent, and probably the best researched discussion about ISIS that I have read is Graeme Wood’s article What ISIS Really Wants in the March 2015 issue of The Atlantic Monthly. I strongly recommend it.  He has gone to some of the most important sources – Islamic leaders who speak for ISIS and have a major role in recruiting for ISIS – in order to understand the appeal of ISIS worldwide, the reason why Muslims from around the world are streaming into ISIS by the thousands.

Until we all – public and political leaders alike – have a better understanding of exactly why ISIS exists, what it seeks,and how it thinks our attempts to counter if will continue to be expensive but largely ineffectual, as they have been to date.

Recommended: The Genius of the Beast: A Radical Re-vision of Capitalism

Among some on the left, capitalism gets a bad rap. They object to the inherent unfairness in which some get richer than others, and some lose their jobs in the incessant "creative destruction" that capitalism drives. But Howard Bloom argues – persuasively - that in fact capitalism ( The "Beast" in this book)  is simply one more expression of a basic driving force in nature, and that the boom-and-bust cycle typical of capitalist economies is in fact a natural, if brutal, driving mechanism for evolution seen throughout nature – evolution of organisms, evolution of societies, and evolution of cultures. The boom and bust cycle, Bloom argues, is really nature's way of exploring all possibilities, a cycle of expansion followed by a cycle of retrenchment, digestion, and reshaping based on what was learned in the expansion. Yes, capitalism is unfair - nature is unfair. But, Bloom would argue, the very instruments that the dissenters use in their dissents - language, printing, cell phones, TV, airlines, etc, etc, are all the fruits of this brutal but effective system.

Bloom is a wonderful out-of-the-box thinker (see his first book, The Lucifer Principle, 1995), and this book is well worth reading.

ISIS, Islam and Christianity

I have argued in a previous post that Islam is not the cause of ISIS and the other brutal Jihadist movements killing thousands around the world; the real cause is the mass of poor, purposeless, unemployed, poorly-educated young men in the Middle East ripe for exploitation by charismatic leaders. Islam is simply the convenient lever by which they can be recruited and motivated by power-hungry leaders, since they are already Muslim.

Having said that, it is still in fact the religion of Islam, or at least one particularly harsh Sunni version of it (Wahhabism), that is being used for this purpose by ISIS and the many associated jihadist movements. And in fact Islamic traditions and Islamic history support many of their brutal acts.  The Prophet was not a nice man by current Western standards. He led a brutal army of conquest, practiced ethnic cleansing, and encouraged his followers to kill unbelievers. ISIS is in fact following fairly accurately in the footsteps of the Prophet. The fantasy ideology which ISIS follows envisions returning the entire world to a 9^th century Islamic empire ruled by harsh Sharia laws. It is, of course, ridiculous to think of returning the Middle East to a medieval prehistory based of what unlettered and uneducated desert people a thousand years ago believed, or didn’t understand.

And yet…..and yet Christianity in some of its forms is just as extreme, just as brutal, and just as ridiculous. We certainly had our period of ruthless crusades, murdering everyone in sight without regard to their religion, plundering cities, and raping women, all in the name of our own version of a primitive Middle Eastern desert religion of two thousand years ago. Here in New Mexico the Spanish Christian priests in the original conquest were just as ruthless toward the native Americans as ISIS is today. In Europe Catholics and Protestants happily fought wars and burned each other’s leaders at the stake for hundreds of years.

Lest you think this is all old news - past history that we can feel bad about for a moment and then move on - consider what is still, this very day, going on in the name of Christianity:

Christian groups throughout the country are attempting in every way they can to prevent women from controlling their own reproductive plans by denying them not only abortions, but in some cases even birth control (need I mention that if men could get pregnant this would not even be an issue?) – all based, not on anything Jesus is reported to have said, but just on the misogynistic speculations of some sexually-repressed medieval male clerics as to when something speculatively called “the soul” entered the body of a fetus – and this by people who didn’t even understand the anatomy and physiology of the human body!  And on the basis of these unscientific speculations a thousand years ago, some modern day Christians oppress women, and the more extreme even bomb or shoot up Planned Parenthood clinics, as just happened again this week.

(And no, one can't invoke the 6th commandment to support this position.  Christians have always been more than happy to kill when it is convenient, and still are.)

Christian groups throughout the country are attempting in every way they can to obstruct and oppress people whose sexual orientation is not straight heterosexual. Why?  Based on some clear modern understanding of human physiology and psychology?  No, based rather on cultural norms of a certain group of Middle Easterners who lived thousands of years ago, and reinforced once again by those sexually-repressed Medieval male clerics.

There are other examples, but these will suffice to make the point. Yes, ISIS is following a particularly brutal form of Islam based on a relatively primitive and unlettered culture centuries in the past. But some Christians  - a good many of them – are doing exactly the same thing, trying to impose on everyone concepts from a primitive culture centuries in the past and completely out of touch with either modern knowledge or modern culture.

Remember Matthew 7:4: “How can you say to your brother, 'Let me take the speck out of your eye,' when all the time there is a plank in your own eye”

This is a propaganda war – and we are losing!

