Election 2016: What Happened and Why?

nakedcapitalism |  Even though this assessment of the Trump win and the implications for American politics going forward is long, it’s also meaty and very much worth your attention. Mark Blyth was virtually the only person to call a Trump victory from the get-go (a colleague who spends a lot of time outside the Acela corridor is another member of that club) but also correctly gamed out how the stock market would react.

Everything Blyth says is incisive, colorful, and on the mark. By contrast, it’s frustrating listening to Schiller because she is invested heavily in Dem orthodoxy, and not even in the plausible parts: the Hillary scandals were manufactured by Republicans, Sanders would have lost if he were the Democratic candidate, Clinton was a victim of being a woman with a long political career (hello?). Similarly, towards the end, Blyth says, “There is no left left. It’s already had its lunch eaten,” and explains why, and then Schiller begs to differ by trying to depict the Democrats as still a real force and capable of being “renovated”. Help me. But she does have some random insightful remarks. 

In other words, you can run the video and tune your attention in and out, although you may then want to go back and listen to just the Mark Blyth remarks a second time. There’s a lot of solid material here.

World’s Biggest Real Estate Frenzy Is Coming to a City Near You

bloomberg |  If they were anywhere else in Beijing, the five young women in cowboy hats and matching red, white, and blue costumes would look wildly out of place.

But here at the city’s biggest international property fair -- a frenetic gathering of brokers, developers and other real estate professionals all jockeying for the attention of Chinese buyers -- the quintet of wannabe Texans fits right in. As they promote Houston townhouses (“Yours for as little as $350,000!”), a Portugal contingent touts its Golden Visa program and the Australian delegation lures passersby with stuffed kangaroos.

Welcome to ground zero for the world’s largest cross-border residential property boom. Motivated by a weakening yuan, surging domestic housing costs and the desire to secure offshore footholds, Chinese citizens are snapping up overseas homes at an accelerating pace. They’re also venturing further afield than ever before, spreading beyond the likes of Sydney and Vancouver to lower-priced markets including Houston, Thailand’s Pattaya Beach and Malaysia’s Johor Bahru.

The buying spree has defied Chinese government efforts to restrict capital outflows and shows little sign of slowing after an estimated $15 billion of overseas real estate purchases in the first half. For cities in the cross-hairs, the challenge is to balance the economic benefits of Chinese demand against the risk that rising home prices spur a public backlash.

“The Chinese have managed to accumulate very large amounts of wealth, and the opportunities to deploy that capital in their own market are somewhat restricted,” said Richard Barkham, the London-based chief global economist at CBRE Group Inc., the world’s largest commercial property brokerage. “China has more than a billion people. Personally, I think we have just seen a trickle.”

Capitalism as Power Model of the Stock Market

bnarchives |  Most explanations of stock market booms and busts are based on contrasting the underlying ‘fundamental’ logic of the economy with the exogenous, non-economic factors that presumably distort it. Our paper offers a radically different model, examining the stock market not from the mechanical viewpoint of a distorted economy, but from the dialectical perspective of capitalized power. The model demonstrates that (1) the valuation of equities represents capitalized power; (2) capitalized power is dialectically intertwined with systemic fear; and (3) systemic fear and capitalized power are mediated through strategic sabotage. This triangular model, we posit, can offer a basis for examining the asymptotes, or limits, of capitalized power and the ways in which these asymptotes relate to the historical and ongoing transformation of the capitalist mode of power.

Running His Mouth Reckless was the ONLY Miracle Scot Free Could Actually Accomplish...,

internationalman |  Mister Trump has, however, stated that he will diminish direct taxation. The highest earners would pay 33 percent and the corporate tax rate would drop to 15 percent. Yet, he offers no explanation as to how he will make up for the shortfall. Nor does he explain how he will deal with the mushrooming national debt.

What this tells us is that, despite the euphoria that is presently being felt by Mister Trump’s supporters, the fundamentals that plague the US economy remain present and not only is it impossible for him to reverse the pre-existent slide toward economic collapse, it’s not really even a part of the agenda.

Under Mister Trump, the US will still see inflation for the US dollar and larger deficits.

At the same time, we’re approaching a wave of corporate debt default for the record books. The huge volume of junk bonds that were issued in recent years will begin to come to maturity in 2017. 2018 will be more severe and 2019 worse still. Highly leveraged companies will go belly-up.

National debt, corporate debt and personal debt are peaking and there will be nowhere to turn for a meaningful bailout. Although there will be quantitative easing and confiscation of private wealth in the coming years, no president, either liberal or conservative, can stop the debt bulldozer that’s now rumbling down the street.

None of this is to say that there may not be significant benefits to a Trump presidency. He’s likely to take a less collectivist approach, will diminish taxation and most importantly, will be less likely to take the US into another world war. This fact alone is reason to be grateful for his ascendancy.

But, regardless of who won the American presidential election, market collapses, debt defaults and an eventual currency collapse were baked in the cake. It’s safe to say that, should they occur in the next four years, as would seem likely, they would be blamed on the president, as they would happen on his watch.

This being the case, in addition to the fact that conservative thinkers are aging and being replaced by collectivists, it’s very likely that the US is looking at its last Republican president. For those who oppose collectivism, the future may look a bit more promising after the recent election, but the outcome will be essentially the same. On the road trip into the future, the scenery may be a bit more palatable than it would have been had Mrs. Clinton been elected, but the fundamental outcome will be the same.

