Scotland is the home of 5,295,400 people plus almost seven million sheep. The normal temperature at Turnberry in January is 42 degrees along with 18 days of rain rising to 57 degrees in July with 12 days of rain. Sheep seldom play golf and neither do most of their owners. Raising sheep is an around-the-clock, seven-day a week, year-around activity not suited to the kind of people inclined to hitting a small white ball, and chasing it only to hit it again. And, who could even imagine what a shepherd would look like in checkered pants and a Paddy cap? At first glance Turnberry, Scotland hardly seems like a good place to build a golf resort. The question becomes who in their right mind would do such a thing?
That dear reader, would take a business genius with a self-declared “big brain” along with his multiple bankruptcies and over 3,500 lawsuits. A person such as Donald Trump, who Marco Rubio called a con artist. The question is how much of his own money does he have in the Trump Turnberry Golf Resort? Trust me, the sheep are not the only ones being sheared in Scotland. Scratch Trump and you will find people being separated rather quickly from their money. What he calls business other people call, “I've been robbed.”
The well-heeled clientele is not Trump's only fraud victims. At the start of the 2007 recession, Donald Trump convinced lower-income people to invest in a pseudo-scientific vitamin scam—all without expressing any concern about how it might potentially endanger people’s health. Using a multi-level marketing scheme called The Trump Network, he encouraged people to take an expensive urine test, which would then be used to personally “tailor” a pricey monthly concoction of vitamins—something a Harvard doctor told the Daily Beast was a straight-up “scam.” After the Daily Beast challenged the company doctor to defend the products, he derided the idea of “evidence-based” medicine. The scam failed leaving Trump with the money and the little guy holding the bag.
Trump’s 2016 Election Campaign is one of his biggest scams so far. He “loaned” his campaign forty-two million dollars out of which he has plowed six million dollars (so far) back into his own pocket. Every time he flies on Trump Air, holds a campaign rally at any of his properties including his Palm Beach estate (Mar-a-Lago) he pays himself out of campaign funds. Now, in spite of crowing loudly that he is self-funding his campaign, he is soliciting money from the wealthy “donor class.” When the campaign is over Trump will use this money to pay himself back for the loans he made to his campaign. With this scam he is able to personally benefit from campaign contributions in a case of having-your-cake-and-eating-it-too.
Trump brags continuously and loudly about his business skills which includes four “Chapter 11 bankruptcies.” His book, The Art of the Deal should have been titled The Art of the Steal. If he should become president, the thought of using the US Treasury like a personal piggy bank will be irresistible to him. If he loses the election, he will sign a contract for another reality television show for some unheard of amount of money. America’s only hope is that the voters realize that Donald Trump is temperamentally unfit to be president. The next time Trump talks abut “Make America Great Again,” the astute voter will ask, “For who?”
Friday, July 1, 2016
Tuesday, June 14, 2016
The Candidate
"Individuals gain power because they answer a need shared by an entire population.”
Eileen Heyes
For a representative democracy to function, intelligent and noble people of high moral character have to run for public office. It takes both courage and moxie to place one’s entire life (as well as friends and family) under a microscope. Unfortunately, candidates for elective offices are not protected by anything like the Queensberry Rules prohibiting blows below the belt. The only protection they have from slanderous lies is the morality and good judgement of their fellow citizens.
Elections, of course, take place in the zeitgeist of the times. For example, when many people are out of work or working in low-wage jobs, voters become angry. During periods of high unemployment, “It is no wonder the people [have] little faith in the ability of their . . . government to get anything done.” In times of high stress the electorate quite naturally looks for simple solutions and scapegoats. One candidate, “. . . sensed, as many politicians did not, that people did not want a detailed plan for turning the economy around. What [they] wanted was someone to lift their spirits and restore their sense of national pride.” In the words of Eileen Heyes, “Someone will have to come along who thinks very simply,” and demonstrates that he “. . . has the strength to carry out his simple ideas.”
The modern political candidate must read the mood, fears, and thinking of the voters. He must also be able to command the attention of the media, especially television. Insults and extreme statements given by a talented entertainer and self-promoter are extremely effective. In one case the candidate's rhetoric was so outrageous that, “Even [his] associates considered it something of an embarrassment, not at all a fitting complement to his powerful speeches.” It did not matter; the cruder and the more outlandish his statements became, the higher he climbed in the poles and the more free television coverage he garnered. “If the new [candidate] was rather extreme in some of his views, well, that could be overlooked.” In the words of Heyes, “All great movements are popular movements, volcanic eruptions of human passions, stirred either by the cruel Goddess of Distress or by a firebrand of the word.” And this candidate was certainly a firebrand.
