My meeting with Donald Trump: A damaged, pathetic personality — whose obvious impairment has only gotten worse

Salon

My meeting with Donald Trump: A damaged, pathetic personality — whose obvious impairment has only gotten worse

I didn’t get his endorsement when I ran for governor — but the severely troubled man I met has only gotten worse

Bill Curry August 12, 2017

In 1994, I visited the home of Donald Trump. He was a Democrat then, of sorts, and I was the party’s nominee for governor of Connecticut. He’d taken an interest in our state owing to his keen desire to lodge a casino in Bridgeport, an idea I found economically and morally dubious. I had scant hope of enlisting him, but made the trip anyway, thinking that if I convinced him I might win, he’d be less apt to bankroll my opponent.

I arrived at Trump Tower in early evening, accompanied by my finance chair and an old friend and colleague. Stepping off the elevator into his apartment, we were met by a display of sterile, vulgar ostentation: all gold, silver, brass, marble; nothing soft, welcoming or warm. Trump soon appeared and we began to converse, but not really. In campaigns, we candidates do most of the talking; because we like to, and because people ask us lots of questions. Not this time. Not by a long shot.

Trump talked very rapidly and virtually nonstop for nearly an hour; not of my campaign or even of politics, but only of himself, and almost always in the third person. He’d given himself a nickname: “the Trumpster,” as in “everybody wants to know what the Trumpster’s gonna do,” a claim he made more than once.

He mostly told stories. Some were about his business deals; others about trips he’d taken or things he owned. All were unrelated to the alleged point of our meeting, and to one another. That he seldom even attempted segues made each tale seem more disconnected from reality than the last. It was funny at first, then pathetic, and finally deeply unsettling.

On the drive home, we all burst out laughing, then grew quiet. What the hell just happened? My first theory, that Trump was high on cocaine, didn’t feel quite right, but he was clearly emotionally impaired: in constant need of approbation; lacking impulse control, self-awareness or awareness of others. We’d heard tales of his monumental vanity, but were still shocked by the sad spectacle of him.

That visit colored all my later impressions of Trump. Over time, his mental health seemed to decline. He threw more and bigger public tantrums; lied more often and less artfully. The media, also in decline and knowing a ratings magnet when it saw one, turned a blind eye. Sensing impunity, Trump revived the racist ‘birther’ lie. In 2011, he told the “Today” show’s Meredith Vieira he had unearthed some dark secrets:

Vieira: You have people now down there searching, I mean in Hawaii?

Trump: Absolutely. And they cannot believe what they’re finding

As Trump recycled old lies, Vieira had a queasy look but no apparent knowledge of the facts. Of course, there weren’t any. Trump had no proof of Obama being born in Kenya. (Since there is none.) It’s highly doubtful he had any researchers in Hawaii. (It was only after Vieira asked him that he claimed he did.) Later, when Trump’s story crumbled, he followed a rule taught by his mentor, Roy Cohn, infamous architect of McCarthyism: Admit nothing. To Trump, a lie is worth a thousand pictures.

By 2016, the private Trump was on permanent public display, raging over mere slights, seeing plots in every ill turn of events and, as always, stunningly self-absorbed. He was called a racist, a sexist and a bully. But his mental health issues were euphemized as problems of “temperament.” He lied ceaselessly, reflexively and clumsily, but his lies were called merely “unproven” or, later, “false.” The New York Times called the birther story a lie only after Trump grudgingly retracted it. Not till he was safe in office claiming that millions of phantom immigrants cast votes for Clinton did the paper of record use the word “lie” in reference to a tale Trump was still telling.

In 2016, the precariousness of Trump’s mental health was clear to all with eyes to see, but like extras in a remake of “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” reporters averted their glances. The day after the election, they were all in a state of shock, like staff at an asylum who woke one morning to find that the patient who thought he was Napoleon had just been named emperor of France. Once he took office, many publications began keeping running tallies of his lies. But all take a more cautious approach to questions of their origins in his deeply troubled psyche. To date, no major network, newspaper or magazine has run an in-depth analysis of Trump’s mental health.

The pathologies of American journalism are by now clichés: aversion to policy analysis; addiction to horse-race politics; smashing of walls that once separated news, opinion and advertising; an ideology that mistakes evenhandedness for objectivity. Yet we hear scant talk of reform. The press excels at public rituals of soul-searching but has little taste for the real thing. That said, its reluctance to discuss mental health reflects its virtues as well as its vices. Of major outlets, Fox News does by far the most psychological profiling. (It turns out all liberals are crazy.)

Like the language of politics, the language of psychology is imprecise; the term “sociopath” is as hard to nail down as “liberal” or “conservative.” What separates a serial liar from a pathological liar? Mere suspicion from paranoia? Righteous anger from uncontrolled rage? How do we ever tell mental illness from ill character? Our view of any antisocial behavior hinges on whether we view it through a moral, legal or therapeutic lens; to take a human life other than in self-defense is insane, and also criminal and, to many, sinful. Do we treat, punish or forgive? It’s so hard to say.

The diagnosis we associate with Trump is “narcissistic personality disorder” (a term that only lately replaced “narcissistic character disorder”). You’ll find it in the Diagnostic Survey Manual of the American Psychiatric Association, fifth edition. Back in February, a principal author of the prior edition, Dr. Allen Frances, wrote a letter to the Times rebuking mental health professionals for “diagnosing public figures from a distance” and “amateur diagnosticians” for “mislabeling” Trump with narcissistic personality disorder. Allen says he wrote the criteria defining the disorder and Trump doesn’t have it. His reasoning: Trump “does not suffer the disorder and impairment required to diagnose mental disorder.”

Frances does what he accuses others of doing. By saying flatly that Trump doesn’t suffer a disorder, he diagnoses a public figure we assume — for multiple reasons — he hasn’t treated. Nor can he or anyone else tell “from a distance” that Trump doesn’t suffer the requisite impairment and disorder. No president ever seemed so impaired or disordered, but we needn’t compare him only to other rotten presidents. Trump is the Chuck Yeager of lying, a shatterer of records thought untouchable. That he is frozen in pathological, crotch-grabbing adolescence is well documented; that his judgment is often deranged by rage is self-evident.