The Defeated Establishment Elites Used Political Correctness to Fragment the Precariat and Unecessariat

oftwominds |  Combine identity politics with political correctness, and the New Nobility/Oligarchy can laugh their way to the bank while their pawn-serfs fight over how many politically correct angels can dance on the head of a pin.

I have long held that our economy is, stripped of propaganda, nothing but an updated version of feudalism, i.e. neofeudal: a vast class of precarious laborers (i.e. precariats--precarious proletariats) who own little to no wealth-producing capital ruled by a New Nobility/Oligarchy that owns the vast majority of wealth-producing capital and control of the political system. 

I explained this structure in America's Nine Classes: The New Class Hierarchy (April 29, 2014), Neofeudalism 101: Strip-Mining the Upper Middle Class (April 8, 2015) and The Class War Has Already Started (November 14, 2015). 

In the Marxist analysis, there are only three classes: those who must sell their labor to earn a livelihood, those who earn their livelihood from owning wealth-generating capital, and the dispossessed/ marginalized who are dependent on the state (bread and circuses) or who scrape out a living on the margins of the lawful economy. 

In this view, there is no meaningful class difference between the well-paid liberal technocrat with the $1 million (mortgaged) house on the Left/Right Coast and the rural conservative "deplorable" wage earner. Both must sell their labor and neither earns a livelihood from wealth-generating capital. 

If we extend this analysis, we find that the entire self-described "middle class" is in fact nothing but the better paid slice of the working class, i.e. the class who must sell their labor to pay their rent/mortgage, buy food, etc. 

Both are precarious, but not equally so. The well-paid technocrat believes his skills will protect him from unemployment, and he is equally confident that the "wealth" in his mortgaged house and stocks/bonds 401K retirement account is secure and permanent.

He feels superior to the "deplorable" wage earner, but this superiority is contingent on 1) asset bubbles never popping (ahem, which they always do, eventually; 2) software that's eating the world will not eat his job or the premium he is currently being paid, and 3) the skills he currently has won't become over-supplied as the global work force expands into the sectors that require high levels of education.

So what inhibits the awareness of shared class membership and interests? Two dynamics come to mind: the liberal/conservative ideological divide, and the politically correct speech acts that differentiate the two.

The urban liberal technocrat feels morally superior to the "deplorable" wage earner because he 1) considers himself a "winner" and the "deplorable" a loser and 2) he has mastered the politically correct speech acts that signify his superior "progressive" status.  

Chief Strategist: King of the Internet Trolls or Dr. Strangelove?

NYTimes |  Mr. Bannon is in some ways a perplexing figure: a far-right ideologue who made his millions investing in “Seinfeld”; a former Goldman Sachs banker who has reportedly called himself a “Leninist” with a goal “to destroy the state” and “bring everything crashing down.” He has also called progressive women “a bunch of dykes” and, in a 2014 email to one of his editors, wrote of the Republican leadership, “Let the grassroots turn on the hate because that’s the ONLY thing that will make them do their duty.”

A few conservatives have spoken out against Mr. Bannon. Ben Shapiro, a former Breitbart News editor who resigned in protest last spring, said Mr. Bannon was a “vindictive, nasty figure.” Glenn Beck called him a “nightmare” and a “terrifying man.”

But most Republican officeholders have so far remained silent. Some have dismissed fears about Mr. Bannon. Other Republicans have praised him, like Reince Priebus, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, whom Mr. Trump announced as his chief of staff on Sunday, and who said Mr. Bannon could not be such a bad guy because he served in the Navy and went to Harvard Business School. Some saw the pick of Mr. Priebus as evidence that Mr. Trump would not be leaning so much on Mr. Bannon. But don’t be fooled by Mr. Priebus’s elevated title; in the press release announcing both hires, Mr. Bannon’s name appeared above Mr. Priebus’s. In a little more than two months Mr. Bannon, and his toxic ideology, will be sitting down the hall from the Oval Office.

Trump Supporters Not Rioting - Yet They Are the Radicalized Extremists...,

theatlantic |  Facebook, where nearly half of Americans get their news, has borne the brunt of the ire, both for creating echo-chambers of partisan news and for failing to promote high-quality information over false drivel. But online extremism researchers say America’s misinformation problem is bigger than Facebook. They are also pointing fingers at sites like 4chan, Twitter and Reddit, online free-for-alls that lack Facebook’s relatively strict stance on hate-speech and have allowed racist communities to flourish in recent years. These forums have grown angrier and more multitudinous since Trump announced his candidacy, and while it’s not yet clear how much they contributed to the triumph of Trump, they certainly lined up behind him.

“When we talk about online radicalization we always talk about Muslims. But the radicalization of white men online is at astronomical levels,” the journalist Siyanda Mohutsiwa, who said she has been following the so-called “alt-right” forums on Reddit for years, wrote in a Twitter thread earlier this week. “These online groups found young white men at their most vulnerable & convinced them liberals were colluding to destroy white Western manhood.”

 Groups that oppose immigration and political correctness, such as neo-Nazis, white nationalists, and the “alt-right,” have bloomed online in recent years. (It’s worth noting that these groups consider themselves distinct, and most don’t use the term “racist;” at most, they prefer the term “racialist.”) A study published in September by George Washington University extremism researcher J.M. Berger found “major American white nationalist movements on Twitter added about 22,000 followers since 2012, an increase of about 600 percent.” Berger found that people who followed white nationalists on Twitter referenced Trump “more than almost any other topic.”