After the Paris attacks, people in places like Washington and London are understandably nervous, games are being cancelled, extra police are being hired, political figures are striving to outdo each other in proposals to “smash” ISIS militarily (at a cost of how many billions more dollars?), and there are serious debates about how much to trust our Muslim neighbors.  All of it exactly what ISIS wants, and what feeds and supports its recruiting drives.

Come on folks, let’s get real.  ISIS has perhaps at most 100,000 mostly poorly-trained and poorly-equipped fighters with a tenuous grip on a few of the more populated places in a wasteland desert in Iraq and Syria and a few small outposts in places like Yemen. It has no industrial base, no advanced weapons, no aircraft or even anti-aircraft guns, a few tanks it captured but no spare parts for them. It is led by a few charismatic sociopaths who are wonderfully effective at selling the fantasy ideology, but are unlikely to be world-class military strategists. It wouldn’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell against a real Western army on the ground in a straight-up army to army faceoff. But of course it is smart enough never to get into such a faceoff (as we discovered in a decade of warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan).

What it does have is an enticing vision and narrative – enticing at least to frustrated and disillusioned out-of-work young Sunni Muslim men – and a wonderfully adept propaganda machine on social media to recruit new members around the world. It is of course these locally recruited fighters that are of real concern to Europe and the US.  The Boston marathon bombers were locals, apparently radicalized over the web. Most of the Paris attackers identified thus far appear to be French or Belgium citizens, again probably radicalized over the web and through social media. If there are more attacks in places like the US, they will probably be launched by local citizens who have been recruited and radicalized, and perhaps even largely trained and organized and directed, over the web and/or through social media.

Even if the very worst imaginable scenario – a nuclear weapon smuggled into a major city and detonated – were to happen, it couldn’t defeat the US or any major European power. This is not like facing a fully armed Nazi German or Soviet Russia with a massive army and an industrial base to support it.

What can defeat us, though, is succumbing to the propaganda and failing to mount an effective propaganda counterattack against ISIS. We will begin winning when our own propaganda efforts begin seeding fear and distrust and disillusionment among ISIS followers, rather than the other way around. So far Western governments, including our own, seem not to have understood that. We are so wonderfully adept at selling people things they don't need through advertising, and packaging flawed political candidates into election-winning images that I can't believe we can't do this job better.

Recommended: How to Beat ISIS: The President Is Partly Right

Walter Russel Mead has an excellent article in The American Interest this week: How to Beat ISIS: The President Is Partly Right. His argument is summarized right at the beginning: 

 To cut the flow of recruits and funds to ISIS, we must make ISIS look unattractive and weak—drab. This is what we have to teach our enemies and those tempted to join them: disenchantment.

It supports my argument that we in the West need to get better at managing the media and social media aspects of the war, so that we can effectively counter the "fantasty ideology" that ISIS promulgates.

The Paris Attacks

What is there to say about the Paris attacks?

First of all, France had a wake–up call in January with the Charlie Hebdo attack in which radical gunmen in Paris killed 11 people and wounded another 11. There was worldwide angst about that at the time, at least for a few days, but France doesn’t appear to have changed any of its security policies significantly as a result of that attack.

For the world at large, clearly there is a double standard running – we are all aghast at the Paris attacks on Friday, in which 128 people died.  On the other hand the world news barely mentioned the attack on the college in Kenya last Thursday in which jihadist gunmen killed 147 people. And of course the world hasn’t shown nearly the same level of angst about the tens of thousands ISIS has been killing steadily within Syria and Iraq. Perhaps that is to be expected. Despite the rhetoric, the world’s actions clearly show we don’t care that much about what ISIS does, as long as it doesn’t do it in our own countries.

Yes, the President has authorized a few bombing attacks – 10 or 20 a day – but that is clearly just a token effort to show that the administration is “doing something”. It is hardly a strategy, despite the president’s repeated assurances that it is. Now that we are beginning to supply effective arms to some of the rebels, perhaps we are beginning to do something more effective, but clearly the administration doesn’t have a real strategy yet. President Obama has apparently underestimated the ISIS threat all along, as his “Junior Varsity” comment in January 2014 showed.

At a strategic level, there are at least five things to note:

1. Modern open Western societies are incredibly vulnerable to these sorts of attacks against soft targets like sports events and concerts and shopping malls and other places where lots of people gather. And these societies are also pretty vulnerable to infrastructure attacks against power grids, communications facilities, transportation systems, water supplies, etc, etc. It is hard to see how this can change without becoming a Soviet-style police state. So “defending” against these sorts of attacks in an open society will always be difficult, and not always successful.  Get used to it.

2. The more zealous right-wingers are all for going into Iraq and Syria and just wiping ISIS out.  It sounds great, but in fact we had half a million American and allied troops in Iraq and Afghanistan for more than a decade, and had no more luck stamping out the extremists than the Russians did in 1979-1989, or than the British did in 1839-1842. The right-wing ought to learn its history, lest it is forced to repeat it – yet again!

3. The root of the problem is a swelling population of young Arab men with no realistic prospects of a job or family or purpose in life, who are ripe for recruitment by charismatic extremists into a movement that gives them some purpose and stature in their own eyes. This whole problem will not go away until the world finds some solution to the underlying economic impoverishment in these Arab countries, and in the ghettos of the diaspora in Europe.  Of course the autocratic kleptocracies that rule most of the Arab nations make the problem worse.