This week the world watched two men of obvious, serious emotional impairment in control of ungodly nuclear weapons trade puerile taunts while threatening to incinerate millions of innocent human beings. Donald Trump, having made war on Mitch McConnell, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Nordstrom, China, Mexico, Australia and the cast of “Hamilton,” baiting a man who idolizes Dennis Rodman and just murdered his own brother. This is simply unacceptable. We know how Kim Jong-un got his job. It’s time we thought about how Trump got his. One answer is that he got it the way authoritarian leaders do in liberal democracies: by exploiting the weakness and naïve politesse of the old order. To contain him, let alone remove him, we must relearn the rules of debate.

We can start by distinguishing name calling (bad) from merely naming (which is not just good but vital). I too recoil from quack therapists diagnosing strangers on cable TV. But you don’t need to be a botanist to tell a rose from a dandelion. In 2016 Trump compared Ben Carson to a child molester and pronounced him “incurable,” but few raised the far more real question of Trump’s own mental health. Do we dare not state the obvious? You needn’t be an amateur diagnostician to see that Donald Trump is mentally ill.

Trump embodies that old therapists’ saw “perception is projection.” You can use this handy tool to locate the truth, exactly opposite from whatever he just said. He has a weight management problem, so women are “fat pigs.” He can’t stop fibbing, so his primary opponent becomes “Lyin’ Ted Cruz.” His career is rife with fraud so the former secretary of state becomes “Crooked Hillary.” He is terrified of ridicule, so Barack Obama is a “laughingstock.” When he says America’s a wasteland but he’ll make it great again, we know his secret fear.

Late in the presidential campaign Hillary Clinton famously dubbed some large portion of Trump’s base a “basket of deplorables.” A constant theme and core belief of her campaign was that his campaign was fueled by racism and misogyny, evils against which Democrats stand united. The evils are genuine and enduring, but political corruption and the economic inequality it fosters did at least as much and probably more to fuel Trump’s rise.

It’s likely that Trump’s arrested development also got him white working-class votes, among males especially. The infantilization of the American male is a phenomenon we have been slow to recognize. It is a product of fast-narrowing economic horizons fueled by cultural forces; by beer ads and anti-intellectualism, by addiction and violent video games, and now by Trump, on whom Jon Stewart pinned the fitting moniker “man baby.”

Countless surveys say our children are less racist and sexist than our parents. What many may not be is more adult. The issue isn’t the bros in the beer ads; we assume they have jobs. It’s the tinderbox we create by mixing ignorance and inequality with dashed hopes and an overwrought sense of victimization. They say presidents lead us down the paths we’re already on. It’s our job to make sure this one doesn’t.

One thing Trump has taught us is that the drafters of the 25th Amendment weren’t thinking about mental illness. It is unlikely anyone it puts in charge would have the courage to take action. In any case, progressives must put their primary emphasis on crafting a blueprint for political reform and economic justice. While they’re at it they could try making better cases on national security and climate change.

They must take another lesson from Trump: to say out loud things they never said before, not as Trump does, but with honesty, decency, reason and specificity. Trump got to be president in part because there were so many things Democrats and the media didn’t think or couldn’t bring themselves to say. Trump’s whole life is a fraud that Robert Mueller may soon expose as a criminal enterprise. His business career was a disaster till a book someone else wrote and a TV show someone else produced made him a celebrity. He then fell into the only line of work he ever prospered in: licensing that celebrity. He does it pretty well, but Zsa Zsa Gabor did it first and Kim Kardashian did it better and neither of them should be president.

In 2016 Trump’s real vulnerabilities were his mental health and personal finances. We can now add his proto-fascism and his possible or intended treason to the list. Trump was lucky in the draw. His defects were so monumental, so toxic, we had no protocol for talking about them. There are effective and responsible ways to talk about all such things, but first our media and political elites must find the courage to name them. They know as well as you or I who he is.

Bill Curry was White House counselor to President Clinton and a two-time Democratic nominee for governor of Connecticut. He is at work on a book on President Obama and the politics of populism.

Alluring Lake Michigan dunes hide destructive potential

Detroit Free Press

Alluring Lake Michigan dunes hide destructive potential

Robert Allen, Detroit Free Press Aug. 13, 2017

LAKE MICHIGAN — One gobbles entire cottages. Another swallowed a child for hours before rescuers could dig him out.

This may sound like the work of a nightmarish creature from the “Star Wars” or “Tremors” science-fiction films, but it’s mostly wind and sand along a Great Lake.

Near Silver Lake in Oceana County — about an hour’s drive north of Grand Rapids — people for many years have lost properties to wind-driven sand dunes. And about 175 miles to the south, at Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore in Indiana, a horrifying event in 2013 was enough to shut down an entire area for four years.

Nathan Woessner, then 6, was walking on Mt. Baldy, a massive, 120-foot-tall dune on the east end of the park, when he fell in an invisible hole. For nearly four hours, he was trapped 11 feet below the surface — he nearly died, but rescuers saved him, according to a report in the Chicago Tribune.

On July 14, the National Park Service reopened the beach below Mt. Baldy. Access to the dune itself remains closed. Rope fences marked “Keep off dunes” guide the path through sand down to the beach.

Bruce Rowe, spokesman with the National Park Service, said trees rotting away under the sand’s surface create the holes. Eleven have been found in the dune, and it remains closed because of the danger.

On Aug. 1, a few people could be seen scattered along the beach. Kristy Stucky, 38, of Merrillville, Ill., and Rachel Henderson, 38, of Crown Pointe, Ill., each brought their young children down to play.

The mothers said they came to the Mt. Baldy beach because it’s not as crowded as the nearby state park, there’s no charge, and they can bring a dog. And also because it just re-opened.

A roped-fence path marks the way around Mount Baldy to the parking lot Aug. 1, 2017 after dune access was closed because of dangerous holes at Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore. (Photo: Robert Allen /Detroit Free Press)

“This is incredible,” Henderson said. “The shorelines are gorgeous, and the water’s gorgeous.”

She said she’s not worried about the sand.

“That never crossed our mind — to go where there’s a fenced area,” Henderson said.

