Prophesy in a Small Package: The Fifth Risk

 

Michael Lewis's "The Fifth Risk" has three salient virtues:

1. Brevity: 219 pages

2. Originality: It's really a book about why we need government

3. Perspicacity: Published in 2018 and focused mostly on the failure of Donald Trump's pirate band to engage in transition, it is the story of what happens when smart warnings go unheeded. Lewis asks an under secretary of Agriculture what his greatest fear is looking ahead-- in the form of "What do you worry about what Trump might do to the department of Agriculture?" and he answered with a single word: Wildfires.

Having spent most of a chapter describing the myriad responsibilities of the Department of Agriculture, which, as Lewis says, is really the department of science, having talked about its roll in keeping geese away from airports, its food programs for rural poor, its meat and food inspection functions--remember Mad Cow Disease--its role in preventing cruelty to animals, its forest management service, that word "Wildfires" seems to come out of the blue. And yet, spoken in 2017, this obscure bureaucrat, Robert Bonnie, knew what Trump and his band were afraid to know, as the vast wildfires of 2020 proved.

Re-reading this book now, two years later, it is a beacon in the dark.

Democrats are forever apologizing for "big government" but Lewis lays out in sufficient detail how indispensable government, even big, federal government is in the life and well being of the nation. 

He begins with the Department of Energy, which like most of the departments in the federal government is misnamed, having outgrown its original missions, and  now midway through re-reading the book and Mad Dog has worked his way back up to the Agriculture Department.

Energy was the obvious place to begin, if only for comic effect. Trump appointed Rick Perry to head it, presumably because during debates Perry had said he would eliminate three departments: Education, Commerce and...he could not recall the third, but later added "Energy."  So he seemed the ideal man for the job to head (i.e. to destroy) the Department of Energy.

Unlike other Trump appointees who were sent to their posts to destroy the organizations they headed, Perry actually slowly learned a little about what the department does. (As opposed, for example, to Wilbur Mills who begrudgingly agreed to be briefed about his new digs at the Commerce Department only to learn that is really the department of statistics, and he erupted: "I thought this was about business! All you talk about is numbers!) 

DOE, it turns out is responsible for the safety of all those nuclear missiles in their silos, which have a tendency to age, deteriorate and leak. It also funds research into energy related things like solar panels, fracking and electric cars. "Every Tesla you see on the road came form a facility financed by the DOE." Of course, whatever you think of fracking, it was the pivotal technology which made American energy dependent and freed us from reliance on those miscreant Saudis.

One fourth of the budget of DOE, many billions, is tied up in trying to keep nuclear waste from seeping into the Colorado river from the site of production of our nuclear arsenal in eastern Washington, Hanford, where the plutonium was made, buried and then sought out ground water like a viper hungering for vital organs. 

Oh, and before we leave the DOE, there is that little matter of the electric grid and the incident, mostly unreported, where "a well informed sniper" with a high powered rifle shot up exactly the right transformers  and cut the cables to the substation to prevent it from communicating. This substation, in San Jose, fed Apple and Google. Imagine what well informed snipers could do if they organized to take out grids on the East Coast.

As Lewis noted, people are pretty good at responding to a crisis that has already happened, like Pearl Harbor. Never going to let that happen again! But imagining what could happen--suppose somebody flew airplanes into a world center of finance in Manhattan--that we don't want to think about. Why upset yourself with scary ideas?

Why, indeed. Of course, imagining scary things is exactly what prompted Einstein to write that famous letter to Franklin Roosevelt, who read it and started the Manhattan project. Einstein had learned of the German work on nuclear fission and he imagined a risk. Fortunately, FDR was not inclined to seek the comfort of ignorance.

Most people are at least dimly aware the internet and GPS are government inventions.

But if you were elected to "drain the swamp" which translates: Kill government or shrink it down to a size you can drown it in a bathtub, then you do not want to know what that would cost you, or how it would put you and those you love--assuming you love anyone other than yourself--at risk.

Lewis observes: 

"Here is where the Trump administration's willful ignorance plays a role. If your ambition is to maximize short term gain without  regard to the long-term cost, you are better off not knowing the cost. If you want to preserve your personal immunity to the hard problems, it's better never to really understand those problems. There is an upside to ignorance, and a downside to knowledge. Knowledge makes life messier. It makes it a bit more difficult for a person who wishes to shrink the world to a worldview."