4. The problem is not the Muslim religion.  The Muslim religion (somewhat distorted) gets used because they are already Muslim, and there is an existing sectarian divide between Sunnis and Shia that can be exploited, so it is a convenient lever.  If these young men were all Christians, no doubt these same charismatic leaders could find ample support in the Bible for their purposes (remember “an eye for an eye”?).  We certainly have had enough bloody Christian extremists though history to prove the point. If religion wasn’t available as a tool, no doubt nationalism or some political ideology like communism or fascism would work as well.  Once the unrest is there, waiting to be used, charismatic leaders can always find a plausible cause to drive recruitment and fire up the troops.

5. This war is being waged as much in the public and social media as on the battlefield, a fact which ISIS clearly understands but which the West seems not yet to have fully grasped.  To win this war (and war it is) we in the West need to get as good as ISIS at using media in the battle. In fact, future wars in general will probably incorporate media manipulation as a key weapon, and we had better learn that and prepare for it.  President Putin, in his Ukrainian adventures, has been quite effective using the media to keep the West divided in its response and therefore largely ineffective.

Recommended: The Flight From Reality

Robert Samuelson has another important article today in the Washington Post: The Flight From Reality. Samuelson points out that while Democrats and Republicans battle over their (relatively minor) issues, neither party is paying any real attention to the truly critical problems that face us as the nation ages (making Social Security and Medicare as they stand now economically unsustainable in the long run), as the continuing flow of unskilled immigrants keep our poverty levels high (whereas we are turning away the skilled immigrants we really need to keep the economy healthy), and as structural issues in the job market (like increasing automation) are hollowing out the middle class.

I would add to his list the looming worldwide social and economic disruption that will come over the next few decades from climate change, and perhaps as well the increasingly poor education that Americans are getting (that keep them from being functional and productive  in an increasingly technological and complex world).

Recommended: Democrats are in denial. Their party is actually in deep trouble.

Matthew Yglesias has an important article today in Vox: Policy and Politics.  It is entitled  Democrats are in denial. Their party is actually in deep trouble and it is well worth reading. Yglesias points out that although the Democrats have controlled the White House, that is almost the only thing they control in the nation's political system - they don't control either chamber of Congress, and the majority of state governors and state legislators are controlled by Republicans - and Republican control has been increasing even during Obama's terms in office (and perhaps because of his terms in office).

So although the liberal media talking heads have had a field day making fun of the current Republican disarray in the House, and the fact that Donald Trump currently leads in the polls for Republican presidential candidates, in fact the Democrats are in far worse shape nationally without even considering Hillary Clinton's continued troubles.  If the Democrats somehow manage to retain the White House in this upcoming election, there is still little chance that they can advance much of their increasingly left-wing agenda.  If they lose the White House they are almost completely locked out of government at the federal level, and in a majority of the state legislators.  

I think much of the left-wing agenda, while emotionally appealing, is economically unsustainable, but I am not happy to see the Democrats in such trouble, because their weakness allows the more extreme right-wing to advance its agendas without effective opposition or debate.

Recommended: The Right Way to Lose a War: America in an Age of Unwinnable Conflicts

Up through World War II America had gained decisive victories in almost all its wars. Since World War II America has essentially failed to win all but one of  the wars it entered  (the first Gulf War is the exception). This is in part because these were all different kinds of wars from the traditional big army meets big army wars at which the American military excels – these are guerrilla wars or insurrections, far from home. And we haven’t learned yet how to extricate ourselves from these when we unwisely get ourselves trapped in them.

Tierney., who also wrote the excellent book How We Fight: Crusades, Quagmires, and the American Way of War (2010), proposes a rational way to approach the problem of disengagement from a war we have no realistic chance of winning (or at least are not willing to commit the lives, time and money needed to win), summarized by “Surge, talk and leave”.  This is a book I wish our political leaders would “read, learn and inwardly digest”, and soon, before they waste more lives in a fruitless effort!

More in gun control

Given, as I argued in my last post, that it is probably not possible to get guns out of people’s hands in this country, what can we do that would help the situation? Well, the NRA bumper sticker “Guns don’t kill; people do” is accurate, so let’s stop focusing on banning certain types of weapons – after all one can get killed just as dead with a cheap handgun as with an “assault weapon”, whatever that is. Let's focus instead on people - on the gun owners and users.

It seems to me that automobiles offer a good model. Automobiles, handled carelessly, can cause a lot of damage and kill people.  So we require that autos be registered and inspected, and we also require that drivers be licensed and pass a test.  We also (in most states) require owners of automobiles to carry adequate liability insurance as a condition of car registration, and we hold owners of cars liable when they cause damage, injury or deaths – sometimes to the tune of millions of dollars.

So suppose we required that all guns be registered annually, for an annual fee that covered the cost of administering the program. Suppose also that on first registering any firearm the owner had to provide a sample bullet and casing, fired at the registration office (so they can’t bring in a fake one), so that there was a record of the ballistic fingerprint  that could be used to trace any bullet fired from that weapon back to the weapon and owner. Registration would also require proof of liability insurance taken out against that weapon. Owners would be expected to protect their weapons at all times - a weapon stolen because it was inadequately protected (locked in an approved  gun safe, for example)  while not in use would make the owner liable for any damages that weapon does.