Slowly but surely he was able to destroy all his opponents, leaving the establishment scratching their collective head and asking, how could this happen? Yes inexplicably, “The temperamental [newcomer] was now a key player in the national arena.” It seemed that “The sentries [party officials] guarding the way proved, in the end, incapable of stopping the cunning newcomer.” “How could one man do all this in a civilized industrial nation in an era of mass communication?” This candidate was certainly a different kind of candidate. “He refused to listen to any real information about his opponents, relying instead on his own instincts.” “He refused to listen to his [political] advisers’ predictions that he was marching into disaster.”
“Sooner will a camel pass through a needle’s eye than a great man be ‘discovered’ by an election. In world history the man who really rises above the norm of the broad average usually announces himself personally.” On 1/1/1933 to the surprise and dismay of the entire world, Adolf Hitler became the chancellor of Germany. Yes, all the material quoted in this essay [with slight modifications noted by brackets and ellipsis] refer to Adolf Hitler and were taken from Eileen Heyes’1994 book, Adolf Hitler.
Eileen Heyes
For a representative democracy to function, intelligent and noble people of high moral character have to run for public office. It takes both courage and moxie to place one’s entire life (as well as friends and family) under a microscope. Unfortunately, candidates for elective offices are not protected by anything like the Queensberry Rules prohibiting blows below the belt. The only protection they have from slanderous lies is the morality and good judgement of their fellow citizens.
Elections, of course, take place in the zeitgeist of the times. For example, when many people are out of work or working in low-wage jobs, voters become angry. During periods of high unemployment, “It is no wonder the people [have] little faith in the ability of their . . . government to get anything done.” In times of high stress the electorate quite naturally looks for simple solutions and scapegoats. One candidate, “. . . sensed, as many politicians did not, that people did not want a detailed plan for turning the economy around. What [they] wanted was someone to lift their spirits and restore their sense of national pride.” In the words of Eileen Heyes, “Someone will have to come along who thinks very simply,” and demonstrates that he “. . . has the strength to carry out his simple ideas.”
The modern political candidate must read the mood, fears, and thinking of the voters. He must also be able to command the attention of the media, especially television. Insults and extreme statements given by a talented entertainer and self-promoter are extremely effective. In one case the candidate's rhetoric was so outrageous that, “Even [his] associates considered it something of an embarrassment, not at all a fitting complement to his powerful speeches.” It did not matter; the cruder and the more outlandish his statements became, the higher he climbed in the poles and the more free television coverage he garnered. “If the new [candidate] was rather extreme in some of his views, well, that could be overlooked.” In the words of Heyes, “All great movements are popular movements, volcanic eruptions of human passions, stirred either by the cruel Goddess of Distress or by a firebrand of the word.” And this candidate was certainly a firebrand.
Slowly but surely he was able to destroy all his opponents, leaving the establishment scratching their collective head and asking, how could this happen? Yes inexplicably, “The temperamental [newcomer] was now a key player in the national arena.” It seemed that “The sentries [party officials] guarding the way proved, in the end, incapable of stopping the cunning newcomer.” “How could one man do all this in a civilized industrial nation in an era of mass communication?” This candidate was certainly a different kind of candidate. “He refused to listen to any real information about his opponents, relying instead on his own instincts.” “He refused to listen to his [political] advisers’ predictions that he was marching into disaster.”
“Sooner will a camel pass through a needle’s eye than a great man be ‘discovered’ by an election. In world history the man who really rises above the norm of the broad average usually announces himself personally.” On 1/1/1933 to the surprise and dismay of the entire world, Adolf Hitler became the chancellor of Germany. Yes, all the material quoted in this essay [with slight modifications noted by brackets and ellipsis] refer to Adolf Hitler and were taken from Eileen Heyes’1994 book, Adolf Hitler.
Friday, June 3, 2016
Anatomy of a Trump Supporter
“No nation is permitted to live in ignorance with impunity.”
Thomas Jefferson
On June 16, 2015 self-proclaimed billionaire and reality-television star Donald Trump announced his candidacy for the Republican nomination for the presidency of the United States. The immediate reaction was, this is a joke, and he is not a serious candidate. Political analysts and all of the media predicted that he would be out of the race by the end of summer. Virtually everyone just sat back waiting for his latest outrageous but entertaining statement. Any one of his following statements would have ended the candidacy of any one of the previous presidential hopefuls in American history:
1. “He [John McCain] was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren't captured.”
2. “You have to take out their [terrorists] families.”
