#Trump ignores strong points in US trade

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

June 27, 2024

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

JUN 28, 2024

Tonight was the first debate between President Joe Biden and presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, and by far the most striking thing about the debate was the overwhelming focus among pundits immediately afterward about Biden’s appearance and soft, hoarse voice as he rattled off statistics and events. Virtually unmentioned was the fact that Trump lied and rambled incoherently, ignored questions to say whatever he wanted; refused to acknowledge the events of January 6, 2021; and refused to commit to accepting the result of the 2024 presidential election, finally saying he would accept it only if it met his standards for fairness. 

Immediately after the debate, there were calls for Biden to drop out of the race, but aside from the fact that the only time a presidential candidate has ever done that—in 1968—it threw the race into utter confusion and the president’s party lost, Biden needed to demonstrate that his mental capacity is strong in order to push back on the Republicans’ insistence that he is incapable of being president. That, he did, thoroughly. Biden began with a weak start but hit his stride as the evening wore on. Indeed, he covered his bases too thoroughly, listing the many accomplishments of his administration in such a hurry that he was sometimes hard to understand. 

In contrast, Trump came out strong but faded and became less coherent over time. His entire performance was either lies or rambling non-sequiturs. He lied so incessantly throughout the evening that it took CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale almost three minutes, speaking quickly, to get through the list. 

Trump said that some Democratic states allow people to execute babies after they’re born and that every legal scholar wanted Roe v. Wade overturned—both fantastical lies. He said that the deficit is at its highest level ever and that the U.S. trade deficit is at its highest ever: both of those things happened during his administration. He lied that there were no terrorist attacks during his presidency; there were many. He said that Biden wants to quadruple people’s taxes—this is “pure fiction,” according to Dale—and lied that his tax cuts paid for themselves; they have, in fact, added trillions of dollars to the national debt. 

Dale went on: Trump lied that the U.S. has provided more aid to Ukraine than Europe has when it’s the other way around, and he was off by close to $100 billion when he named the amount the U.S. has provided to Ukraine. He was off by millions when he talked about how many migrants have crossed the border under Biden, and falsely claimed that some of Biden’s policies—like funding historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and reducing the price of insulin to $35 a month—were his own accomplishments.

There is no point in going on, because virtually everything he said was a lie. As Jake Lahut of the Daily Beast recorded, he also was all over the map. “On January 6,” Trump said, “we had a great border.” To explain how he would combat opioid addiction, he veered off into talking points about immigration and said his administration “bought the best dog.” He boasted about acing a cognitive test and that he had just recently won two golf club tournaments without mentioning that they were at his own golf courses. “To do that, you have to be quite smart and you have to be able to hit the ball a long way,” he said. “I can do it.” 

As Lahut recorded, Trump said this: “Clean water and air. We had it. We had the H2O best numbers ever, and we were using all forms of energy during my 4 years. Best environmental numbers ever, they gave me the statistic [sic.] before I walked on stage actually.”

Trump also directly accused Biden of his own failings and claimed Biden’s own strengths, saying, for example, that Biden, who has enacted the most sweeping legislation of any president since at least Lyndon Johnson, couldn’t get anything done while he, who accomplished only tax cuts, was more effective. He responded to the calling out of his own criminal convictions by saying that Biden “could be a convicted felon,” and falsely stating: “This man is a criminal.” And, repeatedly, Trump called America a “failing nation” and described it as a hellscape.

It went on and on, and that was the point. This was not a debate. It was Trump using a technique that actually has a formal name, the Gish gallop, although I suspect he comes by it naturally. It’s a rhetorical technique in which someone throws out a fast string of lies, non-sequiturs, and specious arguments, so many that it is impossible to fact-check or rebut them in the amount of time it took to say them. Trying to figure out how to respond makes the opponent look confused, because they don’t know where to start grappling with the flood that has just hit them.

It is a form of gaslighting, and it is especially effective on someone with a stutter, as Biden has. It is similar to what Trump did to Biden during a debate in 2020. In that case, though, the lack of muting on the mics left Biden simply saying: “Will you shut up, man?” a comment that resonated with the audience. Giving Biden the enforced space to answer by killing the mic of the person not speaking tonight actually made the technique more effective.

There are ways to combat the Gish gallop—by calling it out for what it is, among other ways—but Biden retreated to trying to give the three pieces of evidence that established his own credentials on the point at hand. His command of those points was notable, but the difference between how he sounded at the debate and how he sounded on stage at a rally in Raleigh, North Carolina, just an hour afterward suggested that the technique worked on him. 

That’s not ideal, but as Monique Pressley put it, “The proof of Biden’s ability to run the country is the fact that he is running it. Successfully. Not a debate performance against a pathological lying sociopath.” 

A much bigger deal is what it says that the television media and pundits so completely bought into Trump’s performance. They appear to have accepted Trump’s framing of the event—that he is dominant—so fully that the fact Trump unleashed a flood of lies and non-sequiturs simply didn’t register. And, since the format established that the CNN journalists running the debate did not challenge anything either candidate said, and Dale’s fact-checking spot came long after the debate ended, the takeaway of the event was a focus on Biden’s age rather than on Trump’s inability to tell the truth or form a coherent thought. 

At the end of the evening, pundits were calling not for Trump—a man liable for sexual assault and business fraud, convicted of 34 felonies, under three other indictments, who lied pathologically—to step down, but for Biden to step down…because he looked and sounded old. At 81, Biden is indeed old, but that does not distinguish him much from Trump, who is 78 and whose inability to answer a question should raise concerns about his mental acuity. 

About the effect of tonight’s events, former Republican operative Stuart Stevens warned: “Don’t day trade politics. It’s a sucker’s game. A guy from Queens out on bail bragged about overturning Roe v. Wade, said in public he didn’t have sex with a porn star, defended tax cuts for billionaires, defended Jan. 6th. and called America the worst country in the world. That guy isn’t going to win this race.”

Trump will clearly have pleased his base tonight, but Stevens is right to urge people to take a longer view. It’s not clear whether Trump or Biden picked up or lost votes; different polls gave the win to each, and it’s far too early to know how that will shake out over time. 

Of far more lasting importance than this one night is the clear evidence that stage performance has trumped substance in political coverage in our era. Nine years after Trump launched his first campaign, the media continues to let him call the shots. 

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[misfitwashere]

June 27, 2024 

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

JUN 28

Tonight was the first debate between President Joe Biden and presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, and by far the most striking thing about the debate was the overwhelming focus among pundits immediately afterward about Biden’s appearance and soft, hoarse voice as he rattled off statistics and events. Virtually unmentioned was the fact that Trump lied and rambled incoherently, ignored questions to say whatever he wanted; refused to acknowledge the events of January 6, 2021; and refused to commit to accepting the result of the 2024 presidential election, finally saying he would accept it only if it met his standards for fairness. 

Immediately after the debate, there were calls for Biden to drop out of the race, but aside from the fact that the only time a presidential candidate has ever done that—in 1968—it threw the race into utter confusion and the president’s party lost, Biden needed to demonstrate that his mental capacity is strong in order to push back on the Republicans’ insistence that he is incapable of being president. That, he did, thoroughly. Biden began with a weak start but hit his stride as the evening wore on. Indeed, he covered his bases too thoroughly, listing the many accomplishments of his administration in such a hurry that he was sometimes hard to understand. 

In contrast, Trump came out strong but faded and became less coherent over time. His entire performance was either lies or rambling non-sequiturs. He lied so incessantly throughout the evening that it took CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale almost three minutes, speaking quickly, to get through the list. 

Trump said that some Democratic states allow people to execute babies after they’re born and that every legal scholar wanted Roe v. Wade overturned—both fantastical lies. He said that the deficit is at its highest level ever and that the U.S. trade deficit is at its highest ever: both of those things happened during his administration. He lied that there were no terrorist attacks during his presidency; there were many. He said that Biden wants to quadruple people’s taxes—this is “pure fiction,” according to Dale—and lied that his tax cuts paid for themselves; they have, in fact, added trillions of dollars to the national debt. 

Dale went on: Trump lied that the U.S. has provided more aid to Ukraine than Europe has when it’s the other way around, and he was off by close to $100 billion when he named the amount the U.S. has provided to Ukraine. He was off by millions when he talked about how many migrants have crossed the border under Biden, and falsely claimed that some of Biden’s policies—like funding historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and reducing the price of insulin to $35 a month—were his own accomplishments.

There is no point in going on, because virtually everything he said was a lie. As Jake Lahut of the Daily Beast recorded, he also was all over the map. “On January 6,” Trump said, “we had a great border.” To explain how he would combat opioid addiction, he veered off into talking points about immigration and said his administration “bought the best dog.” He boasted about acing a cognitive test and that he had just recently won two golf club tournaments without mentioning that they were at his own golf courses. “To do that, you have to be quite smart and you have to be able to hit the ball a long way,” he said. “I can do it.” 

As Lahut recorded, Trump said this: “Clean water and air. We had it. We had the H2O best numbers ever, and we were using all forms of energy during my 4 years. Best environmental numbers ever, they gave me the statistic [sic.] before I walked on stage actually.”

Trump also directly accused Biden of his own failings and claimed Biden’s own strengths, saying, for example, that Biden, who has enacted the most sweeping legislation of any president since at least Lyndon Johnson, couldn’t get anything done while he, who accomplished only tax cuts, was more effective. He responded to the calling out of his own criminal convictions by saying that Biden “could be a convicted felon,” and falsely stating: “This man is a criminal.” And, repeatedly, Trump called America a “failing nation” and described it as a hellscape.

It went on and on, and that was the point. This was not a debate. It was Trump using a technique that actually has a formal name, the Gish gallop, although I suspect he comes by it naturally. It’s a rhetorical technique in which someone throws out a fast string of lies, non-sequiturs, and specious arguments, so many that it is impossible to fact-check or rebut them in the amount of time it took to say them. Trying to figure out how to respond makes the opponent look confused, because they don’t know where to start grappling with the flood that has just hit them.

It is a form of gaslighting, and it is especially effective on someone with a stutter, as Biden has. It is similar to what Trump did to Biden during a debate in 2020. In that case, though, the lack of muting on the mics left Biden simply saying: “Will you shut up, man?” a comment that resonated with the audience. Giving Biden the enforced space to answer by killing the mic of the person not speaking tonight actually made the technique more effective.

There are ways to combat the Gish gallop—by calling it out for what it is, among other ways—but Biden retreated to trying to give the three pieces of evidence that established his own credentials on the point at hand. His command of those points was notable, but the difference between how he sounded at the debate and how he sounded on stage at a rally in Raleigh, North Carolina, just an hour afterward suggested that the technique worked on him. 

That’s not ideal, but as Monique Pressley put it, “The proof of Biden’s ability to run the country is the fact that he is running it. Successfully. Not a debate performance against a pathological lying sociopath.” 

A much bigger deal is what it says that the television media and pundits so completely bought into Trump’s performance. They appear to have accepted Trump’s framing of the event—that he is dominant—so fully that the fact Trump unleashed a flood of lies and non-sequiturs simply didn’t register. And, since the format established that the CNN journalists running the debate did not challenge anything either candidate said, and Dale’s fact-checking spot came long after the debate ended, the takeaway of the event was a focus on Biden’s age rather than on Trump’s inability to tell the truth or form a coherent thought. 

At the end of the evening, pundits were calling not for Trump—a man liable for sexual assault and business fraud, convicted of 34 felonies, under three other indictments, who lied pathologically—to step down, but for Biden to step down…because he looked and sounded old. At 81, Biden is indeed old, but that does not distinguish him much from Trump, who is 78 and whose inability to answer a question should raise concerns about his mental acuity. 

About the effect of tonight’s events, former Republican operative Stuart Stevens warned: “Don’t day trade politics. It’s a sucker’s game. A guy from Queens out on bail bragged about overturning Roe v. Wade, said in public he didn’t have sex with a porn star, defended tax cuts for billionaires, defended Jan. 6th. and called America the worst country in the world. That guy isn’t going to win this race.”

Trump will clearly have pleased his base tonight, but Stevens is right to urge people to take a longer view. It’s not clear whether Trump or Biden picked up or lost votes; different polls gave the win to each, and it’s far too early to know how that will shake out over time. 

Of far more lasting importance than this one night is the clear evidence that stage performance has trumped substance in political coverage in our era. Nine years after Trump launched his first campaign, the media continues to let him call the shots. 

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

[climber-123]

From Heather Cox Richardson:

June 27, 2024 (Thursday)

Tonight was the first debate between President Joe Biden and presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, and by far the most striking thing about the debate was the overwhelming focus among pundits immediately afterward about Biden’s appearance and soft, hoarse voice as he rattled off statistics and events. Virtually unmentioned was the fact that Trump lied and rambled incoherently, ignored questions to say whatever he wanted; refused to acknowledge the events of January 6, 2021; and refused to commit to accepting the result of the 2024 presidential election, finally saying he would accept it only if it met his standards for fairness.

