MAINSTREAM NEWS MEDIA

According to Gallup, American’s confidence in newspapers and television news is at an all-time low. There is reason to be suspicious of news media. They don’t always get things right.

For example, I recall a news article about an American soldier. The article said he was a first sergeant. Then it referred to his platoon. Wait a minute. An infantry company has four platoons. But the first sergeant is not attached to a platoon. He is part of the company headquarters. A follow-up article referred to the man as a sergeant first class. Sergeant first class is a military rank. First sergeant is a position in a military company.

Another example that comes to mind is the presidential election of 2004. Two months before the election Sixty Minutes aired a story that made a false statement about George W Bush’s service in the Texas Nation Guard. The story was based on documents to Sixty Minutes had received. It turned out that the documents were forged. When the forgery was discovered, Dan Rather said that if he had known that, he would not have gone ahead with the story.

So journalists, like the rest of us, are imperfect human beings. They make mistakes sometimes. But that is not the end of it. They have means in place to minimize errors. News writers work with editors so that some of these mistakes can be caught and corrected before the story goes to print or on the air or online. Some mistakes still get through. When errors are caught after the item has been released to the public, responsible journalists make corrections. The news item about the man they identified as first sergeant was really a sergeant first class. Sixty Minutes admitted that they had been conned and corrected itself.

Sure we might sometimes get an incorrect story from the mainstream media, but we know that the media makes an effort to minimize false stories. And if they sometimes fail, the media will make an effort to correct their errors. With false media, on the other hand, we know that they are deliberately trying to sell stories that they know to be false. At the very least we have to be skeptical of any “news” put forth by known disseminators of untrue stories.

Donald Trump, for example, lied as often as he told the truth. The Washington Post kept track of the false or misleading statements he made while he was in office. In four years he told 30,537 lies.

30,537 lies!

The President of the United States!

After that performance, why would anyone believe anything he said? Another notorious prevaricator is Alex Jones. At Sandy Hook Elementary School Adam Lanza murdered twenty children and one teacher. The worst thing a parent can face is the loss of a child at any age. (Believe me, I know.) How much worse it must have been for these people to lose their innocent children in such a senseless event. Yet Jones claimed the whole thing was a hoax, staged to motivate limitations on the ownership of fire arms. For adding more pain to the pain of their loss, Jones has been ordered to pay $473 million to the families of the Sandy Hook shooting victims.

These are only two of the most notorious fabricators. There are many more, including several “new” commentator qt Fox News, QAnon, and many of the MAGA promoters.

Sure, the Mainstream news is not perfect. They sometimes get things wrong. But the most egregious of the con artists are so often false that it would be a mistake to believe any of the garbage they spew unless it is confirmed by a reliable source.

I don’t know what motivates some people to make these false statements. Much of it seems to be greed. They tell these lies for political or financial advantage. That seems to be the in the two men we have cited. Others may be deluded themselves. Still others might be suffering from psychological problems that makes them see the world upside down. Whatever their moral, intellectual or psychological weakness, we need to avoid seeing the world through their flawed vision.

We rely on information we get to make decisions about our lives. We owe it to ourselves to make decisions based reliable information.

INFOWARS

From Alex Jones’s InfoWars we can learn about the involvement of the U S government in 9/11. The Sandy Hook shootings never happened. The survivors of the Stoneham Douglas High School shootings were crisis actors. The government has programs that can control weather. Prominent Democrats are involved in a child pornography ring, located in the basement of a Washington, DC, pizza restaurant. Where does Jones get his information? Some of it he just makes up. He also gathers stories from sources like RT, a Russian state-sponsored propaganda broadcast.

While you are perusing this misinformation, you can buy products from InfoWars, everything dietary supplements, including a medicine for Covid-19, T-shirts, hats, and coffee cups. You can even get food supplies to keep in store for the coming revolution. I don’t know whether Jones actually believes the ideas that he peddles, but he certainly pulls in a lot of followers. InfoWars attracts 10 million visitors a month, a lot more than a straight news site would attract. People who believe in Jones’s misinformation have made him a wealthy man.

QAnon is an anonymous website that also spreads false information. According to them North Korea’s Kim Jon Un was installed and is controlled by the CIA. Germany’s leader, Angela Merkel, is Hitler’s granddaughter. Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and George Soros were involved in a plot to overthrow President Trump. They were also involved in a child sex-trafficking ring. The Rothschild family leads a satanic cult.

QAnon is anonymous, though it supposedly is run by a deep member of the CIA with the highest security clearance. Margorie Taylor Greene believes the QAnon stories. In the last election she was elected to represent Georgia in Congress. Donald Trump’s lies are too numerous to list. According to the Washington Post, which has been keeping track, Trump had made over 20,000 false or misleading statements in the first three and a half years in his administration.

All three of these have had their lies picked up and further spread by the social media. Trump notoriously releases some of his misinformation on twitter. Rather than conduct government business through official channels, he often makes his announcements by a tweet.

One has to wonder whether Trump’s false statements are delusional or a cynical disregard for the truth when he thinks a lie will serve his purposes better. Either way, these misstatements, along with his incompetence, demonstrate how unfit he is for the office he holds. At any rate, over 700 million people voted for him in the recent election and vast numbers of citizens are convinced that the election was somehow stolen from him.