So when Trump sent his men to the various departments, none of them were sent to learn anything about the work of those departments, they were sent to hunt. They demanded lists of employees who had attending conferences on climate control or solar panels. They were seeking out those nasty knowledge seekers in the various departments just as Joe McCarthy, one of Trump's heroes, had sought out "Reds" in the State Department in the Red Scare of the 1950's. 

The core Trump value, which is really the core value of his voters, is the desire to remain ignorant, to stop the search for new knowledge, to simply repeat a mantra, "Freedom!" or "Make America Great!"

In this, Trump and his acolytes are nothing new; they are in fact a regression to the Middle Ages, where knowledge was considered the great threat. People who believe they cannot learn new things cling to their guns and their religion, as Mr. Obama so keenly observed. It's not really socialism or elitism which strikes fear into the heart of the Proud Boys, it's the scary idea of new knowledge. 

Joe Biden is not the smartest man who has ever won the Presidency, but he is brave enough to look at the potential for the new and not be terrified but to be excited. He wants a "moon shot" to "cure cancer." As if there is just one disease, cancer. But his idea is that progress is not to be feared but to be pursued and applauded. 

Look at those defeated coal miners, whose wives say, "We don't want re-training. My husband is 50 years old. All he knows is digging coal. He can't learn anything new now." 

At least they were honest. 

And, in one sense, Trump is honest in that same way: I'm just as stupid as you are, and as ignorant and I don't need to know anything new. I'm rich and I fly around on my own private jet and that's fine with me."

Transgender Politics and the End of the Republic

If ever Jim Jordan, the Freedom Caucus, Rush Limbaugh and the folks at Breitbart could conspire to dream up the perfect spider wasp to insinuate itself into the internal organs of the Democratic Party and left wingers everywhere, then transgender nation provides it.

There are certain cases which, once swallowed by a defender of the faith, can cause an internal meltdown: One classic case of a poison pill is the Mad Cow paradigm for libertarians. 

  Ask a true libertarian, who sees no justifiable role for government, who wants to shrink the government down so small you can drown it in a bath tub, about the proper role of government in the case of a farmer who has a herd suffering from Mad Cow Disease and he dissolves before your eyes:

Leftie: So you say we do not need a Department of Agriculture, a Food and Drug Administration or a Center for Disease Control?

Libertarian: Absolutely!

Leftie: So when farmer Brown wants to sell his herd of cattle suffering from Mad Cow Disease to meat packing plants making hamburgers,  you would say the government has no business depriving him of his property and livelihood through the heavy hand of government?

Libertarian: Well, the market can regulate that.

Leftie: Mad Cow Disease is a prion disease, and if you cook the infected meat you do not destroy it. It enters your body and ensconces itself in your brain and spinal cord, silently, but 10-20 years later, you die as a writhing mass of drooling demented protoplasm.  No market force can remedy that because it all happens long after dollars have changed hands and statutes of limitations expired.

Receptor disorder: XY chromosomes

Now you are faced with one flayed open Libertarian.

Something like that happens when a right winger confronts the Leftie on transgender medicine, but this time it's the Leftie who melts down, because his own fundamental, absolutist principles tether him to positions which rapidly become absurd.

The Leftie is committed to certain principles, just as fervently as the Libertarian was committed to his principles:

1. Demeaning and disparaging people because of their sexual preferences of sense of self is cruel and wrong.

2. Tolerance of a wide variety of belief and self actualization is paramount to a free society.

3. History has shown how damaging and unfair the treatment of homosexuals was throughout the 20th century, with efforts made to "deprogram" homosexuals.

We accept these truths to be self evident.

But what do you do with the person who wants to say Susan is going to town and winds up saying, "Susan says they are going to town." ?

We have a crisis of the pronoun, you see, because Susan is gender fluid, does not consider herself either a she or a he, but something in between. 

And her best friend, Pat,  is a person who though born a boy, has discovered he is actually not a he, but a she in a male body and so is now taking high doses of estrogen and considering having his penis and testicles removed surgically. 