Krugman Admitted He's Clueless...,

mishtalk |  In Thoughts for the Horrified Paul Krugman takes an unusual step of admitting he is clueless.

Let’s take a look.

So what do we do now? By “we” I mean all those left, center and even right who saw Donald Trump as the worst man ever to run for president and assumed that a strong majority of our fellow citizens would agree.

I’m not talking about rethinking political strategy. There will be a time for that — God knows it’s clear that almost everyone on the center-left, myself included, was clueless about what actually works in persuading voters.

Tuesday’s fallout will last for decades, maybe generations.

I particularly worry about climate change. We were at a crucial point, having just reached a global agreement on emissions and having a clear policy path toward moving America to a much greater reliance on renewable energy. Now it will probably fall apart, and the damage may well be irreversible.

Vacation in the Head

Krugman went on to say “I myself spent a large part of the Day After avoiding the news, doing personal things, basically taking a vacation in my own head.”

After taking a vacation in the head, he came back with the wrong answer.

Did Organized Crime Just Now Do This In America?

globalguerillas |  This year, an open source insurgency formed in the US and it took control of the White House.  I didn't write much about it this fall because it hit too close to home.  I knew what would happen.

What is an open source insurgency?  An open source insurgency is how a very large and very diverse group of people empowered by modern technology and without any formal organization, can defeat a very powerful opponent.

I first started writing about open source insurgencies during the war in Iraq over a decade ago.  During that war, over 100 insurgent groups with different motivations for fighting (tribal interests, pro-Baathist, pro-nationalist, pro-Saddam, and lots of jihadi flavors) used the dynamics of open source warfare to fight a global superpower to a standstill.  We saw it again a few years later in the political world, when during the Arab Spring an open source fueled protest toppled governments in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Syria.

Open source insurgencies and protests can arise spontaneously and they are very hard to stop once they get going since they are impervious to most forms of repressive counter-attack and political subversion.  For example, the open source movement propelling Trump forward made him impervious to attacks on his character.  It also eliminated any need for "ground game" or standard political organization and obviated any need for information disclosure and detailed policy papers. 

Of course, that doesn't mean you can't defeat an open source insurgency.  You can, but it requires a different approach.

Elected Officials are NOT an Accurate Representation of Voters’ Wishes.

medium |  The thing that has become the most clear to us this election year is that we don’t agree on the fundamental truths we thought we did.

I went to college in the part of Pennsylvania that definitely flipped the state for Trump. A good number of my friends are still living there, and have posted messages from what seems at this moment in history to be a completely different country.

Over the last several weeks I have watched dozens of my friends on Facebook de-friend one another. I have seen plenty of self-righteous posts flow across my news feed, along with deeply felt messages of fear, anger and more recently — existential despair.

On the other side I see reflections of joy, levity, gratitude and optimism for the future. It could not be more stark.

The thing that both groups have in common is very apparent: A sense of profound confusion about how the other side cannot understand their perspective.

This seemed to be building on a trend in social media that hit full tilt in the lead up to the election: Political divisions between us are greater than they ever have been, and are still getting worse by the day.

I don’t believe that the Media Elite, Donald Trump or the Alt Right are to blame for the state of our politics. They peddle influence and ideas, but they don’t change the actual makeup of our country. Elected officials are still a fairly accurate representation of voters’ wishes.

I also don’t believe this is inherently a reaction to the political overreach of the status quo. This discontent is part of something felt outside of our borders too. You do not have to look far to see this rising tide of hyper-nationalism going international.

The reason is much more subversive, and something we really haven’t been able to address as humans until now. I believe that the way we consume information has literally changed the kind of people we are.

Rhinoceritis

NYTimes |  On Aug. 19, 2015, shortly after midnight, the brothers Stephen and Scott Leader assaulted Guillermo Rodriguez. Rodriguez had been sleeping near a train station in Boston. The Leader brothers beat him with a metal pipe, breaking his nose and bruising his ribs, and called him a “wetback.” They urinated on him. “All these illegals need to be deported,” they are said to have declared during the attack. The brothers were fans of the candidate who would go on to win the Republican party’s presidential nomination. Told of the incident at the time, that candidate said: “People who are following me are very passionate. They love this country, and they want this country to be great again.”

That was the moment when my mental alarm bells, already ringing, went amok. There were many other astonishing events to come — the accounts of sexual violence, the evidence of racism, the promise of torture, the advocacy of war crimes — but the assault on Rodriguez, as well as the largely tolerant response to it, was a marker. Some people were outraged, but outrage soon became its own ineffectual reflex. Others found a rich vein of humor in the parade of obscenities and cruelties. Others simply took a view similar to that of the character Botard in Ionesco’s play: “I don’t mean to be offensive. But I don’t believe a word of it. No rhinoceros has ever been seen in this country!”

In the early hours of Nov. 9, 2016, the winner of the presidential election was declared. As the day unfolded, the extent to which a moral rhinoceritis had taken hold was apparent. People magazine had a giddy piece about the president-elect’s daughter and her family, a sequence of photos that they headlined “way too cute.” In The New York Times, one opinion piece suggested that the belligerent bigot’s supporters ought not be shamed. Another asked whether this president-elect could be a good president and found cause for optimism. Cable news anchors were able to express their surprise at the outcome of the election, but not in any way vocalize their fury. All around were the unmistakable signs of normalization in progress. So many were falling into line without being pushed. It was happening at tremendous speed, like a contagion. And it was catching even those whose plan was, like Dudard’s in “Rhinoceros,” to criticize “from the inside.”

