The current U.S. president appears to be jaw-droppingly ignorant of foreign trade processes. European leaders have been aghast at his slow grasp of details. German Prime Minister Angela Merkel reportedly had to explain that it would be legally impossible for Germany to set up trade agreements directly with the U.S. (since Germany is part of the European Union) eleven timesbefore he is said to have grasped that schoolkid fact).
And the ignorance and confusion apparently doesn’t stop with Trump. Wade Jacoby, writing in the Washington Post, notes that Trump trade adviser Peter Navarro appears profoundly confused about Germany’s monetary goals:
Trump’s trade adviser, Peter Navarro, seems to think that Germany wants a weak euro. In fact, German officials have spoken out consistently against the European Central Bank’s quantitative easing policy that is helping hold down the euro’s value.
The analysis suggests that while Trump and his team are largely clueless, that doesn’t mean they’re automatically wrong about everything — though they don’t appear to have the operational competence to address the extremely complex trade, savings, and investment relationships at the heart of the issue.
From abrogation of long-established treaties, to providing the top secrets of US allies to their — and our — adversaries, to a constant barrage of lies, disinformation, and misinformation — Donald Trump and his team of willfully ignorant incompetents have turned the current US administration into a betrayer of allies and a traitor to our national ideals and principles.
Remember when national security advisor, H.R. McMaster, had a shred of credibility left? Looks like, instead of him imposing discipline on the Trump team, the Trump style has turned McMaster into one of them…
Even though he suggested it was all nothing to worry about, he ALSO claimed that he knew nothing about Jared Kushner’s efforts to set up a secure backchannel communication with Russia using their facilities — a communication channel specifically designed to prevent US intelligence agents from being able to monitor it: “it’s not something that I’ve in any way been involved with or that I have any knowledge of.”
Got that? He doesn’t know ANYTHING about it — but he can assure you it’s NOTHING to worry about. Thanks, H.R. Great work keeping the country safe and free.
I have come to the conclusion that one cannot back Trump unless he or she is both mentally and morally deficient.
A cynical smart person would be able to see how much he lies, how often he breaks promises, and would have investigated his business and other dealings — that’s just smart self-interest. Having done so, they would realize that his ‘business acumen’ is largely PR puffery — had he merely invested all the millions he was given and loaned by his father in index stocks, it’s estimated he would be considerably wealthier. His supposed business acumen lags the market.
A person of lesser intellect and insight but with a sense of common decency might fall for his promises and lies — but would not be able to ignore his bigotry, his cruelty to the weak and different, or his toxic vulgarity.
We’ve been confronted with some very ugly realities about the performance of police of the decidedly difficult and dangerous tasks we’ve set for them.
Individual humans will err, of course. But it appears that these problems are SYSTEMIC — and systemic problems need to be taken up by society as a whole, going beyond mutual blame games and scapegoating, and looking for new solutions that actually work.
Because it’s clear that we are moving farther away from the goals we have, as a society, set for ourselves.
Any thought that appears independently without corroborating observations, corollary conclusions, or peripheral considerations should be suspect, seems to me. If it just ‘pops into your head’ it may well have been put there to achieve someone else’s ends.
I came to the conclusion back in my wild and wooly twenties that sorcery, marketing and politics were all part of the same game.
As I joked when I watched my own Faceback ‘look-back’ vid, a sort of one minute, whirlwind, robo-Ken Burns impressionistic bio vid created from one’s Facebook images posted since joining and accompanied by sweeping, valedictorious music, I feel like I’m at my own memorial service.
But — let me roll back a little…
Back in the ’90s I had the idea of doing multimedia memorials, vids, photo albums, music, writings, etc, and putting them on CDRs for distribution to families and friends at services — and that did come about done by pros — but I had in mind a desktop app that would let normal people create them — or create their own ‘life stories’ as they went along. But, of course, THAT’s a lot of work. I don’t mean the developing — I mean, Joe or Mary Sixpack sitting down and updating their cyber-diary.
But I didn’t count on the cross pollination of existing social media (the oldest form of online activity, with dial-up BBs preceding the WWW by more than a decade) with the not-quite-post-me-gen phenom of blogs to create the new social media pioneered in various ways by the second social media generation: Mp3.com (sharing, BBs, personal publishing), Friendster, MySpace, which then gave way to the third: Facebook.