At one point, the mothers called the kids back to the beach. Rip currents have claimed dozens of lives in the past year on Lake Michigan.

The Great Lakes sand dunes are relatively young, from a geologic perspective, as the lakes were covered with ice until about 16,000 years ago, according to a General Management Plan by the Michigan Department of Natural Resources dated March 2012.

It says the dunes’ sands come from glacial sediment eroded by streams and from waves along the shoreline’s bluffs. Currents moved the sediment along the shoreline, and strong winds carried the sand inland, creating the dunes, according to the management plan.

The coastal dunes, framed in thick forests, are a special place. Stucky said her husband proposed to her, years earlier, at the top of Mt. Baldy — from which miles of Lake Michigan’s blue-green waters are visible.

“We wanted to come back,” she said. “But it was closed.”

Al Gore, on Real Time with Bill Maher (HBO)

EcoWatch

By AlterNet August 9, 2017Al Gore at the Paris COP21 UN conference on climate change in Le Bourget, France (December 7, 2015). Frederic Legrand – COMEO / Shutterstock

Al Gore Predicts Trump’s Exit

By Chris Sosa August 9, 2017

Al Gore reportedly drew laughs from a European audience at a premiere of his new documentary when he insinuated that President Donald Trump might be ejected from office.

Gore is currently touring the globe with his latest environmental movie, “An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power.”

“We’re only six months into the experiment with Trump. Some experiments are ended early for ethical reasons,” Gore said to the filmgoing audience. While he acknowledged his comments were “provocative,” he refused to retract them.

Gore also expressed confidence in the environmental future of the U.S. despite Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris agreement. He believes that American cities, states and corporate leaders will ignore their president and meet U.S. obligations anyway.

“We have a global agreement and the American people are part of this agreement in spite of Donald Trump,” Gore said.

He reassured the foreign audience that the U.S. will “soon once again” have a president who is committed to combatting the global climate crisis.

Watch Al Gore’s recent appearance on HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher” below:

It’s No Longer About Southern Heritage. In Fact, It Never Was.

Esquire

It’s No Longer About Southern Heritage. In Fact, It Never Was.

It’s time Southerners recognize the lies we’ve been telling ourselves for over a century.

Getty NurPhoto

By Tyler Coates August 12, 2017

“It’s about heritage, not hate.”

As a kid growing up in Virginia, that’s the answer I always received when I questioned a Confederate flag hanging on the side of a shed or the statues of Confederate generals lining Monument Avenue in Richmond, our state capital. These weren’t symbols of intolerance, racism, or white supremacy. No, these were to honor the lives lost in a lost cause: a war that divided our country in two, a series of battles in which the Southern man bravely defended his homeland and tragically lost.

We Southerners have a strong sense of pride for our history and culture. We’re very good at lying to ourselves to fit the narrative we want to believe.

A statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee, standing on Monument Avenue in Richmond, Virginia

Getty Hank Walker

I grew up in Montross, Virginia, a tiny little town about an hour from Richmond. There’s not much to say about it, but our bragging rights come from the fact that Montross is the seat of Westmoreland County, where two of America’s most famous generals were born: George Washington and Robert E. Lee. Both of them moved away when they were children, but the symbolism is still there: Two men who played major roles in fundamental moments of our nation’s history had their origins in our tiny part of the world.

Robert E. Lee, I’ll admit, always cast a darker shadow over that part of Virginia than his Revolutionary War counterpart. I grew up being fed the tall tales of his devotion to his home state, his compassion and integrity; he sided not with the South, but with Virginia, and that is why he led the Confederate army against a tyrannical Union. It’s bullshit, of course, but again: Southerners like their legends, and we like to present beautiful odes to our heroes even when the acts they committed were hardly heroic—but were, in fact, treasonous.

I have never looked up to the men whose effigies stand tall in various parts of the South. I never thought they were heroes, simply because of the fact that they were fighting for a destructive, evil cause. We can have an endless debate over “states’ rights” as the root of the Civil War; I find it pointless, because it is nothing more than a convenient narrative to avoid the truth. These men were fighting against the notion that all men and women—not just the white men in power, and the women who stood beside them—deserve the life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for which our forefathers fought in the late 18th century. They wanted to continue the practice of enslaving black men and women, of protecting whiteness. I will never see a Confederate flag or monument and separate it from a history of white supremacy, no matter how often I was instructed by our biased history lessons to ignore it.

I will never see a Confederate flag or monument and separate it from a history of white supremacy.

Last night in Charlottesville, Virginia, white supremacists descended upon the town—and upon the grounds of the University of Virginia—to protest the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee from a city park. (Emancipation Park, to be exact; Southerners often turn a blind eye to irony.) Brandishing tiki torches, racist and homophobic slogans, and Nazi salutes, the group began to clash with Black Lives Matter activists and other groups protesting the planned “Unite the Right” rally. Those clashes continued on Saturday morning, when Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe declared a state of emergency.

Getty Chip Somodevilla

To my fellow Virginians and Southerners who have stood so steadfast in their refusal to see our Confederate monuments for what they are, I ask you: What does this say about our heritage? These men and women are not protesting the elimination of Southern culture and history, but rather reacting to their own deluded notions that white people are losing control of our country. When a group of men and women shout out “Jew will not replace us” in front of a statue of Robert E. Lee, what does that say about your symbol of Southern heritage? When these people brandish Nazi symbols and scream “fuck you faggots” in front of your idol, what does it say about a historical figure who supposedly stood up against a tyrannical government to protect his land?

The South lost the war. Over a century later, we’re still fighting one—but it has nothing to do with states’ rights or Southern pride. It is about racism, intolerance, and hatred. And at the center of it all are symbols that, despite the well-intended Southern narratives that have failed to reframe them as anything else, are the strongest representation of racism in our country’s history.

It is time the Confederate monuments come down for good, as they are now forever linked with an intolerance that extends beyond the borders of the Southern states. It’s not about Southern heritage anymore, but rather America’s heritage of propagating white supremacy as we comfort ourselves with slogans that suggest otherwise.

Beyond Organic: How Regenerative Farming Can Save Us From Global Catastrophe

EcoWatch:

The Regenerators: A better way to farm.