Immediately after the debate, there were calls for Biden to drop out of the race, but aside from the fact that the only time a presidential candidate has ever done that—in 1968—it threw the race into utter confusion and the president’s party lost, Biden needed to demonstrate that his mental capacity is strong in order to push back on the Republicans’ insistence that he is incapable of being president. That, he did, thoroughly. Biden began with a weak start but hit his stride as the evening wore on. Indeed, he covered his bases too thoroughly, listing the many accomplishments of his administration in such a hurry that he was sometimes hard to understand.

In contrast, Trump came out strong but faded and became less coherent over time. His entire performance was either lies or rambling non-sequiturs. He lied so incessantly throughout the evening that it took CNN’s fact-checker Daniel Dale almost three minutes, speaking quickly, to get through the list.

Trump said that some Democratic states allow people to execute babies after they’re born and that every legal scholar wanted Roe v. Wade overturned—both fantastical lies. He said that the deficit is at its highest level ever and that the U.S. trade deficit is at its highest ever: both of those things happened during his administration. He lied that there were no terrorist attacks during his presidency; there were many. He said that Biden wants to quadruple people’s taxes—this is “pure fiction,” according to Dale—and lied that his tax cuts paid for themselves; they have, in fact, added trillions of dollars to the national debt.

Dale went on: Trump lied that the U.S. has provided more aid to Ukraine than Europe has when it’s the other way around, and he was off by close to $100 billion when he named the amount the U.S. has provided to Ukraine. He was off by millions when he talked about how many migrants have crossed the border under Biden, and falsely claimed that some of Biden’s policies—like funding historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and reducing the price of insulin to $35 a month—were his own accomplishments.

There is no point in going on, because virtually everything he said was a lie. As Jake Lahut of the Daily Beast recorded, he also was all over the map. “On January 6,” Trump said, “we had a great border.” To explain how he would combat opioid addiction, he veered off into talking points about immigration and said his administration “bought the best dog.” He boasted about acing a cognitive test and that he had just recently won two golf club tournaments without mentioning that they were at his own golf courses. “To do that, you have to be quite smart and you have to be able to hit the ball a long way,” he said. “I can do it.”

As Lahut recorded, Trump said this: “Clean water and air. We had it. We had the H2O best numbers ever, and we were using all forms of energy during my 4 years. Best environmental numbers ever, they gave me the statistic [sic.] before I walked on stage actually.”

Trump also directly accused Biden of his own failings and claimed Biden’s own strengths, saying, for example, that Biden, who has enacted the most sweeping legislation of any president since at least Lyndon Johnson, couldn’t get anything done while he, who accomplished only tax cuts, was more effective. He responded to the calling out of his own criminal convictions by saying that Biden “could be a convicted felon,” and falsely stating: “This man is a criminal.” And, repeatedly, Trump called America a “failing nation” and described it as a hellscape.

It went on and on, and that was the point. This was not a debate. It was Trump using a technique that actually has a formal name, the Gish gallop, although I suspect he comes by it naturally. It’s a rhetorical technique in which someone throws out a fast string of lies, non-sequiturs, and specious arguments, so many that it is impossible to fact-check or rebut them in the amount of time it took to say them. Trying to figure out how to respond makes the opponent look confused, because they don’t know where to start grappling with the flood that has just hit them.

It is a form of gaslighting, and it is especially effective on someone with a stutter, as Biden has. It is similar to what Trump did to Biden during a debate in 2020. In that case, though, the lack of muting on the mics left Biden simply saying: “Will you shut up, man?” a comment that resonated with the audience. Giving Biden the enforced space to answer by killing the mic of the person not speaking tonight actually made the technique more effective.

There are ways to combat the Gish gallop—by calling it out for what it is, among other ways—but Biden retreated to trying to give the three pieces of evidence that established his own credentials on the point at hand. His command of those points was notable, but the difference between how he sounded at the debate and how he sounded on stage at a rally in Raleigh, North Carolina, just an hour afterward suggested that the technique worked on him.

That’s not ideal, but as Monique Pressley put it, “The proof of Biden’s ability to run the country is the fact that he is running it. Successfully. Not a debate performance against a pathological lying sociopath.”

A much bigger deal is what it says that the television media and pundits so completely bought into Trump’s performance. They appear to have accepted Trump’s framing of the event—that he is dominant—so fully that the fact Trump unleashed a flood of lies and non-sequiturs simply didn’t register. And, since the format established that the CNN journalists running the debate did not challenge anything either candidate said, and Dale’s fact-checking spot came long after the debate ended, the takeaway of the event was a focus on Biden’s age rather than on Trump’s inability to tell the truth or form a coherent thought.

At the end of the evening, pundits were calling not for Trump—a man liable for sexual assault and business fraud, convicted of 34 felonies, under three other indictments, who lied pathologically—to step down, but for Biden to step down…because he looked and sounded old. At 81, Biden is indeed old, but that does not distinguish him much from Trump, who is 78 and whose inability to answer a question should raise concerns about his mental acuity.

About the effect of tonight’s events, former Republican operative Stuart Stevens warned: “Don't day trade politics. It's a sucker's game. A guy from Queens out on bail bragged about overturning Roe v. Wade, said in public he didn't have sex with a porn star, defended tax cuts for billionaires, defended Jan. 6th. and called America the worst country in the world. That guy isn't going to win this race.”

Trump will clearly have pleased his base tonight, but Stevens is right to urge people to take a longer view. It’s not clear whether Trump or Biden picked up or lost votes; different polls gave the win to each, and it’s far too early to know how that will shake out over time.

Of far more lasting importance than this one night is the clear evidence that stage performance has trumped substance in political coverage in our era. Nine years after Trump launched his first campaign, the media continues to let him call the shots.

[news365timesindia]

[ad_1] 4 min read Last Updated : Oct 11 2024 | 11:51 PM IST In 2014, the French economist Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century became an international sensation, reshaping the inequality debate and launching its author into superstardom. Dr Piketty was right to point out that the political case for income redistribution is almost entirely focused on domestic concerns. But his central argument—that capitalism inevitably leads to growing inequality—falls apart when comparing the situation of impoverished farmers in Vietnam with the relative comfort of middle-class French citizens. In reality, the trade-driven rise of economies in Asia and Central and Eastern Europe over the past four decades has led to what may be the most dramatic reduction in cross-country disparities in human history. Despite this, Western observers rarely pay more than lip service to the roughly 85 per cent of the world’s population living in the Global South. While philanthropists like Bill Gates devote significant resources to improving lives in Africa, most foundations and institutions remain focused on reducing within-country in­equality. Although both causes are admirable, political analysts often ignore the fact that, by global standards, poverty is virtually nonexistent in advanced economies. Click here to connect with us on WhatsApp  Farmers in India, of course, have no influence over US or European elections, where the focus has increasingly turned inward in recent years. Nowadays, candidates do not win by pledging to help Africa, let alone South Asia or South America. This shift helps explain why Dr Piketty’s framing of inequality as a domestic issue has resonated strongly with American progressives— and, indirectly, with former President Donald Trump’s Make America Great Again movement. But this interpretation overlooks the hundreds of millions of people living in climate-vulnerable developing countries. Moreover, despite the lasting impact of colonialism, there is little appetite in Europe’s welfare states or Japan for paying reparations to former colonies. To be sure, there is a strong case for strengthening social safety nets in developed countries, especially when it comes to education and health care. From a moral standpoint, though, it remains highly debatable whether this outweighs the urgent need to address the plight of the 700 million people around the world living in extreme poverty. To their credit, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund have taken significant steps to assist developing countries. But their resources and mandates are limited, and rich countries tend to support policies and initiatives that align with their own interests. One area where there seems to be broad consensus is the need for climate action. With this in mind, I have long advocated the creation of a World Carbon Bank that would support developing countries’ green transition by providing technical assistance and offering large-scale climate financing, preferably through grants, not loans. As I recently argued, grant financing is especially important in view of another crucial way to reform global capitalism: Barring private lenders from suing defaulting sovereign debtors in developed-country courts. Ultimately, reducing global poverty requires greater openness and fewer trade barriers. The global economy’s fragmentation, fuelled by geopolitical tensions and populist politicians pushing for trade restrictions, poses a serious threat to the economic prospects of the world’s poorest countries. The risk that political instability in these regions will spill over into wealthier countries is escalating at an alarming pace, already reflected in these countries’ increasingly fraught debates about immigration. Developed economies have three options, none of which focuses solely on domestic inequality. First, they can strengthen their ability to manage migration pressures and confront regimes that seek to destabilise the global order.

Second, they can increase support for low-income countries, particularly those capable of avoiding civil war. Lastly, they can send citizens to assist low-income countries. Many governments have already experimented with domestic programmes that encourage recent college graduates to spend a year teaching or building homes in underprivileged communities. At the very least, sending Western students to developing countries— even for short periods — would enable privileged campus activists to learn about the economic hardships faced by much of the world’s population and see for themselves how people live in countries where capitalism has yet to take hold. Such experiences could foster a deeper awareness of global challenges and give young people a clearer understanding of the crises that may eventually affect their own lives. This is not to suggest that within-country inequality is not a serious issue. But it is not the greatest threat to sustainability and human welfare. The most urgent task facing Western leaders is finding the political will to enable countries to access global markets and bring their citizens into the twenty-first century. The writer professor of economics and public policy at Harvard University  ©Project Syndicate, 2024 Disclaimer: These are personal views of the writer. They do not necessarily reflect the opinion of www.business-standard.com or the Business Standard newspaperFirst Published: Oct 11 2024 | 11:50 PM IST [ad_2] Source link

[news365times]

[ad_1] 4 min read Last Updated : Oct 11 2024 | 11:51 PM IST In 2014, the French economist Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century became an international sensation, reshaping the inequality debate and launching its author into superstardom. Dr Piketty was right to point out that the political case for income redistribution is almost entirely focused on domestic concerns. But his central argument—that capitalism inevitably leads to growing inequality—falls apart when comparing the situation of impoverished farmers in Vietnam with the relative comfort of middle-class French citizens. In reality, the trade-driven rise of economies in Asia and Central and Eastern Europe over the past four decades has led to what may be the most dramatic reduction in cross-country disparities in human history. Despite this, Western observers rarely pay more than lip service to the roughly 85 per cent of the world’s population living in the Global South. While philanthropists like Bill Gates devote significant resources to improving lives in Africa, most foundations and institutions remain focused on reducing within-country in­equality. Although both causes are admirable, political analysts often ignore the fact that, by global standards, poverty is virtually nonexistent in advanced economies. Click here to connect with us on WhatsApp  Farmers in India, of course, have no influence over US or European elections, where the focus has increasingly turned inward in recent years. Nowadays, candidates do not win by pledging to help Africa, let alone South Asia or South America. This shift helps explain why Dr Piketty’s framing of inequality as a domestic issue has resonated strongly with American progressives— and, indirectly, with former President Donald Trump’s Make America Great Again movement. But this interpretation overlooks the hundreds of millions of people living in climate-vulnerable developing countries. Moreover, despite the lasting impact of colonialism, there is little appetite in Europe’s welfare states or Japan for paying reparations to former colonies. To be sure, there is a strong case for strengthening social safety nets in developed countries, especially when it comes to education and health care. From a moral standpoint, though, it remains highly debatable whether this outweighs the urgent need to address the plight of the 700 million people around the world living in extreme poverty. To their credit, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund have taken significant steps to assist developing countries. But their resources and mandates are limited, and rich countries tend to support policies and initiatives that align with their own interests. One area where there seems to be broad consensus is the need for climate action. With this in mind, I have long advocated the creation of a World Carbon Bank that would support developing countries’ green transition by providing technical assistance and offering large-scale climate financing, preferably through grants, not loans. As I recently argued, grant financing is especially important in view of another crucial way to reform global capitalism: Barring private lenders from suing defaulting sovereign debtors in developed-country courts. Ultimately, reducing global poverty requires greater openness and fewer trade barriers. The global economy’s fragmentation, fuelled by geopolitical tensions and populist politicians pushing for trade restrictions, poses a serious threat to the economic prospects of the world’s poorest countries. The risk that political instability in these regions will spill over into wealthier countries is escalating at an alarming pace, already reflected in these countries’ increasingly fraught debates about immigration. Developed economies have three options, none of which focuses solely on domestic inequality. First, they can strengthen their ability to manage migration pressures and confront regimes that seek to destabilise the global order.