Suppose similarly that we licensed all gun owners and/or users, for an annual fee that covered the cost of administering the program. Licensing would require taking and passing a course in gun safety, and a periodic refresher course.  Those who cannot pass a background check for criminal records and/or mental problems cannot be licensed.

Now, possession of an unregistered firearm would be a serious felony, and besides criminal charges they would be barred from ever owning or being licensed to use a firearm (since they would have been convicted of a felony).  Possession of any firearm, registered or not, when not licensed would similarly be a serious felony, and besides criminal charges they would be barred from ever owning or being licensed to use a firearm.

Criminals, of course, will ignore this, but the law already makes criminal sentences stiffer if a firearm is involved.

For law-abiding gun owners this allows them to own and shoot as many guns of as many varieties as they like, provided all their guns are registered, but does require them to be licensed, trained, and fiscally responsible for any damage the weapons might do, whether in their possession or not. People who want to own high-capacity automatic weapons might find that their insurance costs are higher, but then their liability is higher as well.  Insurance companies will have a strong incentive to assure that the people they insure are well trained and careful about protecting their firearms.

This wouldn't be an easy law to write. Are air guns and BB guns included? What about home-made guns (since there are plans on the web for using a 3-D printers to make a gun)? What about guns stolen while being transported (say, from one's airline luggage)? It will take some work to make a consistent law, but it would be worth it.

It’s not a perfect system, but it seems to me it would be a workable one, and perhaps (barely) palatable to the American gun-owning public.  It is, after all, not much different than what we already do with automobiles.

Effective gun control

Now that we seem to have twice-daily shootings at schools and colleges around the country, a number of people, including Hillary Clinton and President Obama, are proposing various gun control measures – like banning assault weapons (pretty much a no-op, since “assault weapon” is a poorly-defined marketing name, and most semi-automatic rifles wouldn’t fall under that category), requiring dealers at gun shows to do background checks (dealers are already required to do background checks on any sales, whether at gun shows or in stores, so that is another cosmetic suggestion), and preventing domestic abusers from buying guns (but domestic abuse isn’t one of the categories currently carried in the national database).

All these proposals sound great, but in fact they would likely have little if any effect on the current gun violence – they just let politicians sound like they are doing something. If they had all been enacted, most of the recent mass shootings would probably still have taken place.

In fact nothing really is going to have much effect on the gun problem until one (or both) of two things happens:

(1) drastically reduce the number of guns Americans hold (currently estimated at 270-300 MILLION guns) by either confiscating them (that isn’t likely to fly politically in this country) or a massive compulsive buy-back (which probably wouldn’t fly either, and would cost an exorbitant amount), and /or

(2) Imposing civil and criminal liability on gun owners and gun dealers whose allow their weapons to be stolen or “borrowed” and used in crimes. There have been three killings in the past few days by young children who simply went into their house and picked up one of their parent’s guns – meaning the guns weren’t in a locked gun safe or locked with a trigger lock.  If those parents had been liable for massive civil fines – losing everything – for that carelessness, they might have been more careful.

The problem, of course, is that option (1) is probably politically impossible.  If the government tried to confiscate everyone’s guns it would probably spark serious civil unrest and rebellion in parts of the nation, and it would be political suicide for any political party that tried it. It would simply confirm the right-wing fears that the government is out to establish a tyranny.

Option (2) just might be possible if enough people got behind it, but of course there will be serious opposition from powerful lobbies, like the NRA and the gun dealers and manufacturers. Still, a serious financial liability might make at least some people be more careful with their guns.  It probably still wouldn’t have much effect on the occasional disgruntled postal employee or bullied teenage loner who wants to go out taking some of their supposed tormentors with them.  

Liberals (who don’t own guns) want to address this problem, and I agree with them.  But the proposals being suggested to date by political leaders and hopefuls are just political wishful thinking at best, or cynical campaign sound bites at worst.

Putin does it again!

Once again Russian President Vladimir Puten has managed to outfox and blindside the Obama administration with his quick and decisive move to put Russian military forces in Syria to bolster the Assad regime, and his moves today to begin bombing, not ISIS as he claims, but rather the American-backed forces fighting the Assad regime. No doubt he feels he can get away with this because of the history of indecision, waffling, and strategic confusion displayed by the administration since the beginning of this Syrian civil war - not to mention the indecision, waffling, and strategic confusion the administration has shown in the Ukrainian situation.

It is clear that President Obama and his advisers are out of their depth here, not least because they are apparently ignoring the advice of the military commanders (who predicted, for example, that his pitiful plan to train a few thousand Syrian rebels wouldn't work - they never got but a few hundred signed up, and those were all but wiped out in their first encounter with ISIS).

It would be nice if I thought any of the current presidential contenders would be any better at this. I don't.

My personal filters for presidential candidates

I have my personal filter for potential candidates for president of the United States.  For what it is worth, here it is:

A) I want someone who has actually governed before, actually met a budget and negotiated with a legislature and dealt with the sort of problems a government faces.  That means, in effect, I want someone who has at least governed a state before.  Reagan, Carter, Clinton and George W. Bush had all been governors.  Bush’s father, H. W. Bush had not been a governor before becoming  President,  but he had been Vice-President.  Obama had not been a governor or had any significant legislative experience before,  and it shows.  He still has absolutely no idea how to negotiate with Congress, not even with members of his own party.

