3/31/18

Mueller and 45; The Interminable Election Cloud


Special Council Robert Mueller has a been investigating President Trump since May 2017; nearly a year, and the lengthy process itself is starting to interfere with the election cycle. Hopefully the Special Council would conclude the investigation after a year has passed in time to allow the mid-term election to pass without being under the dark cloud of suspicion of one party's leader colluding with the traditional main enemy of Wall Street.

It may not have been a good idea to appoint a former head of the F.B.I. To investigate the President who had shortly before fired a head of the F.B.I.; James Comey. That itself presented a form of the appearance conflict of interest. If a union boss had been fired by a CEO perhaps appointing a former union boss to lead an investigation into the CEO's affairs would be the brightest way to go.

F.B .I. Chief Comey seemed to interfere in the 2016 election process with his unusual timing of the release of investigations into Candidate Hillary Clinton's loose private e-mail server and statements about her was exonerated or not. It was discovered eventually that one her her hard drives with the record of emails was erased without a good reason why. Former Chief Mueller duplicating former Chief Comey's history of F.B.I. election influence is an unfortunate emergent condition contributing to the public opinion about the veracity of U.S.A. Democracy. Creating dubiously non-partisan investigations that do not cohere with the idea of due process of law so far as reasonable timeliness goes that have a real affect on voter decisions probably should not occur just because it is popular with a broadcast media and opposition party to do so. In the Watergate burglary there were plain overt felony crimes to be investigated to start with rather than a broad effort to implicate anyone connected to the President in any sort of crimes, while the President himself hasn't been shown to have done any sort of criminal activity for-himself.


A Partisan intifada to protest the election result seems  a banana republic. sort of political event instead of one of speedy and transparent legal procedures.

3/29/18

Bungling the Peace Dividend

What can be done to make imperialism and Britain great again? Commercially looting and sacking Russian natural resources might be a place to start. The world has run out of easy continents to loot and sack, so apparently Russia is about the only place with a plausible possibility. Margaret Thatcher helped end a cold war; Theresa May fuels getting it restarted.

  Is Britain up to the task? If only Winston Churchill were still around to stand up to the bully. Fortunately British leadership again may draw upon the U.S.A. as the enforcer of its stranglehold on the Russians. When two Russians were poisoned by nerve agent in England recently, and Britain, who invented the nerve agent GB positively identified the poison as nerve agent, the west fell in line behind Britain in containing Russian so the looting and sacking might become closer to fruition. The phrase ‘win one for the Footsie’ took hold.

 American foreign policy makers should have quality strategic goals rather than reactionary donkey replies in Stimulus-Response (SR) mode to any phenomenal political event or false flag operation abroad designed to manipulate gullible or disingenuous U.S. political leaders. Making Russia and China solid friends and moderate defense associates ought to be strategic goals of U.S. foreign policy. That would enable better global allocation of finite government resources from defense spending to ecospheric recovery and removal of vestigial elite, aristocratic crimes upon the poor.   The nation’s political leadership has squarely bungled the peace dividend that should have followed the end of the cold war and transition of the Soviet Union to a market economy. There really isn’t any excuse for that, and it has harmed American economic national interests.

  It would be wrong to give credit to U.S. Government leadership for political wisdom when it is perennially lacking. Stages in evolving national history occur; now’ists have symbiotically upsurged into being dialectically concentrated corruption with two corrupt parties conjugating as one under judicial oversight pissin on principles of the founders.   Corporatism has ended democracy.
 
 The cost of failing to develop a mutually prosperous and secure military relationship with Russia after the cold war is high for each respective nation. The United States had all of the advantages at Cold War’s end and should have been the dance leader in a dialectical reformation of capitalism for Russia as it related to the U.S.A. The U.S. instead choose to develop an antagonistic relationship because it could so long is it could find opportunities to dispute with Russian President Vladimir Putin. American foreign policy since the end of the Cold War seemed to require perennial military conflict in some form in order to keep the Defense budget as high as at Cold War levels.

   If one considers the real military situation of the U.S.A. today it can be difficult to find large scale enemies or enemy relationships that could not be fairly readily transformed into non-belligerent conditions. Fundamentally China and Russia are the sole enemies that comprise potential survival threats militarily, and each of those probably have no interest in war or the old idea of conquest.

  China does have a communist party corps that distrusts the most rich and aristocracy well-founded on its own imperial past. Richard Nixon began the process of normalizing U.S.-Chinese relations and that has continued so far as to bring China and the U.S. into reasonably amicable trade relations. America buys lots of stuff from China; no one needs war.