The Regenerators: A better way to farm.Read more: http://bit.ly/2s0OOcSvia Greenpeace New Zealand

Posted by EcoWatch on Saturday, August 12, 2017

Beyond Organic: How Regenerative Farming Can Save Us From Global Catastrophe

Ronnie Cummins June 4, 2017

A growing corps of organic, climate, environmental, social justice and peace activists are promoting a new world-changing paradigm that can potentially save us from global catastrophe. The name of this new paradigm and movement is regenerative agriculture, or more precisely regenerative food, farming and land use.

Regenerative agriculture and land use incorporates the traditional and indigenous best practices of organic farming, animal husbandry and environmental conservation. Regeneration puts a central focus on improving soil health and fertility (recarbonizing the soil), increasing biodiversity, and qualitatively enhancing forest health, animal welfare, food nutrition and rural (especially small farmer) prosperity.

The basic menu for a regeneration revolution is to unite the world’s 3 billion rural farmers, ranchers and herders with several billion health, environmental and justice-minded consumers to overturn “business as usual” and embark on a global campaign of cooperation, solidarity and regeneration.

According to food activist Vandana Shiva, “Regenerative agriculture provides answers to the soil crisis, the food crisis, the health crisis, the climate crisis and the crisis of democracy.”

So how can regenerative agriculture do all these things: increase soil fertility; maximize crop yields; draw down enough excess carbon from the atmosphere and sequester it in the soils, plants and trees to re-stabilize the climate and restore normal rainfall; increase soil water retention; make food more nutritious; reduce rural poverty; and begin to pacify the world’s hotspots of violence?

First, let’s look at what Michael Pollan, the U.S.’s most influential writer on food and farming, has to say about the miraculous regenerative power of Mother Nature and enhanced photosynthesis:

Consider what happens when the sun shines on a grass plant rooted in the earth. Using that light as a catalyst, the plant takes atmospheric CO2, splits off and releases the oxygen, and synthesizes liquid carbon–sugars, basically. Some of these sugars go to feed and build the aerial portions of the plant we can see, but a large percentage of this liquid carbon—somewhere between 20 and 40 percent—travels underground, leaking out of the roots and into the soil. The roots are feeding these sugars to the soil microbes—the bacteria and fungi that inhabit the rhizosphere—in exchange for which those microbes provide various services to the plant … Now, what had been atmospheric carbon (a problem) has become soil carbon, a solution—and not just to a single problem, but to a great many problems.

Besides taking large amounts of carbon out of the air—tons of it per acre when grasslands [or cropland] are properly managed … that process at the same time adds to the land’s fertility and its capacity to hold water. Which means more and better food for us…

This process of returning atmospheric carbon to the soil works even better when ruminants are added to the mix. Every time a calf or lamb shears a blade of grass, that plant, seeking to rebalance its “root-shoot ratio,” sheds some of its roots. These are then eaten by the worms, nematodes, and microbes—digested by the soil, in effect, and so added to its bank of carbon. This is how soil is created: from the bottom up … For thousands of years we grew food by depleting soil carbon and, in the last hundred or so, the carbon in fossil fuel as well. But now we know how to grow even more food while at the same time returning carbon and fertility and water to the soil.

A 2015 article in The Guardian summarizes some of the most important practices of regenerative agriculture:

Regenerative agriculture comprises an array of techniques that rebuild soil and, in the process, sequester carbon. Typically, it uses cover crops and perennials so that bare soil is never exposed, and grazes animals in ways that mimic animals in nature. It also offers ecological benefits far beyond carbon storage: it stops soil erosion, re-mineralizes soil, protects the purity of groundwater and reduces damaging pesticide and fertilizer runoff.

If you want to understand the basic science and biology of how regenerative agriculture can draw down enough excess carbon from the atmosphere over the next 25 years and store it in our soils and forests (in combination with a 100-percent reduction in fossil fuel emissions) to not only mitigate, but actually reverse global warming, read this article by one of North America’s leading organic farmers, Jack Kittridge.

If you want a general overview of news and articles on regenerative food, farming and land use, you can follow the newsfeed “Cook Organic Not the Planet” by the Organic Consumers Association and/or sign up for Organic Consumers Association’s weekly online newsletter (you can subscribe online or text “Bytes” to 97779).

You can also visit the Regeneration International website, where you’ll find this list of books on regenerative agriculture.

Solving the Soil, Health, Environmental and Climate Crises

Without going into extensive detail here (you can read the references above), we need to connect the dots between our soil, public health, environment and climate crisis. As the widely-read Mercola newsletter puts it:

Virtually every growing environmental and health problem can be traced back to modern food production. This includes but is not limited to:

Food insecurity and malnutrition amid mounting food waste
Rising obesity and chronic disease rates despite growing health care outlays
Diminishing fresh water supplies
Toxic agricultural chemicals polluting air, soil and waterways, thereby threatening the entire food chain from top to bottom
Disruption of normal climate and rainfall patterns

Connecting the Dots Between Climate and Food

We can’t really solve the climate crisis (and the related soil, environmental, and public health crisis) without simultaneously solving the food and farming crisis. We need to stop putting greenhouse gas pollution into the atmosphere (by moving to 100-percent renewable energy), but we also need to move away from chemical-intensive, energy-intensive food, factory farming and land use, as soon as possible.

Regenerative food and farming has the potential to draw down a critical mass of carbon (200-250 billion tons) from the atmosphere over the next 25 years and store it in our soils and living plants, where it will increase soil fertility, food production and food quality (nutritional density), while re-stabilizing the climate.

The heavy use of pesticides, GMOs, chemical fertilizers and factory-farming by 50 million industrial farmers (mainly in the Global North) is not just poisoning our health and engendering a global epidemic of chronic disease and malnutrition. It’s also destroying our soil, wetlands’ and forests’ natural ability to sequester excess atmospheric carbon into the Earth.

The good news is that solar and wind power, and energy conservation are now cheaper than fossil fuels. And most people are starting to understand that organic, grass-fed and freshly-prepared foods are safer and more nutritious than chemical and GMO foods.