This filter alone eliminates Donald Trump, Ben Carson, Hillary Clinton, Carly Fiorina  and Bernie Sanders, all the current front runners in both parties.

B) I want someone who is not a scientific ignoramus. I don’t require that they have a doctorate in a field of science, but that at least they understand the value of the scientific method and have some respect for widely-held views in the scientific community.  In particular, I have no interest in voting for anyone who, despite the overwhelming consensus among climate scientists, still believes climate change is a fraud.

This filter eliminates a number of those with governing experience, including Jeb Bush (governor of Florida) , Mike Huckabee (governor of Arkansas) , Mike Pence (governor of Indiana), and Rick Perry (governor of Texas).  Scott Walker (governor of Wisconsin)  and Bobby Jindal (governor of Louisiana)  are unknowns – they keep dodging the question.  It also eliminates Ben Carson, though he was already eliminated above.

C) I want someone who doesn’t have a religious agenda to force their own religious views on issues like abortion and gay marriage down everyone else’s throats.  That eliminates most of the remaining Republican contenders who haven’t already been eliminated by (A) and (B) above.

Notice that I haven’t even dealt yet with policy issues of substance, like fiscal policy or foreign affairs or immigration policy, and yet we have already eliminated almost everyone in the field.

Of the candidates currently in the field, the only contenders who look like they might possibly pass these three filters are Chris Christie (governor of New Jersey, but currently only a blip in the polls) and Vice President Joe Biden (and he hasn’t even decided to run yet).

The refugee issue

The hundreds of thousands of Middle Eastern refugees streaming into Europe over the past few weeks raise some difficult questions about just how much responsibility nations have to take in refugees.

One might think that simple human kindness would dictate that any refugee ought to be accepted by any nation.  And for relatively small numbers of refugees that is a reasonable course.  But what about situations where the number of refugees severely disrupt a nation, and severely strain its resources?

America is a nation of immigrants, so we manage to adapt to imported new cultures relatively well.  But many European nations are quite homogeneous in their makeup and culture, and the importation of hundreds of thousands of people from an entirely different culture will be massively disruptive, and will no doubt cause considerable cultural and political difficulties and taxpayer expense in future years, and perhaps produce massive ghettos of un-assimilated people who will resent their inferior job opportunities, and who have a tradition (among some, at least) of reacting with religiously-driven extremism. This is already what has happened in many European nations with the relatively few Middle Easterners who have emigrated – how much worse will it be with hundreds of thousands or even millions more?

Fortunately we are separated by a wide ocean from this refugee wave, so we can pick and choose who we take. Europe is not so lucky.

I’m sure it is politically incorrect to mention this (especially in the current “victim-centered” culture in America) , but don’t refugees themselves bear some responsibility for their own condition? In some cases they actually elected the very people who have made their life so miserable.  In other cases they at least didn’t resist the ascent of the forces that are now driving them out of their own country.  No doubt their current condition is piteous, but do other nations have a responsibility to rescue them from their own political fecklessness or unwillingness to fight for their own rights and freedom?

Certainly there are many things other nations should have done to prevent this tragedy.  Neither the US nor Europe took the Syrian uprising seriously enough, nor the rise of ISIS.  Our military adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq only succeeded in thoroughly destabilizing the Middle East, not in solving any of its problems.  And I notice that other wealthy Muslim nations aren’t rushing to help their Muslim brothers and sisters much.

This issue needs some rational, clear-headed discussion about just what responsibilities nations have for people dispossessed in their own country. It will be hard to have such a discussion while small toddlers are washing up drowned on beaches, but we need the discussion anyway.

Still a miserable field!

About a month ago I wrote a piece about how miserable the field of presidential candidates was, both Republican and Democrat. A month on things look, if anything, even worse.

On the Democratic side, Hillery Clinton's campaign continues to implode as her cadre of loyal but apparently inept advisers and hired media experts (she has spent million on them over the past couple of months) continue to try to reshape her image, first one way and then another. A president's advisers matter, because they shape the president's policy, perceptions, and reactions to events. Set aside Hillery's own faults (of which there are plenty) - her advisers, apparently chosen, as in her last campaign, for loyalty above competence, are not the ones I would want shaping the White House's actions in the world.  And of course the polls show her losing support day by day, so that by now even a renegade, poorly-funded unknown (but authentic) Socialist like Sanders is even with her in Iowa.

On the Republican side, while Donald Trump continues to clown his way to the top of the polls, most of the rest of the field  are trying to outdo themselves chasing irrelevant "moral" issues, like defunding Planned Parenthood or defending a Kentucky County Clerk's right to ignore the law. From the point of view of campaign strategy, it would be stupid to do even if these were legitimate issues, but the Planned Parenthood issue has no basis in fact, and the County Clerk in question is a poor sap being used by an anti-gay organization to get some free publicity.

Set aside the candidate's positions on issues that matter (to the extent one can even tell what they are), none of the candidates in either party are showing the sort of good judgement and competency one would like to see in a president of the worlds most powerful nation.. 