Evil settles into everyday life when people are unable or unwilling to recognize it. It makes its home among us when we are keen to minimize it or describe it as something else. This is not a process that began a week or month or year ago. It did not begin with drone assassinations, or with the war on Iraq. Evil has always been here. But now it has taken on a totalitarian tone.

At the end of “Rhinoceros,” Daisy finds the call of the herd irresistible. Her skin goes green, she develops a horn, she’s gone. Berenger, imperfect, all alone, is racked by doubts. He is determined to keep his humanity, but looking in the mirror, he suddenly finds himself quite strange. He feels like a monster for being so out of step with the consensus. He is afraid of what this independence will cost him. But he keeps his resolve, and refuses to accept the horrible new normalcy. He’ll put up a fight, he says. “I’m not capitulating!”

Want to Understand How Trump Happened? Study Quantum Physics

qz |  Donald Trump’s election victory is only a shock if you have been looking at the world through simple equations. Classical physics is rooted Newton’s three laws, where an action has an equal reaction, objects at rest tend to stay there, and force equals mass times acceleration. Newton describes the observable world in ways that are logical. But long ago, scientists showed the underlying physical world can’t be explained with algebra. To understand the universe, classical physics had to incorporate quantum mechanics, which describes a micro-world of uncertainty and ambiguity that is harder to measure but defines our true reality. Likewise, as recent geopolitical shocks have proven, outdated methods are no longer capable or sufficient to explain global society’s complex and interconnected systems.

Quantum mechanics’ principles are actually quite clear: Units are difficult to quantify, and they’re in perpetual motion; invisible objects can occupy space; there are no causal certainties, only correlations and probabilities; gravity matters more than location; and meaning is derived relationally rather than from absolutes. Relatively is the rule. Indeed, the principles of quantum mechanics are, when explained in art, quite clear. Take this example:

Michael Frayn’s award-winning play Copenhagen presents multiple versions of what might have transpired when German physicist Werner Heisenberg paid a visit to his Danish mentor Niels Bohr in late 1941. Against the backdrop of an intense arms race between the US and Germany to develop atomic weapons that could determine the outcome of World War II, the two Nobel laureates debated the scientific aspects of nuclear fission and the psychology of nuclear deterrence, seamlessly blending physics and geopolitics in their discourse.

Seventy years later, another Nobel Prize-winning physicist, Leon Cooper of Brown University, began using Frayn’s play as a medium to instruct his undergraduate students. He recruited an ensemble of faculty, including the respected international-relations theorist Thomas Biersteker and a European historian, to co-teach the course. Uniquely, each class featured a live performance of scenes from the play by members of the Trinity Repertory Company of Providence, Rhode Island. Cooper issued a challenge to his students from the outset: “Can you understand the play if you don’t understand the physics?”

Today, in the wake of the Trump win, there is no more important question that we can ask about the emerging world order than this: Can we understand geopolitics if we don’t understand its physics?

A Different Theory of Quantum Consciousness

theatlantic |  The mere mention of “quantum consciousness” makes most physicists cringe, as the phrase seems to evoke the vague, insipid musings of a New Age guru. But if a new hypothesis proves to be correct, quantum effects might indeed play some role in human cognition. Matthew Fisher, a physicist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, raised eyebrows late last year when he published a paper in Annals of Physics proposing that the nuclear spins of phosphorus atoms could serve as rudimentary “qubits” in the brain—which would essentially enable the brain to function like a quantum computer.

As recently as 10 years ago, Fisher’s hypothesis would have been dismissed by many as nonsense. Physicists have been burned by this sort of thing before, most notably in 1989, when Roger Penrose proposed that mysterious protein structures called “microtubules” played a role in human consciousness by exploiting quantum effects. Few researchers believe such a hypothesis plausible. Patricia Churchland, a neurophilosopher at the University of California, San Diego, memorably opined that one might as well invoke “pixie dust in the synapses” to explain human cognition.

Fisher’s hypothesis faces the same daunting obstacle that has plagued microtubules: a phenomenon called quantum decoherence. To build an operating quantum computer, you need to connect qubits—quantum bits of information—in a process called entanglement. But entangled qubits exist in a fragile state. They must be carefully shielded from any noise in the surrounding environment. Just one photon bumping into your qubit would be enough to make the entire system “decohere,” destroying the entanglement and wiping out the quantum properties of the system. It’s challenging enough to do quantum processing in a carefully controlled laboratory environment, never mind the warm, wet, complicated mess that is human biology, where maintaining coherence for sufficiently long periods of time is well nigh impossible.

Over the past decade, however, growing evidence suggests that certain biological systems might employ quantum mechanics. In photosynthesis, for example, quantum effects help plants turn sunlight into fuel. Scientists have also proposed that migratory birds have a “quantum compass” enabling them to exploit Earth’s magnetic fields for navigation, or that the human sense of smell could be rooted in quantum mechanics.