Pat's is living with Suzanne, who is a lesbian. They are lovers. They want to have a baby but there are problems.  The insurance company refuses to pay for in vitro fertilization at $10,000 a pop a cost which the insurance company will pass on to the American public.

So what to do? 

When this case was presented to the psychiatrist, Paul McHugh, he asked: Well, what kind of sex are Pat and Suzanne having? If Pat's penis goes into Suzanne's vagina, is she really a lesbian and is he really now a she? If this is not happening, what is? When they make love, does Pat get an erection? Does he ejaculate?  If so, why is in vitro necessary?

Paul McHugh, MD

Paul McHugh is a psychiatrist, who left Cornell to head the Johns Hopkins department, but when he arrived he was asked to help with the Hopkins Transgender Medicine Clinic, which included Urology, Endocrinology, Surgery and Psychiatry. McHugh did his homework and was shocked to see the suicide rate among patients in the clinic approached 40%. (This turns out to be not an anomaly, as even today most Transgender Clinics report similar numbers.)

This disturbing suicide rate among patients was then and continues to be written off by the directors of these clinics as being attributable not to any failure of the clinics but to the severe antipathy faced by these patients as they are berated and hated by American society at large.

But McHugh asked a different question: What if these patients are committing suicide because of a failure of the clinic to meet their needs, or worse, because of the therapies the clinic offered?

Until he had the answers to these questions, he withdrew Psychiatry from the Clinic, which caused an explosion of recrimination both within Hopkins--medical students and professors alike refused to talk to him--but when word got out, a host of attacks launched on social media. McHugh was imposing his 20th century Catholic beliefs on needy transgender patients, denying they had a disease, and he was as bad as those doctors who wanted to force homosexuals into "deprogramming" clinics in the 20th century. 

Semenya: Androgen receptor dysfunction

Of course, McHugh was saying nothing of the kind.  Homosexuals did not seek therapy from clinics or doctors. They did not need hormonal therapy to achieve their goals of leading a happy, normal life. They did not have 40% suicide rates, even though they faced horrific discrimination, had been excluded from church, jobs, social clubs.

"Gender dysphoria"  is a different thing altogether, McHugh postulated. If gender dysphoria can be defined as a sense by an individual that the role he or she had been assigned, and in fact the anatomy he or she possesses is different from what they feel inside and in fact is simply wrong.

McHugh wondered whether the real model for transgenders who want to go from male to female or from female to male is in fact not homosexuality at all, but anorexia nervosa.

The patient with anorexia nervosa, typically a young female, who is five feet seven inches tall and weighs 90 pounds, looks in a mirror at her body and says, "I am SO fat!"

That, McHugh calls "a wrong idea." And that wrong idea takes control of the patient's life and ultimately ruins or ends it. Few people would argue the patient should be accommodated, should be helped to lose weight and to maintain such a low weight or be assisted in continuing to driving it downward. 

But when a 13 year old girl tells her parents or the doctors at the transgender clinic she feels like a boy trapped in a girl's body, that cannot be a wrong idea and anyone suggesting otherwise is like those old doctors who tried to convince homosexuals they had to be deprogrammed and changed to conform to society's demands.

5 A reductase: Girls at birth, boys at 12

Complicating all this is the well studied arena of disorders of sexual differentiation, which by the mid 1970's had been explored biochemically and genetically and which continues to be studied today.

What has happened, of course, is doctors who never understood the disorders of sexual differentiation science have conflated these disorders with "gender dysphoria" as if the gender dysphoric patient is simply another variety of patients afflicted with a disorder of sexual differentiation.

But there is a substantial difference: In the case of biochemical disorders of sexual differentiation, the hormonal and neurological mechanisms have been discovered and defined and can sometimes be treated, but none of that has been possible (yet) for gender dysphoria. What makes it even more complicated is that way back in the 1970's some patients with some types of biochemically induced disorders of sexual differentiation did complain of the same phenomenon: Some said they never felt like a girl, even though they had been identified as a girl at birth, and raised as a girl. They were, in fact, in many important ways, boys in girls' bodies, just as the gender dysphoric patients say today. And when science finally caught up with these individuals, it was discovered that girl was XY (as opposed to the normal XX female chromosomal complement). There were even some villages in the Dominican Republic, where there was lots of consanguinity (intermarriage) where the children were given gender neutral names--the Spanish equivalent of Pat, Chris or Robin)--because at age 12 some of the village "girls" grew penises and developed into strapping boys. (The five alpha reductase deficiency.) These were boys who really were trapped in girls' bodies and in fact, transformed themselves (transitioned) at puberty.