There is something significant about the Trump phenomena

When Donald Trump first announced for president, most observers (including myself) though he would be a flash in the pan – a week-long media event and then gone.  When he made his first outrageous statement (I can’t even remember what it was, there have been so many) most observers (including myself) figured he had shot himself in the foot, and would soon be gone.  Well, we were all wrong.  It is months later, many, many outrageous statements later, and Trump is not only leading in the polls, but is widening the lead over the past few weeks.

Taken in isolation, it would be easy to assume there is a small base of Republicans who just live on another planet.  But look at the context.  The nominal democratic dynastic shoo-in, Hillary Clinton, is losing ground steadily to outright Socialist Bernie Sanders, and some polls suggest that if Vice President Biden runs, she would lose ground to him as well.  On the Republican side, look at who the runners-up are behind Trump -  not the establishment figures like Jeb Bush or Scott Walker or Marco Rubio, who were supposed to be the contenders – it is Ben Carson, a retired neurosurgeon.

There is a significant message here – It’s Washington outsiders who are leading or gaining in the polls, on both the Democratic and Republican side, not establishment Washington insiders.  And why might that be?

Well, among the outrageous and incorrect and plain made-up-on-the-spot statements that Trump spouts every week there is a lot of truth, a lot of things we all know but don’t often say. Maybe he is getting the support because, in his crude and uncontrolled and egotistical way, he is saying what no professional politician will admit – that the emperor has no clothes.

·         Everyone knows, but few say, that politicians from the president on down are bought and paid for by special interest groups, corporations, unions.  When a super-PAC puts half a billion dollars behind a candidate, who but a naïve fool would not think that they expect something significant in return when she/he wins?

·         Everyone knows, but few say, that Washington insiders get special treatment and are for the most part above the law. When I did classified work, if I had mishandled classified material like Hillary Clinton (who is still getting a pass from the media), or like General and CIA Director David Patraeus (who got a lenient plea bargain), or like CIA Director John Deutch (who got a Presidential pardon), I would have been in the slammer so quickly and for so long.

·         Everyone knows, but few say, that Washington insiders are not accountable. How many heads have rolled because of the IRS’s baised treatment of Republican political action committees before the last election?  How many heads have rolled since The Office of Personnel and Management managed to lose the entire files of everyone investigated for a security clearance since 2000, and lose them apparently to Chinese hackers?  How many heads rolled when the Government ObamaCare websites first went up so disastrously?  How many heads do you expect to roll because Hillary Clinton was allowed to use a personal server (likely not very secure), in her home, to store and pass government and diplomatic messages of potentially damaging information?

·         Everyone knows, but few say, that politicians are in it for their careers, and for their pocketbooks, not for the nation or even for their supporters. (If I hear another politician prating on about “serving the People”, I’m going to throw up!) Most of Congress gets re-elected every year, unless they really goof up or they die. And both parties have made sure that happens in the House by outrageous gerrymandering of districts. Note how many in Congress are pretty rich. Notice that when they leave office they go into lucrative jobs in corporations or as K-street lobbyists for the very people for whom they used to do favors (Or, if they are Clintons, they get $750,000 speaking fees for an hour speech from a group negotiating with the State Department – headed by Hillary - for a lucrative deal)

·         Everyone knows, but few say, that our Government is really, really f**ked up (pardon the language, but it seems to require that level of expression to truly capture the state of affairs). OPM can’t even keep some of nation’s most sensitive data (files from security clearance investigations) safe. (They didn’t even discover they had been hacked until a vendor came in to demonstrate some security software and discovered it)   The Air Force makes a $25 BILLION dollar error in calculating the probable cost of its new bomber. A guy like Edward Snowden  - only a low-level contractor, not even a government employee - can download millions of classified files and send them off anywhere he likes – and isn’t even caught (he had to announce that he had done it before anyone noticed).  The list goes on and on, with new examples added every single day.

So perhaps when outsiders begin to speak up, even if they are as outrageous as Donald Trump or as left-wing as Bernie Sanders or as unconventional as Ben Carson, they are tapping into something fundamental about the America electorate.  The electorate as a whole isn’t particularly smart, and is easily beguiled by specious arguments and red herrings and populist promises that can never be fulfilled, but they are smart enough, Republican and Democratic alike, to know that the Washington insiders these days  are pretty inept at most things they try except getting re-elected and getting rich.

Barack Obama got to be president on the basis of soaring oratory and a promise to make Washington work better. Well, we got the oratory - almost 8 years worth of it thus far - but we didn’t get better government (though we certainly got more government). So perhaps it is not surprising that outsiders in both parties are doing so much better that the talking heads on TV  would have predicted.

There is an interesting dynamic at play here. It started, or at least perhaps first became noticeable, with the rise of the Tea Party groups.  I suspect the anomalies thus far in this election are part of the same mass movement and largely independent of political parties.  The electorate is uneasy, unhappy, even perhaps increasingly enraged, at Washington insiders. The issues are many and different depending on one’s political stance, but the uneasiness is general, across all parties, and may well develop into something politically significant. Especially since the emergence of social media has dramatically changed the electoral landscape.

Racial bias...

Commentators, puzzling about Donald Trump’s continued popularity, have begun to speculate that it is his candor that is winning converts – yes, he often says dumb, incorrect, even outrageous things, but what you see is (apparently) what you get – a real Donald, warts and all.  Compared to weasel-wording, spin-doctored , TV-groomed, PAC-purchased politicians, he is a refreshing change for many.