3. “I am going to bomb the shit out of them [ISIS].”
4. “We are going to have a deportation force.”
5. “I would bring back water-boarding and I would bring back a hell of lot worse than water-boarding.”
6. “I want surveillance of certain Mosques.”
7. “I love the old days. Do you know what they used to do with guys like that [a protestor]? They would be carried out on a stretcher folks.”
8. “There has to be some form of punishment for women who have abortions.”
The more outlandish, crude, or extreme Trump’s statements the greater his support became as measured by the polls and primary election returns. Buckets of ink, hours of pundits pontificating, and thousand of blogs have attempted to answer the question, “Who are the Trump supporters?” A December 2016 Washington Post analysis found that Trump's support was skewed to white uneducated males, especially those with lower incomes. His support is 47 percent among men vs. 28 percent among women. Fifty percent of Trump’s supporters make less than $50,000. Education level is the hallmark of Trump supporters with the absence of a college degree being the single-best predictor of a Trump supporter. An analysis of Trump's win in New Hampshire indicated that for every one percentage-point increase in the number of college graduates over the age of 25, Donald Trump's share of votes fell by 0.65 percentage points. In summary the profile of a Trump supporter is an uneducated lower-income male.
Political scientists Jonathan D. Weiler and Marc J. Hetherington presented another compelling possibility in their 2009 book, Authoritarianism and Polarization in American Politics. They defined authoritarianism as a worldview that values order and authority and distrust outsiders and social change. People scoring high on the authoritarianism scale seek strongman leaders who are punitive, target out groups, and have simple and forceful leadership styles. This is especially true when they feel threatened. Prior to the 1964 civil rights legislation authoritarianism was equally distributed between the Democrat and Republican Parties. However, the rise of Trump coincides with the Republican Party becoming the party favored by authoritarians. Weiler and Hetherington measured people’s authoritarianism by ascertaining their answer to three questions:
1. Are you freaked out by social change?
2. Do racial differences unsettle you?
3. Do you support strongman leaders?
They realized that these questions were far too direct to elicit honest answers, so they devised four questions disguised as “Child-rearing values.” Subjects were asked, “Which one of the following pairs of values do you think is more important for a child to have?”
Independence or Respect for elders
Obedience or Self reliance
Curiosity or Good manners
Considerate or Well-behaved
The authoritarians answered “Respect for elders, Obedience, Good manners, and Well-behaved” as the most important qualities for a child to have. They then surveyed Trump and non-Trump supporters, and found that Trump supporters were strongly correlated with high scores on the authoritarian assessment test. In light of Weiler and Hetherington’s findings Trump’s “crazy” statements all of a sudden make sense. For example, his statements: “You have to take out their families” and “I am going to bomb the shit out of them” both appeal to people who prefer simple solutions and a strong leadership style. His statements We are going to have a deportation force and I want surveillance of certain Mosques appeals to the authoritarian’s distrust of out-groups such as immigrants and Muslims.
Unlike presidential elections in the past the Republican primaries indicate that the voters were not moved by ideology. Trump has not exhibited an identifiable political philosophy. His theme is “Make America Great Again” followed by a number of dubious claims like “building the wall,” “deporting illegals,” and “bringing the jobs back from overseas.” In November 2016 voters will have to decide who has the experience and temperament to be president. To date Trump has campaigned as a grandiose narcissistic bully, and opportunist. Einstein once said, “Everyone has to sacrifice at the altar of stupidity from time to time.” Donald Trump has surely exceeded the threshold of "from time to time."
Thomas Jefferson
On June 16, 2015 self-proclaimed billionaire and reality-television star Donald Trump announced his candidacy for the Republican nomination for the presidency of the United States. The immediate reaction was, this is a joke, and he is not a serious candidate. Political analysts and all of the media predicted that he would be out of the race by the end of summer. Virtually everyone just sat back waiting for his latest outrageous but entertaining statement. Any one of his following statements would have ended the candidacy of any one of the previous presidential hopefuls in American history:
1. “He [John McCain] was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren't captured.”
2. “You have to take out their [terrorists] families.”
3. “I am going to bomb the shit out of them [ISIS].”
4. “We are going to have a deportation force.”
5. “I would bring back water-boarding and I would bring back a hell of lot worse than water-boarding.”
6. “I want surveillance of certain Mosques.”
7. “I love the old days. Do you know what they used to do with guys like that [a protestor]? They would be carried out on a stretcher folks.”
8. “There has to be some form of punishment for women who have abortions.”