What have we come to? That so many people have fallen for the lies of these charlatans? Unfortunately, it is not just these malignant forces that have captured the minds of Americans. The social media echoes the lies and false conspiration that Alex Jones et al project. From time to time Facebook or Twitter will temporarily suspend Alex Jones or label Donald Trump’s accounts as less than accurate. But it is usually too little, too late. Millions of people depend on sources like Facebook rather than traditional sources for their news.

It is not enough to try to reform the social media. The answer lies elsewhere. In a future post we will look at how we can minimize the damage done by these malevolent forces.

The Damage Done by Facebook

It is the nature of politicians to lie, and not only Republicans. (I did not have sex with that woman, Miss Lewinski.) But when the President of the United States makes over 20,000 false statements in three and a half years in office, mendacity is brought to a new low. Unfortunately, in these dishonest times the Great Prevaricator has had lots of help. The social media, particularly Facebook and Twitter, have helped him spread his misinformation across the country. The President communicates more through the social media than through official channels, and for the most part these media leave his misinformation untouched. Donald Trump is not the only one who disseminates fabrications through Facebook and others. It is known, for example, that Russia spread lies through these sources to influence the 2016 Presidential election. Facebook was charged with allowing Russians to sow chaos during that election. Since the election was so close, it is very likely that Russian posts on Facebook contributed to the outcome. Other unfriendly powers, like Iran and North Korea, have also spread untruthful statements through Facebook. It is not just foreign powers who spread fraudulent ideas through the internet. Notably QAnon has been posting poisonous ideas for the past three years. QAnon is anonymous, but it poses as an unnamed high-ranking government official. It promotes the conspiracy theory that Democrats are running a pedophile ring, and Donald Trump is leading the fight against the ring. During the 2016 presidential campaign it was charged that Hillary Clinton was involved in such a ring that was located in the basement of a Washington pizzeria, Comet Ping Pong. One man believed the falsehood so strongly that he went to the restaurant armed with a rifle. It turned out that there was no ring, and the restaurant didn’t even have a basement. Marjory Taylor Greene from Georgia seems sure to be elected to Congress. She supports the QAnon conspiracy theories. She also said that Barack Obama is a Muslim, liberal philanthropist George Soros is a Nazi, and she questioned whether a plane really crashed into the Pentagon on 9/11. QAnon undermines trust in public institutions through hate speech and the spread of unfound conspiracy theories. Turning Point USA is another group that has been disseminating fraudulent stories. It published pro-Trump comments and misinformation. One of its affiliates, Turning Point Action, was paying teenagers to post messages. Another affiliate, Rally Forge, paid users to cast doubt on mail-in ballots and spread misinformation about the coronavirus. Many of their accounts used stock photos to create false profiles. In April 2020 websites spreading untruthful stories about health on Facebook drew nearly one half a billion views. The top ten sites peddling inaccurate information and conspiracy theories drew nearly four times as many views as the top reputable sites for health information on Facebook. The false claim that pure alcohol could cure the virus led to 800 deaths and 60 cases of blindness after believers drank methanol as a cure. False information and conspiracy theories downplay the public health crisis, spread disinformation about potential remedies and likely safety risks of future vaccines. The social media have taken some steps toward correcting some of the problems created fabrications on their sites. Twitter, for example, has rules against harassment, hate speech, and incitement to violence. They eliminated many accounts that violated these rules. Facebook removed hundreds of fake profiles linked to Turning Point USA. Twitter suspended over one hundred Iranian accounts linked to issues of social justice. When Donald Trump posted a false message that the flu is more deadly than COVID19, Facebook removed the post. Twitter left it in but added a warning label of misinformation. They also prevented it from being shared. Facebook and Google will block all political ads until after the election. We’re glad that the social media is taking some steps to limit deceitful posts on their sites, but what they are doing is not enough. While Facebook and Twitter have removed or labelled some posts as misinformation, lot of disinformation slips through Facebook’s disinformation system. They have stopped publishing posts from QAnon and its affiliates, but individuals can still post QAnon ideas and fabrications. 93,000 active Twitter accounts refer to QAnon in their profile. Since so many people rely on the internet for information, it is unacceptable that so much of the data in cyberspace is fraudulent. Something must be done to correct this. It is not an easy task. Liberals complain that the cloud contains so much prevarication. Conservatives charge that the social media has a liberal bias because so many of the posts that are removed have been placed by conservatives. In a future post we will look at some of the things that can be done to make the social media more honest.b

CONSPIRACY THEORIES

 

Did you know—

The “Illuminati” is a group seeking to establish a New World Order, in which they will control everything. It says so on the back of the American dollar bill. Novus Ordo Secolorum.

If the Illuminati don’t gain control of the world, the Jews will. You can read about it in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, written early in the 20^th century.

When the Jews aren’t trying to seize control of the world, they are up to other kinds of mischief. They are responsible for the promotion of Communism. After all, Karl Marx was a Jew. George Soros, who was 14 at the end of World War 11, was a Nazi collaborator. Whenever there is a protest in the streets, Soros is handing out $100 bills to the protestors. He promotes Antifa. Such luminaries as Victor Orbon, Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani, Bill O’Reilly, and Alex Jones have attested to this last statement. Incidentally, the holocaust is a hoax, designed to promote Jewish interests.

If the Jews and the Illuminati don’t seize control of the world, the Catholics might try. You can read about it on the Berean Beacon, written in 2000.

Look out for black helicopters. They may be carrying UN forces seeking to control the U.S.

Water condensation trails (contrails) from aircraft contain chemical and biologic agents under a secret government program.

