It's got electrolytes (Part 1.)

Joe: For the last time, I'm pretty sure what's killing the crops is this Brawndo stuff.

Secretary of State: But Brawndo's got what plants crave. It's got electrolytes.

Attorney General: "So wait a minute. What you're saying is that you want us to put water on the crops.

Joe: Yes.

Attorney General: Water. Like out the toilet?

Joe: Well, I mean, it doesn't have to be out of the toilet, but, yeah, that's the idea.

Secretary of State: But Brawndo's got what plants crave.

Attorney General: It's got electrolytes.

Joe: Okay, look. The plants aren't growing, so I'm pretty sure that the Brawndo's not working. Now, I'm no botanist, but I do know that if you put water on plants, they grow.

Secretary of Energy: Well, I've never seen no plants grow out of no toilet.

Secretary of State: Hey, that's good. You sure you ain't the smartest guy in the world?

Joe: Okay, look. You want to solve this problem. I want to get my pardon. So why don't we just try it, okay, and not worry about what plants crave?

Attorney General: Brawndo's got what plants crave.

Secretary of Energy: Yeah, it's got electrolytes.

Joe: What are electrolytes? Do you even know?

Secretary of State: It's what they use to make Brawndo.

~Idiocracy (2006 Film)

So, I saw this Trump tweet yesterday morning when I got home from work. Apparently, the President (who was born in 1946 and who thus lived the majority of his life during the Cold War and should know better, not only due to decades of Capitalist propaganda...but from being an actual Capitalist in exactly the sense of being what the Communists had a problem with in the first place) doesn't know the difference between Capitalism and Communism. Rothman's acidic sarcasm aside...well, damn, I can't even snark that.

The real issue here, of course, is that Trump doesn't like Jeff Bezos, who owns not only Amazon but also the Washington Post, which is of course very critical of Trump, but the main thrust of Trump's entire argument is that the innovator and job creator should pay more in taxes and the State should regulate the Free Market on behalf of something something Gazpacho small business or something. Oh, and fuck that guy.

Didn't this motherfucker just give Amazon, and Bezos, huge tax cuts? Tax cuts, by the way, that most Americans up to and including a decent number of actual billionaires said we didn't need or want?

I mean, I know I'm old and was a conservative back when things still kind of made sense but that Tweet seems to fly in the face of the globally-engaged free-market conservatism that I was taught.

Yes, it's been a little hard on the American worker (not least because many white American workers refuse to adapt or retrain, preferring to pine for an era of good-paying, easy-to-get manufacturing jobs that ended around the time people now applying for Social Security were graduating from high school and getting started in the workforce. Note regarding methodology here: As many people do, I'm using the early 1970's as a benchmark here, specifically the 1973 oil crisis. It would take another decade or so to begin to bite, but a person who started as an assembly line worker in a General Motors plant in 1973 would be damned lucky to have made it 20+ years to collect early retirement in the 1990's and GOD-damned lucky to retire in 2003 with a full pension.

My family had several GM employees including both of my uncles and one of my aunts, My Mom still has a (part-of-the-year) neighbor (who spends a lot of time in Florida now) that is a Chrysler retiree. (He was an old-school, fiercely racist nominally-conservative Democrat Union man back in the day, and honestly probably one of the reasons I hung on as a Republican for as long as I did, because at least somebody like Bob Dole could tell the racists to get the fuck out.) The point is, I've seen this stuff up close. To a great extent, the Free Market really doesn't benefit me much, but it's still a better system than Communism, as long as it's regulated to some degree. I firmly believe in regulated Capitalism. I've been part of multiple small businesses mostly on the bust-your-ass end of the spectrum. Yes, most Free Market nuts would probably consider me a liberal, but I still believe in it, at least as long as the shit gets regulated.

Why? Like it or not, free trade has lifted literally billions of people out of poverty. Of course, the real issue is that what constitutes poverty, middle class, upper class etc. in terms of monetary values varies wildly from country to country until you get to the top 1% levels. The People's Republic of China has gone from Communist backwardness in 1973 to thriving Dragon Economy in 2018. While Trump attacks Amazon on Twitter, Xi is doing everything the hell possible to promote Chinese tech firms. 

He seems to be doing a damned good job of it too.

As with America of 45 or 50 years ago, just a few dollars an hour (in American terms) is a damned decent wage in China, their minimum wage is roughly a dollar an hour, though enforcement of labor laws is spotty...due to demands on the part of the people enforcement has improved. In point of fact, rich Chinese motherfuckers have begun outsourcing jobs to places like Bangladesh and Vietnam.

I read recently that the Chinese space program is expecting to deorbit their first space station soon. So, they're about where we were 40 years ago...and our government doesn't even have a manned space program. Trump's big talk aside, there's no actual money in the budget or projects in the works to do anything about that, either. We're increasingly reliant on SpaceX to do what the government ought to be doing. Now, don't get me wrong I fully support Elon Musk and most of his projects, including SpaceX. Whatever else you can say about him, he has a vision for the future that involves sustainable living on Earth while we build the technologies needed to reach out into the Universe, and he's sticking to it.

Meanwhile, one hell of a lot of American Republican voters have apparently lost their damned minds. They aren't thinking about the future or reaching out into the universe, they seem to hope only that they get to shoot people and have their boot on someone else's throat before they die (meaning, somebody else shoots them) and that's about it. I'm not sure who took this picture or where it was taken but I saw it on Twitter a few days ago and it's been bothering me since, not least because of the mutilated Bible verse on the back window. Personally, I can't imagine why anybody would junk up their vehicle like that, for any politician. For the record I don't doubt this is real, I know a kid (a maintenance contractor where I work) who did something similar with one of the cars he owns-it's a 1998 Oldsmobile Aurora, it's not like this dude has money. The fact is that American supposed-conservatives are ready to bow down to someone and something that represent the worst aspects of both capitalism and communism...roughly circa 1958 or so...with no understanding that the world has changed since then aside from the fact that they've conveniently forgotten the Cold War, who was on what side and why, and perhaps most of all why things turned out the way they did.

In "Conservative"-land, we won the Cold War because we're us, and they're them, and of course we're better than them...and that's where it ends. No wonder, then, that nihilistic Russians can play these fools like a goddamned Pan flute.

When you lack the imagination to see that people can play you, or that your invariably short-term goals can be twisted to suit somebody else's purposes...when you indeed, lack the imagination to understand that the world is a big, incredibly diverse, scary place with dangers and wonders, joys and sorrows as far removed from your daily routine as Neptune is far from the Sun (and that there's nothing wrong with that!)  or even the imagination to see a threat like Russia as real, you shouldn't be surprised when there's a lot of damned Russians around here, when your social media feeds are full of them, you should damned well hope that the least you get is mocked by somebody you disagree with who's at least from your own country.

An awful lot of people who thought the Russians were their friends...and an awful lot of Russians who thought that Putin and his clique were on their side...are dead.

The enemy of your enemy is not your friend, and my ferrets have a better understanding of economics and politics than the President. A central point I intend to hammer home in the coming days is that there's a lot of things about our system, from our checks and balances in our own system to emphasis on competence and knowledge that existed with previous administrations, to the idea that free trade lifts people in other countries out of poverty to our various diplomatic efforts all the way to our rule of law in a domestic legal sense and our rules of war...these things do not exist for the benefit of other people...but for ourselves, so that we do not become monsters.

Had Trump made the slightest efforts to abide by the political rules and norms of our system, they would have protected him, more than they constrained him.

What's coming for him? That's going to be no one's fault but his own.

Part 2

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