Second, they can increase support for low-income countries, particularly those capable of avoiding civil war. Lastly, they can send citizens to assist low-income countries. Many governments have already experimented with domestic programmes that encourage recent college graduates to spend a year teaching or building homes in underprivileged communities. At the very least, sending Western students to developing countries— even for short periods — would enable privileged campus activists to learn about the economic hardships faced by much of the world’s population and see for themselves how people live in countries where capitalism has yet to take hold. Such experiences could foster a deeper awareness of global challenges and give young people a clearer understanding of the crises that may eventually affect their own lives. This is not to suggest that within-country inequality is not a serious issue. But it is not the greatest threat to sustainability and human welfare. The most urgent task facing Western leaders is finding the political will to enable countries to access global markets and bring their citizens into the twenty-first century. The writer professor of economics and public policy at Harvard University  ©Project Syndicate, 2024 Disclaimer: These are personal views of the writer. They do not necessarily reflect the opinion of www.business-standard.com or the Business Standard newspaperFirst Published: Oct 11 2024 | 11:50 PM IST [ad_2] Source link

[zhangsanhzgb]

FTX’s fund allocation draws market attention

1. **FTX’s fund allocation draws market attention**

Recently, FTX is distributing a total of $16 billion in funds, including $12 billion in cash. After this capital flows back into the market, it is expected to drive investors back into the market and trigger a new round of buying.

2. Global Liquidity Index and Market Rebound

The correlation between the cryptocurrency market and global liquidity is becoming increasingly clear. Whenever the global liquidity index reaches current levels, the market usually follows a strong rally.

3. Future Potential of Ethereum ETF

Although the Ethereum ETF is progressing slowly, its prospects are still exciting. As time goes by, this field is expected to achieve a faster pace of development.

4. BlackRock’s BUILD Fund Outlook

In addition to ETFs, the optimistic attitude of BlackRock, the world's largest asset management company, towards blockchain technology cannot be ignored. The BUILD fund is a reflection of this attitude, and it is only the beginning of its layout in this field.

5. Goldman Sachs’ Tokenization Plan

Not only BlackRock, but other large institutions such as Goldman Sachs are also actively embracing tokenization technology. This trend shows the growing recognition of blockchain technology by traditional financial institutions.

6. The impact of the US election on the crypto market

Trump’s campaign dynamics have a potentially positive impact on the cryptocurrency market. Due to his administration’s support for the crypto industry, the market is paying close attention to his campaign performance.

7. Market expectations of rate cuts

The market generally expects that there may be three interest rate cuts this year, among which the probability of a 25 basis point rate cut in September is as high as 90%.

8. Ordinary investors remain on the sidelines

Despite the gradual recovery in the market, Google search volume for “cryptocurrency” and “Bitcoin” remains at low levels. In addition, the Coinbase application is only ranked 416th, showing that ordinary investors still have a strong wait-and-see mood.

9. **Key Support Level for US Dollar Index**

The U.S. Dollar Index (DXY) has continued to trend lower over the past few months and is now close to a key support level. If this support level is breached, it could have a significant positive impact on the cryptocurrency market.

10. **Bearish factors fading**

The main reasons for the previous market sell-off, such as the MtGox incident, the German Bitcoin sell-off, Jump Trading’s market operations, recession concerns and geopolitical conflicts, seem to be gradually subduing, which has brought more optimistic expectations to the market.

How to buy BTC 

How to buy cryptocurrency on an exchange

Invest in BTC It has never been easier! Registering on an exchange, verifying your account, and paying by bank transfer, debit or credit card, with a secure cryptocurrency wallet, is the most widely accepted method of acquiring cryptocurrencies. Here is a step-by-step guide on how to buy cryptocurrency on an exchange.

Step 1: Register OKX (click the link to register)

You can register by email or phone number, then set a password and complete the verification to pass the registration.

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[foreverlogical]

In his continuing quest to remain president despite having lost this month’s election, President Donald Trump has been trying to wrest electoral votes away from Joe Biden in states that Biden won. Among the most aggressive tactics that the President might use is a direct appeal to the Republican-controlled legislatures of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania to hand him those state’s electoral votes.

On Thursday, the post-election narrative seemed to edge further down that path, as the Republican leaders of Michigan’s two legislative chambers—Senator Mike Shirkey and Representative Lee Chatfield—agreed to take a meeting with the President in Washington tomorrow. Until that point Shirkey and Chatfield were signaling that they didn’t intend to second-guess Michigan’s voters, who chose Biden by more than 150,000 votes. But by taking the White House meeting, they indicated their possible openness to changing their minds.

Politically, it’s possible that they see taking the meeting as a smart move, showing unhappy Michigan Republicans that they’re on the president’s side.

But as a matter of statesmanship—and, legally, for their own sakes—they’d be smarter to cancel it.

The scheduled meeting threatens two kinds of danger. At the largest level, it threatens the system of democratic presidential elections: If state officials start claiming the right to overturn elections because of vague claims about “fraud,” our democratic system will be unworkable. But in a more specific and immediate way, it threatens the two Michigan legislators, personally, with the risk of criminal investigation.

The danger to democratic elections is well-understood. The Constitution authorizes state legislatures to decide how states choose presidential electors. For more than a century, every state legislature has chosen to do it by popular election. According to one school of thought, though, a state legislature could choose to set aside a popular vote if it doesn’t like the result and choose different electors instead. This is a pretty undemocratic idea, as well as one that misreads the history of election law: the National Review recently described it as “completely insane.” (State legislatures have the power to change the system for choosing electors in future elections, but not to reject an already-conducted election just because they don’t like the result.) Nonetheless, the President is pushing for it. By so far refusing to go along with Trump, Republican state legislators have been standing up for the idea that fair, democratic elections are more important than any individual president. If Shirkey and Chatfield are reconsidering that view, they are playing with the possibility of throwing out the results of a free and fair election. That’s not something that the system comes back from easily.

The scheduled White House meeting also poses another kind of danger—one hanging specifically over the two Michiganders whose minds Trump seeks to change. Consider: Why, exactly, does President Trump want to see these two men in person, in his office? It isn’t to offer evidence that Michigan’s election was tainted and should therefore be nullified. If he had any such evidence, his lawyers would have presented it in court, rather than abandoning their Michigan lawsuitas they did today. It’s also unlikely that Trump is planning to persuade the Michiganders through subtle legal arguments about their constitutional role. Subtle argument isn’t really Trump’s way of doing things.

The president is a dealmaker, and it’s far more likely that his agenda is transactional. When considering a course of action, he doesn’t think about principles; he thinks about what’s in it for whom. So it makes sense to think that he is inviting Shirkey and Chatfield for a private meeting to offer them something. If they help throw the election to him, he can offer a lot. Give me Michigan’s electoral votes, he might say, and I’ll give you a cabinet post or make you Ambassador to Spain. President Trump is also not above offering cash: Give me the votes, and I’ll see to it that lots of money flows to places where you want it—to your state, or to you personally. (That would be an outrageous allegation to have made about Barack Obama or George W. Bush. But the president who paid illicit cash to Stormy Daniels to protect his first presidential run shouldn’t be presumed to scruple at paying more illicit cash to protect his second one.)

The danger for Shirkey and Chatfield, then, is that they are being visibly invited to a meeting where the likely agenda involves the felony of attempting to bribe a public official.

Under Michigan law, any member of the legislature who “corruptly” accepts a promise of some beneficial act in return for exercising his authority in a certain way is “forever disqualified to hold any public office” and “shall be guilty of a felony, punishable by imprisonment in the state prison not more than 10 years[.]”

To be sure, there’s lots of horse-trading in politics that doesn’t amount to bribery. There’s nothing legally wrong with “You vote for my turnpike project, and I’ll vote for your dam.” But the prospect before Shirkey and Chatfield isn’t legislative logrolling, with representatives negotiating policy or even pork-barrel spending. It’s the prospect of a promise to deliver something of value to the officeholder personally. In other words, we aren’t talking about Trump’s saying “Here’s what’s in it for your constituents.” The prospect, in a one-on-one meeting with this president, is Trump’s saying “Here’s what’s in it for you.”

Shirkey and Chatfield are already on record—admirably—as being against a legislative intervention to ignore the popular vote and reallocate Michigan’s electors. If they take a meeting with a man who desperately wants them to change their minds, and who has no scruples about what kind of leverage he might use to get it, and then they do change their minds and try to send Michigan’s electors to Trump, the possibility that they were bribed will be screamingly obvious.

To be sure, it might not be true: Maybe Shirkey and Chatfield fear Trump’s supporters in the next election so much that they’d change their minds without a direct bribe on the table. But the bribery possibility is strong enough that a responsible prosecutor might feel compelled to pursue it. And the relevant prosecutor—Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel—is a straight-shooting Democrat who does not pal around with Shirkey and Chatfield. If she thought the facts justified an investigation, Shirkey and Chatfield would be investigated.

If the risk of prosecution were federal, the two men might figure they had little to worry about: President Trump, in his second term, would tell the Justice Department to lay off. But the president can’t stop a state prosecution, and he can’t pardon a state crime. Nor would the president’s conversations with Shirkey and Chatfield be shielded from investigation by any sort of executive privilege: Shirkey and Chatfield are not members of the president’s federal policymaking team. So if the Michigan attorney general decided to proceed, Shirkey and Chatfield would be looking—in the best-case scenario—at the pain and disrepute of subpoenas and a criminal investigation. In a less-good-case scenario for them, they’d be looking at the loss of their office and their liberty.

The point here is not that Shirkey and Chatfield are shady characters who might be involved in bribery. Let’s assume that they are honorable and upstanding public servants. But one thing that people who try to stay clean know is that it’s unwise to put yourself in a situation where it will look like you’ve broken the law—or, worse yet, where you might be induced to do so. “Lead us not into temptation” is well known as a religious precept: it’s also excellent legal advice.

The Trump Administration is nearing its end. Any other president who got these results on Election Day would have conceded gracefully and now be cooperating in a peaceful transfer of power—giving his successor’s team the information it needed so that from the stroke of noon on January 20, it could begin protecting American national security, fighting the Covid pandemic, and so forth. President Trump is choosing to block all of that constructive work so that he can avoid admitting that the other guy won. He is doing a fair amount of damage on his way out. That damage is hurting the country in general, and it will also hurt specific people.

A drowning man grabs at anything, and a strong drowning man brings other people down with him. To this point, Republican legislators in Michigan—and in other states where Trump might try to tip the scales, like Wisconsin and Pennsylvania—have wisely kept their distance. That’s good for them, personally, and it’s also good for democracy. If they’re smart, and the country is lucky, that’s how things will stay.

VISIT WEBSITE

[sz-amare]

9. “Hard Work” BS

One of the most frequently explored themes in shōnen anime is the concept of hard work vs. natural talent. It is one of my favorites, and it excites me to see how an anime portrays its message on the matter. The general concept that you can surpass anyone with rigorous and strict hard work is very inspiring to the younger demographic, myself included. However, there are many instances where an anime will try to tackle this concept but will either fail or ironically contradict their themes without realizing it. Naruto and Black Clover are the first ones that come to mind, but several others do the same. Although, there is one anime I love that tackles the idea, without really trying to, and succeeds. And that is Haikyuu.

Starting with an anime that fails to portray the message of hard work, we have Black Clover. Now I know I bashed Black Clover in the previous post, but once again, I give criticism is where criticism is due. But to make it up to the Black Clover fans, I will try my best to make an analysis/review on Black Clover in the near future, talking about what it does right and what it does better than most. Anyway, in the world of Black Clover, there are three basic regions in the Clover kingdom. We have the Forsaken Realm, the Common Realm, and the Noble Realm. Nobles in Black Clover tend to have a high affinity for magic and live in the Nobel Realm, while commoners and peasants live in the Forsaken Realm, having a low magic affinity. The Common Realm is between the two; people who live there have average status and average affinity for magic.

Asta lives in the Forsaken Realm, meaning he is a commoner. As I mentioned in a previous post, the main reason Asta wants to become the wizard king is to prove that peasants can become the most powerful mage and thus remove discrimination against them. The only way he can prove this is by working harder than anyone else. The only issue is, Asta is nothing like a regular commoner. As a matter of fact, he is nothing like your average human. He is possessed by a devil that gives him anti-magic abilities, which gives him an edge over people with powerful magical abilities. So… even if Asta became the wizard king, can we really say that other commoners have the potential to become the wizard king as well? No. We can’t. Now yes, Asta did train harder than everyone else in his respective series. Fun fact, if you look at physical strength alone and ignore magical abilities, Asta is the second strongest character in the world of Black Clover. But unfortunately, he doesn’t rely on his physical strength along, but on his anti-magic and devil abilities almost no one else has. His hard work is real and very admirable, but the theme of hard work does not play out with his character’s message, and I find that to be a major flaw.

If you thought the theme of hard work vs. natural talent was badly portrayed in Asta’s character, prepare yourself for Naruto. Before I start, I want you to understand that in Naruto, there are a couple of examples where I think the theme is beautifully explored. Lee vs. Gara is an excellent example, and in this case, hard work loses. Might Guy’s character alone is brilliant to this theme. To think that he was one of the greatest fighters the whole time, but even we, the audience, looked down on him, thinking he was not as strong as some of the Akatsuki, simply because he only used taijutsu. 

But there is one example where the series not only falls short but miserably fails to the point where I feel embarrassed. And that is Naruto vs. Neji.