The assassination of Jack Kennedy was a conspiracy by the CIA, the Mafia, LBJ, Fidel Castro, or the KGB. The federal government concealed crucial information to cover up the conspiracy.

Global Warming is another hoax invented for ideological and financial reasons. Donald Trump and Sen. James Inhofe promoted this explanation for global warming stories.

The Deepwater oil rig accident in 2010 was caused by sabotage by environmentalists. Or maybe it was just a Russian submarine, according to Rush Limbaugh.

The shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School was another hoax, aimed to promoted gun control. However according to former KKK Grand Master David Duke, maybe the Zionists were responsible. Alex Jones suggested it might have been staged with actors. Rush Limbaugh noted that it might be the Mayan Calendar that caused Adam Lanza to make the attack.

Autism is caused by vaccinations. This was reported by a British doctor who published an article about it in Lancet. Later the article was denounced by Lancet, and the doctor lost his license to practice medicine.

QAnon promotes several theories: Civil servants (the Deep State) is in a plot to take control of the government away from elected officials. Many prominent Democrats, including Hillary Clinton, are Satan worshiping pedophiles. She was said to be connected to a child pornography ring in a Washington, DC, restaurant in 2016. In recent month a number of Republicans have come out supporting the QAnon theories. Marjory Taylor Greene is one of these. She recently won a primary in Georgia and will probably be elected to Congress.

Televangelist John Hagee called COVID-19 a dress rehearsal for the New World Order. Some have called it a Jewish plot to force vaccinations and sterilization. Or perhaps its was manufactured by the Rockefellers and Bill Gates with the goal mass of vaccinations to reduce human population. Gates, whose foundations donated millions to vaccine research, may have wanted to use the vaccine to plant microchips in people’s bodies. That would allow him to monitor their movement.

It is difficult to understand how any otherwise intelligent person can fall for these outlandish theories, but a lot of people do. In later posts we will look at how people come to believe these things, the psychological difference between believers and skeptics, and how a reader can test the validity of theories like these.

 

 

TRUTH

According to the Washington Post, after Donald Trump had been in office for three and a half years, he had told 20,000 lies or misleading statements. Twenty thousand! The President of the United States!

It is hard to believe. It would have been unbelievable before Trump. Never before have we had a President so unfit for office. He is unfit morally, intellectually, psychologically, and temperamentally. He has created irreparable damage to the United States in many ways, much of it through his prevarications. He has destroyed the credibility of his office and of the United States itself. Promises made in the name of the United States under previous administrations have meant nothing to him. The message he has created: The United States is not good for its word.

His misinformation about the Covid 19 virus has caused the death of tens of thousands of Americans. In his eagerness to reopen institutions that had had been closed to limit people’s exposure to the virus, he encouraged many states, mostly under Republican governors, to reopen prematurely, causing death rates from the virus to shoot up. He has ignored advice from experts, from scientists. He has minimized the effects of Covid 19, calling it little more than a cold. He has said it will be gone in little time. He has called it a hoax. 

While Donald Trump has been the Great Prevaricator of our times, he is not alone in spreading misinformation. Alex Jones spread the message that the shooting of twenty school children in Sandy Hook, CT, was a hoax. Can you imagine how the parents must feel? To lose a child in that terrible event and then have an unprincipled person like Jones tell people that it was a hoax?

Jones also promoted the false story that Hillary Clinton was involved a child porn ring located in a pizza restaurant in Washington. One man was so convinced on the truth of that story that he went to the restaurant armed with a rifle, determined to free the children from the basement where they were held. There was no basement in the restaurant. Or any children.

QAnon is another group that promotes false conspiracy stories and accuses prominent people of child pornography. We now have a woman from Georgia, Marjorie Greene, who espouses the QAnon message. She will probably be elected to Congress in November. Anyone who believes Fox News and personalities like Rush Limbaugh does so at their peril. Misinformation is spread freely through the social networks, and gullible people believe these propagators of falsehood. Some people believe that social networks are reliable sources of news.

There have always been liars of course. The difference is that today liars can spread their poison on the internet, and gullible people are taken in by the falsehoods. Then they spread the false stories through the social media. It is difficult sometimes to know what to believe. 

The purpose of free education is to enable people to make wise choices in electing candidates to public office. If people are fed disinformation, they will elect candidates like Donald Trump. Clearly something must be done to limit the dissemination of lies about public events. We cannot afford the election of another candidate as woefully unfit for office as Donald Trump.

Something must be done. We can’t rely on the government to do it. An administration like the present one cannot be allowed to declare what is fake news and what is not. The social media cannot be trusted to do it. Mark Zuckerberg refused to remove Holocaust denial statements from Face Book, saying it was a matter of opinion. Of course it is not a matter of opinion. The Holocaust was a fact. To deny that it existed is a lie.

The answer is in education. Teaching people to think and to evaluate information is as important as the three Rs. Two professors at the University of Washington have a class that does just that. The name of the class is Calling Bullshit https://www.callingbullshit.org/index.html . The course teaches students how to evaluate data and check sources. Even though this is a college course, it has been taught on the secondary level as well.

As the course description says, the world is awash in bullshit. People are posting misinformation online about the coronavirus. They are denying climate change. They are electing people like Marjorie Greene and Donald Trump. We must educate everyone on how to detect bullshit. 

An Open Letter to Nancy Pelosi

Dear Speaker Pelosi:

Every day brings new lies and new outrages. By his own admission, the President of the United States put pressure on the head of a foreign country to find some dirt on Joe Biden, who is one of the leading candidates for the Democratic nomination. What does this man have to do before the House of Representatives takes action to impeach him?

