Trump's Card

[Satchmo Distel]

I agree totally. Up to 1945 we had had countries that filled a minority of the world's land mass pumping shit into the atmosphere and poisoning poor old Mother Earth. Gradually it's become the majority and still growing. Another big fail of Clinton was her inability to get this point over but equally, how fucked are we that most Americans apparently don't give a fuck?

[diggedy derek]

Erskine, to say "There's a lot worse going on to be objecting to" is prime whataboutery.

I'm sure it was a shit interview, I haven't really checked, but if you're slagging off a woman in the media, your points would resonate louder and reflect better on you if you don't allude to her as a sexual plaything.

I don't think I'd have a problem if you were saying something similar about a hetereosexual man.

[laverte]

^ Agree ^

[Tubby Isaacs]

Europe and China are in a death embrace as well. I was at a presentation in Sweden where some guy was showing off about how Sweden was leading the way in CO2 reductions. I called bullshit on it. Lots of Swedish manufacturing has been moved to China. And with it the CO2 emissions. But planet Earth doesn't care which country is producing the CO2 emissions.

Everywhere exports emissions to China, but Sweden not as much as UK and about the same as Germany. Have the others achieved what Sweden has?

[Tubby Isaacs]

Well, US workers have been screwed over by Republicans and Democrats allowing corporations to outsource jobs to low wage countries.

But I don't think that's a genie that can be put back in the bottle now. The USA and China are in a death embrace to the bitter end, until every last barrel of oil has been dug out of the ground, turned into plastic and dumped into the ocean.

But Sanders was very much implying the genie could back in the bottle. When I'm president, corporations will be investing in America, not Mexico or China, he said. Really?

[Tubby Isaacs]

Obviously, I was observing the Presidential Election from a distance, but I got a very strong sense of the rustbelt being key to voters across the country. Yet Mike Pence seemed to get an easy time seeing he was an actual rustbelt state governor. What's he supposed to have done for post-industrial Indiana?

[Tubby Isaacs]

Yeah.

Paul Ryan got an easy time too. But in fairness, he does seem to have had a spectacular conversion to lefty style industrial policy in his own area. He's upset John Kasich.

Are there any kind of federal rules about state aid? They need some.

[ursus arctos]

No, it is a free for all in terms of state and local subsidies and there is little, if any, support for federal limits.

They would also pose an interesting Constitutional question.

[Tubby Isaacs]

Ouch.

Is there much academic interest in the cost of subsidies and divergent regulations across states?

[Tubby Isaacs]

You told me about Texas and its effect on schoolbooks. That's far more than an economic problem, but it's the sort of thing I'm thinking about here.

[ursus arctos]

It's really a niche subject, I'm afraid.

Texas schoolbooks are a classic example of market power in an industry with very few participants. So are California emission regulations.

[anton pulisov]

Everywhere exports emissions to China, but Sweden not as much as UK and about the same as Germany. Have the others achieved what Sweden has?

My point is that if people want to classify CO2 by countries then it should fall under the country of the end user of the product. So Chinese iphone emissions should be transferred to the country that the iphone was sold in.

[anton pulisov]

Cat 3 hurricane headed straight to the Corpus Christi area.

We'll see how putting nobody in charge of FEMA will work out.

AntoinetteP has been evacuated to San Antonio.

[Tubby Isaacs]

I agree about the end user point for CO2. I think there are some calculations done on that basis. Probably not the ones at that presentation, mind.

[Tubby Isaacs]

It's really a niche subject, I'm afraid.

Texas schoolbooks are a classic example of market power in an industry with very few participants. So are California emission regulations.

Thanks. California sounds like levelling up, I suppose.

[Incandenza]

People may be sick of pieces trying to explain Trump's psychology and the way he thinks, but I think this one by David Roth is the best that I've read:

It is not quite fair to say that Donald Trump lacks core beliefs, but to the extent that we can take apart these beliefs they amount to Give Donald Trump Your Money and Donald Trump Should Really Be on Television More. The only comprehensible throughline to his politics is that everything Trump says is something he’s said previously, with additional very’s and more-and-more’s appended over time; his worldview amounts to the sum of the dumb shit he saw on the cover of the New York Post in 1985, subjected to a few decades of rancid compounding interest and deteriorating mental aptitude. He watches a lot of cable news, but he struggles to follow even stories that have been custom built for people like him—old, uninformed, amorphously if deeply aggrieved.

There’s a reason for this. Trump doesn’t know anything or really believe anything about any topic beyond himself, because he has no interest in any topic beyond himself; his evident cognitive decline and hyperactive laziness and towering monomania ensure that he will never again learn a new thing in his life. He has no friends and no real allies; his inner circle is divided between ostensibly scandalized cynics and theatrically shameless ones, all of whom hold him in low regard and see him as a potential means to their individuated ends. There is no help on the way; his outer orbit is a rotation of replacement-level rage-grandpas and defective, perpetually clammy operators.

Trump now “executes” by way of the The Junior Soprano Method. When he senses that his staff is trying to get him to do one thing, Trump defiantly does the opposite; otherwise he bathes in the commodified reactionary grievance of partisan media, looking for stories about himself. It takes days for his oafish and overmatched handlers to coax him into even a coded and qualified criticism of neo-Nazis, and an instant for him to willfully undo it. Of course he brings more vigor to the latter than the former; he doesn’t really understand why he had to do the first thing, but he innately and deeply understands why he did the second. The first is invariably about someone else—some woman, there was a car accident, like during or maybe after that thing—and therefore, as an asshole, he does not and cannot really care about it. The second is about him and therefore, as an asshole, he really, really does.

[Amor de Cosmos]

Apparently this hurricane is looking particularly ominous in terms of rainfall/flooding. I heard a story on the radio this morning that atmospheric conditions are ripe for keeping it in one place for several days.

Yes. Houston schools have been closed until, maybe, the middle of next week, much to the grand-kids delight. Meanwhile my stepdaughter's trying to fix the plug in the bath so water won't drain, as they'll need it full for cooking purposes. Meanwhile looks like Galveston's going to get demolished again.

[Lang Spoon]

Yeah, it's a lot better than my going purple and shouting at Newsnight's hot takes on Trump or crying/laughing with the Daily Show. And if I ever catch Sky News press preview (especially if there's an Institute of Ideas unspeakable/house trained pantomime fascist on) I'm liable to stroke.

[Gerontophile]

C*nt pardons c*nt. News at 11.

[Gerontophile]

Gorka resigns (gossip at the moment).

[Satchmo Distel]

C*nt pardons c*nt. News at 11.

But also gives a green light to other cunts to ignore judicial rulings knowing Trump will bail them out.

[ursus arctos]

Quite.

And red meat for the base.

White House briefing furiously that Gorka was fired.

Wonder if the joins Bannon at Breitbart.

[ad hoc]

Presidential pardons. Why do they exist? They seem a bit dictator-to be honest (regardless of who the sitting president is). I understood this 3 branches of government thing was central to the way the US worked so why give the president the power to completely override one of the other two?

[ursus arctos]

They exist because the framers believed that the Pardon Power was an inherent prerogative of the sovereign, and that the Executive was the best place for it.

But it has always been circumscribed by norms limiting its exercise. Needless to say, this particular exercise violated every single one of those norms.

[Tubby Isaacs]

McCain has strongly criticized the pardon, I see.