Along the same lines as telling it like it is, politically incorrect or not, let me point out an obvious fact that no one seems to want to address for fear of being racist – there is rampant black racism as well as white racism. Let the police shoot a black man these days  – even an armed one – and there will be riots and protests and stern words from the President, and all the usual black civil rights leaders will show up to berate the white community.

But let a black man shoot a white TV reporter and white cameraman n Virginia, on air, and you hear hardly a peep from the black community.  Let a black man in Houston approach a white sheriff’s deputy filling his gas tank at a gas station and shoot him, execution style from behind, and repeatedly, and not a single one of the prominent (and loud) civil rights leaders has a word to say about it.

Looks like pretty obvious racial bias here………

Is the Iran agreement reasonable?

The worry many people (including myself) have had about the Iranian nuclear deal is that the American administration was too eager to get a deal, and gave away the farm in order to get an agreement. The revelation tonight by the Associated Press that, via a secret agreement (not the only one either, apparently, because it is labeled  "Separate Agreement II" -- what is "Separate Agreement I", one wonders?) between Iran and the IAEA, Iran will be allowed to inspect the Parchin nuclear site (suspected of having been used for nuclear weapons work)  WITH ITS OWN IRANIAN INSPECTORS!!!!!!  In other words, no foreign inspectors will be allowed to see the site.  Is that real verification? I think not.

Apparently this nuclear agreement, or at least key parts of it, actually depends on Iran doing its own verification! And if the president trusts that, then I have a bridge to sell him as well.......

What other quiet "side agreements" are there in this deal?

Until now I was more or less convinced that this deal was, if not great, at least acceptable.  But  apparently we haven't really seen all of the deal, and what is hidden may well be unacceptable. 

It will be interesting to see how the administration and its spin doctors try to handle this revelation.

Donald Trump's appeal

Watching clips from last night's Republican debate (I didn't waste my time watching the whole thing live) I guess I can begin to see why Donald Trump has some appeal. He is a loudmouthed blowhard, but at least he is an AUTHENTIC loudmouthed blowhard. He says what he thinks, straight out, dumb or not, politically incorrect or not. It's a little refreshing.

 In comparison, everyone else looks like they are reading from scripts prepared ever so carefully by committees of spin doctors and focus groups to be sure to appeal to a base and not offend campaign sponsors. Everyone else seemed to be simply pasting together well-worn campaign slogans that we are all tired of hearing (especially since we know they really don't mean them).

It is, perhaps, a measure of how weak the Republican field really is that a substance-free blowhard like Donald Trump could dominate the stage in this debate.  Of course, there is rampant speculation that he entered the race deliberately to split the Republican party and give Hillary a clear run at the Presidency.  The fact that he is close person friends with the Clintons, and that Bill Clinton called him a few weeks before he announced and encouraged him to run, feeds this speculation.

I certainly wouldn't vote for the Donald, but his presence in this campaign may finally move a few of the others to abandon their carefully-scripted speeches and tell us what they really think. No, I don't expect Hillary to do that, but with luck one of two of the Republican contenders might pick up on the clue.

What a miserable field!

So far the upcoming presidential election is shaping up to be a really miserable choice.

On the Democratic side we have Hillary Clinton as the “inevitable” contender, despite a succession of illegal or barely legal activities that stretch back to her husband’s administration.  Does anyone still remember the Rose Law Firm records of her billings that conveniently “disappeared” from the law firm files , only to eventually be found in the White House family quarters (and revealing that she double-billed many of her clients)? And then most recently we find that as Secretary of  State she kept her emails on a private server in her home (despite the security issues) , and conveniently “erased” all  the “personal” (ie- incriminating) emails before she released the rest to the Congressional Committee investigating this issue (shades of Nixon’s 18-minute gap?).  In between is a whole string of questionable actions which the press is conveniently ignoring for the moment.  This is hardly the person I would pick to lead this nation.

Then there is Joe Biden possibly entering the race.  Despite his tendency to repeatedly say the wrong thing at the wrong time, which made him a joke through most of Obama’s terms, compared to Hillary he actually looks better, which is pathetic.

And finally we have Bernie Sanders, a died-in-the-wool old fashion Socialist, eager to turn the US into a European-style centrally-planned, centrally-managed cradle-to-grave nannystate, despite the fact that Europe recently has been showing us just how economically unsustainable such a state is.

On the Republican side we have (currently) 17 contenders, of whom only one (Senator Lindsey Graham, who is no more than a blip in the polls at the moment) accepts the overwhelming scientific consensus that climate change is real, and largely caused by human activities. So the other 16 are either (a) scientific ignoramuses, (b) dumb as dirt, or (c) simple opportunists who know perfectly well that the evidence is overwhelming, but hold their position simply as matter of getting votes from the far-right base and/or mollifying the energy companies that contribute to their campaigns.  None of these options recommends them as potential presidents of this nation.

Then there is the undeniable fact that Republicans these days seem to have forgotten that this nation was founded on the principle of separation of church and state, and individual freedom, and want to inflict on everyone their own, often quite parochial and  narrow-minded, religious and moral constraints.