Some may feel that impeachment is a futile action because the craven Republicans in the Senate will not uphold the impeachment. That is probably true. Mr. Trump will likely be able to hold onto his office until the end of his term. However, there is a matter of principle involved. The legislative branch has a responsibility to say, “No more! The kind of things Mr. Trump has been doing and saying are not acceptable in a President of the United States.”

In the last election We the People elected a majority of Democrats to the House because we wanted someone to stop Mr. Trump before he can do any more damage. If the Republicans in the Senate do not vote to sustain the impeachment, their failure will be remembered in the next election. We the People will also remember the Democrats who failed to rein in a president who is so unfit for his job.

THE GREAT PREVARICATOR

Although the Great Prevaricator has elevated disinformation to an art form, he did not invent it. Lies and Liars have always been with us. In the last century people would support their false statements by saying, “I read it in the newspaper,” making no distinction between such rags as The Enquirer and the New York Times.

With the internet, widespread misinformation has become more prevalent than ever. Professional liars such as Alex Jones spread their mendacity throughout the world. What can stop them? How can citizens know whom to believe?

Recently some steps have been taken to rein in some of the deception that runs rampart on the internet. Apple, Facebook, YouTube, and Spotify have removed Jones’s venom from their sites. However his garbage was not removed because it was false. It was removed because it violated their policies about hate speech.

Facebook has also deleted some accounts that were spreading falsehoods. These accounts are similar to the covert Russian accounts that are believed to have influenced the 2016 American election.

I am glad that something is being done about these fonts of poison, but two questions come to my mind. Are we playing whack-a-mole? If we chop off one toxic head, will two more arise someplace else? The second question concerns: who decides? Who determines whether a particular piece of information is harmless or a piece of trash that should be thrown out with the rest of the rubbish?

I certainly don’t want conservatives deciding what I can and cannot read. I don’t want liberals making the decisions either. Sometimes we need to be politically incorrect. We need to raise and discuss issues that some people find uncomfortable.

The decision about whether a bit of information is valid and worthy of consideration must be left in the hands of the people. Yet many of the people have shown themselves to be incapable of making informed decisions about the value of all the data that streams to them every day.

Therefore, it is our responsibility to give the people the skills they need to make knowledgeable decisions. From an early age children need to be taught to think scientifically. They need to learn to evaluate the fact statements that come to them. They need to be able to evaluate the evidence that is presented to them and to think critically.  

If we can open the minds of the new generation coming up, they will be less likely to fall for the toxic dishonesty of the Great Prevaricators of the future.

THE WORST JOB IN THE WORLD

The worst job in the world has to be press secretary for Donald Trump. Day after day poor Sean Spicer has to get up and try to paper over lies so outrageous that they would make Baron Munchausen blush.   What’s worse is that poor Sean is appallingly unsuited for the job. What you would need for the job at the very least is a sense of humor, which poor Sean doesn’t seem to have.

Edwin Edwards has the ideal personality for Sean Spicer’s job. Edwards served one term as a congressman from Louisiana, four terms as governor, and eight years as an inmate in a federal prison for corruption. Edwards is larger than life and full of joie de vivre. 

He said of an opponent in the election of 1983: "David Treen is so slow it takes him an hour and a half to watch 60 Minutes." In the election of 1992, his opponent was David Duke, a leader of the Klan. Edwards said of Duke: "The only thing we have in common is we’re both wizards under the sheets." In the election someone charged him, married at the time, with sleeping with six difference women in one night. He replied: "No, it wasn't that way. He (the author) was gone when the last one came in." 

Recently a voter came up to him and said, “I hate Democrats, but I’m voting for you,” the woman said. “All y’all steal. But you were honest about it. You were gambling, you said you were gambling. You didn’t sneak around, hide nothing. You never took from the taxpayers, just from the fat cats.” Asked why Louisiana voters seem so willing to forgive Edwards his past transgressions, the woman said, “Well, he’s one of us.” Then she hugged Trina [Edwards’ 35-year-old wife], imploring, “Don’t let this weasel get away.”

Anyway, Edwards isn’t going to take a job working for Trump. At 86 he thinking of running for Congress again.

BULL IN THE CHINA SHOP

After Donald Trump was elected to the presidency, the stock market started climbing. Presumably this was based on the premise that taxes would be lowered on business and the wealthy. Given the Republican majority in both houses of Congress, this seems likely to happen. However, not everyone is optimistic about the economic outlook over the next four years.

This is partly because we can’t take Mr. Trump at his word. He often does not seem to comprehend the complexities of the issues he deals with. He frequently walks back statements he has made or says they were merely jokes. Sometimes he outright lies and continues to insist of the veracity of those lies long after they have been exposed as falsehoods.

Also Republicans are generally regarded as friendly to business while Democrats are thought of as hostile to business, but recently the economy has flourished under Democratic administrations and floundered while the Republicans had the White House. President Clinton handed President Bush a tidy surplus in the federal treasury. Bush promptly squandered it by lowering taxes on the well-to-do and starting a misguided war in Iraq. Under the Bush administration we saw the greatest economic struggle since the Great Depression. President Obama took the mess that Bush had handed him and turned it around, pulling us out of the Great Recession and handing the economy to President Trump in a much better shape than it was when he received it. Do you have any confidence in Donald Trump’s ability to handle it with care?

