Reverie

New Years is a time of looking forward. It should be a time to reassess the past too. Some notions:

1. Hilary spent over 600 million to be president.

            Jeb Bush spent 125 million.

            Putin spent 100K  on Facebook apparently to stop Hilary from being president, half of it after the election.

Does any of this ring a bit false?

We are now spending millions to figure out how Putin did it. We should. And we probably should hire him as National PR Director. 

         2. The current narrative is that foreign manipulation influenced the election. But has there been any evidence other than the DNC doing domestic manipulation? Has any investigation into that domestic manipulation been done? Is domestic manipulation of an election less important than foreign manipulation?

          3. If I told you that a political candidate had faked a report on an opponent in an election and that report became the basis of a national inquiry with subpoena  powers, would you suspect that the country in question was a sound-truck democracy that had been the site of more than eight or nine revolutions in the last thirty or so  years, or not?

          4. Almost everyone who were assessing the last election turned out to be wrong. One would think that those people--especially the press--would try to figure out why they were wrong and how to do better the next time. But, instead, they seem to be trying to make their predictions turn out to be right.

           5. It is axiomatic that the elite, the press and the politicians seem intent upon proving that Trump is an outlier, someone whose character should disqualify him from the presidency. But is it possible that he is actually typical of politicians in all matters except veneer? Could that his legacy?

           6. Any tax reform should have two aims: To make taxes simple and to minimize the amount of money withdrawn from the economy's true developers and  expanders, i.e. the public. But the recent tax debate centered not on the fact that the government is a terrible and distorted investor in the economy but rather how to keep its impact on the economy constant during the changes. That is simply not an improvement and, worse, is a poor way of thinking.

            7. Identity politics is a remarkable development: It is an effort to find a common denominator among people (as religion does.) But that is tough as we are a rich and varied species. Even dog breeds are difficult to classify and, in dog shows, dogs are accepted and excluded on the most superficial, arbitrary and generally unessential characteristics--so the shape of an ear or paw is essential. Identity politics is the ultimate parsing, reducing qualities narrower and narrower until community is an impossibility. It is man in search of isolation.

              8. Strangely, the parsing of America does not include masculinity which seemingly is both monolithic (and Neolithic) with no room for variety.

              9. Everything I have read about Trump paints him as a man obsessed with the ratings of his TV show, The Apprentice, when it was on. So why does he hold his ratings/popularity as president with such indifference?