  That leaves Russia as the best potential enemy to justify a large defense budget. Yet the only real Russian military threat is nuclear and maybe some secret trick weapons. Yet the vast Pentagon budget has a huge number of military personnel taking home too-high salaries. Before the volunteer army E-1s might take home 62 dollars to 350 dollars I recall. Now it’s something like $24,000. Cutting the Defense budget by half would be a good idea if we were on-good-commercial with Russia as with China. If that were the case there would no large standing military threat of world war scale on Earth challenging the U.S.A., Russia, China, Europe or Latin America and that would be a good thing.

  U.S. leadership cannot bring themselves to comprehend the importance of saving the nation a half a trillion dollars annual from the Defense budget. A tacit agreement with China and Russia could create an agreement for them to freeze their own defense budgets and even roll them back toward new, lower U.S. levels. Realistically the greatest threats to U.S. national security are not conventional war these days. It is instead terrorism from a number of organizations globally some of which are state organizations. There are dangers of surprise nuclear and biological war. I suppose there are even dangers of kinetic weapons launched from space. Defense spending might want to adjust to the new military reality instead of prepping to fight old wars that require nothing more than simplistic Hatfield-McCoy role playing.

  Russia, China and the United States face the mutual threat of global ecospheric degradation and perhaps eventual collapse in the greatest mass extinction underway in millions of years. They face similar challenges of terrorism and like all nations require security from global organizational imperialism subverting national interests.

   U.S. leadership should choose to use logic as well as myopia in prioritizing foreign and domestic policy. A free world with a security and ecologically recovering Russia as a business and military partner is better than with Russia as an isolated foe. Leadership in peace is requisite for logic and political progress as well as the ability to resist invaders or return to hostile relationship as the normal condition.

The incipient trade war with China might have gone in many directions. China might have begun trying to grow its own apples in Inner Mongolia or some better place. Washington State apple growers might have found a way to make apple energy bars replete with vitamin B, C and D in shiny foil wrappers that were loosely based on applet and cotlets; the translucent, sweet apple and apricot candy bars famous from Cashmere.  Chinese selection of Washington State apples for possible tariffs may have supported a communist party bias against the exploitation of labor. The Washington State apple growing industry exploits vast numbers of poorly-paid migrant farm workers. It is such businesses that demand cheap foreign labor. The West Coast of the U.S.A. and the South are an archipelago of illegal alien workers laboring far below minimum wage. The Federal Government does nothing to eliminate that serfdom as it easily could be attaching felony penalties for paying anyone in the U.S.A. anything less than minimum wage for work-even if they are illegal workers. The United States cannot have a vast evil serf labor empire benefiting the most corrupt powers of concentrated wealth and pretend to be a good moral force on the world; especially if it tries to force a Sodom and Gomorrah social ethic of homosexual marriage on the rest of the world. A billion Muslims, a billion Chinese an a billion Latin Americans might resist. Tolerance for the life choices of others is important. The Middle East might have experienced the goodness of apples without an expiration date. Wars lead sometimes to places that none expected to go. One should tolerate heterodox forms of political systems rather than exterminate them.

Mass movements of populations in a world with nine billion people is itself dangerous in a number of respects. U.S. leadership is however Britain’s bĂȘte noir easy to exploit as an enforcer of British imperial interests. Europe too seems to prefer belligerence with Russia rather than neighborliness on a positive basis. Russia’s vast lands have always attracted the interests of foreign invaders and now that mind-set again comprises an  element in the inability of Europe and the United States to move beyond the old paradigm to something new; a planet restoring its ecosphere, developing renewable and sustainable economics with liberty justice and security for all.

President to Ban Foreigners and Non-Citizens from D.C. Hotel to Comply With Law?

Before taking office with the acclaim of Americans that want a wall covered in solar panels built on the Mexican border, President Trump owned a hotel and possibly additional properties in the nation’s capital city. The President has been sued by two state’s attorney’s generals for letting foreigners that have public business presumably, stay in that hotel. There is some sort of ban on receiving bribes or emoluments from foreigners while in office.

In the founder’s day corporate collective business didn’t exist. Individuals just owned land and private buildings. It was easier to recognize illicit contributions then now. A new herd of capital at Arlington pastures before Washington choose to cast a veto would have been noticed. Capitalism and government could use reform.

Traditionally U.S. Presidents have not been showered with foreign gifts or financial support and were thus weak on the trade balance issue, giving more than receiving-a Christian yet not a Democrat Party way of being-for-oneself. However there may be no law against foreign born Americans actual taking the office of President through stealth and subterfuge votes if one goes on the precedent offered by 2016 candidate Senator Ted Cruz who is a foreign born citizen of Canada and Cuba. Canadians and other foreigners including Ted Cruz may not be allowed to stay in the President’s Washington D.C. hotel even if U.S. Senators if they have not forfeited their foreign citizenship with denunciation and stamping on the Maple Leaf flag and all of the foreign syrup that stands for within a foreign embassy witnessed by their co-conspirators. The President may need to ban Brits and all 30 million illegal aliens and Mexicans from staying at any of his hotels to be sure they aren’t slipping him emoluments including ketchup and Gray Poupon, under the table.