And it boggles the mind that Donald Trump, a wildly-narcissistic, ego-driven, publicity-seeking clown if there ever was one, is well ahead in recent polls of Republican voters. It suggests that a lot of Republican voters are also dumb as dirt, or at least that the rest of the field is so thoroughly unappealing that “the Donald” looks reasonable by comparison, which is also pathetic.

Perhaps things will change over the next few months and someone, either among this crowd or a new face entering late, will look more appealing.  But the choice thus far is pretty disappointing. I am no fan of President Obama’s administration, but most of these clowns, Democratic and Republican alike, based on what I have seen thus far, would likely make his administration look good by comparison.

The Iranian Nuclear Deal – the technical aspects

As is usually the case in Washington, there is the actual reality and there is a political reality, and often they are miles apart.  The political reality about the Iranian nuclear agreement is that the right opposes it on principle and the left is trying hard not to get burned by supporting something that may eventually fall apart.

But if one talks to nuclear proliferation experts (I happen to know a couple) the general consensus is that the inspection regime in the agreement, if followed, would make it pretty hard for Iran to hide a significant nuclear program.  IAEA inspectors have 7/24 access to all declared nuclear sites in Iran (sites we already know about) and a process to inspect any suspicious undeclared site with a maximum of 24 days notice.  Now 24 days may seem like a lot of time to clean up any illegal work before an inspection, but it isn’t that easy with nuclear materials – they almost always leave traces that can be detected with today’s technology. And the process to re-impose UN sanctions if Iran violates the agreement is cleverly crafted so that Russia and China can’t block it in the UN Security Council.

So from a technical perspective, the Iranian deal looks acceptable. No system is perfect, and no doubt Iran can find ways to cheat a little around the edges if it wants to, but it looks like it would be very hard (not impossible, but very, very hard) for them to mount the sort of major effort required to build a working nuclear weapon without the inspectors noticing it months ahead of time.

Nevertheless, emotions are high on this issue, both among politicians and among many in the voting public, so the fact that the technical experts are relatively satisfied with the deal probably will have little effect on the raucous public debate that is beginning.

The Iranian nuclear deal

Against all odds we seem to have a proposed deal with Iran to limit their nuclear ambitions. Since any deal would have had to have the (probably grudging) approval of Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, it probably means that Iran’s hard liners won’t be able to kill it. And while Republicans seem to be lining up to oppose the deal, I assume President Obama can corral enough Democrats to (probably reluctantly) uphold any veto.  So no doubt we will end up with this deal.

It certainly isn’t a good deal, because it leaves most of Iran’s nuclear facilities intact, except for disabling their heavy water reactor at Arak that could have been used to produce plutonium for weapons.  But it may be an adequate deal if (and only if):

1. the Iranians allow the IAEA inspection system to work as it should, and

2. the Western powers have the political will to put sanctions back into effect if Iran violates the terms of the agreement.

I doubt that this agreement will lead to any early thaw between Iran and the Western powers.  Indeed, Khameni may feel it necessary to let his hard liners have victories in other areas to sooth their opposition to this deal. And no doubt much of the flood of new money from unfrozen Iranian assets and new Iranian oil sales will be used to stir up more trouble elsewhere in the Middle East. 

On the other hand, the flood of new Iranian oil on the market will probably depress the price of oil yet more, and cause Russia’s President Putin more headaches. 

Only time will tell whether this was a naive effort, or a worthwhile diplomatic victory. It's too early yet to judge.

The Supreme Court rulings

Today’s Supreme Court ruling on gay marriages was more or less what I expected. Federal Appellate Courts had divided on this issue, but clearly one can’t have marriages recognized in one state but not another, so now that gay marriage is legal in a majority of the states the Supreme Court was bound to rule in favor of uniformity across the nation. And in fact I think it was the right thing to do morally, despite the howls of protest from the far right. But the dissents were interesting – Justice Roberts argued the Federalism case; that this was an issue that should be left to the states to decide. Justice Scalia was disturbed that such a large social issue was being decided by a group of unelected judges, rather than by the democratic process. Both are valid worries.

But yesterday’s Obamacare decision worries me. The ruling sets a bad precedent – that an agency can decide for itself what a law “is supposed to mean”, even if that isn’t what the wording of the law says. The Affordable Care Act (ObamaCare) was hastily written and not even read in its entirety by most of the Democrats who voted for it, and contains lots of inadvertent errors. By rights these should have been corrected by Congress as they were found, but of course politically this was not possible – not least because in ObamaCare the Democrats very unwisely forced through a major social and economic change with absolutely no bipartisan support – not a single Republican vote. But even so I don’t think it is proper to allow a government agency to unilaterally decide to interpret a law in a way other than the way it is written. This precedent will quite likely be abused in the future.

In the previous ObamaCare ruling I also think Justice Roberts was off base. He saved ObamaCare by ruling that the penalty for not buying insurance (the “individual mandate”) was not really a penalty, but rather a tax legal under the taxing power of Congress. That despite the vigorous arguments by the President during the pre-vote debates that this was not a tax. The Courts have a principle - correct I think - to defer to the wishes and intents of the legislature to the extent they can discern them, but I think this was stretching that principle a bit too far. In both these cases the Justices saved Congress from its own sloppy work, but I don’t think that is what the Supreme Court should be doing.