During the Chuinin exams, we see Neji as one of the most powerful forces that Naruto will probably have to face off against in the future. Neji was born in one of the strongest clans, the Hyuga, resulting in him having an overpowerd ability, the byakugan. Then we have Naruto, who has been an underdog his entire life. He was also discriminated against because of the demonic Nine-Tails Fox that was trapped in his body. Naruto was one of the weakest contenders in the exams, but he believed that he would beat Neji, the second most talented contender there, through his hard work. Neji was also spouting some destiny bull crap that Naruto promised his hard work would also defy. But anyway, during the fight, nothing much was happening other than trading fists and philosophies between the two. When the fight starts to get interesting, Naruto asks the Nine-Tails Fox for chakra, giving him a massive boost, resulting in his victory.

I’m sorry, what?! How can you spout some hard work non-sense for over a dozen episodes, claiming that your hard work would trump someone’s natural abilities but end up using an overpowered ability, unique to you, to prove that point? That is completely self-contradictory. It would have been fascinating to see Naruto realize that the only way he won was because of his unique abilities, resulting in him understanding that although he won the physical fight, he lost the battles of ideals. This would spark development where Naruto now understood, or at least began to believe, that natural talent is overall superior but mixed with a lot of hard work, you could become the strongest. That is precisely why Naruto is the strongest at this point. But no, Naruto took pride in the battle he “won,” even though he completely contradicted himself. Later on in the series, we even learn that Naruto is a part of a clan stronger than the Hyuga, the Uzumaki. So technically, Naruto was never inferior to Neji. This mistake is laughable.

For the anime I believe they tackled the theme of hard work vs. natural talent in one of the most unique ways, we have the volleyball anime, Haikyuu. One of my favorite parts in the series is when Kageyama and Tsukishima receive special training while Hinata is nothing more than a ball boy. Hinata has already proved his hard work through his jumping height and speed, but this arc proved something slightly different from the usual. While Hinata’s two rivals are getting special training, he feels the desperation to train so that he doesn’t fall behind in skill. As a result, he tries to join one of the camps to receive the same special training one of his rivals is receiving. He then understands his rudeness for joining uninvited. As a form of an apology, he starts picking up stray balls after they go out of bounds. While two of his rivals are working hard, he is a ball boy. His feelings of desperation slowly rise, but he can’t do anything about it.

After talking to a couple of people, he begins to understand that he can take advantage of his position. He spends each moment staring at the other volleyball players who are training, observing what they are doing to learn something. Basically, while his rivals are working hard in a special training program not many people get, Hinata works hard to find training – working hard at special training vs. working hard to receive training, if you will. He takes advantage of his dire situation and uses it to learn all sorts of things.

Looking now at the end of season four, we can see the fruits of Hinata’s labor finally shine. He perfectly receives multiple crucial spikes and starts to seem like a well-rounded player. After Kageyama, it felt like Hinata deserved the title of MVP for the first time.

In general, I don’t think that failing to deliver a great message through the theme of hard work vs. natural talent will make or break an anime. But when that theme is an essential part of a message you want to portray or pertains to a big part of an arc, failing to deliver can create significant inconsistencies and dial down the quality of an anime as a whole in some viewers’ eyes. Asta’s whole goal should be obtained through the means of hard work alone; otherwise, it creates cracks in the logic of his message. When hard work vs. natural talent is a reoccurring theme in Naruto for about 40 episodes and creates a contradictory ending to the theme, it will cause significant dissatisfaction to the audience who resonated with it. I love the general concept of themes, but when dealing with one, always bring a good closing to it to flesh out the elements of your story and so you don’t turn off your audience.

[arcticdementor]

In 2016, voters on both sides of the Atlantic shocked the political establishment by voting for Brexit and Donald Trump. In the eyes of their critics, these movements represented the resurgence of dan­gerous forms of populism and nationalism. Combined with earlier “nationalist-populist” victories in central Europe, and rising support for populist parties elsewhere, commentators at the time predicted—or, in most cases, feared—that a populist wave could soon sweep across the West and beyond.

Four years later, such a wave has not materialized, though popu­lism has hardly disappeared. Andrzej Duda recently won reelection in Poland, while Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party has held on to its super­majority in parliament, and populist parties represent significant vot­ing blocs in legislatures around the world. After a three-year interlude, the United Kingdom has moved forward with Brexit under the premiership of Boris Johnson.

Today, as another U.S. presidential election approaches, it is worth taking stock of the transformations that have—and have not—oc­curred within American conservatism during the last four years. If Trump goes down to defeat this November, some will suggest that any attempted reconfiguration of the American Right provoked by his 2016 election was a misbegotten effort, and that, after a four-year hiatus, global liberalism can now safely resume. But a closer examination of right-wing populism’s trajectory, both within and outside the United States, suggests that such a return to Bush-era conservatism is unlikely. Regardless of what happens in the November election, the gaps between conservative ideology and practical realities will continue to push right-wing parties in postliberal directions and will continue to favor political, if not necessarily partisan, realignment.

…

Michael Lind has described the situation as a new class war. “A trans­atlantic class war has broken out simultaneously in many Western countries,” he writes, “between elites based in the corporate, financial, government, media, and educational sectors and disproportionately native working-class populists. The old spectrum of left and right has given way to a new dichotomy in politics among insiders and out­siders.”3 Lee Drutman’s much-discussed analysis of the 2016 elec­torate in the United States indicates how this reconfiguration has begun to unfold. Comparing the social and economic views of voters for Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton in 2016, Drutman found, not surprisingly, that traditionally conservative voters favored Trump and traditionally liberal voters favored Clinton. What propelled Trump to victory was his three-to-one win over Clinton among populist vot­ers—those liberal (i.e., Left) on economic issues and con­servative on social questions and matters of identity. Most strikingly, populists made up 28.9 percent of the American electorate in 2016, whereas libertarian voters—those conservative on economics and Left or lib­eral on social questions—were only 3.8 percent of the electorate.4

It was Trump’s performance among the large number of populist voters and Trump’s disregard of libertarians that shocked the Ameri­can Right in particular. Ever since Frank Meyer and William F. Buckley patched together “fusionist” conservatism in the 1950s and ’60s, the American Right has combined social and cultural traditionalism with a broadly liber­tarian economic outlook. The terminology has long been confus­ing, as American conservatives have typically held views called liberal or neoliberal in the European context: they argue for a small state with minimal intervention in the private sector; they favor (at least in theory) the privatization or elimination of many government services; and they are suspicious of public benefits as well as public services, but they make an exception for a strong military. This alliance was driven by the turn of the Democrats toward the Left, although the Democratic Party had previously been home to socially conservative Catholic immigrants who favored the corporatist agenda of Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1930s.

…

One additional factor is needed before explaining how the Repub­lican Party and American conservatives responded to Trump’s vic­tory. Tocqueville was correct when he observed that America was a society full of associations, with citizens constantly forming new groups to push for political and social changes of every variety. Over the second half of the twentieth century, however, many of these associations changed from organic expressions of citi­zen concern to large foundations which advanced the agendas of their donors. On the right, this change meant that conservative think tanks, activist groups, and the like adopted an almost universally libertarian viewpoint—as the donors endowing these foundations held libertarian views on economics—albeit under the banner of “fusionism.” Consequently, at typical conservative conferences for university students, socially con­servative students are imbued with libertarian free market doctrines (though rarely any serious empirical study of modern markets and firms).

…

The end of the Cold War and the success of Bill Clinton’s neo­liberal presidency—during which he incorporated welfare reform, free trade, and stricter criminal justice policies into the Democratic platform—convinced libertarians and neoliberals on the right and left that their moment was at hand. The Republican Party came to power in the U.S. Congress in the 1994 elections on a mission to slash government spending and welfare benefits. “The era of big government,” said Clinton in his 1996 State of the Union, “is over.” While the GOP did not achieve all its dreams (it had also hoped to eliminate numerous federal agencies like the Department of Education), free trade agreements such as nafta and Chinese accession to the WTO were signed with bipartisan support. During this period, the United States conceived of a future economy that would combine the mone­tization of internet technology and a transition from heavy manufacturing employment to a service-sector economy (hospitality, etc.). With a few exceptions, American conservatives had little or nothing to say about this change, even as the manufacturing core of the American economy was hollowed out. Fusionist conservatives had outsourced the economic portion of their thinking to libertarians, and they mostly professed their desire to “allow market forces to work.”

In the absence of an economic policy that would help middle- and working-class Americans, however, conservatives’ insistence on con­serving traditional family structures became hollow and moralistic. Many otherwise socially conservative black and Hispanic voters have avoided the Republican Party for precisely this reason. But socially conservative white voters, even those whom Republican economic policies do not help, have stayed with the party in the hopes that Republican presidents would appoint socially conservative judges to the U.S. Supreme Court and other federal courts. A tipping point during the 2016 campaign was Trump’s decision in May of that year to release a list of possible Supreme Court picks in order to reassure pro-life voters of his sympathy with socially conservative causes.

Yet Trump’s appointees have largely disappointed social conservatives with their recent rulings. It seems increasingly clear that, over a period of four decades, the conservative legal movement’s primary success has been to keep Republican voters engaged in a Sisyphean task. America’s underlying liberalism, as Adrian Vermeule put it re­cently, has meant that “in critical cases, involving central commitments of the unwritten constitution, it is highly likely that one or more of the middling conservative justices” will defect.5 Conservatives have pinned their hope on institutions designed to fail them in critical moments.

…

Following the shock of 2016, American conservatives have divided into three main categories: (1) those who opposed Trump, still oppose him, and hope to regain control of the Republican Party on the stand­ard pro-business, laissez-faire platform of recent decades; (2) those who were initially skeptical about Trump but have rallied around the cause of nationalism; and (3) those who have used the occasion of the Trump presidency to push for a new Right. Let us take a brief look at these three groups.

…

The great hope of the Never Trumpers seems to be that a Trump loss in November, especially a decisive one, will revive their fortunes within the Republican Party. But their political prospects seem lim­ited even in this scenario. Despite advertising themselves as responsible centrists, they have shown essentially zero interest in serious policymaking, focusing almost entirely on Trump’s character, per­sonal scandals, their preferred vision of “American values,” and so on. Meanwhile, the few areas of potential bipartisan collaboration have shifted, for the foreseeable future, mainly to issues of industrial policy and technological competition with China—issues the Never Trump­ers have totally ignored, both during the last few years and throughout their entire careers. It was Republicans like Tom Cotton, Marco Rubio, and Josh Hawley who recently cosponsored the American Foundries Act with Chuck Schumer, for example. And now that Democratic nom­inee Joe Biden has made issues like industrial policy and “Buy American” key aspects of his campaign, any Republican cooperation with a Biden administration will likely be led by the economic pop­ulists. The Never Trumpers are simply irrelevant on these issues, and their actual records when in government remain glaring liabilities for anyone associated with them. Donors and media out­lets might have some use for them, as they apparently do today, but neither the Biden administration nor the post-Trump Republican leadership are likely to have much interest in these figures.

Unlike the Never Trumpers, the second group of conservatives have embraced Trump’s “nationalist” rhetoric, but they have other­wise left traditional (anti-statist) American conservatism intact. Among voters, these were Americans who gravitated to Trump’s slogan, “Make America Great Again,” along with immigration restrictions and a rejection of globalism in economic and foreign policy. Some conservative intellectuals embraced the nationalist framework from the beginning, such as Michael Anton, whose article “The Flight 93 Election” starkly contrasted the options of Trump and Hillary Clin­ton. Writing in 2016 at the ironically titled blog Journal of American Greatness under the pseudonym Publius Decius Mus (a blog to which I contributed as well), Anton excoriated “checklist conservatives” for having stuck with free market ideology and neoconservative foreign policy even in the face of repeated failures. This group of nationalist conservatives have congregated around the Claremont Institute and its Claremont Review of Books and affiliated publications. Aside from becoming gen­erally more nationalist on foreign and immigration poli­cy, however, this group has had little to say about the implications of broader political realignment.

In summer 2019, the Israeli intellectual Yoram Hazony launched a conference in Washington under the name “National Conservatism,” aiming to gather intellectuals and politicos who reject the Never Trump framework. Hazony’s own defense of nationalism, published in the 2018 book The Virtue of Nationalism, is itself sui generis. In Hazony’s account, nations are the permanent opposition to empires, against which they always find themselves locked in struggle, though it is difficult to fit into this framework nations that became or ac­quired empires (what would anti-imperial nationalism say about Algeria, for example?). Hazony’s view of nations is based heavily on the Old Testament and the experience of Israel and England, as well as a pecu­liarly English view of conservatism as subrational and tra­ditionalist. National Conservatism is also markedly Protestant in an old-fash­ioned way, as Hazony has promoted the view that Henry VIII’s actions constituted the first Brexit in resistance to ecclesiastical imperialism. While openly aligning itself with European populists and nationalists, however, National Conservatism has had little to say about the sources of continental right-wing thought, from Roman law to the Catholic Church, or about the conservative use of the state.

