Monday, August 5, 2019

Trump and Other Illnesses

“Football combines the two worst things about America: It is violence punctuated by committee meetings.”--Will


Chris' girlfriend, Alyssa, arrived back from Italy for a week.
A professor of mine in college used to say that diagnosing an opponent was the hallmark of the demagogue. So read what is below with care.


Smith revised The Theory of Moral Sentiments six times.


President Trump overruled advisers to ramp up tariffs on China after a heated exchange in which he insisted it was the best way to make China comply with demands. (wsj)

AARP has a lot of insurance and annuity plans. They are in favor of the horrific Secure Act. Think they have a conflict?


A report, published in the Spanish newspaper El País, claims a team of researchers led by Prof Juan Carlos Izpisúa Belmonte from the Salk Institute in the US have produced monkey-human chimeras. The research was conducted in China “to avoid legal issues”, according to the report.


 “Drinking at least one artificially sweetened beverage daily was associated with almost three times the risk of developing stroke or dementia compared to those who drank artificially sweetened beverages less than once a week,” according to the study, published in the American Heart Association journal “Stroke.”


On this day in 1861, Lincoln imposed the first federal income tax by signing the Revenue Act. Strapped for cash with which to pursue the Civil War, Lincoln and Congress agreed to impose a 3 percent tax on annual incomes over $800.


        Trump and Other Illnesses

There is a strange narrative emerging in some political analysis of the current American scene: Trump support and opiate addiction comes from the same demographics. "According to the common wisdom and several sociological studies, the main reason that communities hit by the opioid crisis are also addicted to Donald Trump is the economic distress that underlies both." One article quotes JAMA, reporting “socioeconomic conditions” account for only about two-thirds of the Trump-opioid connection. So Trump support is sort of a pathology.

Science.

One article leaps to this conclusion: "What is immediately different for indigent people in rural Kentucky or the Mahoning Valley of Ohio is that so far as they are concerned, they didn’t simply lose their jobs, the Blacks got them–because the Government favors Blacks." Sean Mcewee reported in Salon during the 2016 campaign, these Trump supporters experienced their pain as discrimination and victimization. “Racism is the real driver of Trump’s success,” he wrote, ”social pain is understood through the lens of racial animus.” The victimized people expressed animus toward Muslims, gays, lesbians, coastal elites, Harvard, and Washington.

I was not aware that lesbians were taking jobs from tough old white guys in West Virginia but, if a reporter writes it, I suppose it is true. But I do know that in March 2016, at a Democratic town hall in Ohio, Hillary Clinton  said, “We're going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business.” This was immediately taken as a sign of her hostility to the working class and a confirmation of Democrats’ “war on coal.” She later lost every county in West Virginia — the country's premier coal-mining state — to Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary, a dramatic reversal from her landslide win against Barack Obama in the state's 2008 Democratic primary.

There may have been some subtle racism in that vote but it is truly hard to see. What is easy to see is a reaction of a sizable portion of poor working people to the unmasking of the disguise that they are cared for by people who have, at their core, a profound Utopian vision of the world that simply does not include them.

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