Conservatives believe that the marketplace will be able to resolve any issues it faces. If you just let things go, the law of supply and demand will make everything turn out right in the end. They resent liberal meddling, making up rules and regulations that hinder business’s ability to function without interference.

And yet that is just what Donald Trump did when he stepped into a business decision made by Carrier in Indiana. The company was going to shutter two plants and send them to Mexico. Trump talked them into keeping one of those plants open, partly by having his running mate, who happened to be governor of Indiana, grant the company some $7 million in tax credits. Trump also threatened to impose a heavy tariff on any material coming from that Mexican plant into the United States. It is almost like having the central government decided how many pairs of shoes were to be made, as was done during the Soviet government in Russia. 

Can the President step in, in the decision any business makes if he does not agree with it? Is the governor of every state involved going to grant tax credits to companies that say they’re going to move out of the country? What will stop manufacturers from threatening to move out of the country unless they get significant tax breaks? What will prevent the companies that keep manufacturing here from replacing huge portions of their work force with automation?

Mr. Trump blames China and Mexico for the loss of manufacturing jobs in the United States. He threatens to tear up international trade agreements and raise trade barriers in the form of high tariffs against countries he deems our adversaries in trade. However, those jobs are gone forever. More jobs have been lost to automation than to companies sending them overseas. What is needed is not a trade war but education to prepare American workers for the new world that is emerging through automation, computers, and the internet.

If America raises import duties on goods from other countries, they will retaliate by doing the same to us. Such warfare will destroy the delicate symbiosis that keeps the world economy in balance. The real estate bubble that burst in 2008 threw the economy off balance not only in this country but world-wide. The Great Depression of the 1930s was felt in every country. In warfare no one wins. Everyone loses. This is true in economic war as well.

A recent issue of The Week featured Trump on the cover as a bull in the china shop. It was an apt comparison.

GOVERNMENT BY TWITTER

During the primary campaign an 18-year-old college student named Lauren Batchelder told candidate Donald Trump that she didn’t think that he was “a friend to women.” The next day on Twitter called Batchelder “an arrogant young woman” and speculated that might have been a plant for a rival campaign.

After that she started getting threatening and sexual phone calls. One said, “I wish I could punch you in the face.” Another told her, “Watch your back, punk.”

A few days ago Chuck Jones, leader of the United Steel Workers at Carrier in Indianapolis, said that Trump had lied to Carrier workers. Trump then tweeted that Jones had done a terrible job representing the workers. If the union was any good, Trump said, they would have kept the jobs in the country.

Jones then started getting threatening phone calls. One told him, “You better keep your eye on your kids.” Another said, “We know what car you drive.”

Then the CEO of Boeing was quoted as questioning Trump’s policy on trade. Trump responded with a tweet that said that the cost of building Air Force One, which was being done by Boeing, had spiraled out of control. He quoted a cost of $4 billion, which was far from true. He also threatened to cancel the contract with Boeing.

The next morning Boeing stocks fell nearly $2 a share.

What do you call a government whose citizens fear to criticize its leaders?   

LOSER

For many people the appeal of Donald Trump as a presidential candidate is his success as a businessman.  This “successful businessman” had four business bankruptcies in 1991 and 1992. His leaked income tax form shows that he lost almost $1 billion in 1995. He lost all that money because of mismanagement of his Atlantic City casinos and bad investments in an airline and the Plaza Hotel in New York.

People who worked for him lost their jobs. Scores of contractors were never paid for their work. Investors in Trump’s enterprises saw their shares go from $35.50 in value to 17 cents. Yet Trump continued to enjoy a lavish lifestyle and was able to use the tax loss to shield himself from paying taxes for years to come.

Trump said an ability to avoid paying taxes makes him smart. The two stooges, Rudy and Chris, both referred to Donald’s tax avoidance as “genius.” If losing $915 million is genius, I’d hate to see how much money stupidity can lose.

Donald Trump has called lots of people losers, but he is way ahead of them as the biggest loser of them all.

SPACE MASTER

Since the federal budget for NASA has declined, American billionaires have entered the space race. Led by Elon Musk of Tesla Motors and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen and Richard Branson of Virgin Galactic have been  testing rockets and preparing a manned trip to Mars. One failed exploit was an attempt by Mark Zuckerberg of FaceBook to launch a satellite that would have provided internet service to the developing world.

Can you think of any famous billionaires who have not been mentioned? Of course, there is Donald Trump, who has a hand in dozens of enterprises. A Leisure Times staff member investigated the possibility of a Donald Trump space endeavor. It has been kept on the hush-hush, but The Donald does have a rocket being prepared for a trip to distant planets.

“I didn’t want to say anything about it earlier,” Trump said, “because I don’t like to draw attention to myself, but I can tell you, I will be the best space master that God ever created.”

It seems that the entrepreneur has assembled a group of wealthy businessmen to finance the operation. Although he will head the organization, none of his own money will be involved. He didn’t have a lot of information about the fine points, saying, “It’s called management.”

“In a risky undertaking,” the real estate tycoon continued, “it’s better to use other people’s money. That way, if the thing blows up, I won’t be out any of my own money. In fact I would still come out ahead, because I would pay myself a nice salary as CEO of the project.”

We were impressed with the brilliance of Trump’s plan. “I’ve got a very good brain,” he said, tapping himself on the forehead. “After all, I went to Wharton.”

A DESCENT INTO ANARCHY

There are unwritten rules of conduct between civilized people. When we ignore these rules, we do so at the risk of descending into anarchy. Several politicians have destroyed what should be the decorum and gravitas of presidential politics and brought it down to the level of crude, middle school name calling.