…

The difficulty facing National Conservatism, however, is that it is primarily oriented toward rethinking conservatism itself rather than thinking primarily about the challenges of contemporary politics. National Conservatism and (anti-Trump) Principled Conservatism are both arguments over the content of conservatism. In the Anglo-American context, National Conservatism, as Hazony frames it, high­lights historical empiricism (or traditionalism), nationalism (i.e., against imperialism), religion, and limited executive power. While the “na­tionalism” element of National Conservatism is transferable to other countries, historical empiricism and limited executive power are not the most pressing political concepts, particularly in times of economic crisis and emergency.

…

Thus most of the conservative activists wearing MAGA hats at Trump rallies or conservative political conventions are simply anti-immigration libertarians. Talk to them about the need for the state to support domestic manufacturing, or the need to boost family for­mation through a Hungarian-style benefit program, and they will probably call you a socialist. In general, aside from opposition to immigration and support for the American military, they have no vision of how the government is to be used at all. In different cir­cumstances, they would revert to an anti-government stance along with opposition to increases in federal spending.

…

The third group of conservatives are those who take Trump’s election, Brexit, and the rise of populist political movements in Eu­rope to demonstrate that the configuration of politi­cal ideologies immediately prior to 2016 had fallen out of step with conditions on the ground. As it is to this group that I myself belong, I transition here from describing the circumstances of Ameri­can con­servatism to outlining, however briefly, an argument for this vision of the Right.

American conservatism has been anti-statist since it coalesced in opposition to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s expansionary New Deal during the Great Depression, and particularly in its formulation after World War II. Even among conservatives who are not anti-statist per se, hostility to and skepticism of the federal government runs deep. The state is considerably less visible in daily life in America than else­where: health care is privately administered, public universities are not free, taxes are not suffocating, and labor is more lightly regulated. Yet most American conservative intellectuals, activists, journalists, think tank staff, and the like still act as though the primary enemy is the federal government, or use alarming rhetoric about taxation that has not been changed since the days of much higher tax rates before Reagan’s tax cuts in 1981 and 1986.

From the standpoint of the postliberal Right, the liberal view of the state as a keeper of the peace and preserver of individual liberties—the view of most American conservatives before Trump—is not an adequate answer to the present situation. A correction in the direction of the state is needed. On this point the American Right has much to learn from the European Right. And as discussed above, the constituencies that delivered the Re­publicans to power in 2016 would likely agree. According to a major March 2019 survey of U.S. adults, pluralities of respondents favor increased federal spending in almost every category: education, veterans bene­fits, rebuilding highways and bridges, Medicare, environmental pro­tection, health care, scientific re­search, Social Security, assistance to the needy, domestic anti-terror­ism, military defense, and assistance to the needy in the world. Only in the category of assistance to the unemployed did respondents favor keeping spending the same (43 percent) rather than increasing it (31 percent).6 Trump’s victory additionally suggests that there is a majori­ty of Americans who favor increased state intervention to align eco­nomic production with the national interest, and who favor an end to the increasingly punitive and destabilizing form of cultural pro­gres­sivism domi­nant at present, and a correction in favor of the family.

The way to view this movement is that a maintenance or increase of state power in the United States is going to continue. The question is simply whether the Right is willing to use power when it has access to it, and use it for the sake of the common good. Twentieth-century conservatives’ devotion to unregulated markets and liber­tarianism has now contributed to a series of financial crises, the loss of U.S. manu­facturing, and a completely demor­alized society. Yet many conservatives continue to speak as though libertarianism is the solu­tion.

…

If we consider the policy areas that can and should drive political change in the United States, two areas stand out for the new American Right: family policy and industrial policy. On the first, merely speaking about the cultural pressures that families face, as American conservatives have typically done, is not enough. Too many families cannot afford children, and all the factors hindering the choice to raise children are only becoming exacerbated in the post-Covid-19 world. The United States has the fiscal resources for a family policy, like that pioneered in Hungary and elsewhere, that would meaningfully sup­port the formation of families—and the creation, for conservatives, of a stable electoral base. In the fall 2019 American Affairs, I outlined what a FamilyPay proposal should look like in the United States, cen­tered on an annual $6,500 benefit for married couples with one child, $11,500 for two, and so on. As the response to coronavirus shows, rapid political change is possible under extreme circumstances, and the Right must be ready to go with spending plans that buoy Ameri­can families during a time of severe economic distress.

…

The second area of advance in conservative thinking concerns industrial policy. In the United States, industrial policy largely dis­appeared from public discourse after the end of the Cold War and the worldwide trend toward liberalization. During that time, though, the United States arguably implemented a different kind of industrial policy—of moving labor off­shore and transitioning to a digital and service-sector economy. Since 1990, China in particular has rapidly increased its share of value-added in high-tech manufacturing, while U.S. manufacturing produc­tivity growth has stalled. American com­panies have become less inno­vative, not more; they do less investment, not more; and many spend a significant portion of their profits boosting their own stock prices. The result is that the number of low-wage, low-pro­ductivity service sector jobs has in­creased, while many critical manu­facturing sectors have slumped.

Politicians like Senators Marco Rubio, Josh Hawley, and Tom Cotton, in particular, are putting industrial policy back on the map, arguing that national security requires us to maintain industrial capa­city, not only through Trump-style trade actions but through direct­ing American investment toward strategic sectors. Government re­ports from Rubio’s office have emphasized the need to counteract China’s plan to dominate world manufacturing by 2025, a view which has since become something of a bipartisan consensus. While indus­trial policy has often been thought to be more appropriate for de­veloping economies, the frightening reality is that Western economies are or soon will be merely “developing” compared to Chinese ad­vances in 5G communications, artificial intelligence, and many other fields. The coronavirus crisis has also highlighted Ameri­can dependence on Chinese-manufactured pharmaceuticals and medical equipment; the pressing need for an American industrial policy can no longer be ignored.

Moreover, the postliberal priorities of industrial policy and fami­ly policy are complementary. A comprehensive family policy will give statesmen on the right the stability from which to implement an ambitious industrial policy (and pursue concomitant goals of stronger labor policy and workforce skills development).

…

What the Right has not yet found is an ideology through which to integrate these elements of a new politics that takes advantage of the state for the sake of the common good. Indeed, the Right has implau­sibly convinced itself that modern conservatism is not an ideology at all. As the reaction against liberal democracy’s system of separations implies, however, majority or potentially majority constituencies across the West want their nations to be integral wholes: to have con­trol over their borders, an economy put in the service of the com­mon good, the ability to raise successful families, and the capacity to main­tain their strategic advantage in the face of rising adversaries.

The discovery in 2016 of voters with morally right-wing and eco­nomically “statist” views has been mirrored elsewhere. In the United Kingdom, this group turned out in force, both in the 2016 Brexit referendum and in the December 2019 elections that were in effect a second referendum on Brexit. The same voter group has kept Victor Orbán in power in Hungary, and has established and expanded a right-wing majority in Poland—most recently sending Andrzej Duda to a second presidential term, even in the face of a concerted international campaign to delegitimize his election in advance. Coun­tries previously thought to be immune to populism, like Spain, show growing movements in this direction. Italy has grown even cooler toward the European Union since the EU effectively hung it out to dry during the Covid-19 crisis earlier this year. And while the French Right is politically divided, a union of right-wing forces there would be politically formidable. While the circumstances are different, each of these changes follows a similar path. At some point along the way, an enterprising right-wing party realizes that liberalism has become an exhausted ideology—exhausted because it is incapable of clearly articulating what the common good is, and incapable of inspiring the loyalty and shared sacrifice that nation-states require to function.

Everywhere that the Right is successful, it is shifting toward a postliberal political stance to reintegrate society, economy, and the state. To do so, it must begin with a base of socially conservative vot­ers, since voters split more strongly on social issues than on economic ones. Instead of trying to turn these voters into economic liberals, the Right should give them what they want: an economy oriented toward the nation by employing the means of state, and a society that is supportive of family life. Internally, this move will require the Right to change itself markedly. However important the traditions of Anglo‑American conservatism may be for some strains of conservatism, the moment is one in which politics and the state must reassert themselves against the attempt to dissolve them into markets and a borderless globalism. That will require the Right to become more corporatist in its approach to directing busi­ness activity in the na­tional interests, and more integralist in its view of the link between government and the common good. The word integralism has come back into vogue in English, not to posit some immediate union of church and state, but to argue that the liberal separation of politics and the common good is unsustainable and must be reintegrated. Whatever word we use to label it, the policies of the next Right are already in evidence: it will use the power of the state to coordinate business and industrial enterprises toward the common goods of peace and strength, while pursuing macroeconomic policies that shore up the cultural base required for any functioning polity. In doing so, moreover, the Right’s focus will inevitably shift from internal debates over the content of conservatism to external coalition building and effecting a larger political realignment.

[pokemon-card-of-the-day]

Pokemon Card of the Day #1729: Flareon (Plasma Freeze)

Right from the start, it was easy to tell that Flareon was going to be a little bit different. This was a Pokemon that got stronger for each Pokemon in the discard pile, which meant that it took a lot of work to reach serious levels of power but the potential was there. If nothing else, it could easily lead to some creative deck-building considering the inevitable attempts to make anything related to Eevee into something that worked. People did indeed put work into it and came up with something that, while not amazing, was good enough to be a solid deck for people on a budget. Most of the time, that was the end of the story. Flareon managed to get metagame changes to go its way as time went on and extra cards to help it toward its goal, making the strange deck choice more interesting as time went on. Maybe Flareon, as odd as it was, could be the answer to every Eevee fan’s dreams? It had been quite a while since they had something great to work with, after all.

100 HP was pretty typical on a Stage 1. It was a bit frail with all of the really strong attackers out there, to be fair, but it wasn’t at the point where it would just crumble to every single deck out there. The Water Weakness could be an issue with things like Seismitoad EX, Empoleon, and Articuno out there. Many of the other attackers of the type, such as Keldeo EX, didn’t really care if the Weakness was there since they could KO anyway. Flareon also needed 2 Energy to retreat if it wanted to do so, and while it was hard to fit in too much switching help in these sorts of decks, it could be nice every once in a while. Luckily, Flareon was normally trying to trade hits and didn’t switch too often in practice.

Vengeance was the attack that people tried so hard to use. It started off very slowly, as 20 damage for 2 Colorless Energy was very poor. The catch here was that 10 damage was added for each Pokemon in the user’s discard pile. Very early Flareon decks used Audino to freely toss into the discard pile. Some even used Cofagrigus, but that gave up a Prize and wasn’t too great. Obviously, other cards like Professor Juniper (and the later Sycamore) and Ultra Ball could help as well. It took a lot of work and sacrificed Trainers for more Pokemon, but Vengeance could be scary late in the game for something that just needed a Double Colorless Energy.

Two things changed to make Vengeance much more potent in later formats. First of all, the Trainer pool was a bit better for the concept. Battle Compressor was especially good at dumping Pokemon into the discard pile to power up Flareon. Archie’s Ace in the Hole could even let you get out Empoleon as a secondary attacker to use alongside Flareon, which was especially useful to have in reserve in case you wanted to use Lysandre’s Trump Card to prevent yourself from running out of cards in your deck. The other thing was that Fire became a much more potent attacking type with Virizion/Genesect decks being amazing along with the rise of Metal decks revolving around Bronzong. This gave Flareon some really important targets, and while Water decks were still a problem, Leafeon being available helped deal with those. This gave Flareon a much better chance to succeed than was first expected.

Flareon had another attack as well. Heat Tackle wasn’t amazing, but 90 damage for a Fire and 2 Colorless Energy wasn’t too bad. The 10 damage in recoil was a pain since it could leave Flareon vulnerable to those 90 damage attacks (such as from Darkrai EX). Some earlier decks had a Fire Energy or something to make this an option, but it was usually ignored.

Flareon was one of the more surprising success stories of its time. What was originally viewed as a low-cost deck most people wouldn’t bring to a tournament ended up being a serious contender that could take advantage of favorable match-ups against some of the best options the game had to offer. It did have a few consistency problems even once it got all that help, since it relied on running fewer Trainers than most decks and needed a lot of set-up to become powerful, keeping it from the top tier. It was something you needed to be prepared for, however, and was one of the more fun and unique decks to play while it was available. You could do some very interesting things with Flareon.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

The elephant in the room.   ::  January 18, 2023

Robert B. Hubbell

         The radicalization of the GOP is the elephant in the room of American politics. Most days, the media discusses the Republican Party as a legitimate participant in American democracy. It is not. Occasionally, the veneer of its respectability falls away, and we see it for what it is: An organization that uses violence and intimidation as political tools, has adopted deliberate falsehood as the lingua franca of politics, and peddles dangerous conspiracy theories to dupe, defraud, and incite its gullible base.

         On Tuesday, three stories collided in the news to remind us of the elephant in the room—the politically motivated shootings in New Mexico, Kevin McCarthy’s legitimization of George Santos by appointing him to two congressional committees, and the right-wing’s most recent lies about the COVID vaccine allegedly causing cardiac arrest. If the media was doing its job, it would rise in unison to say that the GOP is a terrorist organization masquerading as a major party in American politics. To be fair, some news organizations did raise the alarm on Tuesday, but most spent the day engaged in “whataboutism” over Joe Biden’s document gaffes—a development that is not even in the same galaxy as the GOP’s offenses on Tuesday.

