FUNDAMENTALLY TRANSFORMED: Dignity and Sadness in the Working Class.
Archive for 2016
September 21, 2016
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THE 2016 ELECTION’S CORE ISSUE: It connects Hillary’s illegal email server, Benghazi, the Clinton Foundation, ObamaCare and the Obama Administration’s foreign policy.(My latest New York Observer column, bumped)
THIS IS CNN — AND THEIR CRACK PRECRIME UNIT: CNN Defends Adding ‘Racial’ to Trump Profiling Comments, Insists They Knew What He Meant.
PROBLEMATIC: HILLARY CLINTON INSULTS HOMELESS PEOPLE ON ‘THE TONIGHT SHOW.’
They peasants are just so deplorable!
SHE IS IN NO WAYS TIRED: Clinton Cancels Fundraiser, Trump Rally Draws 10,000 in NC.
There’s no more rigorous hiring process than the one for POTUS, because there’s no more rigorous job than POTUS. If a candidate can’t handle the process, then they can’t handle the job.
THAT’S SOME FINE, CLINTONIAN PARSING THERE: Sid Blumenthal says he didn’t push birtherism, but he urged journalists to look into Obama’s ties to Kenya in 2008.
OH PLEASE LET THIS BE TRUE: Obama’s Last Lecture.
GENDER GAP: Women earning more doctoral and master’s degrees than men.
Women earned more doctoral degrees than men in 2015 – the seventh year in a row this has occurred. They also earned more master’s degrees and outnumber men in graduate school.
Politicians who like to mislead on the gender wage gap (more accurately referred to as an “earnings” gap due to choices men and women make in their careers) will point out that women are earning more degrees but still earning less pay. To look at the charts compiled by American Enterprise Institute Scholar Mark Perry, one would see part of the reason.
Women earned more degrees than men, and made up a majority of degrees in seven out of 11 different fields. But the fields where men outnumbered women are some of the highest-paid ones, including business, engineering, mathematics and physical sciences. Women outnumbered men in majors such as arts and humanities, education and social sciences.
When these women wind up with student-debt problems, that will be the fault of the patriarchy, of course.
WHY DON’T WE PASS THE TIME BY PLAYING A LITTLE SOLITAIRE? NY Times: Larry King, Ed Schultz Are Russia’s ‘Manchurian Anchors.’
Curiously, the paper that brought you “The Pinchurian Candidate” and published an op-ed by Putin on September 11, 2013 (what, Bill Ayers wasn’t available that year?) doesn’t seem to view that as a compliment.
RESET: US blames Russia for Syria convoy attack; Moscow points to terrorists.
UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon called the attack “sickening, savage and apparently deliberate.”
“Just when we think it cannot get any worse, the power of depravity sinks lower,” Ban told world leaders convening Tuesday at the UN General Assembly annual meeting.
Eighteen of the convoy’s 31 trucks were hit, the United Nations said. The convoy was due to deliver food and medical aid for some 78,000 people in eastern Aleppo, where an estimated 250,000 civilians are facing severe shortages as a result of a government siege.
Publicly, John Kerry sold the Syrian deal with Russia as a possible “turning point” in the five-year-old civil war. But privately, he “conceded to aides and friends that he believes it will not work,” even before it was implemented.
JONATHAN CHAIT: Donald Trump Is Winning September:
Sometime around the end of summer, it dawned upon most Democrats, and the elite of both parties, that they — okay, we — inhabit a different political universe than does the rest of the country. In our world, Donald Trump is a surreal authoritarian buffoon whose presidency is too nightmarish to contemplate, except perhaps as an abstract intellectual exercise to bolster whatever argument one wishes to make about larger trends in American society. Hillary Clinton is deeply familiar, liked by some, loathed by many, and caught in a vortex of mutual paranoia with the news media that leads her into errors of secrecy. But her flaws, as the conservative but Clinton-endorsing pundit P. J. O’Rourke put it, lie “within normal parameters,” and disagreements within the elite feel small in the face of Trump. Envisioning him as the actual president of the United States seems to us like a category error, as if a Game of Thrones character were to show up on Veep.
But as the first of the presidential debates looms, the hard numbers simply do not bear out this reality. The website FiveThirtyEight gives Trump more than a four-in-ten chance of actually, for real, winning. The Upshot, the New York Times’ forecaster, puts it at a slightly more comforting one in four, which sounds low except that, as the model’s authors point out, this makes the odds of a Clinton victory about equal to an NFL placekicker’s chances of making a 49-yard field goal. Also, the kicker has pneumonia. Citigroup recently warned that investors are underappreciating the significant risk to the economy of a Trump victory. A Trump presidency has felt unimaginable all summer long for the same reason Brexit couldn’t pass in England and Trump couldn’t win his party’s nomination: We refused to believe what the numbers were telling us.
Epistemic closure. Maybe if you guys noticed, or cared, that 84% of white working class say government does not represent their views, you’d have a clue.
UPDATE: Blame Samantha Bee: “Outside the liberal tent, the feeling of being suffocated by the left’s cultural dominance is turning voting Republican into an act of cultural rebellion — which may be one reason the Obama years, so good for liberalism in the culture, have seen sharp G.O.P. gains at every level of the country’s government.”
FUNDAMENTALLY TRANSFORMED: Lunch Now Too Expensive For Many Americans.