This descent into chaos is not limited to presidential politics. Maine Governor Paul LePage compared the IRS to the Gestapo and said that President Obama “hates white people.” When the assistant senate majority leader Troy Jackson said the governor was “delusional,” LePage replied that Jackson was “the first to give it to the people without providing Vaseline.” When the governor thought that Democratic Representative Drew Gattine had called him a racist, he left a message on Gattine’s answer machine. The message contained these words: “you little son of a bitch, socialist, c*ck sucker.”

Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte is another politician who finds it easy to come up with nasty words to express his thoughts. When he was mayor of Davao City, an Australian woman was gang-raped and murdered. Duterte made a joke about it. More recently, when he was scheduled to meet President Obama at the ASEAN conference, Duterte made a reference to Obama as a son of a bitch. He later apologized and said he hadn’t meant it personally. Nevertheless, Obama cancelled the meeting.

The outrageous things that Donald Trump has said are too numerous to mention, but here is a sampling: He has insulted woman many times as well as Muslims and Mexicans. He has used offensive language to describe all of his opponents in the Republican primary elections as well as his opponent in the general election. He called Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg an incompetent judge. He mocked disabled reporter Serge Kavaleski. Trump belittled John McCain’s military service and attacked the parents of a fallen American soldier.

So these three men have shown themselves to be crude, uncivilized bullies. Does that mean that they are unfit for high office? Yes, it does, and not only because they lack the dignity to represent the constituency they serve. If they cannot or will not follow the rules of civil intercourse, then they cannot be trusted to follow the larger rules which they must. Otherwise the result is anarchy.

Last year Governor LePage proposed an amendment to the constitution, which would abolish the state income tax. The House of Representative voted 82-64 against the amendment. In a snit because his proposal had been voted down, the governor for a while vetoed all bills, regardless of their merit, if they had been sponsored by Democrats.

Last year Democratic House Speaker Mark Eves was hired by hired by
Goodwill-Hinckley as president of the charitable organization that works with at-risk youth. Because of the governor’s dislike of the Eves, he threatened to withhold $500,000 in state funding if they hired Eves. The intimidated board of Goodwill-Hinckley withdrew the job offer.

At the very least these actions are abuse of power or failure to perform his duty as governor of the state.

Since Duterte became president hundreds of people suspected of being drug dealers or even drug users have been killed. This is not new. For several years, While Duterte  was mayor of Daveo City, there were over a thousand extra-judicial killings of people believed to be involved in drug traffic. According to the State Department, the U. S. government has “solid evidence that Duterte was responsible for these extrajudicial killings.”

So here is a man who “Gets things done.” But at what cost? People suspected of crime were killed without benefit of a trial by jury. Where is the protection to ordinary citizens in this kind of government?

Donald Trump has never served in elective office, but he has shown his true colors in many ways. He has already told us what he would do if he had a chance.

In the face of Russian intransigence, Trump would have us renege on our pledge to NATO allies unless they begin paying more for the maintenance of NATO forces. After that our word would mean nothing.

He would reduce the national debt by getting the people we owe to accept pennies on the dollar. It worked for him in his many bankruptcies. Paul Krugman said that Trump wants to run the U S Treasury like a falling Atlantic City casino. This action would destroy the confidence in American currency that was established by Alexander Hamilton.

He would use nukes against our enemies. During his security briefing, he asked three times whey we couldn’t use our nuclear bombs. Trump would be willing to launch a nuclear holocaust, which could mean the end of humanity on earth.

He would subject suspected terrorists to waterboarding and worse. John McCain, who was tortured while he was a POW, said that torturing prisoners was not what this country is about.

Finally Donald Trump would get revenge on terrorists by assassinating their families. Here is still another example of his willingness to commit illegal acts to get what he wants.

Donald Trump’s unwillingness or inability to follow the rules of civil discourse are indications of his unwillingness to follow the laws of the land or international law. To put in his hands the power of the presidency would be the first step toward a descent into anarchy.

  

GOP CONVENTION SPEAKER

No one knows what will happen at the GOP Convention in Cleveland, but whatever it is, it probably won’t be pretty. Former Republican Presidents and Presidential candidates have announced that they won’t be there. Donald Trump is even having trouble getting prominent Republicans to speak at the event.

In one of the strangest developments in this Strangest Show on Earth, rumors are circulating that the Donald will ask former Presidential candidate Dr. Carl Perrin to speak in Cleveland. What! Perrin is a life-long Democrat. How can anyone think that he would even consider speaking at the Republican convention, especially one that is poised to nominate Donald Trump?

We must emphasize that this is only rumor, a rumor that we have not been able to verify from other sources. According to this rumor, Trump is really desperate to get speakers for the big event, and although Perrin is not nationally known, within his small circle, a lot of people know him. Further, according to the story, the retired English professor will be able to speak on any topic he wants. The Trump people are even suggesting that Perrin will be encouraged to talk about cheap beer.

You can see the dilemma that puts Perrin in. People who know him are aware of much he likes to talk about cheap beer. As one close associate said, “He won’t shut up about cheap beer.” Will this life-long Democrat go to the convention in Cleveland and witness the possible nomination of the least-qualified presidential candidate ever in order to get a chance to talk to the country about cheap beer?

Only time will tell.