         It is both aggravating and enervating to constantly call out the outrageous behavior of the Republican Party that threatens the foundations of our democracy. But failing to raise the alarm is even more dangerous. Part of the Republican strategy is to grind us into submission, to exhaust us, to disgust us to the point that we will look away. To preserve our mental health, we cannot—indeed, we must not—maintain a constant state of agitation over the GOP’s actions. But when circumstances warrant, we must tell friends, neighbors, and complete strangers, “This is not normal! As a nation, we are better than this. Our future depends on rising above the hate, lies, and ignorance that has become the stock in trade of the Republican Party.”

         To be clear, it is not enough to complain about the conduct of the GOP. We must take action to persuade others that the GOP’s actions are wrong and dangerous—and that anything less than active condemnation is complicity. Strong words, I know. But that is where we find ourselves on Tuesday evening. I wish it were otherwise.

         Let’s look at the latest developments as we continue our dedication to the truth and defense of democracy.

Failed GOP candidate for state legislature in New Mexico arrested for shooting at homes of Democratic officials.

         A failed GOP candidate for the New Mexico state legislature hired four accomplices to shoot at the homes of Democratic state and county officials. In at least one instance, the failed candidate pulled the trigger on a shot aimed at a residence. In that instance, a bullet passed through the bedroom of the daughter of a Democratic legislator. The alleged perpetrator, Solomon Pena, is a MAGA extremist who attended the Stop the Steal Rally on January 6th and followed Trump’s playbook by refusing to concede that he lost his bid to become a member of the New Mexico legislature. See Washington Post, Solomon Peña's plot to shoot Democrats' homes was motivated by false claims of a stolen election, New Mexico authorities say.

         Per the Post,

In an interview, Albuquerque Police Chief Harold Medina said he has no doubt that Peña was motivated by Trump’s false claims of election fraud following the former president’s 2020 defeat. Medina said Peña regularly expressed extreme views on social media and boasted of attending Trump’s Stop the Steal rally in Washington on Jan. 6, 2021.

         On cue, Republicans in New Mexico expressed shock and dismay that someone would resort to violence in pursuit of a lunatic conspiracy theory about a stolen election—oblivious to the irony that Pena was following the GOP’s template established by Trump on January 6th. But belief in “rigged elections” has become part of Republican orthodoxy. A majority of the current House GOP caucus voted against the electoral slates of Arizona and Pennsylvania—as did GOP Speaker (McCarthy) and GOP Majority Leader (Scalise). When GOP congressional leaders are election deniers, it can be no surprise that the rank and file follows suit.

         Indeed, the belief that the 2022 midterms were “rigged” is rampant among Republicans. A CBS / YouGov poll taken last week shows that a whopping 72% of Republicans do not believe that Democrats “legitimately won control of the Senate in the midterms! (See page 71 of polling crosstabs.)

         Let’s reflect on that statistic for a moment. Nearly three-quarters of Republicans believe that the 2022 congressional midterms were rigged because Democrats retained control of the Senate. Nearly the same percentage of Republicans (76%) either approve of the insurrectionists’ actions on January 6th (15%) or do not want their congressional representatives to condemn the insurrectionists (61%).

         Pretending that Pena’s actions are “shocking” or “unexpected” is ridiculous. His actions are consistent with beliefs held by three-quarters of Republican voters. Pena’s actions align with the core beliefs of the Republican base. Unless and until Republican leaders condemn the January 6th insurrection and disabuse their followers of the notion that any Republican loss is evidence of a rigged election, we will get more of the same.

         Two weeks ago, a reader sent a note criticizing me for painting all Republicans with a broad brush of complicity in MAGA extremism. She pointed to the Republican Governor of Vermont, Phil Scott, who has opposed Trump for the last six years while he otherwise supports the Republican Party agenda. With respect and admiration for Governor Scott’s stance against Trump, Scott lends legitimacy to the Republican Party by remaining associated with a party whose members overwhelmingly support election denialism and support (or excuse) the violence of January 6th. As I wrote above, “anything less than active condemnation is complicity.”

         I expect to receive criticism and pushback from (some) readers on my strong position on this subject. But we would be having an entirely different conversation if the stray bullet that entered the bedroom of an 11-year-old girl had not missed but had instead killed her. We cannot afford to wait until the next violent attack by a MAGA supporter who is acting on beliefs widely shared in the Republican Party. Anyone and everyone who maintains their association with the GOP in hopes of saving or reforming it should leave the Party and let it fail. Anything less is to ignore the elephant in the room—the radicalization of the Republican Party.

-Robert B. Hubbell

[taylorscottbarnett]

“10 ominous and risky trend”

Nah. First you only list nine. One is basically listed twice.

Ok so this is my issue with this analysis, we have the attention grabber: “Called the 2008 Crash” however some form of recession usually hits every decade or so. Let us take a look at the predictions that didn’t pan out (and still haven't):

He predicted that foreign investors would stop financing the fiscal and current-account deficit and abandon the dollar, wreaking havoc on the economy. He said that these problems, which he called the “twin financial train wrecks,” might manifest themselves in 2005 or, at the latest, 2006. “You have been warned here first,” he wrote ominously on his blog. But by the end of 2006, the train wrecks hadn’t occurred.

Note, the economy may have crashed, but it had zero to do with foreign investors not financing debt. Throughout the economic crisis and the decade that followed, countries bought up US Debt like it was hand sanitizer and paper towels at the start of the COVID crisis.  The world has also weathered the Greek debt crisis as well as the Italy’s issues, and Brexit with not much crisis to show for it, and what did happen was mostly temporary for the world economy. People have been issuing warnings about the aging crisis for decades, but it is not as hard to solve (for the US) as people assume. Yes social security, and medicare taxes and increasing intensives for companies and people to invest in saving for the future need to be increased. However, America’s aging workforce has two silver bullets: One, automation. In some estimates nearly have of all jobs can be automated in the next decade -- while that has it’s own set of issues, a worker shortage isn’t one of them. Secondly, as I’ve stated before, immigration reform would go a long way towards shoring up the US’ older workforce. The later comes with new workers contributing social security and medicare taxes to public coffers. The former can be taxed the same, just with new tax systems.

Let’s take a look at some of the issues he has declared the reason we are all doomed:

A third issue is the growing risk of deflation. In addition to causing a deep recession, the crisis is also creating a massive slack in goods (unused machines and capacity) and labour markets (mass unemployment), as well as driving a price collapse in commodities such as oil and industrial metals. That makes debt deflation likely, increasing the risk of insolvency.

Hey look while Republicans supposedly feared inflation when we were fighting the 2007-2008 financial crisis (one that I’ll remind you never occurred) and economists stated wouldn’t occur. Paul Krugman spent years warning about over-hyped inflation worries by policy makers.:

Recently the Federal Reserve released transcripts of its monetary policy meetings during the fateful year of 2008. And boy, are they discouraging reading. ... The economy was plunging, yet all many people at the Fed wanted to talk about was inflation. ... 

As I suggested, we used to marvel at the wrongheadedness of policy makers during the Great Depression. But when the Great Recession struck, and we were given a chance to do better, we ended up repeating all the same mistakes.

But Republicans were up in arms, warning that the Fed’s policies would lead to runaway inflation. A Congressman named Mike Pence introduced a bill that would prohibit the Fed from even considering the state of the labor market in its actions. A who’s who of Republicans signed an open letter to Ben Bernanke demanding that he stop his monetary efforts, which they claimed would “risk currency debasement and inflation.”

Bernanke, Fed economists, and Keynesians in general were proved right: printing money isn’t inflationary in a depressed economy.

Needless to say, those warnings proved totally wrong. Soaring inflation never materialized. Job creation was sluggish at first, but more recently has accelerated dramatically.

K so let us move on to other issues shall we?

A fifth issue is the broader digital disruption of the economy. With millions of people losing their jobs or working and earning less, the income and wealth gaps of the 21st-century economy will widen further. To guard against future supply-chain shocks, companies in advanced economies will re-shore production from low-cost regions to higher-cost domestic markets. But rather than helping workers at home, this trend will accelerate the pace of automation, putting downward pressure on wages and further fanning the flames of populism, nationalism, and xenophobia.

Again, Automation is inevitable, and as I said earlier, a benefit and solution to an ageing workforce. One should also note this crisis has also been talked about for decades. It still never happened. Although many jobs have been automated, more jobs tend to come in and take the place of those lost jobs. Sectors of the economy die all the time. They get replaced. Automation isn’t going to necessarily be the death of the American worker -- if anything working less wouldn’t hurt us. There is a valid argument if you look at many of our peers, the American worker is overworked already.

This points to the sixth major factor: deglobalisation. The pandemic is accelerating trends toward balkanisation and fragmentation that were already well underway. The US and China will decouple faster, and most countries will respond by adopting still more protectionist policies to shield domestic firms and workers from global disruptions. The post-pandemic world will be marked by tighter restrictions on the movement of goods, services, capital, labour, technology, data, and information. This is already happening in the pharmaceutical, medical-equipment, and food sectors, where governments are imposing export restrictions and other protectionist measures in response to the crisis. 

True, at the moment populism has had a nice multi-year run. de-globalization has been a goal of Donald Trump for his entire presidency. Trump will not be president forever. As our current COVID crisis has illustrated, he really is a carnival barker, and if anything has increased the odds of Biden becoming president and they were already pretty damn likely.

Under conditions of heightened economic insecurity, there will be a strong impulse to scapegoat foreigners for the crisis. Blue-collar workers and broad cohorts of the middle class will become more susceptible to populist rhetoric, particularly proposals to restrict migration and trade.

Again, this already happened with the election of Donald Trump. But take a look at just how close many of those state elections came: Michigan, Wisconsin, Florida and Pennsylvania --  A flu (and this would have been an illness far less destructive than COVID) could have affected the outcomes of those states -- and the election. A few thousand votes in a country that cast 138,884,643 ballots and had another  92,671,979 that could have voted but didn't won Trump the election.

This points to an eighth factor: the geostrategic standoff between the US and China. With the Trump administration making every effort to blame China for the pandemic, Chinese President Xi Jinping’s regime will double down on its claim that the US is conspiring to prevent China’s peaceful rise. The Sino-American decoupling in trade, technology, investment, data, and monetary arrangements will intensify.

Re-read my above two responses.

A final risk that cannot be ignored is environmental disruption, which, as the Covid-19 crisis has shown, can wreak far more economic havoc than a financial crisis. Recurring epidemics (HIV since the 1980s, Sars in 2003, H1N1 in 2009, Mers in 2011, Ebola in 2014-16) are, like climate change, essentially manmade disasters, born of poor health and sanitary standards, the abuse of natural systems, and the growing interconnectivity of a globalised world. Pandemics and the many morbid symptoms of climate change will become more frequent, severe, and costly in the years ahead. 

Arguably COVID closings around the world and shelter-at-home orders have if anything given the world a chance to take a breath. Also if you are arguing a globalized world is a direct reason a pandemic like this will “become more frequent, severe, and costly” then wouldn’t it stand to reason de-globalization (that you claim will happen as a result of this pandemic) would make these event’s less likely to happen in the future? Which is it? It cannot be both.

Also am I missing something or do I not find a “seventh factor” in your post at all?

[investmart007]

WASHINGTON | AP FACT CHECK: Trump ignores strong points in US trade

New Post has been published on https://is.gd/339ZQz

WASHINGTON | AP FACT CHECK: Trump ignores strong points in US trade

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump is presenting a skewed portrait of how the world does business with the U.S to rationalize his escalating trade dispute with allies.

At the same time, he’s glossing over aspects of the U.S. economy that don’t support his faulty contention that it’s the best it’s ever been. The complexities of health care for veterans are also set aside as he hails a new era in the Department of Veterans Affairs’ system.

A look at some of his statements over the past week and the reality behind them:

TRUMP: “Last year, they lost 800 — we as a nation, over the years — but the latest number is $817 billion on trade. That’s ridiculous and it’s unacceptable. And everybody was told that.” — news conference Saturday at the Group of Seven summit in Canada.

THE FACTS: Trump’s bottom-line number in his dispute with trading partners is wrong. The U.S. ran a trade deficit last year of $568.4 billion, says his administration’s Census Bureau and Bureau of Economic Analysis, not $817 billion.

Trump refers only to the deficit in goods. Last year, the U.S. bought $811 billion more in goods from other countries than other countries bought from the U.S. But the U.S. had a surplus in trade in services, which brought the actual trade deficit down.

He made a similar error in a tweet Thursday, saying “The EU trade surplus with the U.S. is $151 Billion.” It was $101 billion.

The U.S. is more competitive in services than in goods overall, and services are a big part of the trade equation. Trump glosses over that aspect of trade.

___

TRUMP: “Why isn’t the European Union and Canada informing the public that for years they have used massive Trade Tariffs and non-monetary Trade Barriers against the U.S. Totally unfair to our farmers, workers & companies. Take down your tariffs & barriers or we will more than match you!” — tweet Thursday.