The food movement and climate movements must break through our single-issue silos and start to work together. Either we stop Big Coal, Big Oil, fracking and the mega-pipelines, or climate change will soon morph into climate catastrophe, making it impossible to grow enough food to feed the planet. Every food activist needs to become a climate activist.

On the other hand, every climate activist needs to become a food activist. Our current system of industrial food, farming and land use, now degenerating 75 percent of all global farmland, is “mining” and decarbonizing the soil, destroying our forests and releasing 44-57 percent of all climate-destabilizing greenhouse gases (carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide and black soot) into our already supersaturated atmosphere, while at the same time undermining our health with commoditized, overly processed food.

Solving the Crisis of Rural Poverty, Democracy and Endless War

Out-of-touch and out-of-control governments of the world now take our tax money and spend $500 billion dollars a year mainly subsidizing 50 million industrial farmers to do the wrong thing. These farmers routinely over-till, over-graze (or under-graze), monocrop and pollute the soil and the environment with chemicals and GMOs to produce cheap commodities (corn, soy, wheat, rice, cotton) and cash crops, low-grade processed food and factory-farmed meat and animal products. Meanwhile 700 million small family farms and herders, comprising the 3 billion people who produce 70 percent of the world’s food on just 25 percent of the world’s acreage, struggle to make ends meet.

If governments can be convinced or forced by the power of the global grassroots to reduce and eventually cut off these $500 billion in annual subsidies to industrial agriculture and Big Food and instead encourage and reward family farmers and ranchers who improve soil health, biodiversity, animal health and food quality, we can simultaneously reduce global poverty, improve public health, and restore climate stability.

As even the Pentagon now admits, climate change, land degradation (erosion and desertification) and rural poverty are now primary driving forces of sectarian strife and war (and massive waves of refugees) in places like Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya and Somalia. U.S. military intervention in these regions, under the guise of “regime change” or democratization, has only made things worse. This is why every peace activist needs to become a climate and food activist and vice-versa.

Similarly corrupt, out-of-control governments continue to subsidize fossil fuels to the tune of $5.3 trillion dollars a year, while spending more than $3 trillion dollars annually on weapons, mainly to prop up our global fossil fuel system and overseas empires. If the global grassroots can reach out to one another, bypassing our corrupt governments, and break down the geographic, linguistic and cultural walls that separate us, we can launch a global regeneration revolution—on the scale of the global campaign in World War II against the Nazis.

One thing we the grassroots share in all of the 200 nations of the world is this: We are sick and tired of corrupt governments and out-of-control corporations degenerating our lives and threatening our future. The Russian people are not our enemies, nor the Chinese, nor the Iranians. The hour is late. The crisis is dire. But we still have time to regenerate our soils, climate, health, economy, foreign policy and democracy. We still have time to turn things around.

The global regeneration movement we need will likely take several decades to reach critical mass and effectiveness. In spreading the regeneration message, and building this new movement at the global grassroots, we must take into account the fact that most regions, nations and people (and in fact many people who are still ignorant of the facts or climate change deniers) will respond more quickly or positively to different aspects or dimensions of our message (i.e. providing jobs; reducing rural and urban poverty and inequality, restoring soil fertility, saving the ocean and marine life, preserving forests, improving nutrition and public health, eliminating hunger and malnutrition, saving biodiversity, restoring animal health and food quality, preserving water, safeguarding Mother Nature or God’s Creation, creating a foundation for peace, democracy and reconciliation, etc.) rather than to the central life or death message: reversing global warming.

What is important is not that everyone, everywhere immediately agrees 100 percent on all of the specifics of regenerative food, farming and land use—for this is not practical—but rather that we build upon our shared concerns in each community, region, nation and continent. Through a diversity of messages, frames and campaigns, through connecting the dots between all the burning issues, we will find the strength, numbers, courage and compassion to build the largest grassroots coalition in history—to safeguard our common home, our survival and the survival of the future generations.

GOP senators react to Trump’s Charlottesville comments: “Mr. President – we must call evil by its name.”

Vox

GOP senators react to Trump’s Charlottesville comments: “Mr. President – we must call evil by its name.”

Updated by Tara Golshan August 12, 2017

Sen. Cory Gardner Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images

It was perfectly clear what President Donald Trump was avoiding in his comments about the violent white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia Saturday. He condemned the hate and bigotry “on many sides.” He didn’t call out white nationalists or supremacists by name.

His words did not go unnoticed — prompting top GOP senators, like Sens. Chuck Grassley (IA), Orrin Hatch (UT), John McCain (AZ), Rob Portman (OH), Cory Gardner (CO) and Marco Rubio (FL), to call out the president for sidestepping the force of evil at play.

Cory Gardner @SenCory Gardner Mr. President – we must call evil by its name. These were white supremacists and this was domestic terrorism

Rubio followed suit, pressing the need for Trump to acknowledge the events that transpired.

Marco Rubio @marcorubio Very important for the nation to hear @potus describe events in #Charlottesville for what they are, a terror attack by #whitesupremacists

For context, keep in mind that these are not back-bench Republicans. They’re well-known and influential players in Republican politics. They’re also not reflexive critics. They’ve defended Trump in the past. From this perspective, it’s a big deal to see senators buck their party leader so forcefully.

Still, their obvious statements against neo-Nazis shouldn’t normally look like an act of political courage. They are telling Trump that he needs to call today’s events for what they are: an act of domestic terrorism by white supremacists and white nationalists.

Chuck Grassley @ChuckGrassley What “WhiteNationalist” are doing in Charlottesville is homegrown terrorism that can’t be tolerated anymore that what Any extremist does.

Senator Hatch Office @senorrinhatch Their tiki torches may be fueled by citronella but their ideas are fueled by hate, & have no place in civil society.

Senator Hatch Office @senorrinhatch We should call evil by its name. My brother didn’t give his life fighting Hitler for Nazi ideas to go unchallenged here at home. -OGH

Rob Portman @senrobportman The tragedy in Charlottesville this afternoon was domestic terrorism. We must all condemn hatred and white nationalism.