ELECTION CHAOS

    

 Things are getting really dicey. Just a couple of weeks to the Republican 

Convention, and huge numbers of GOP stalwarts are doing all they can to prevent Donald Trump from getting the nomination. The Bushes are not going to the convention. George Will has dropped out of the Republican Party. The Koch brothers are not contributing to Trump's campaign. Republican senators are saying that they might vote for Hillary! Republican leaders in both the House and Senate are criticizing some of The Donald's most outrageous Statements. Mitch McConnell refused to say whether Trump was qualified to be President. Polls show Hillary 12 points ahead of Donald.

    Meanwhile everything is not all sweetness and light with the Democrats. A tell-all book by a former Secret Serviceman is letting secrets out of the bag. According to this book, Hillary once threw a lamp at Bill. Pictures of the broken lamp are offered as proof. The Clinton White House was a wild, swinging times, filled with cocaine sniffing orgies. Oh My!

    Former Presidential candidate Carl Perrin has not escaped from all this calumny. Stories that came out during his 2008 campaign are rising to the surface again. According to these stories, he used federal funds to travel to Maine to see a woman young enough to be his daughter. This story was completely insidious because on the surface it is true, but the insinuation is not. The "federal funds" that Perrin used were his Social Security check. The woman "young enough to be his daughter" was in fact his daughter. Why would stories like this come out now? Perrin wasn't even in this election campaign. He found that all that politicking was interfering with his nap time. However, Hillary is looking for a vice presidential candidate to run with her. Naturally the former English professor's name came up.

Why would anyone object to Perrin's being named to the Democratic ticket? Two theories come up. Some politicians object to Perrin not because they have anything against him, but because they are promoting some other candidate for the job. Still others say that they object to Perrin because he is not qualified for the job! 

    When he was running for office in 2008, he didn't have a fully-planned platform, these people say. The only thing he promised was cheap beer. Nothing about taxes, defense, health care. Cheap beer is important, but there are other things that should concern the President.

    Perrin isn’t even sure he wants the job. Why should he settle for being vice president? He is already president of the LV Computer Club

BERNIE AND DONALD

A few weeks ago I saw a Facebook posting with pictures from the late sixties or early seventies. On one side was Bernie Sanders being dragged away by the police. Opposite was Donald Trump in uniform. Not the uniform of the United States military but the uniform of the military prep school he attended. The message evidently was supposed to show Sanders as a trouble maker, a rabble rouser who was in trouble with the law while Trump was a law-abiding citizen, being educated to defend the United States militarily.

Somehow that was not the message I got. Bernie Sanders was doing what he has always done and continues to do: he was fighting against injustice wherever he saw it.

Donald Trump, on the other hand, was posturing. Even though he went to a military prep school and later would cite that as a key to his insight into the military, in fact Trump never served in the military. He was able to avoid the draft during the war in Vietnam because he had “a foot thing.”

Further, he has never supported the military. He put down John McCain because he had been captured, as though that made him less of a man. McCain didn’t exactly surrender on the battle front. He was shot out of the sky. He endured five years of captivity and torture and refused to go home ahead of his comrades when he had an opportunity.

Trump showed how loyal he was to veterans when he held an event to raise funds for veterans’ organizations. Except he didn’t turn the funds over to those groups until he was shamed into it four months later by The Washington Post.

Bernie Sanders is a man who stands up for what he believes in. Donald Trump is an empty suit, an embarrassment.

WHAT HAS HAPPENED TO THE MIDDLE CLASS?

It’s disappearing. That’s what. The middle class, as defined by families with an annual income from $35,000 to $100,000, is dwindling. In 1967, 53 percent on the American population fit into this category. By 2013 only 43 percent were in the middle income group.

It’s pretty common knowledge how this has come about. Good paying factory jobs have gone overseas or have been taken over by robots in this country. People with limited education have been particularly hard hit by this change in the economy. It has become difficult for them to find jobs, and when they are hired, the pay is much lower than it would have been in factory jobs in the past.

Younger people graduating from college face their own set of problems. They are saddled with tens of thousands of dollars in student loans, and it is not easy for them to find good jobs. Many young men and women in their late twenties, instead of setting out on their own, are moving back in with their parents.

The middle class is hurting. Not only has the quality of their lives been diminished, but the length of life itself is getting shorter. The life expectancy of Americans grew dramatically over the 20^th century. It continues to grow in the current century—except for middle-aged whites. The people in this group are dying at a faster rate through an increase in suicides and problems related to substance abuse: alcoholic liver disease and overdoses of opioids. This is particularly true of people who had not gone to college.

For many in this group, the American Dream is a fantasy. Some bankers became obscenely rich through weird schemes which involved giving mortgages to people who would not be able make the payments. Then the bottom fell out as the Great Recession hit. Middle class people lost their jobs, their homes, and their health insurance, which was tied to those jobs. They looked to government for help, but they didn’t get it. Instead of working together, Congress and the White House were at odds. The Senate majority leader said that his main goal was to see that Obama would be a one-term president.

It should be no surprise then that embittered members of the middle class do not expect any help from government and reach to outsiders who can shake things up and get government working again. The problem is, these outsiders will not be able to keep the promises they have been making. Even though Bernie Sanders has been in the United States Senate for a long time, he is an outsider. He calls himself a Democratic Socialist. He was not even a member of the Democratic Party until he decided to run for the presidency. His proposals sound good to many people: Put tighter controls on the banks, make the super rich pay more taxes. Let all Americans who want to go to college. The difficulty is, these things don’t come about by fiat. They require the cooperation with Congress. How do you think the current Congress would respond to Bernie’s proposals?