TRUMP: “Farmers have not been doing well for 15 years. Mexico, Canada, China and others have treated them unfairly. By the time I finish trade talks, that will change. Big trade barriers against U.S. farmers, and other businesses, will finally be broken. Massive trade deficits no longer!’ — tweet Monday.

THE FACTS: Whatever his beef with farm trade with specific countries, he’s wrong in suggesting U.S. agriculture runs a trade deficit. The U.S. exports more food products than it imports, running a $17.4 billion surplus last year. It’s long been a bright spot in the trade picture and it’s why many U.S. farmers are worried about losing markets as Trump retreats from, renegotiates or disparages trade deals.

U.S. farmers do brisk business with the three countries he complains about in the tweet, two of them under the umbrella of the North American Free Trade Agreement, which Trump is threatening to leave if it’s not recast to give the U.S. greater advantage. The U.S. exported $20.5 billion in agricultural products last year to Canada, the largest market for U.S. farmers. That made for a modest deficit of $1.8 billion. The U.S. exported $18.6 billion in farm goods to Mexico, running a deficit of $6 billion.

The U.S. has a lopsided advantage with China on farm goods, in contrast to manufactured products. It sold $21 billion in agricultural products to China in 2016, for a surplus of $16.7 billion.

The Agriculture Department says exports of food products have grown “steadily over the last two decades.”

Trump’s unrelievedly negative view of the EU may be grounded in a substantial trade deficit with the continent, but his administration’s trade office takes a longer and more benevolent view of the relationship.

“Two-way U.S.-EU trade has been roughly balanced over time,” says the U.S. Trade Representative’s Office, “and the very high levels of foreign investment accounted for by each in the other’s markets means that the trans-Atlantic economy is arguably the most integrated on Earth.”

___

TRUMP: “We have the strongest economy that we’ve ever had in the United States — in the history of the United States.  We have the best unemployment numbers.” — news conference Saturday.

TRUMP: “Best Economy & Jobs EVER, and much more.” — tweet Monday referring to achievement in his first 500 days in office.

THE FACTS: May’s unemployment rate of 3.8 percent is not the best ever. And the economy has seen many periods of stronger growth.

The lowest unemployment rate since World War II was reached in 1953, when it averaged 2.9 percent, almost a full point lower than today. The job market is certainly strong, with unemployment at an 18-year low, and if it drops another tenth of a point, it’ll be the lowest since 1969.

Yet the jobless rate was at or below 4 percent for four straight years back then, from 1966 through 1969, and wages were rising more quickly. The cost of items such as college and health care was much lower then.

Overall the economy has yet to show it can sustain growth in excess of 3 percent, as Trump has promised.

In the 1990s boom, still the longest on record, the U.S. economy expanded at an average annual pace of 4.3 percent for five years, from 1996 through 2000. In the 1980s, growth averaged 4.6 percent annually from 1983 through 1987. While the economy has picked up from 2016, its best showing since Trump took office was 3.2 percent in last year’s third quarter.

___

TRUMP: “Separating families at the Border is the fault of bad legislation passed by the Democrats. Border Security laws should be changed but the Dems can’t get their act together! Started the Wall.” — tweet Tuesday.

THE FACTS: No law mandates that parents must be separated from their children at the border, and it’s not a policy Democrats have pushed or can change alone as the minority in Congress. Children are probably being separated from the parents at the border at an accelerated rate because of a new “zero tolerance policy” being put in place by Trump’s own administration. Announced April 6 by Attorney General Jeff Sessions, the policy directs authorities to prosecute all instances of illegal border crossings, even against people with few or no previous offenses.

Administration officials are quick to note that Sessions’ policy makes no mention of separating families. That is correct. But under U.S. protocol, if parents are jailed, their children are separated from them because the children aren’t charged with a crime.

So while separating families might not be official U.S. policy, it is a direct consequence of Sessions’ zero-tolerance approach.

According to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, more than 650 children were separated from parents at the border during a two-week period in May.

___

TRUMP: “I have to tell you, the Coast Guard saved 16,000 people. … Saved 16,000 people, many of them in Texas, for whatever reason that is. People went out in their boats to watch the hurricane. That didn’t work out too well. That didn’t work out too well.” — hurricane preparation briefing Wednesday.

THE FACTS: There is no indication the Coast Guard was busy saving the lives of foolhardy hurricane gawkers drifting off the Texas coast. Texas officials are baffled at Trump’s words and the Coast Guard does not back them up. Some of the most powerful images from Hurricane Harvey were of flooded Houston streets swarming with volunteer boaters who answered the call of overwhelmed first responders and used their personal watercraft to rescue families from their homes.

Coast Guard Petty Officer Edward Wargo of Houston said the service didn’t take note of how or why people got stranded during Harvey, but said most rescues appeared to occur within city limits and neighborhoods. Republican Gov. Greg Abbott said he had “no information one way or the other” about Trump’s claim that people were on the water to watch Harvey. But the outgoing speaker of the Texas House, Republican Joe Straus, rejected the idea.

“The people who took their boats into the water during Harvey were not storm-watchers,” Straus tweeted. “They were heroes who went toward danger to rescue friends, neighbors, strangers. Texans helping Texans in a time of desperate need.”

___

TRUMP: “In the campaign, I also promised that we would fight for Veterans Choice. … It seemed like if they’re waiting on line for nine days and they can’t see a doctor, why aren’t they going outside to see a doctor and take care of themselves, and we pay the bill? It’s less expensive for us, it works out much better, and it’s immediate care. And that’s what we’re doing.” — remarks Wednesday during the signing of a bill intended to give veterans more access to private health care as an alternative to the VA system.

THE FACTS: The care provided under the Choice private-sector program is not as immediate as Trump suggests, nor does it always work out much better. Currently, only veterans who endure waits of at least 30 days — not nine days — for an appointment at a VA facility are eligible to receive care from private doctors at government expense. Under a newly expanded Choice program that will take at least a year to implement, veterans will still have to meet certain criteria before they can see a private physician, such as when a local VA facility does not offer the services required or veterans face an “unusual or excessive burden” to getting the care they need.

Waits for a private doctor are not always shorter. The VA has said its medical facilities are “often 40 percent better in terms of wait times” compared with the private sector.

There also is little evidence that providing private care to veterans compared with treatment at one of VA’s 1,300 clinics and hospitals will be “less expensive.” Experts generally agree that VA care is less costly due to economies of scale. A congressional commission in 2016 determined that giving veterans more flexibility to see doctors outside the VA system would probably increase costs, due in part to growing demand from veterans who are drawn by the idea of picking their own doctor.

___

TRUMP: “This bill speeds up the claims process, increases the health services, expands access to walk-in clinics, and fights opioid addiction.”

THE FACTS: It’s not clear whether a newly expanded Choice program will speed up the claims process.

A Government Accountability Office report released this past week found that despite the Choice program’s guarantee of providing an appointment within 30 days, veterans waited an average of 51 to 64 days; the process took as long as 70 days. Investigators faulted bureaucratic inefficiency and understaffing at VA, which contributed to delays in making referrals and scheduling appointments. They warned of continuing problems of long waits under a newly expanded Choice program until the VA is able to more easily exchange veterans’ medical records with outside physicians; the VA has said achieving that could take years.

Pointing to faulty data, government investigators said the VA “cannot determine whether the Choice program has helped to achieve the goal of alleviating veterans’ wait times for care.”

___

TRUMP, on expanding the Choice program: “This has been for years; for 30, 40 years, they’ve been trying to get this done, and they haven’t been able to. And we got it done.”

THE FACTS: It’s not done. Trump signed into law a bill that would loosen restrictions for veterans seeking medical care outside the VA system, but it’ll take at least a year to implement and its actual scope in expanding choice to veterans will depend on the next VA secretary, who has yet to be confirmed by the Senate. A successful expansion of private care will also depend on an overhaul of electronic health records at VA to allow for a seamless sharing of records with private physicians. That overhaul will take at least 10 years to be complete.

Limited money for the program could also hamper its effectiveness. A group of senators is seeking to pay for the law by adding new money to cover the VA private care program, but the White House has been quietly working to block that plan, saying it is “anathema to responsible spending.” The White House is insisting that added costs of the newly expanded private care program be paid for by cutting spending elsewhere at the VA, something that major veterans groups generally oppose.

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By CALVIN WOODWARD and PAUL WISEMAN, By Associated Press

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[alexsmitposts]

Food Stamp Cuts – Western Capitalism & “Useless Eaters” Donald Trump recently announced changes to the US Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), commonly called “Food Stamps.” This program enables low income Americans to buy food. As a result, 750,000 people will immediately lose their food assistance, while it is expected that as many as 3 million will be deprived of their benefits in the near future. Meanwhile, Michael Bloomberg, former New York City Mayor, has announced that he is running for President of the United States as a Democrat. Many are revisiting his leadership of New York City and the many controversial things he did. Among them is was a subway advertisement campaign intended to discourage teen girls from becoming mothers by shaming them. The ads, showing a small child with the words “I’m twice as likely not to graduate high school because you had me as a teen” had the obvious, though unstated goal of increasing abortion among low-income New York City residents, many of which are not white. Unemployment in the USA is low currently, and despite numerous projections that things could get bad soon, the stock market numbers and other measurements currently look somewhat better than most of the last decade. So, why cut food stamps? Eliminating “Useless Eaters” To Save Capitalism Those who equate the Soviet Union with Nazi Germany overlook many very key differences between the two countries and their political systems. One of the most obvious is this: the Soviet Union worked very hard to expand its population, while the Nazis worked very hard to reduce their population. As Stalin’s Five Year Economic plans created huge steel mills and power plants, and new universities sprung up across the Soviet Union amid the abolition of illiteracy, a special prize called “Mother of the Soviet Union” was given to any woman who had more than 10 children. The Soviet government wanted more people to be born and to join in the project of building and developing a new, strong socialist country. However, Nazi Germany did the opposite and began forcibly sterilizing people. In 1934, just a year after the Nazis took power, 300,000 to 400,000 people were forcibly sterilized. A law was passed in 1935 making it illegal for anyone to get married if any kind of hereditary ailment could be passed on to the children. Following the sterilizations came the exterminations. The Nazi government began referring to disabled people as “useless eaters” and executing them in gas chambers. Eventually, the Nazi state began exterminating Jews, Gypsies, Homosexuals and Political Dissidents. The justification for this “final solution” was belief that all social defects were hereditary and needed to be eliminated from the gene pool. The Nazis were big believers in the concept of “overpopulation,” though this was a concept they did not invent. The term comes from the work of Robert Thomas Malthus, the British economist who blamed the French Revolution and the social unrest of the 1790s on the population growing at a faster rate than the food supply. John D. Rockefeller, the billionaire and founder of Standard Oil (now Exxon-Mobil)  was a big supporter of Malthus and his economic theories. Eventually Rockefeller bankrolled the Birth Control League of Margaret Sanger, now known as “Planned Parenthood.” The organization pushed for the legalization of contraception and abortion. One of the posters used to raise funds for the Birth Control League was a poster of a starving child holding out an empty bowl begging for food. Though Margaret Sanger had once been a socialist, as she became the voice of the “Birth Control” movement she published explicitly racist books and pamphlets and spoke at Ku Klux Klan events. She also began using phrases like “the cruelty of charity” arguing that the social welfare state was immoral because it encouraged inferior people to breed. When Margaret Sanger traded socialism for sex, and abandoned class struggle in pursuit of sexual liberation, she stopped advocating for the working class. During the 1930s depression, the Communist Party USA organized “Hunger Marches” saying “Don’t Starve, Fight!”  The Communist Party USA said the great depression pointed toward the need for the US economy to reorganized in a rational way, to serve the people, not the irrationality of profits. However, Margaret Sanger took the opposite approach, working to reduce “overpopulation” by eliminating “useless eaters.” Automation & The Crisis of Capitalism The causes of the Great Depression were rooted in the technological advancements of the 1920s. Henry Ford’s assembly line innovations and other breakthroughs made it easier for radios, cars, and other commodities to be churned out more efficiently than ever before. Soon the market was glutted with more products than ever before, produced more efficiently than ever before. However, across the western world millions of workers were left “outcast and starving” because they had no place at the assembly line. They could not afford to buy these products, and soon banks failed, corporations collapsed, and the US experienced an episode of mass malnutrition. The 2008 financial crisis was the opening explosion of a long-term crisis rooted in the same problem, decades later. The innovations of Henry Ford and the 1920s factory owners were child’s play compared to the continuing computer revolution, marching forward at a rapid pace since the 1980s. Andrew Yang, the maverick Democratic Presidential candidate continues to highlight the looming threat of mass unemployment due to technology. He told the New York Times: “All you need is self-driving cars to destabilize society…we’re going to have a million truck drivers out of work who are 94 percent male, with an average level of education of high school or one year of college. That one innovation will be enough to create riots in the street. And we’re about to do the same thing to retail workers, call center workers, fast-food workers, insurance companies, accounting firms.” Among Silicon Valley forecasters, the alarm bells about automation are going off, and proposals such as “universal basic income” are being raised. The underlying basis of the discussion is the same as Malthus, Sanger and Rockefeller’s discussion in times past. The voices raising alarm about the crisis of automation are all essentially asking “Soon millions and millions of Americans will have no place in the economy. What do we do about all the useless eaters?” Western capitalism has entered a stage where it views the population not as an asset, but as a burden. Instead of seeing each citizen as capable of creating a contribution to society, and making the country better, the population is viewed as a problematic horde that must be carefully managed and prevented from causing further problems. “Populism” is presented as a great evil, because it involves the rabble asserting political aspirations deemed by the elite to be unacceptable. Even much of what passes for “socialism” in 21st Century America, addresses the question in the same manner. The “Democratic Socialist” current argues that as technology eliminates jobs, more money should be spent to provide healthcare and education to the population. At the same time, however, the “Democratic Socialist” voices like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders advocate reducing US living standards and consumption in the name of environmentalism. They argue that Americans consume too many resources, and in the name of climate sustainability, the population should transition to a lifestyle of less extravagance. However, the basic solution to this long standing problem seems to be ignored. Karl Marx’s magnum opus, the economic textbook called “Capital” discusses the General Law of Capitalist Accumulation and workers competition with machines, pointing toward the only real way to resolve this contradiction. The banks, factories and industries must be operated in a rational way. The economy must not operate on the basis of profits. In a centrally planned economy, in which profits are no longer in command, automation would increase the wealth of society, and abundance would not result in poverty. The pessimism of the 21st century western world is rooted in the economic reality that under the rule of profits, technology and historical progress continue to point toward great catastrophe. It is only by re-opening the question of whether or not socialism is a viable alternative that this pessimism can be overcome.