Fisher’s notion of quantum processing in the brain broadly fits into this emerging field of quantum biology. Call it quantum neuroscience. He has developed a complicated hypothesis, incorporating nuclear and quantum physics, organic chemistry, neuroscience and biology. While his ideas have met with plenty of justifiable skepticism, some researchers are starting to pay attention. “Those who read his paper (as I hope many will) are bound to conclude: This old guy’s not so crazy,” wrote John Preskill, a physicist at the California Institute of Technology, after Fisher gave a talk there. “He may be on to something. At least he’s raising some very interesting questions.”

We Were Wrong About Consciousness Disappearing in Dreamless Sleep

sciencealert |  When it comes to dreamlessness, conventional wisdom states that consciousness disappears when we fall into a deep, dreamless sleep. 

But researchers have come up with a new way to define the different ways that we experience dreamlessness, and say there’s no evidence to suggest that our consciousness 'switches off' when we stop dreaming. In fact, they say the state of dreamlessness is way more complicated than we’d even imagined.

"[T]he idea that dreamless sleep is an unconscious state is not well-supported by the evidence," one of the researchers, Evan Thompson from the University of British Columbia in Canada, told Live Science.

Instead, he says the evidence points to the possibility of people having conscious experiences during all states of sleep - including deep sleep - and that could have implications for those accused of committing a crime while sleepwalking.

But first off, what exactly is dreamlessness?

Traditionally, dreamlessness is defined at that part of sleep that occurs between bouts of dreams - a time of deep sleep when your conscious experience is temporarily switched off. This is different from those times when you simply cannot remember your dreams once you've woken up.

As dream researchers from the University of California, Santa Cruz explain, most people over the age of 10 dream at least four to six times per night during a stage of sleep called REM, or Rapid Eye Movement. (Studies suggest that children under age 10 only dream during roughly 20 percent of their REM periods.)

Considering REM periods can vary in length from 5 to 10 minutes for the first REM period of the night to as long as 30-34 minutes later in the night, researchers have suggested that each dream is probably no longer than 34 minutes each. 

While there's some evidence that we can dream during the non-REM sleep that occurs 1 or 2 hours before waking up, if you’re getting your 7 hours of sleep each night, that still leaves a lot of room for dreamlessness.

Thompson and his colleagues suggest that the traditional view of dreamless as being an unconscious state of deep sleep is far too simplistic, arguing that it's not a uniform state of unconsciousness, but actually includes a range of experiences involving certain stimuli and cognitive activity.

Can Science Crack Consciousness?

thescientist |  Ever since I switched my research focus from theoretical physics to neuroscience many years ago, my professional life has focused on the “easy problem” of consciousness—exploring relationships between brain activity and mind. So-called signatures of consciousness, such as increased blood oxygen or electrical activity patterns in different brain regions, are recorded using several different imaging methods, including electroencephalography (EEG) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).

The “hard problem”— how and why neural activity produces our conscious awareness—presents a much more profound puzzle. Like many scientists and nonscientists alike, I have a long-running fascination with the mystery of consciousness, which serves as the inspiration for my latest book, The New Science of Consciousness.

A new approach to studying consciousness is emerging based on collaborations between neuroscientists and complexity scientists. Such partnerships encompass subfields of mathematics, physics, psychology, psychiatry, philosophy, and more. This cross-disciplinary effort aims to reveal fresh insights into the major challenges of both the easy and the hard problems. How does human consciousness differ from the apparent consciousness of other animals? Do we enjoy genuine free will or are we slaves to unconscious systems? Above all, how can the interactions of a hundred billion nerve cells lead to the mysterious condition called consciousness?

A Better Way to Crack the Brain

nature |  At least half a dozen major initiatives to study the mammalian brain have sprung up across the world in the past five years. This wave of national and international projects has arisen in part from the realization that deciphering the principles of brain function will require collaboration on a grand scale.

Yet it is unclear whether any of these mega-projects, which include scientists from many subdisciplines, will be effective. Researchers with complementary skill sets often team up on grant proposals. But once funds are awarded, the labs involved often return to work on their parts of the project in relative isolation.

We propose an alternative strategy: grass-roots collaborations involving researchers who may be distributed around the globe, but who are already working on the same problems. Such self-motivated groups could start small and expand gradually over time. But they would essentially be built from the ground up, with those involved encouraged to follow their own shared interests rather than responding to the strictures of funding sources or external directives.

This may seem obvious, but such collaboration is stymied by technical and sociological barriers. And the conventional strategies — constructing collaborations top-down or using funding strings to incentivize them — do not overcome those barriers.

Open Thread: Who is Playing This Hand?

The Trump card is always the most powerful in the deck, it is also the most feared and unpredictable. Trump is the perfect wrecking ball and that's obviously a YUUUGE part of his mission. 

He has wrecked the GOP. 

He has wrecked the DNC. 

He has wrecked the MSM. 

He has exposed the fraudulent election process, phony candidates, fake platforms, fictitious campaigns, and fabricated debates. 

You don't get to be a Manhattan real estate mogul without the backing of certain oligarchs. You don't get to participate in the gambling "industry" without the backing of certain oligarchs. With the exception of ancient gambling oligarch Sheldon Adelson, all the known power brokers who brought Trump to the dance back in the day are dead and gone. 

So who, exactly is holding the Trump card about to be put in play in the White House? 

What are their objectives aside from clearing the decks of all the useless, impotent, and limp-wristed oxygen thieves who've demonstrated a profound inability to equitably govern and to steer the American ship of state onto a course of sustainable profitability? 