The more outlandish, crude, or extreme Trump’s statements the greater his support became as measured by the polls and primary election returns. Buckets of ink, hours of pundits pontificating, and thousand of blogs have attempted to answer the question, “Who are the Trump supporters?” A December 2016 Washington Post analysis found that Trump's support was skewed to white uneducated males, especially those with lower incomes. His support is 47 percent among men vs. 28 percent among women. Fifty percent of Trump’s supporters make less than $50,000. Education level is the hallmark of Trump supporters with the absence of a college degree being the single-best predictor of a Trump supporter. An analysis of Trump's win in New Hampshire indicated that for every one percentage-point increase in the number of college graduates over the age of 25, Donald Trump's share of votes fell by 0.65 percentage points. In summary the profile of a Trump supporter is an uneducated lower-income male.
Political scientists Jonathan D. Weiler and Marc J. Hetherington presented another compelling possibility in their 2009 book, Authoritarianism and Polarization in American Politics. They defined authoritarianism as a worldview that values order and authority and distrust outsiders and social change. People scoring high on the authoritarianism scale seek strongman leaders who are punitive, target out groups, and have simple and forceful leadership styles. This is especially true when they feel threatened. Prior to the 1964 civil rights legislation authoritarianism was equally distributed between the Democrat and Republican Parties. However, the rise of Trump coincides with the Republican Party becoming the party favored by authoritarians. Weiler and Hetherington measured people’s authoritarianism by ascertaining their answer to three questions:
1. Are you freaked out by social change?
2. Do racial differences unsettle you?
3. Do you support strongman leaders?
They realized that these questions were far too direct to elicit honest answers, so they devised four questions disguised as “Child-rearing values.” Subjects were asked, “Which one of the following pairs of values do you think is more important for a child to have?”
Independence or Respect for elders
Obedience or Self reliance
Curiosity or Good manners
Considerate or Well-behaved
The authoritarians answered “Respect for elders, Obedience, Good manners, and Well-behaved” as the most important qualities for a child to have. They then surveyed Trump and non-Trump supporters, and found that Trump supporters were strongly correlated with high scores on the authoritarian assessment test. In light of Weiler and Hetherington’s findings Trump’s “crazy” statements all of a sudden make sense. For example, his statements: “You have to take out their families” and “I am going to bomb the shit out of them” both appeal to people who prefer simple solutions and a strong leadership style. His statements We are going to have a deportation force and I want surveillance of certain Mosques appeals to the authoritarian’s distrust of out-groups such as immigrants and Muslims.
Unlike presidential elections in the past the Republican primaries indicate that the voters were not moved by ideology. Trump has not exhibited an identifiable political philosophy. His theme is “Make America Great Again” followed by a number of dubious claims like “building the wall,” “deporting illegals,” and “bringing the jobs back from overseas.” In November 2016 voters will have to decide who has the experience and temperament to be president. To date Trump has campaigned as a grandiose narcissistic bully, and opportunist. Einstein once said, “Everyone has to sacrifice at the altar of stupidity from time to time.” Donald Trump has surely exceeded the threshold of "from time to time."
Thursday, May 19, 2016
Trump And The Five Stages Of Grief
Since Donald Trump became the presumptive nominee for the Republican candidate for president, there has been considerable angst among a large segment of the Republican Party. Twenty percent of Republicans say they will support Hillary Clinton over Trump. His fitness for the presidency has been openly challenged by many party regulars. Republican leaders such as Romney and both the Bush presidents are refusing to attend the convention in Cleveland. The leader of the Republican Party and Speaker of the House, Paul Ryan has so far refused to endorse Trump, in part, out of fear that with Trump on the top of the ballot the Republican candidates for the House of Representatives and the Senate will be put at risk.
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in her 1969 book, On Death and Dying, proposed what is now called the Kübler-Ross model to describe a series of emotional stages experienced by survivors of a traumatic experience such as the death of an intimate. These five stages are denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. The Republican Party is currently in the “bargaining” stage of dealing the grief of Trump being the likely party nominee. Trump’s closed-door meeting with Paul Ryan and senior Republican members of the Congress is just one indication of the bargaining taking place. Eventually most Republicans will coalesce behind Trump’s candidacy not out of love for him but out of fear and loafing of Hillary Clinton.
Trump was able to secure the Republican nomination by appealing to the basest atavistic fears and instincts of the bulk of right-wing activists who vote in the primaries. He accomplished this with three promises:
1. Build a wall along the US/Mexican border
2. Round up and deport twelve million illegal immigrants
3. Band Muslims from entering the United States
None of these proposals would ever be approved by Congress, and even if they did, they would be struck down by the courts. The West Point Honor Code states, “A Cadet will not lie, cheat, steal or tolerate those who do.” I hereby offer the Rationalist Voter Pledge. A rationalist will not endorse, support, or vote for Donald Trump or tolerate those who do.