Penis at 12 patient

But these folks are a far cry from today's Transgender Clinic populations, where the vast majority of patients feeling trapped in a body of the wrong sex, have no identifiable biochemical abnormality, no genetic abnormality; from the point of view of male and female hormone levels, of chromosomes, of genes (the SHY gene) these girls saying they want to be boys or boys saying they want to be girls, by all tests known to man, have no identifiable "reason" to feel this way.

Of course, it is possible we simply are not smart enough yet, do not have the biochemical tests yet to understand why they feel that way. But until we do, these people are said to have a "psychiatric" disorder. Or, no, we cannot say "disorder." These people should not be called "abnormal," be "accused" of having a disease. We should be more open minded (a liberal absolute), more accepting of differences, and by all means, Heaven forbid, we should not be judgmental!

In some of those 1970's patients who were raised as girls but feeling like boys, until their underlying biochemical problem was identified, the question was raised: How did this boy know? He never wanted to play with dolls or do girlie things. He always chased around playing war with the boys, although his testosterone levels were normal female. What happened? The tentative explanation was that during the "first puberty" which happens during fetal life, a time when male hormone in the male fetus surges, just enough male hormone was made in these boys who were identified as girls, to condition parts of the brain where male and female behavior are programmed. This is different, apparently, from parts of the brain where sexual preference is programmed. But all of this remains an unproven hypothesis.

At Mad Dog's last trek through the international Endocrine Society meetings he went to two sessions which alarmed him greatly, as a sequence.

#1 Abuse of Anabolic Hormones:  This was a session given by a professor from the University of Michigan, who we will call Dr. Apologist. He present the case of a patient who is very familiar to any practicing endocrinologist. 

This patient is a twenty something man referred for "hypo T." That is, low blood testosterone levels. He arrives at the office, often in form covering clothes but in the exam room, with his shirt off, you see two things: Massive musculature with trapezius, pectoralis, bicep and deltoids which would put Arnold Schwartzeneger to shame. There is also a hint of excess breast tissue ("man boobs".) Looking at his biochemical testing: the tell tale biochemical profile of someone who have been injecting industrial doses of testosterone for months to years but then stopped about 6 weeks before having his bloods drawn.  The patient is clearly getting testosterone from some source, likely among his gym rat friends but now he wants a more reliable, less expensive source from the doctor. 

Endocrinologists from the Netherlands in the audience noted that this is such a common group of patients they have actually established "Androgen Abuse Clinics" there, where patients are treated as if they have any other sort of drug addiction problem, sign contracts to gradually taper off in a classic "detox" mode. These patients look in the mirror at their Incredible Hulk bodies and see a 98 pound weakling.

#2 Transgender Medicine: From that session, Mad Dog walked into the session with a panel of the heads of Transgender Medicine Clinics at university hospitals from Boston to New York to San Francisco.

A case of a female to male transgender was presented. This patient had been given doses of testosterone to help grow lip hair and also to suppress menstruation, which continued despite the male hormones and served as a reminder to the patient of her own persistent internal organs. The doses are what knocked the socks off Mad Dog.

A normal dose of testosterone is 200 mg every two weeks. This patient was getting 300 mg three times a week, thats 3600 mg a month compared to 400 mg--nine times the recommended, "safe" dose. None of those "androgen abuse" patients had anything on that transgender clinic patient. 

Mad Dog texted Dr. Apologist from the prior session to ask how this could be sanctioned by the Endocrine Society and Dr. Apologist texted back that this was not androgen abuse because it was "gender affirming" therapy.

Notice, when the man uses 1/9 of that dose to maintain his bulk, he is treated as a substance abuser, a man very like the patient with anorexia nervosa, who has the wrong idea about his body, but if the Transgender Clinic doctor prescribes that dose, he is "gender affirming."