What's Behind Your Preznit Elect

WaPo |  To examine the relationship between Trump and Cohn, The Post reviewed court records, books about the men and newspaper and magazine stories from the era, along with documents about Cohn obtained from the FBI through a Freedom of Information Act request. The Post interviewed Trump and others who knew both men.

When they met, Trump, 27, tall and handsome, was at the start of his career and living off money he was earning in the family business. Cohn, 46, short and off-putting, was near the peak of his power and considered by some to be among the most reviled Americans in the 20th century.

Cohn could be charismatic and witty, and he hosted lavish parties that included politicians, celebrities and journalists. A wall at the Upper East Side townhouse where he lived and worked was filled with signed photographs of luminaries such as Hoover and Richard Nixon.

Alan Dershowitz, a professor emeritus at Harvard Law School and a renowned constitutional scholar, said he was surprised when he finally got to know Cohn. “I expected to hate him, but I did not,” Dershowitz told The Post. “I found him charming.”

There were legions of Cohn detractors. “He was a source of great evil in this society,” Victor A. Kovner, a Democratic activist in New York City and First Amendment lawyer, told The Post. “He was a vicious, Red-baiting source of sweeping wrongdoing.”

In interviews with The Post, Trump maintained that Cohn was merely his attorney, stressing that he was only one of many of Cohn’s clients in New York. Trump also played down the influence of Cohn on his aggressive tactics and rhetoric, saying: “I don’t think I got that from Roy at all. I think I’ve had a natural instinct for that.”

Trump said he goes on the offensive only to defend himself.

“I don’t feel I insult people. I don’t feel I insult people. I try and get to the facts and I don’t feel I insult people,” he said. “Now, if I’m insulted I will counterattack, or if something is unfair I will counterattack, but I don’t feel like I insult people. I don’t want to do that. But if I’m attacked, I will counterattack.”

Journalists and contemporaries of both men, including a close political ally of Trump, said there was more to the relationship than Trump now acknowledges. Cohn himself once said he was “not only Donald’s lawyer but also one of his close friends.” Roger Stone, a political operative who met Trump through Cohn, said their association was grounded in business, but he also described the lawyer as “like a cultural guide to Manhattan” for Trump into the worlds of celebrity and power. “Roy was more than his personal lawyer,” Stone told The Post. “And, of course, Trump was a trophy client for Roy.”

Investigative reporter Wayne Barrett, who spent dozens of hours interviewing Cohn and Trump beginning in the 1970s, once wrote in “Trump: The Deals and the Downfall” that Cohn began to “assume a role in Donald’s life far transcending that of a lawyer. He became Donald’s mentor, his constant adviser.”

Barrett now says Cohn’s stamp on Trump is obvious. “I just look at him and see Roy,” Barrett said in an interview. “Both of them are attack dogs.”

Roy Marcus Cohn

wikipedia |  Roy Marcus Cohn (/koʊn/; February 20, 1927 – August 2, 1986) was an American attorney who became famous during Senator Joseph McCarthy's investigations into Communist activity in the United States during the Second Red Scare. Cohn gained special prominence during the Army–McCarthy hearings. He was also a member of the U.S. Department of Justice's prosecution team at the espionage trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.

LibTARD Elites Never Saw That Ass-Whooping Coming And Can't Accept How and Why It Happened...,

michaelmoore | Here are the 5 reasons Trump is going to win:

I can see what you’re doing right now. You’re shaking your head wildly – “No, Mike, this won’t happen!” Unfortunately, you are living in a bubble that comes with an adjoining echo chamber where you and your friends are convinced the American people are not going to elect an idiot for president. You alternate between being appalled at him and laughing at him because of his latest crazy comment or his embarrassingly narcissistic stance on everything because everything is about him. And then you listen to Hillary and you behold our very first female president, someone the world respects, someone who is whip-smart and cares about kids, who will continue the Obama legacy because that is what the American people clearly want! Yes! Four more years of this!

You need to exit that bubble right now. You need to stop living in denial and face the truth which you know deep down is very, very real. Trying to soothe yourself with the facts – “77% of the electorate are women, people of color, young adults under 35 and Trump cant win a majority of any of them!” – or logic – “people aren’t going to vote for a buffoon or against their own best interests!” – is your brain’s way of trying to protect you from trauma. Like when you hear a loud noise on the street and you think, “oh, a tire just blew out,” or, “wow, who’s playing with firecrackers?” because you don’t want to think you just heard someone being shot with a gun. It’s the same reason why all the initial news and eyewitness reports on 9/11 said “a small plane accidentally flew into the World Trade Center.” We want to – we need to – hope for the best because, frankly, life is already a shit show and it’s hard enough struggling to get by from paycheck to paycheck. We can’t handle much more bad news. So our mental state goes to default when something scary is actually, truly happening. The first people plowed down by the truck in Nice spent their final moments on earth waving at the driver whom they thought had simply lost control of his truck, trying to tell him that he jumped the curb: “Watch out!,” they shouted. “There are people on the sidewalk!”

theintercept |  1. Democrats have already begun flailing around trying to blame anyone and everyone they can find — everyone except themselves — for last night’s crushing defeat of their party.

You know the drearily predictable list of their scapegoats: Russia, WikiLeaks, James Comey, Jill Stein, Bernie Bros, The Media, news outlets (including, perhaps especially, The Intercept) that sinned by reporting negatively on Hillary Clinton. Anyone who thinks that what happened last night in places like Ohio, Pennsylvania, Iowa, and Michigan can be blamed on any of that is drowning in self-protective ignorance so deep that it’s impossible to express in words.