If Hillary Clinton had been elected in 2016 the Clinton foundation might have had to give up tours of the state department or contributions from Russian oligarchs (life can be hard).  In order to comply with American law the President may need to boot foreigners out of all his hotels and possibly the Martian El Largo too.

  When President George Washington posed at the front of a boat while crossing the Delaware River amid ice floes to stay at the four-star Mayflower Hotel he possibly day-dreamed of revenues from his own future hotels when potentates of the Middle East and Canada would pay top dollar for the privilege of staying at his King Suites chain to watch Dusty Lanyard on special-view TV at a thousand dollars a night. Maybe he knew that domestic Americans agitating for abortion and homosexual marriage would never stay there to try to bribe him, yet if he could he probably would have sent a tweet or two on the topic so future historians could reflect upon in order to comment knowledgeably on such matters.

  President Trump could just ban any foreigners with government employment at least, and maybe even their proxies and foreign media too and just give discounts to the National Rifle Association members that are the only really trustworthy national organization in a time where illegal aliens are better regarded in the state of California (state officials regard a mustache as chauvinistic and are considering litigating about National Security Advisor John Bolton over it when he gets on the job).

Enslaving the Public with Defense Spending & British Evolving Gooniess

Wars have been quite costly for nations to prosecute since the 18th century.  Britain and France took on great public debt to wage their wars of conquest and colonization during the 18th and 19th century. The British fight to keep America enslaved brought them to take on debt equivalent to 800% of their national annual income. If Britain had won that war the British would have had vastly more wealth and income, so the rich were gambling on a good policy for positive payback. Russia may have a similar appearance to contemporary Brits and Wall Street.

Britain lost the American revolutionary war lost so their debt persisted until about World War One when they drew the United States into the battle to help them win an armistice costly to Germany.

  The ratio of private capital and debt to public capitol and debt as they relate to national income is quite an interesting historical study about which I have been reading recently in Thomas Pickety’s ‘Capital in the 21st Century’. There are various relationships that occur to nations over history between public and private capital that recur. I am just adding a few of my own remarks here that pertain to the U.S.A.

 In Britain today 99% of capital is private yet of course the U.S. public often tend to regard Britain as a neo-socialist nation with its public health system. British public capital is rather puny because it is a small nation without much public land or parks. In the 21st century land does not comprise a great percent of capital in first world nations. The United States probably has a greater level of public capital because it still has substantial public lands and obviously those will be targets of long-range hostile takeover by the private sector though that would cause egregious ecospheric harm.

  Private capital is definitely in the rise in the United States. It crashed during the second wo0rld war and has since recovered such that it comprises many times the national income. Public capital is comparatively deflated though the ecological value is quite undervalued. As private capital is concentrated because of the nature of networking and collective ownership in stocks it has a self-reinforcing nature that lets it accumulate more wealth and power reducing the masses to dependent and relatively powerless status. Mass political parties evolve to condition the masses to pursue unrealistic and irrelevant, non-economic political objectives.

   Interestingly enough it is war that tends to reduce the ratio of private capital to public capital though not always in a way that one expects. Britain and France financed their wars in different ways. France took on vast public debt on which it eventually defaulted while Britain fought America without raising taxes. Instead the Brits borrowed money from the rich and repaid them over a century. A huge percent of British government spending for a century went to just paying off the loans to the rich with interest. The rich got much richer as a result and public infrastructure was neglected. The United States seems to face similar challenges today.

  With tax cutting programs since the Reagan administration wars and defense spending have generally been accomplished without raising taxes to pay for them. I believe that President Roosevelt probably didn’t get his ideal 90% tax rate on the rich made law until the outbreak of the Second World War though the depression before had perhaps supported a legislative increase in taxes to benefit the public sector. Wars that are fought without raising taxes in the U.S.A. along with great defense spending even during peace rely in loans/bonds sold to the rich. The nation pays for that for decades or centuries. While inflation remains low and wealth is concentrated through a number of mechanical networking means of technical power the public debt is a great lever on the public sector reinforcing the corporate ad hoc governing state of an elite 1% of the people over ever one else to have their way. They own the broadcast media and increasingly the Internet and suppress or marginalize any sort of dissent or suggestion within Democratic means for changing ratios of taxation and public capital (that does not require socialism incidentally for effective reform).