With a critical mass of friends and social contacts, the dreary work of autobiography (which tends to produce the kind of long, involved, ultimately boring writing I specialize in) was supplanted by something more like everyday social life: banter, personal and family news sharing, civics discussions, personal op-ed and jeremiads, and a dash of self-promo and self-branding.
Capture enough of that and you have the raw material for something like my original cyber-memorial idea, but even better, since it forms a sort of meta-snapshot of the subject’s life.
Anyhow… this grieving father wanted to share his son’s look-back vid with family and friends, but FB’s rules, interlaced with a variety of federal and other laws seemed to not permit it and his entreaties via email and normal channels got nowhere.
In desperation, he posted a heart-rending off-the-cuff minute and a half vid explaining the situation and asking his friends and their friends to share it.
It worked. Thanks, Facebook, for doing the human thing.
The NRA says we must put armed guards in all nursery schools, elementaries, middle schools, and high school campuses.
They fail to point out that there were two armed guards at Columbine.
Two is not enough. And clearly they were outgunned. They should have had rocket launchers and perhaps an armored personnel carrier.
Maybe we need to bivouac the army in our schools in order to protect our children from ourselves — since we, as a nation, appear incapable of reining in the gun psychos and paranoiacs (like Adam Lansa’s end-o-times-obsessed mother who stockpiled all those weapons despite the presence of her deeply troubled son).
This is all so silly. And backwards.
The NRA is behind the times — and clearly addressing the trade needs of the gun makers who pump money into NRA coffers as though they believed all that eye-of-the-needle stuff from Matthew 19:24.
No. We don’t need guards with simple firearms.
We need a circling air force of heavily armed drones hovering over every school in the U.S.
Here’s more from around the web, with special attention to the Orca Project, Team Romney’s supposedly groundbreaking but actually spectacularly mismanaged ‘strike list’ web app for GOP get-out-the-vote (GOTV) workers…
Here’s a first hand account from a Romney volunteer of the disaster that was “Orca” — which Politico’s Haberman & Burns dubbed the “Fail Whale” of the Romney campaign.
Wrapping back around to the whole ‘competence’ issue — this campaign is something of a crystallization of Mitt Romney’s life…
His famous father, George Romney, actually built things, accomplished things. When he was CEO of the American Motors, he took that newly merged, debt-burdened company to profitable, debt-free operation. When he was Republican governor of labor-heavy Michigan, he was a popular governor. When he ran for the GOP presidential nomination in ’68, by his blunt candor in assessing the Vietnam War as a loss (even then) and the managing generals as ‘brainwashing’ American politicians, he effectively ended his future chances in the GOP — but he got the truth out in front of the American people at a crucial time.
In his business career, Mitt specialized in “creative destruction” — buying troubled companies, plundering them for their assets for quick returns in some cases or, in others, using the companies as dumping grounds for debt sales from other Romney-controlled enterprises that effectively eviscerated Peter to fatten Paul — making losers of victimized existing investors in the troubled companies while rewarding investors in Romney’s other ventures.
Clearly, Mitt never really learned how to build lasting, healthy companies and his overall record shows that quite clearly. But he was hell at profiting from others’ misfortunes — he became one of the US’s richest businessmen doing it.
Sadly, for his apparent dreams of ‘besting’ his father (hadn’t we already been through that Freudian scenario with the reckless incompetence of George W Bush?), Mitt never apparently gained the management skills of his father — and that has become painfully evident in the aftermath of his unsuccessful campaign against an embattled incumbent with an Oval Office desk full of troubles…
Mitt Romney couldn’t manage his own campaign — and manifestly did a disastrous job of it — how on earth could he have managed the executive branch of the most powerful nation on earth?
In the aftermath of Mitt Romney campaign spokeman John Sununu’s unfortunate moment of frankness — where he suggested that former George Bush Secretary of State Colin Powell had endorsed Barack Obama because they are both black — a suggestion Sununu was quickly prodded to backpedal away from by key members of the GOP — General Powell’s chief of staff at the State Department, former military man, Ret. Col. Lawrence Wilkerson — who is white and Republican — had a mouthful to say in a brief interview on MSNBC. The Wilkerson interview begins about 2 min. 40 seconds into the clip, after typical partisan bloviation from the MSNBC host. Do yourself a favor and cut to the chase.
KS2 Problema 
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