When a political party is demolished, the principal responsibility belongs to one entity: the party that got crushed. It’s the job of the party and the candidate, and nobody else, to persuade the citizenry to support them and find ways to do that. Last night, the Democrats failed, resoundingly, to do that, and any autopsy or liberal think piece or pro-Clinton pundit commentary that does not start and finish with their own behavior is one that is inherently worthless.

The Sweet-Salty Deliciousness of All Those Tears of Unfathomable Sorrow....,

powerlineblog |  This email blast comes from the Office of Multicultural Affairs at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell. This is not a joke:

From: Otero, Elsie F
Date: Wed, Nov 9, 2016 at 10:49 AM
Subject: Post Election Support

Dear Students,

We at the Multicultural Affairs Office hope this email reaches you and you are doing ok. We know many of you stayed up waiting to hear of the election results. These are unprecedented times. The nation as well as our community is reacting in many different ways. We are reaching out to each of you because we know that this was an intense election and we are already hearing a number of reactions, feelings and emotions. This is a critical time to make sure that you, your friends, classmates, neighbors are doing ok and seeking the appropriate support especially if they need a place to process or work through what they’re feeling.

You may hear or notice reactions both immediate and in the coming weeks, some anticipated and many that may be difficult to articulate or be shared. While it may take some time to fully take in all the recent events, please also know that the OMA office is here for you. Our UMass Lowell community is here for you. Do not hesitate at all to come in or ask for support.

Today there is a Post-election self-care session from 12-4pm in Moloney. The event will include cookies, mandalas, stress reduction techniques and mindfulness activities. Counseling and Health Services will also be available. We have sent out messages through our Social Media sites as well as encouraging students to drop in all week. Above all, take good care and know that there is strength in our community that you can lean on.

Kind regards,
Office of Multicultural Affairs Staff

Leslie Wong, Director
Elsie Otero, Associate Director
Francine Coston, Associate Director
Allyson Lynch, Coordinator
Michelle, Zohlman, Graduate Fellow

Elsie Otero
Associate Director, Office of Multicultural Affairs
University of Massachusetts Lowell
220 Pawtucket Street, Suite 366
Lowell, MA 01845

Don't Cry Yet My Sweets, We're Only At Step 3.

jayhanson |  Organisms evolved a bias to maximize fitness by maximizing power. With greater power, there is greater opportunity to allocate energy to reproduction and survival, and therefore, an organism that captures and utilizes more energy than another organism in a population will have a fitness advantage.

Individual organisms cooperate to form social groups and generate more power. Differential power generation and accumulation result in a hierarchical group structure. 

“Politics” is power used by social organisms to control others. Not only are human groups never alone, they cannot control their neighbors’ behavior. Each group must confront the real possibility that its neighbors will grow its numbers and attempt to take resources from them. Therefore, the best political tactic for groups to survive in such a milieu is not to live in ecological balance with slow growth, but to grow rapidly and be able to fend off and take resources from others[5].

The inevitable “overshoot” eventually leads to decreasing power attainable for the group with lower-ranking members suffering first. Low-rank members will form subgroups and coalitions to demand a greater share of power from higher-ranking individuals who will resist by forming their own coalitions to maintain it. Meanwhile, social conflict will intensify as available power continues to fall.

Eventually, members of the weakest group (high or low rank) are forced to “disperse.”[6] Those members of the weak group who do not disperse are killed,[7] enslaved, or in modern times imprisoned. By most estimates, 10 to 20 percent of all the people who lived in Stone-Age societies died at the hands of other humans.[8] The process of overshoot, followed by forced dispersal, may be seen as a sort of repetitive pumping action — a collective behavioral loop — that drove humans into every inhabitable niche of our planet.

Here is a synopsis of the behavioral loop described above:

Step 1. Individuals and groups evolved a bias to maximize fitness by maximizing power, which requires over-reproduction and/or over-consumption of natural resources (overshoot), whenever systemic constraints allow it. Differential power generation and accumulation result in a hierarchical group structure.

Step 2. Energy is always limited, so overshoot eventually leads to decreasing power available to the group, with lower-ranking members suffering first.

Step 3. Diminishing power availability creates divisive subgroups within the original group. Low-rank members will form subgroups and coalitions to demand a greater share of power from higher-ranking individuals, who will resist by forming their own coalitions to maintain power.

Step 4. Violent social strife eventually occurs among subgroups who demand a greater share of the remaining power.

Step 5. The weakest subgroups (high or low rank) are either forced to disperse to a new territory, are killed, enslaved, or imprisoned.

Step 6. Go back to step 1.

The above loop was repeated countless thousands of times during the millions of years that we were evolving[9]. This behavior is inherent in the architecture of our minds — is entrained in our biological material — and will be repeated until we go extinct. Carrying capacity will decline[10] with each future iteration of the overshoot loop, and this will cause human numbers to decline until they reach levels not seen since the Pleistocene.

Intellectual Yet Idiot: Don't Let the Door Hit You in Your Little Narrow Ass...,

medium |  What we have been seeing worldwide, from India to the UK to the US, is the rebellion against the inner circle of no-skin-in-the-game policymaking “clerks” and journalists-insiders, that class of paternalistic semi-intellectual experts with some Ivy league, Oxford-Cambridge, or similar label-driven education who are telling the rest of us 1) what to do, 2) what to eat, 3) how to speak, 4) how to think… and 5) who to vote for.