  I believe the United States following the black pimpernel administration and the most recent tax cuts have passed over the event horizon into the realm of corporatism as the de facto political structure of the United States and that little can be done about it. Few understand it and fewer have the will or capacity to return to a reformed constitutional democracy since even the interpretation of the constitution by the High Court has become one of creative fiction.

  Capital makes for good reading, tough John Saul’s book from 1999, I believe, named ‘The Unconscious Civilization’ describing corporatism, and perhaps ‘Ecological Economics’, and some political philosophy about the nature of capitalism in addition to Adam Smith’s ‘The Wealth of Nations’ probably are required readings if one is to understand Smith’s idea about breaking up concentrated wealth and power latent in the Aristocracy of England in his day sufficient well empirically to think about creating a reformed constitutional democracy in the United States with a sustainable ecospheric relationship that provides and supports the means for enabling citizens to achieve their maximum inventive and productive potential that would keep them happy.

In contemporary popular economic philosophy there is generally confusion about the relation between private capital and public such that it is believed that to reform and to have a more equitable distribution of wealth private capital must be shifted to public capital and that of course is the road towards socialism. That mistaken belief readily overlooks the possibility of reforming private capital and reforming tax and business laws to assure that wealth is not concentrated and that everyone has an equal opportunity to produce and conserve capital without the problem of running into the obstruction of inherited concentrated wealth that dominates capital.

 With the British invention of evolution theory a major change has occurred in support of the British method of concentrating wealth for the benefit of elites. Adam smith of course opposed and reformed that policy that is recurring now. Evolution theory made a political device appeals to every godless goon and immoral thug in the west seeking an amoral environment to exist in as a kind of amoeba without civic or moral concerns under the aristocratic supervision of behavioral evolutionary biologists. The trend isn’t good for the American paradigm.

3/23/18

President Trump Lags Behind Obama War Creation Pace

President Trump's first year in office was luck-luster regarding the creation of wars. President Obama's first year saw glorious speeches made across the middle east followed by several wars during the Arab spring. In fact the President never lacked for wars he had stimulated being fought during his entire administration in addition to watching over the rise of the Islamic state. It is difficult to defend the President's lack of wars and some must face up to the fact that he could be more interested in business and building than destruction.

  Fortunately the President is hiring the known tough guy John Bolton for his new National Security Adviser. Maybe he can get things on track possibly through North Korea, though it must be recognized by war mongers that the meeting scheduled with the Warrior-Dictator Kim Jong Un may nip in the bud the prospects for a quick and effective small nuclear conflict to end the North Korean build up of weapons of mass destruction while being bellicose and threatening toward the 1%.

  President Trump has given 700 billion more to the Pentagon for national defense in his new spending bill yet about nothing for a defense wall with Mexico. Without solid wars its hard to justify the budget for a DOD that can't even defend the southern border.

  One can have difficulty understanding the reasoning for war for the worlds instead of ecospheric restoration of course. I believe it goes like this... When the aliens return and hover over Mt. Everest they shall drop an anchor line to the summit, descend a few who will walk down to the 22,000 level where their press spokesman Elvis, will explain it all.

  

Making Nuclear Reactors Great Again

  Nuclear reactors release energy when U-235 undergoes fission. Apparently that's a reasonably simple process. Usually water is used to dampen that so the heat and energy is moderated. one would think that something besides water could be used and it probably has; maybe sodium or something.

  Nuclear reactors have sometimes had their energy runaway and causing meltdown of the unit and of course contamination as radioactive fallout and such things are as harmful for human prospects for life on Earth as basic environmental damage that significantly harms the ecosphere and people too. Thus its a good idea that continuing research on safe reactor design and alternative mediums for capturing the fissile energy release safely.

  Russia and China have some very small nuclear reactors used commercially as well as the very large, yet they are still rather substantial in weight and possibly not valuable in the forseeable future for providing energy to electrify barren outer solar system moons cleanly. One might like to find dampening moderators that occurs simply as superconducting materials or batteries; solids that don't require liquid water; so rare in some places beyond the other.

  Not all solid moderators are without implications for bomb making of course. Graphite is used as a moderator at Oak Ridge to compile plutonium for weapons and of course to power satellites like Voyageur. The value of creating safe solid moderators for in-line superconducting and of a very light weight structure that could be placed by drones and robots on distant lifeless moons without enough sunlight for solar power to speak of, would advance manned space exploration and research colonization.

The Earth economy probably doesn't need much more than solar power and super-conductors of course, yet that can't be said of distant worlds that people  may want to vacation and live on in the next century.

The Brits made a gas cooled and graphite moderating reactor among others, based on the Magnox reactor design.



On Golden Pond or Lake of Fire?

 I was wondering if a second Biden term would bring a Lake of Fire to the world with nuclear holocaust, or a golden pond for a reelected oc...