[george-hanson-blog1]

*Position of Maintaining or Destroying Self: Trump vs Hilary*

  In this entry, I will examine the critical question: What is the appropriate position between maintaining and destroying a self? Does this artifact find that position?

To investigate these questions, I examined the presidential debate between Donald Trump and Hilary Clinton in New York with the subject focus on trade. This debate shows that one’s self is highly valued to the point where maintaining self warrants destroying the opponent’s self.

This presidential debate held on September 27th, 2016 shows Trump and Clinton debating on trade issues and it leads to personal attacks on Clinton withholding of deleted emails and Trump's refusal to release tax returns. Though they input their views on how to improve trade for the US and foreign relations it easily gets lost in the smoke of the attacks against each other in an attempt to discredit and destroy their images. This artifact is not the full debate but more of a highlight edit that shows more often than not the sidetracking of attacking the opponent on grounds that do not relate to the question posed by Lester Holmes.

Hauser (1986) explains the commitments through rhetoric as rhetors have a stake in their rhetoric. "Rhetoric makes commitments: to self, to others, to the truth value of our ideas, and to a view of what is required for human social relations" (p45). He states that a rhetor has a responsible position to use their rhetoric to advance justice and truth. Through their reflection of self, a rhetor can make arguments and expressions of their views which defines their principles and truths. Hauser also points out that the use of rhetoric can evoke a self within the rhetor which requires them to reexamine assumptions and how they view themselves which aids in discovering oneself. Not only can rhetoric help create and higher awareness of self, but it can also reinforce the existing self. This comes in the form of identification of their ideas and where they stand against other ideas. Though rhetoric is supposed to be used for good, Hauser also argues that one can destroy self or others through the usage of scapegoating and symbolically dismantling the selves of their opponents. 

 One of the components most prevalent in this artifact is the usage of scapegoating and ad hominem attacks of each person's character which fails to address the original question posed by Holmes for debate. Clinton argues that Trump would not be the best idea for the president on the idea of trade. She points out that Trump has not released his tax returns which shows either; he is not as rich as he says he is, he is not as charitable as he says he is, or he does not want the American people to know that he has not paid federal taxes in many years. Interrupting by the end of this statement Trump rebuttals that Clinton as in fact attempted to cover up shameful actions by deleting over 33,000 emails which she is not willing to release. This tactic of Trump scapegoating risks his image of self because he assumes, he can control the audience to the point where they should be thinking of what he is thinking. This is damaging because the audience has the choice to ignore, not believe, or refute this claim. Trump also makes Clinton the problem that once she fixes this issue, he will release his tax returns even "against his lawyer's orders" to show he has nothing to hide. This argument is highly personal which allows one's self to be challenged and re-evaluated. Both these arguments call for reflection of the other but not themselves which attempts to create a destroying of other arguments. 

Other instances of destroying self are present when Trump and Clinton engaged in a debate on ISIS and their "plans" on how to deal with this group. Trump argues that Clinton's plans are very clear so much so that it appears on her website that the enemy could easily look at it. He furthers his claim that her plan is not ready or effective since she has been "fighting ISIS her entire adult life" which suggests that he must revaluate her plan and herself on where she stands on this issue. During this dialogue, Trump never mentions his side on how to fight ISIS to protect his self-image and bring attention to Clinton in hopes that his argument will become weaker and appear as if she is not fit for war or national security. It seems that Trump calls for reflection on Clinton's ideas and oneself but remains planted on that his image is superior and does not self-reflection or change. 

There are both advantages and disadvantages to this narrative, but the advantages outweigh the disadvantages. An advantage is that maintaining oneself allows for reflection and constructive critique which creates a channel for change in becoming a better rhetor. A rhetors job is to advance truth and justice and should not be focused on destroying others. A disadvantage is that some politicians believe in order to improve or create a better view of their image they must weaken or discredit their challenger rather than improve or build on their existing concept of self. There is a trend that the aspect of evoking self is ignored more often. This artifact does not find the appropriate positions to maintain the destroying self. However, it does show the not so appropriate position which attempts to destroy your opponent more over the fact of improving oneself.  The over usage of destroying other limits the effectiveness of rhetoric of self. 

Keremidchieva (2012) further explains how narratives work based on straggles of “bureaucratization and monetarization” which can cause women’s subaudition due to familiar normative suggested by capitalism concerning male dominance and female subordination. As applied to this debate Trump does not have to prove he is right or wrong but only has to show how his power and ideas tower over Clinton. Implying that she does "not have the stamina" to be president of the United States. Also, due to his "success" as a businessman and building many "strong" companies he can assert his dominance as the strong person in the debate without even debating on the issue at hand. This image creation of Trump's self allows him to destroy Clinton's self by provoking ideas that bring a reflection on arguments presented by Clinton. 

In summary, I examined the critical question: What is the appropriate position between maintaining and destroying a self? Does this artifact find that position? I used the first presidential debate from 2016 to investigate these questions. By using Hauser’s concepts of rhetoric and self it was determined that the appropriate position between maintaining and destroying a self is complicated and often is motivated by political ideas and gender-normative. This artifact does not find this position however, it provides an example of which this position can be set up in an attempt to attack someone with ad hominem attacks and scapegoating. 

References 

Guardian News. (2016, September 27). Retrieved October 23, 2019, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBhrSdjePkk.

Hauser. G. A. (1986). Making commitments through rhetoric. In Introduction to rhetorical theory (pp. 45-55). New York: Harper and Row. 

Keremidchieva, Z. (2012). Legislative Reform, the Congressional Caucus for Women’s Issues, and the Crisis of Women’s Political Representation. Women & Language, 35(1), 13–38. Retrieved from http://proxy.augustana.edu:2059/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=77928144&site=ehost-live

[lunatictimekeeper]

[AT] Care

Words: 1187 || Rating: OT || Fandom: Original

Characters: Citra, Blanca, and (Minor) Viviene. 

Summary: Blanca and Citra need each other - and they slowly but surely recognize it. ( A small art trade with @twentyfive454 ,  Thank you so much!! If you’d like me to take this down just dm me <3 )

What does it mean… to care for someone? It would never help getting attached to anyone, no one was worthy after all. They were all pawns in her grand game of chess, even before the virus outbreak. Blanca knew who would serve a purpose and who would be completely useless to her. When Viviene tried to usher the elites to evacuation, Blanca knew what her plan was. Survive. Then chaos reigned as those filthy pawns attempted to overthrow the queen. And just like that Viviene was dead and Blanca was stuck, her meticulous plans foiled by mere nobodies. She was abandoned soon after, alone and stranded in a place with looters and peasants.

Can you… lie, to that someone? She was, however, no defeated. Blanca recalled the queen's trump card, the dog that Viviene had chained on a leash. And like that her gears turned as she hid the body where none would find it; the return of the dog was not long after. Citra arrived, frantic searching for Vivienne, but Blanca was much more clever than that. She escaped, she’d said. Made it to the safe haven, where she and Citra should meet her. Not guilt, no shame, only cunning approval as Citra seemed to eat up the lie. Give a dog a bone and surely their tail will wag after all. Can you… hurt, that someone? Blanca had it thought out. Citra would be the pawn that kept her alive. As long as there was no proof of death for Vivienne, there was no disloyalty to her from Citra. In the end he was quite useful - she learned to take signals because he couldn’t speak, and she learned that Citra was very capable of defending her… and himself. He was a powerhouse, and an unbelievably foolish and easy to manipulate one. Guns, Knives, chairs. He was a survivalist - use any means necessary to live. In that way… she supposed she had a respect and understanding of him - not that it meant much - because he too was a survivor. They went about it different ways, Citra by using force and strength, and Blanca by using honeyed words and a twisted tongue. Citra was hardly amused by her use of him though. He would do what it took to get back to Viviene though, even if it meant the controlling stuck-up princess called some of the shots. He knew she had a way of twisting her tongue so that her words catered to what everyone wanted to hear. Having a silver tongue had probably gotten her far in life. But Citra was a man of honest means. What he couldn’t have, he didn’t need. What he did have, he protected unabashed. The chain he wore linked him to Viviene, but for not the end was held by Blanca. Can that someone… forgive you? They’re time together was cut short. Blanca knew her fathers hold on her, and she couldn’t stand to see that he was at the base. If he told Citra the truth it was over, but trading her freedom… was it worth it? It was, and the deal was made. The reign didn’t last long, as the leash he put her on caught fire and withered away little by little, until the fuse reached her throat and everything spilled forth like liquid fire. Citra was stunned. With his voice back, with his hands around her neck. How! How could she! His mind was doing ten hour marathons in seconds. She gasped and teared beneath him, and he released her to storm off - clear you head, Citra. It’s a lie, right? No, because Blanca’s father confirmed it. He was a fool to trust that woman. A fool. And yet he couldn’t bring himself to hate her - she just wanted to live. All she wanted… was to live. He cursed inwardly. Blanca had never felt guilty. She’d never felt attachment enough to be guilty. And yet, under her fathers thumb, under Citra’s eye, guilt poured from her and she couldn’t stop the tears that rode her eyelids. She had smacked a hand away at some point and stormed off herself - she could do this on her own, she had to do this on her own… but she couldn’t, because she was weak. She hadn’t wanted Citra, she’d needed him. And it had blown up in her face. She had made it quite a bit aways when Citra found her. He wasn’t leased, but his sole purpose was to be needed. And right then, he realized that Blanca needed him. No matter how much he disliked her for lying, he couldn’t turn away from the prospect of having his purpose in life fulfilled. He wasn’t a pawn anymore, he was a knight. And every queen needs one, whether she knew it or not. Can that someone… care for you too? Citra isn’t sure how long it had been, he isn’t even sure when it had happened - but eventually they made a homestead for themselves and he could recognize the mutual attraction that seemed to be sprouting between them. Linger touches, looks, small cuddles here and there… Was it possible to love something you once thought you hated? He had considered his feeling nothing more that physical attraction - he couldn’t deny that Blanca was beautiful and strong in her own right. But then it became so much more clear that this woman had become such an important part of his life. He didn’t admit it at first - Blanca would never see him that way and he didn’t expect her to. But the spark of affection seemed to go both ways; admitted or not. Blanca had never been so confused. It frustrated her to no end to know that she was teetering off the edge of homosexuality and into bisexuality. She’s always considered herself a lesbian! But now, cuddled up against the warm muscled body, she felt her temperature rise and her heartbeat skyrocket. And all because she had gotten close to this man. And as much as she wished she could just ignore it and pretend it wasn’t there, Citra was important to her. Or, he’d grown to be. The fire licked at her skin as she waited for him to return, her cheeks flushed from the heat but her body still numb from the cold. She didn’t move when a whistle settled into her ear and the door opened soon after. They’d come to the realization that just entering the house could end badly, so they’d since made signals. Citra sat behind her, and without thinking she leaned into him. She sighed, contented and in the moment she realized she might not have hated Citra at all - she had just needed time to realize that he was a decent guy. Citra on the other hand, took the moment to indulge in her warmth and physical contact. He was so adverted to it from anyone but her… She was his reason now, he had decided. She was the one thing that kept him alive and the only thing that he could fight for whole heartedly. Yes, care means many things.