But the problem is the one-eyed following the blind: these self-described members of the “intelligentsia” can’t find a coconut in Coconut Island, meaning they aren’t intelligent enough to define intelligence hence fall into circularities — but their main skill is capacity to pass exams written by people like them. With psychology papers replicating less than 40%, dietary advice reversing after 30 years of fatphobia, macroeconomic analysis working worse than astrology, the appointment of Bernanke who was less than clueless of the risks, and pharmaceutical trials replicating at best only 1/3 of the time, people are perfectly entitled to rely on their own ancestral instinct and listen to their grandmothers (or Montaigne and such filtered classical knowledge) with a better track record than these policymaking goons.

Indeed one can see that these academico-bureaucrats who feel entitled to run our lives aren’t even rigorous, whether in medical statistics or policymaking. They cant tell science from scientism — in fact in their eyes scientism looks more scientific than real science. (For instance it is trivial to show the following: much of what the Cass-Sunstein-Richard Thaler types — those who want to “nudge” us into some behavior — much of what they would classify as “rational” or “irrational” (or some such categories indicating deviation from a desired or prescribed protocol) comes from their misunderstanding of probability theory and cosmetic use of first-order models.) They are also prone to mistake the ensemble for the linear aggregation of its components as we saw in the chapter extending the minority rule.

The Intellectual Yet Idiot is a production of modernity hence has been accelerating since the mid twentieth century, to reach its local supremum today, along with the broad category of people without skin-in-the-game who have been invading many walks of life. Why? Simply, in most countries, the government’s role is between five and ten times what it was a century ago (expressed in percentage of GDP). The IYI seems ubiquitous in our lives but is still a small minority and is rarely seen outside specialized outlets, think tanks, the media, and universities — most people have proper jobs and there are not many openings for the IYI. Beware the semi-erudite who thinks he is an erudite. He fails to naturally detect sophistry.

The Singularly Self-Absorbed Whining Started Before the Election was Even Decided...,

WaPo |  There are lots of media stories revolving around campaign 2016. We can thank CNN for many of them, including the drawbacks of placing political hacks on the payroll of prominent news outlets and of spending too much time airing Trump rallies. Fake news stories also have had a glorious run, as have the ethics of reporting on the FBI and the Justice Department; fact-checking organizations are entitled to a long post-election vacation; and journalism professors will be referring for decades to Election 2016 as a crucible of false equivalence.

The media story of the 2016 campaign, however, is the anti-Semitic backlash against journalists critical of Donald Trump. Political hacks at cable networks, after all, aren’t exactly a new thing; nor are fake news stories or overworked fact-checkers; and people have been griping about false equivalence before Donald Trump came along and invalidated all political comparisons. The horrific and voluminous anti-Semitic attacks against journalists writing about Trump, however, are new and very frightening. “I myself have never experienced something like this,” says Eisner, 60, whose resume includes more than two decades at the Philadelphia Inquirer.

“This” is the subject of a recent exhaustive report by the Anti-Defamation League under the title, “Anti-Semitic Targeting of Journalists During the 2016 Presidential Campaign.” The study focused on the playground for this rash of hatred — Twitter, that is. Between August 2015 and July 2016, it found that 800 journalists were targeted in almost 20,000 anti-Semitic tweets. The top 10 targets got it the worst, receiving 83 percent of the Twitter-born anti-Semitism. As to the provenance of this madness, the ADL report chooses its words with precision: “There is evidence that a considerable number of the anti-Semitic tweets targeting journalists originate with people identifying themselves as Trump supporters, ‘conservatives’ or extreme right-wing elements.”

What Hath Trump Wrought?

buchanan |  “If I don’t win, this will be the greatest waste of time, money and energy in my lifetime,” says Donald Trump.

Herewith, a dissent. Whatever happens Tuesday, Trump has made history and has forever changed American politics.

Though a novice in politics, he captured the Party of Lincoln with the largest turnout of primary voters ever, and he has inflicted wounds on the nation’s ruling class from which it may not soon recover.

Bush I and II, Mitt Romney, the neocons and the GOP commentariat all denounced Trump as morally and temperamentally unfit. Yet, seven of eight Republicans are voting for Trump, and he drew the largest and most enthusiastic crowds of any GOP nominee.

Not only did he rout the Republican elites, he ash-canned their agenda and repudiated the wars into which they plunged the country.

Trump did not create the forces that propelled his candidacy. But he recognized them, tapped into them, and unleashed a gusher of nationalism and populism that will not soon dissipate.

Whatever happens Tuesday, there is no going back now.

How could the Republican establishment advance anew the trade and immigration policies that their base has so thunderously rejected?

How can the GOP establishment credibly claim to speak for a party that spent the last year cheering a candidate who repudiated the last two Republican presidents and the last two Republican nominees?

Do mainstream Republicans think that should Trump lose a Bush Restoration lies ahead? The dynasty is as dead as the Romanovs.

The media, whose reputation has sunk to Congressional depths, has also suffered a blow to its credibility.

Its hatred of Trump has been almost manic, and WikiLeaks revelations of the collusion between major media and Clintonites have convinced skeptics that the system is rigged and the referees of democracy are in the tank.

But it is the national establishment that has suffered most.

The Trump candidacy exposed what seems an unbridgeable gulf between this political class and the nation in whose name it purports to speak.