Donald Trump may be intelligent (as he keeps telling people), but he is profoundly ignorant. As the owner of a vast real estate empire, he is not even answerable to a corporate board. It’s his money, and he can do whatever he wants with it. The President of the United States does not have that freedom. He is answerable to Congress, the Supreme Court, and the people of the United States. If the American people are unhappy with the president, he can be impeached.

Not only does Trump fail to recognize the limits of the president’s ability, he (Trump) doesn’t even seem to have a clear vision of how to accomplish any of the thing he calls for or to recognize what damage some of his proposals would do to the position of the United States in the world.

Since the malaise of the middle class arose from the elimination of good paying factory jobs, both Trump and Sanders have plans to fix it. Trump would start imposing high tariffs on goods imported from China. The problem with that is that China and other countries would retaliate by charging high tariffs on goods from the United States. It would lead to world-wide economic turmoil. In the end, it would do more harm than good to the American economy.

Sanders would stop international trade agreements like the Trans Pacific Partnership., which he believe would result in sending more American jobs overseas.

The problem with both their views is that they want to take America back to some point in the past. Trump wants to “Make America Great Again.” And you can’t go back. The past that we remember with such nostalgia is gone. The world has been changed profoundly in the last quarter century by computers. Instead of looking toward the past, we need to look to the future where more computer-related jobs will be created. In the transition to that future, we need to help the middle class.

Think of the projects created by Franklin Roosevelt to help the country climb out of the Great Depression. These projects put millions of people to work and helped improve the country’s infrastructure. Under Eisenhower people were put to work creating America’s superhighways. The infrastructure today is in bad shape. Many of the country’s bridges are unsafe. We need to fix them, and we need to create jobs for the millions of people who have fallen out of the middle class.

PREDICTION

PREDICTION

The next president of the United States will be a Democrat, and for that the Democrats can thank Donald Trump. No matter how the political campaigns go over the next 11 months, Trump will play a major role in the Republican camp, and whatever the outcome for the GOP, the Democrats will come out ahead on Election Day.

Even though he has been held a strong lead in national polls for months, the Republican leadership is desperate to push him out of first place, resorting to a brokered convention if necessary. If the convention opens with Trump holding a plurality of the votes, the electors representing those ballots will be legally bound to vote for him on the first ballot only. On subsequent ballots the electors can vote for anyone they want. The situation opens itself up to three possible scenarios, all of which would lead to a Democratic victory in the general election.

SCENARIO ONE

Trump arrives at the convention with a majority of votes or is able to overcome opposition at the convention and become the Republican candidate. His support comes primarily from older white males with limited education. Twenty-six percent of Republicans have negative feelings about him. Many GOP leaders have said that Trump does not represent Republican or even American values. Most of them, no doubt, like Paul Ryan, will hold their noses and vote for him. However, the Donald will not gather enthusiastic support from the Republican party.

The reality show star cannot expect much support outside of his core followers. He has insulted each of his rivals for the Republican nomination. He has alienated huge groups with his put-downs and gratuitous insults. Fifty-nine percent of the American public has negative feelings about him. If he runs, the Democratic candidate will win the election and possibly win both the House and the Senate at the same time.

SCENARIO TWO

The Republican establishment is able to deny Trump the nomination. In revenge he runs as third-party candidate. In such a case Trump would get votes from people who would otherwise vote for the Republican candidate. Result: a win for the Democrats.

SCENARIO THREE

Trump does not win the nomination and for whatever reasons decides not to run as a third-party candidate. He has been in the leading position for so long that his core followers will still feel that he has been cheated of his rightful prize. Those mendacious Washington politicians, along with the lamestream media swindled the Donald. His core will not then vote for Democrats. Heaven forbid! They will just stay home on Election Day and throw the election to the Democratic candidate, whoever he or she is.

WHO IS THIS?

His primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.

Do you recognize the person being described here? Are you sure? No, it is not that crude loudmouth who has been going around insulting everyone with apparent impunity. It is the psychological profile drawn up by the OSS of Adolf Hitler.

And yet ignorant people continue to support this man. He is still leading in the polls of candidates for the Republican nomination. I am beginning to worry.

SERIOUS CANDIDATE?

Few except the most gullible believe that Donald Trump is a serious candidate for the presidency. Some skeptics are raising the same question about Democratic candidate Carl Perrin. Perrin insists that he is much more serious about the issues than Trump.

Trump’s bluster and bombast, Perrin says, are all vague, superficial generalities. He wants to build a wall between the U. S. and Mexico and have the Mexican government pay for it! No word about how he going to do this. No details. No specifics. It is obviously never going to happen.

He is going to send all illegal Mexican aliens back to Mexico. There is no thought to how that would disrupt the American economy or how he would find all the millions of illegal aliens or move them back to Mexico. If any news person presses him for particulars, Trump becomes belligerent.

Perrin, on the other hand, has one main issue: cheap beer. It all started when farmers began to plant more corn so that it could be made into ethanol. Land that had previous been planted with barley is now used to grow corn. Since there was less barley for making beer, the price of beer began to go up, making it more expensive for the average American.

Perrin wants to solve this problem by having the government provide price support for barley. It would be good for farmers, good for the economy and good for six-pack Joe. Here is a workable, detailed plan for keeping the price of beer low for working Americans. Perrin is serious about keeping beer affordable for the people of this great country. This is not a position Perrin arrived at in time for a political campaign. Perrin has always been serious about cheap beer.