Wednesday, February 24, 2016
Trump is the virtual winner
In September 2015 Diogenes wrote (See President Trump):
"All the pieces necessary for a US fascist-style dictatorship are currently in place: (1) Trump, a media-savvy, wealthy, charismatic, and populist demagogue in the mold of Huey Long, (2) an ignorant, uneducated, and frightened electorate combined with a history of a low turnout in primary elections, and (3) an extremely weak field of other Republican contenders who lack any ability to garner the attention of the media away from the King of reality television."
In January 2016 Diogenes wrote (See President Trump Revisited): "All the pieces necessary for a US fascist-style dictatorship are currently in place: (1) Trump, a media-savvy, wealthy, charismatic, and populist demagogue in the mold of Huey Long, (2) an ignorant, uneducated, and frightened electorate combined with a history of a low turnout in primary elections, and (3) an extremely weak field of other Republican contenders who lack any ability to garner the attention of the media away from the King of reality television."
"This entire sordid Republican Primary has delighted Democrats until they realized (belatedly) that Trump is a master politician who might very well defeat Hillary to become the 45th President of the United States."
And today, February 24th--Diogenes writes:
Trump has a lock on the Republican nomination with the establishment Republicans left with just one slim option. And that is, Kasich and Rubio must join forces whereby one agrees to drop out and support the other. The decision could be made on the basis of a coin toss if negotiations fail. The loser drops out with the understanding that the winner would pick him for Vice President. This, of course, is highly unlikely setting up an inevitable Trump/Clinton confrontation in November.
Friday, January 22, 2016
President Trump Revisited
“It was the best of many bad options.”
Gore Vidal
President Trump was originally posted on 9/15/2015 at the blog site, The Needlefish Chronicles, but was later moved to the site The Diogenes Files (to make room for weightier matters) on 12/18/2015 thus losing over ninety days of seniority due to Google’s carelessness.
Bill Clinton said Obama was “luckier than a dog with two dicks” to face hapless Mitt Romney in the 2012 election. This makes it very difficult to describe the luck of Donald Trump in facing Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, Ben Carson, and Ted Cruz (and a host of duller luminaries) for the Republican Presidential nomination. Brother George tarnished the Bush name so badly that Jeb cannot use his only advantage--name recognition. Although Jeb and his allies have spent 111 million on campaign ads, he is currently at the bottom of the pack with a 5% ranking. This is a case of the “the dog will not eat the dog food.” Rubio an obvious greenhorn enjoys the worst attendance record in the US Senate and was documented both as a liar and a thief in Peter Golenbock’s 2014 book The Chairman. Ben Carson made a fortune pitching religious bromides to the faithful and selling bogus nutritional supplements to another information-challenged group. He actually bragged about trying to kill his mother with a hammer. In his book he claimed that General Westmoreland met with him personally and offered him a four-year scholarship to West Point. The entire story has been totally debunked. That leaves only Ted Cruz standing between Trump and the nomination. And that, dear reader makes Trump luckier than (expletive deleted).
Ted Cruz was moving up on Trump until Trump brilliantly played the “birther” card, an old canard that a Hillary Clinton volunteer dreamed up in the 2008 election in an attempt to derail Barack Obama. It failed to resonate with the Democrats, but proved to be immensely popular with right-wing Republicans who to this day think Obama was born in Kenya in the Muslim faith. While Tea Party Republicans would be hard-pressed to find Kenya on a map, they know where Canada is located and Cruz fully admits to being born there having only renounced his Canadian citizenship in May 2014. The entire Canadian thing has been just more than Tea Party queen Sarah Palin could stand, so she dropped Cruz and gave Trump a big mama grizzly-bear hug upsetting Cruz so badly that he lost his normally icy calm demeanor and in an attempt to mimic John Kennedy, he confused a Robert Kennedy quote for the work of JFK.
Ted Cruz is a very scary man with eyes colder than a viper but on closer examination, he is more of a libertarian than a conservative, reminding people of their crazy uncle who shows up at every family gathering, gets drunk, and falls into the backyard fish pond. This entire sordid Republican Primary has delighted Democrats until they realized (belatedly) that Trump is a master politician who might very well defeat Hillary to become the 45th President of the United States. And he will build the wall, all four-thousand miles of it. Not on our southern border, but on the Canadian border. Not to keep the Canadians out, but to prevent Americans from fleeing the country.
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