CapitalistImperialistPig

Christopher Dickey in The Daily Beast. PARIS — By the middle of 1942, a handful of senior officers in the German army and intelligence apparatus worried that their Führer, Adolf Hitler, had gone completely insane. That may sound, today, like an understatement. But as happens when any populist demagogue takes power, many people embraced him at first, many others were willing to makes excuses for him, and still others convinced themselves that they could live with him at least. Indeed, over the previous decade the vast majority of Germans were persuaded that Hitler understood them, and they understood him—such was the chemistry between the man and his constituents—even if much of the rest of the world found him appalling. “He is the loudspeaker which magnifies the inaudible whispers of the German soul,” world-renowned Swiss pyschotherapist Carl Jung told an American reporter in 1938. Lots of good stuff on WWII intelligence in the article.

...is at record lows for this time of year. This does not necessarily mean that record minima will occur next summer, since open water loses more heat than when ice-covered and because a lot of Arctic snow is in early winter, which again means less insulation against heat loss. Even so ... we still seem on target for an ice free Arctic in 2030 or so - maybe sooner. Antarctic sea ice also at record lows for the date.

That's me, for now. Just sayin'

Robert P. Jones, writing in the NYT, sees the election in terms of a White Christian backlash: The Rage of White, Christian America Between Barack Obama’s 2008 election and 2016, America has transformed from being a majority white Christian nation (54 percent) to a minority white Christian nation (43 percent). But on Election Day, paradoxically, this anxious minority swarmed to the polls to elect as president the candidate who promised to “make America great again” and warned that he was its “last chance” to turn back the tide of cultural and economic change. One clue to the power of this racial and religious identity can be seen in the striking similarity of a map of white Christian population density by state to the red and blue election night map. While the similarity of those maps in Kentucky and West Virginia might not be a surprise, the same similarity in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania goes a long way to explaining why Hillary Clinton’s Midwestern firewall did not ho...

Just after Bush's Iraq invasion I remember seeing a ragtag group of protesters marching on a main local thoroughfare. "Way too late" I recall thinking at the time. To me, the current protests against Trump are equally dumb. They don't accomplish anything and they annoy people. We already know that the majority of Americans voted against Trump and that he won anyway. Now we just have to see what he does.

Headline I saw: Schumer now the most important Democrat in D.C.

Like many others, I've been pondering the question of why nearly 1/2 of Americans voted for (and elected) a vulgar, dishonest, and dangerously unstable person for President. Obviously there is an economic component, a nostalgia for the good old union factory jobs that meant good benefits and a middle class lifestyle. The race divide was actually less severe than in the Obama elections - more Blacks and Hispanics voted for Trump than Romney. I think that there was a big cultural component. These voters saw their culture under siege and voted against all those threats to it: Mexicans, Gays, Blacks, Muslims and, perhaps especially, the media figures propagating all the multi-cultural and related notions. I call it the anti-Jon Stewart vote. It could just as well be called the anti-Miley Cyrus vote. Stewart and his Alumni relentlessly mocked Trump, Fox News, and the other totems of the right and these cultural conservatives wanted revenge. Miley and others like her live their liv...