On Saturday, crowds of white Americans donned confederate flags and swastikas to march in the name of bigotry and hate leaving one counter-protester dead and injuring more than a dozen others. A rally goer purposefully drove his car into a crowd of counter-protesters — an act that Trump has found it easy to call terrorism in the past.

In a statement, McCain said the event put the ideals fought for in the Civil War at stake:

Our Founders fought a revolution for the idea that all men are created equal. The heirs of that revolution fought a Civil War to save our nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to that revolutionary proposition.

Nothing less is at stake on the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia, where a violent attack has taken at least one American life and injured many others in a confrontation between our better angels and our worst demons.

White supremacists and neo-Nazis are, by definition, opposed to American patriotism and the ideals that define us as a people and make our nation special.

As we mourn the tragedy that has occurred in Charlottesville, American patriots of all colors and creeds must come together to defy those who raise the flag of hatred and bigotry.

As many have pointed out through the day, condemning these actions is among the lowest bars to pass — but it is one that Trump decidedly chose not to cross. He ignored questions from reporters asking if he condemns white supremacy.

Instead, as Vox’s Dara Lind wrote, the president ended up “signaling to the white supremacists that he is on their side.”

Neo-Nazis are rallying in Virginia today. Here’s how to think about the alt-right.

VOX

Neo-Nazis are rallying in Virginia today. Here’s how to think about the alt-right.

“They believe social taboos are bullshit and want to poke holes in all of it.” —Angela Nagle

Updated by Sean Illing August 12, 2017

Members of the “alt-right” gather on the University of Virginia campus on Friday night. (Evelyn Hockstein/For The Washington Post via Getty)

On Saturday, members of the so-called “alt-right” will converge on Charlottesville, VA for the “Unite the Right” rally. The rally is taking place just a few hours after a group of torch-wielding white nationalists marched through the University of Virginia campus on Friday night.

The alt-right protesters were shouting chants like “You will not replace us” and “Blood and soil” — the latter a direct reference to Nazi ideology.

A new book by Angela Nagle, an Irish academic and writer, offers a timely exploration of the alt-right as a cultural and political force. The book is called Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right. It’s a taxonomy of the alt-right — a reactionary political movement whose adherents include white nationalists like Richard Spencer and more influential people like Steve Bannon and Steven Miller, both of whom serve as key advisers for President Trump — and a survey of the subculture that spawned it.

I reached out to Nagle to talk about the book and what she learned while writing it. She sees the alt-right as a product of a cynical age, one defined by skepticism and alienation. On the right, she argues, young men have latched onto a burgeoning counterculture that rejects social taboos around race and gender. On the left, intellectual culture has become increasingly insular, creating space for reactionaries on the right.

The result, she says, “is a complete absence of any kind of hopeful inspiring vision of the future.” This is the broader sickness, she told me, and “the alt-right is just a symptom of it.”

You can read our full conversation below.

Origins of the alt-right

Sean Illing: How did this book come about?

Angela Nagle: I started studying online anti-feminist movements seven or eight years ago. At the time, what was interesting to me about them was their countercultural style, and it didn’t resemble traditional anti-feminist movements. One of the big themes of the book, really, is the fact that the same ideas can be translated through very different political and aesthetic styles. It’s very hard to describe online politics because it doesn’t take the same formation as traditional politics, and that was interesting to me. So I started studying it and just naturally found my way into this world.

Sean Illing: Is there a “Big Bang” moment for the alt-right, a cultural event that helped explode it into being?

Angela Nagle: Trump was the big explosive moment. Obviously there have been reactionary online for many years before Trump, but Trump’s campaign was the moment where it all went completely mainstream. Gamergate was very significant in bringing together a whole cross section of people who were anti–political correctness, but a lot of these people weren’t necessarily right-wing. They were cultural libertarians or free speech enthusiasts, but there wasn’t a lot of political organizing. That changed with Trump. All the anti-PC stuff, the anti-immigration politics, the trolling campaigns — Trump boosted all of that into the mainstream.

Sean Illing: When someone identifies themselves as alt-right, what are they trying to signal? Or maybe a better way to put it is what are they defining themselves against?

Angela Nagle: If they’re using the term in the strict sense, it says they’re against the idea that problems in society are socially constructed or even that most of our experiences are socially constructed. So they would say that gender is not socially constructed but a biological category. They say the same thing about race. They reject the idea that America is founded on abstract principles and instead believe it’s a product of white Anglo-Saxon Protestants and that it could be no other way.

Sean Illing: I always wonder when it comes to stuff like this if it’s more about a mischievous contrarianism or if they actually believe what they’re propounding.

Angela Nagle: I think a lot of them start off by trolling and doing the anti-PC thing and resisting what they feel is dogma being shoved down their throats by liberal professors and parents, but where do you go from there? Do you reject all of these principles? There’s not much else there in the way of new ideas to replace them, so it’s very easy to end up going very far to the right at that point.

Sean Illing: Half the time, I can’t tell if they’re waging a civilizational battle or a heroic trolling campaign.

Angela Nagle: At this stage, anyone who thinks they’re doing it for LOLs is either deluding themselves or hiding behind that ironic style in order to avoid being interpreted, because at this point the stakes are actually quite high, and Trump is in the White House, and this movement has spread far beyond the confines of a few obscure message boards.

Sean Illing: For a long while, I saw the alt-right as this weird quasi-nihilistic subculture that latched onto politics purely as a tool of disruption and not necessarily as a means to some actual political outcome. But either I was wrong or at some point this movement shape-shifted into something much more serious than that.

Angela Nagle: Yeah, I think definitely the latter. But there are different components that make up the alt-right; it’s only recently that they’ve melted together. Some of the younger people who got into in the last couple of years just started out trolling and saying outrageous things for its own sake. It was almost like performance art, a kind of game.

Now I would say that it has changed, especially as more extreme and organized elements of the far right have latched onto this movement and, in some ways, helped to legitimize it. I see a rightward drift because the people who thinks it’s all funny and transgressive and ironic are bringing people in but then they have no ideas to keep them there because they don’t know what they believe in. But the extreme right groups, led by people like Richard Spencer, do know what they believe in and they do have solutions for the problems they identify.

“It’s basically a belief that the various societal norms and taboos — around race or culture or gender — are bullshit and that they’re poking holes in all of it. It’s a kind of postmodern questioning of everything.”