IT’S NOT REALLY “HOMEGROWN:” Homegrown terror roils 2016. Our attacks are mostly by migrants who have frequently traveled to their home countries or the middle east. Ahmad Khan Rahmani’s wife left the country a few days before his attacks. Omar Mateen’s wife, Noor Salman, hasn’t been seen since the FBI “lost” her months ago.
The face of “homegrown” terror isn’t homegrown at all.
I wonder how long it will take us.
ELI LAKE: Preparing for North Korea’s Inevitable Collapse.
Crimes against humanity generally cost a regime its legitimacy, if not its sovereignty. And yet most national security professionals would regard the collapse of the North Korean slave state as a calamity. The reason for this is simple: all the nuclear weapons and material. A 2015 study from the U.S.-Korea Institute at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies estimated North Korea possessed 10 to 16 nuclear weapons, and will possess 20 to 100 such weapons by 2020. This says nothing of the highly enriched nuclear fuel the state has produced or the mobile rockets and longer-range missiles to launch the warheads.
Trying to secure all this after a chaotic collapse or overthrow of the Kim regime would be a nightmare.
But not the only nightmare, as I wrote more than a decade ago:
Whether or not there’s a war, when North Korea collapses there’s going to be a humanitarian crisis on a scale the world has never seen — 22 million scared, hungry, and desperate people left without any semblance of anything familiar.
And then there are the costs of reunification. A country smaller and less rich than West Germany would have to pay the transition costs of de-programing and westernizing a country larger, far poorer, more oppressed than East Germany. For additional perspective, the Germanys reunited 25 years ago, and the bills still aren’t paid.
North Korea’s nukes are the immediate concern, but the North Koreans will require decades of healing.
THE DALLAS MORNING NEWS IS PAYING DEARLY FOR ENDORSING HILLARY CLINTON: “The Dallas Morning News is paying a steep price for endorsing Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, in the form of canceled subscriptions and loud protests. The endorsement broke a 75-year streak in the paper’s history of endorsing Republicans, and generated a lot of reader pushback in the form of angry comments and vows to unsubscribe from the paper. Although Dallas is relatively liberal, the state hasn’t gone Democrat in a presidential election in 40 years.”
I only read the sports section of the DMN, looking for news about the Cowboys. In recent weeks, I’ve noticed they’ve slapped some pretty severe anti-adblocker code onto the site, perhaps to recover some of the lost revenue referred to above.
I’M SURPRISED THE NUMBERS ARE THAT LOW: CNN/KFF Poll: 84% of white working class say government does not represent their views.
WHY IS OBAMA PROTECTING THE SAUDIS HERE? Congress set for Saudi showdown with Obama.
The Senate will stay in session next week for a looming showdown with President Obama over legislation making it easier for the families of victims of the 9/11 attacks to sue Saudi Arabia.
Obama is expected to veto the legislation by Friday, the deadline for him to use his veto pen. The bill has overwhelming bipartisan support, suggesting the two-thirds majorities in both chambers necessary to override the president’s veto are there.
If Congress were to leave Washington for the campaign trail this week, as many had expected, the administration might have had a better shot at convincing Democrats to uphold an Obama veto in a lame-duck session after the elections.
But Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) on Tuesday vowed the Senate would stay in the Capitol to deal with the issue, as well as a separate push to deny an arms sale to Saudi Arabia.
“Both of those we’ll have to deal with before we depart,” McConnell told reporters.
The leader offered a similar message in private, telling rank-and-file Republicans during their lunch that they will reconvene next week if Obama waits until the last minute to veto the popular bill.
Stay tuned.
FAST ASLEEP IN AMERICA: ‘Donald Trump could destroy America:’ U2’s Bono uses Clinton Initiative to deliver hysterical lecture on Republican candidate.
(Classical allusion in headline.)
BETTER DEAD THAN RUDE: Chelsea bombing proof PC police stuck in pre-9/11 mindset.
(Classical reference in headline.)
SCIENCE: In Men, Depression is Different: Symptoms—and help—are unlike what women experience.
Statistics show that men become depressed much less often than women do. In 2014, 4.8% of men aged 18 or older in the U.S. had at least one major depressive episode in the past year, compared with 8.2% of women in the same age group, according to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health conducted by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.
But experts worry that these figures don’t tell the whole story. Men are much less likely than women to report feeling depressed or to seek treatment for depression. . . .
Women often internalize depression—focusing on the emotional symptoms, such as worthlessness or self-blame, experts say. Men externalize it, concentrating on the physical ones. Men typically don’t get weepy or say they feel sad. They feel numb and complain of insomnia, stress or loss of energy. Often, they become irritable and angry.
Some men aren’t in touch with their feelings. But the larger problem is that men have been conditioned not to talk about them. “There is that sense that they should be in control of their emotions and that being depressed can be viewed as a sign of weakness,” says Jeffrey Borenstein, a psychiatrist and president of the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation in New York. Men are expected to handle problems on their own, he says.
This sense of weakness can make depression worse for men, therapists say. “For women, depression is a signal for getting help, that something needs to be addressed in a fundamental way,” says Nando Pelusi, a clinical psychologist in New York. “For men, it’s a signal that they are a failure and are submitting to defeat.”
That sense of defeat is why depressed men typically withdraw and isolate, says Donald Malone, a psychiatrist and chairman of psychiatry and psychology at the Cleveland Clinic.
And this can wreak havoc on a man’s relationships, as loved ones, especially spouses, can feel hurt and rejected.
Men depressed — women and minorities hardest hit, or something.