The psychology of the alt-right

Sean Illing: Can you give me a typical psychological profile of the kind of person drawn into the alt-right movement?

Angela Nagle: I think it’s slightly different depending on where you get drawn in. There are all kinds of characters in this movement that appeal to different people for different reasons. But I suppose the main things that they have in common, and this is why they use the term “red pill” so much, is that they feel they have stumbled upon this dark truth and that nobody is willing to reckon with or to think about what they have discovered.

Sean Illing: And what’s that dark truth?

Angela Nagle: It’s basically a belief that the various societal norms and taboos — around race or culture or gender — are bullshit and that they’re poking holes in all of it. It’s a kind of postmodern questioning of everything.

Sean Illing: The people you describe in the book, especially the younger, more online-oriented people, seem to be struggling with a contradiction: They want to be relevant in a culture they claim to hate. Or maybe they just read too much Nietzsche.

Angela Nagle: Yeah, definitely with those guys, I think they are both participants in and very disgusted by what they consider a degenerate culture. Which is why I think it’s so interesting that a political ideology that is so disgusted by modern libertinism and gender-bending sexuality and porn and everything would find a home in 4chan of all places, because these are people who spent years watching the most horrific and dehumanizing porn you can find on the web, and they all suddenly went right-wing reactionary.

Sean Illing: What does that suggest to you about the psychology of the alt-right?

Angela Nagle: I think it says that their sense of the world gone to hell was actually influenced by their own immersion in the forms of culture that they eventually saw as degenerate and ruined. But if they spent more time in the mainstream culture and in society in general, perhaps they wouldn’t have this sense that everything is degenerate and Western civilization is in ruins.

Members of the alt-right march through the University of Virginia campus. Photo by Samuel Corum/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

The new left

Sean Illing: You use the phrase “Tumblr left” to describe the part of the online left that has made a religion of demonstrating its “wokeness.” What’s your criticism of this corner of the web?

Angela Nagle: I think that you cannot take the left out of the picture and make any sense of what’s going on, because particularly in these very online younger forms of politics, there was a battle of the subcultures going on online and then it spilled over into campus stuff as that generation of teenagers went to college.

People on the left were annoyed with me because they thought I portrayed a very small subculture on the left as representative of the left in general, but I don’t think that’s the case. I had to describe the online left accurately as I saw it, and the right was in an absolute state of panic about the fact that they were seeing all of these things happening on college campuses: speakers being shut down, platforms being denied, large groups of people ganging up on dissident voices.

Sean Illing: What have your critics on the left got wrong?

Angela Nagle: I think parts of the left have conflated my attempt to criticize this identity-based internet subculture with all of identity politics, and that’s simply not true. Identity politics gave us the women’s rights movement, the gay rights movement, the civil rights movement, and so on. It would be absurd to conflate that entire radical history with this small internet subculture.

What I criticized wasn’t identity politics in general but a specific version of identity politics that was about performative wokeness, and in particular the reason I didn’t like it was because it was very inclined to censor and it was very inclined to gang up on people. I hate that, and I think it deserves to be criticized.

Sean Illing: You touch on an argument to which I’m increasingly sympathetic, which is that the intellectual culture on the left has become narrow and reactionary in its own way.

Angela Nagle: I think you’re right, and you can see this in the free speech debate. People who are very emotionally heightened about this cannot see why you would want to invite a bad person like Milo Yiannopoulos onto a college campus, because they think why would you bring in someone who’s going to say hateful things and make minorities feel intimidated and so on.

But in shutting down its political enemies, the left has also shut down its own internal dissenters, who have always made the left intellectually vibrant. These are the people who keep the ideology from becoming fossilized because they force everyone to constantly rethink things, and these are the very voices that have been shut down. No one on the left wants to discuss taboo subjects anymore. Everyone is shut down for the tiniest of transgressions and anyone who is off message is attacked, and that’s a climate in which ideas die.

“The crisis of liberalism is that it became so cocky about the hegemony of its own ideas that it lost the ability to make the case for itself”

The future of the alt-right

Sean Illing: We seem to have reached something like peak alt-right, but in the book you suggest that the movement may not have staying power. Why?

Angela Nagle: Subcultures come and go, and the thing we now call the alt-right probably will go away. Scandals will come up. The movement will splinter into various groups. There will be infighting. But the central ideas they have put on the table will have to be dealt with, and it is very difficult to deal with them when you have such an intellectually stifling culture.

Whatever we call the alt-right now may go away, but something with a different style and the same central ideas will reemerge in its place.

Sean Illing: To be perfectly honest, I’m not confident our current political culture is capable of challenging these ideas as forcefully as we need them to be challenged.

Angela Nagle: The crisis of liberalism is that it became so cocky about the hegemony of its own ideas that it lost the ability to make the case for itself. There’s this assumption that our ideas are brilliant and beyond question and anyone who questions them can be dismissed as sexist or racist or whatever. Well, that’s not good enough, and the taboos have been broken.

It’s not enough to say what you are against. We have to specifically say what we are for and defend it. We’re in an age of enormous cynicism, and there’s a complete absence of any kind of hopeful, inspiring vision of the future. This is the real problem, and the alt-right is just a symptom of it.

Why income inequality is so much worse in the U.S. than in other rich countries

Washington Post Opinion-Rampage

Why income inequality is so much worse in the U.S. than in other rich countries

By Catherine Rampell August 11, 2017

My column Friday was about why the $15-minimum-wage-obsessed grass-roots left should get more fired up about expanding other kinds of tools to help poor people. Particularly ones that don’t make the poor more expensive to hire, such as the earned-income tax credit, food stamps, housing vouchers, etc.

These kinds of anti-poverty tools are sometimes referred to as “post-tax” policies. They’re mostly paid for by the government (i.e., taxpayers) rather than by employers or workers. The column mentioned that the United States relies far less on them than other developed countries. Here’s some more detail on that point.

Below is a chart, from University of Oxford economist Max Roser, showing a measure of income inequality called a Gini coefficient. Gini coefficients can run anywhere from zero to one. A value of zero would mean that income was distributed perfectly evenly among everyone in society; a value of one would mean that a single person has all the income and everyone else gets nothing. In other words, the higher the measure, the more unequal the income distribution.

The orange points show Gini coefficients for market income — that is, what people earn before the tax and transfer system comes into play.

The United States doesn’t exactly rank here as the most egalitarian advanced country on Earth, but we don’t totally embarrass ourselves. On pre-tax-and-transfer income inequality, we do about as well as France.

Now look at the blue points, which show Gini coefficients after considering tax and transfer spending, i.e., redistribution.

The United States does much, much worse. The only developed country with more unequal income distribution is Mexico. (Chile also is more unequal, though it’s not usually categorized as an advanced/developed economy.)

As I’ve said before, I favor using both pre-tax and post-tax policies to reduce inequality and help the poor. These data suggest there’s a whole lot more room for improvement on post-tax redistribution especially.

Catherine Rampell is an opinion columnist at The Washington Post.

Transforming the world’s least sustainable city

Cities Rising: Transforming the world’s least sustainable city

Katie Couric, Cities Rising August 9, 2017

https://www.yahoo.com/katiecouric/transforming-worlds-least-sustainable-city-221217694.html

By Alexandra Zaslow

Phoenix is throwing away the reputation it once had as the world’s least sustainable city and making great strides to become more resourceful.

It has launched a Reimagine Phoenix Initiative with a goal to increase the city’s waste diversion rate to 40 percent by 2020 — and it doesn’t stop there.

“We’re going straight to zero waste by the year 2050,” said Ginger Spencer, the city’s public works director.

With 1 million tons of waste being sent to the landfill annually, Phoenix began to devise ways to become a more sustainable city.

The Resource Innovation Campus was created to “redefine” trash for Phoenix’s residents and businesses.

“Ironically, one of our most innovative departments is the [one] that most people would think was the most kind of old-school, traditional department,” Mayor Greg Stanton said. “We’re turning it on its head and saying that needs to be the most innovative place in the entire city of Phoenix.”

On the Resource Innovation Campus sits a 27-acre transfer station for compost and recycling, as well as 50 acres of land for businesses. In partnership with the city, the Resource Innovation and Solutions Network Incubator, located on the campus, works with entrepreneurs and small businesses to turn the city’s trash into resources.

“What we’re throwing away and things that we’re recycling actually have a tremendous amount of value,” said Alicia Marseille, director of the incubator.

Sustainability isn’t just happening on that campus: The entire city of Phoenix is working to become more resourceful.

Across the city, streetlights are switching over to LEDs and roofs of city buildings and facilities are switching to solar.

“Phoenix is leading the way,” Stanton said. “That’s what we owe future generations.”

A photographer captured these dismal photos of life in North Korea on his phone

Business Insider

A photographer captured these dismal photos of life in North Korea on his phone

Melia Robinson August 10, 2017

Children walk to school in Tumangang, North Korea, in August 2015.Xiaolu Chu/Getty

As North Korea continues its saber-rattling about nuclear strikes, we still know very little about the country.

The North Korean government is notoriously secretive. Upon entering the country, visitors are instructed on what they can and cannot take pictures of. Customs agents inspect your cellphone and other digital devices, including cameras, tablets, and storage cards, for banned content.

These restrictions prompted Getty photographer Xiaolu Chu to travel by train through the country in August 2015, documenting everyday life through his phone lens. He told Business Insider it was too risky to use a high-end camera because locals would report him to the police.

While some images were deleted during run-ins with the police, Chu shared some snapshots with us. Take a look at life inside North Korea.

View As: One Page Slides

Chu took the long way around during his visit to North Korea.

Xiaolu Chu/Getty

Most Chinese tourists enter by train through Sinuiju or by plane through Pyongyang. He instead traveled to Russia so he could access the northern port at Tumangang.

Google Maps

The train ride from Tumangang to Pyongyang — the capital of North Korea — lasts a day. It was canceled because of a dispute between North Korea and South Korea.

Xiaolu Chu/Getty

“Fortunately, we had a whole day to go out and take some pictures in the village,” Chu said.

Xiaolu Chu/Getty

He saw scores of people living in abject poverty. Many begged for money.

Xiaolu Chu/Getty

“There are nearly no fat people in North Korea, everyone looks very thin,” Chu said.

Xiaolu Chu/Getty

Many of the residential buildings looked run down and in need of repair.

Xiaolu Chu/Getty

When he later returned to the train station, he noticed portraits of the country’s former leaders and the words “long live” hanging overhead.

Xiaolu Chu/Getty

At night, these shrines were the only lit structures in the village. Other buildings sat in darkness.

Xiaolu Chu/Getty

The next day, he boarded a train for the nation’s capital.

Xiaolu Chu/Getty

A customs agent on board checked his tablet to make sure it wasn’t GPS-enabled. The government also jams signals as a security measure.

Xiaolu Chu/Getty

The customs agent also checked his laptop and DSLR camera. Chu said the agent had no trouble operating the devices, with the exception of the MacBook.

Xiaolu Chu/Getty

The train chugged along, giving Chu glimpses of everyday life. This boy collected corn cobs beside the tracks.

Xiaolu Chu/Getty

Many people rode bicycles to get around.

Xiaolu Chu/Getty

Some scenes were quaint. Children took an afternoon dip in a river.

Xiaolu Chu/Getty

Anytime the train pulled into a station, there were painful reminders of the country’s poor living conditions. This little boy begged for money at a station in Hamhung.

Xiaolu Chu/Getty

Korean People’s Army soldiers rested on the tracks.

Xiaolu Chu/Getty

Whenever he hopped out, Chu shot photos on his phone. “DSLR is too obvious to take pictures in that condition as people in the village were extremely vigilant,” he said.

Xiaolu Chu/Getty

Several locals reported him to the police. “A policeman and a solider stopped us and checked our cellphone. I hid most of the pictures, [but a] few pictures were deleted,” he said.

Xiaolu Chu/Getty

The tourism bureau encourages visitors to take photos of student-exercise groups. These kids rehearsed for a celebration of the 70th anniversary of the Workers’ Party of Korea.

Xiaolu Chu/Getty