Which brings us back to why Transgender Clinics will spell the end of the Republic.

Once Jim Jordan gets ahold of this craziness, those who want to embrace Gay, Queer, Transgender rights will cling to their desire to be warm and accommodating, to not make people who suffer gender dysphoria suffer any more than they already do, and they will cling to that main mast as the ship of state sinks beneath the waves.

The very conflation of LGBT/Q is a harbinger of demise for liberal politicians.

Saying that Lesbian & gay & bisexual folks deserve to be treated as anyone else should be emphatically embraced by liberal politicians. This is about "sexual preference." These folks need no clinics and request no change in the English language surrounding pronouns.

Not sure, exactly the difference between "queer" and L and G is, but not a major thing.

It's grouping "T" --transgenders--with that group which spells doom. It's like adding an "A" for anorexia nervosa folks into that. Yes, of course, patients, people with a "problem" should be treated with respect and sympathy and empathy, but let's not confuse folks with distinctions the average American has no patience for. Educate the public, fine. But let's not sink the Democratic battleship with that torpedo.

The more middle America who know nothing about the biology of sexual differentiation, the difference between genetic sex and gender identity, the difference between being homosexual and wanting to change your sex, the more middle America is confronted with locker rooms, bathrooms, being told they are obtuse because they cannot wrap their heads around calling a person who looks like a girl "they" and stumbling over pronouns, the sooner those politicians who look weak and incapable of standing up to all this craziness will be shown the door. And those politicians are AOC, who is otherwise laudable, but fatally flawed on this issue and then more moderate Democrats and we'll have another four years of Donald Trump or someone like him.

Memo to Joe: White House Office of Pithy Phrases

 

Mad Dog delighted in Joe Biden's remark "With Obama, Osama Bin Laden is dead and General Motors is Alive."

Rare among Democrats Joe has the capacity and willingness to zing the Republicans in memorable, delightful phrases.

Republicans have long been the masters of the pungent  phrase: Death Tax, Tax and Spend Democrats, all those things meant to hook and energize their willing masses yearning to breath fire.

But Joe will have new demands on his time and he needs a steady stream of pith made available, for which Mad Dog recommends he enlist Aaron Sorkin, David Simon and anyone else he can enlist to percolate up some phrases the White House can put out there and Congressional Democrats can pick up as a daily mantra.

He also needs a few cards in his vest for special targets:

Mad Dog has long wanted to see Jim Jordan skewered, as he strides the halls of Congress in his shirtsleeves, chest out for thumping, just to drive home the point he was a college wrestling champion and is still a big, virile Republican who could take you out behind the bar and beat you into submission.

One of Mad Dog's favorites, stolen from John Randolph, would be used the next time Jordan suggests some Democrat is a wimp and a weenie who doesn't have the balls to send the tanks made in his district into some new war, or Democrats are too chicken and wimpy to just allow COVID to burn its way through the nation:

"Mr. Jordan prides himself on a muscular animal faculty in which the orangutan is his equal and the jackass infinitely his superior."

And all like that.

Democrats need a daily stream of deflationary barbs to puncture the Republican blimp of virility.

Golly Toto, I Don't Think We're in New Hampshire Anymore

 "All politics is local."

--Tip O'Neill, former Speaker of the House

Before the internet, Mr. O'Neill's quip likely was more accurate, but one thing our connected information age has done is to nationalize politics. Just go on Twitter and see comments from Michigan, Texas, California, Oregon and you cannot distinguish them from people writing from New Hampshire.

Hampton Falls, NH

Which is not to say, we do not have local issues or that announcing you want to cut the corn ethanol in gasoline program will go unnoticed in Iowa, but if Donald Trump has taught us anything it's that the creepy crawlies are distributed from sea to shining sea, from the Great Lakes to the Gulf. 

There is some commonality which connects the junkyard owner in Wisconsin to the Hispanic who lives along the border in Texas to the guy down the street from Mad Dog in Hampton, who still flies his Trump flag, and who drove around for months with Trump flags flying from his Ford F 250.

Beautiful Downtown Hampton

Analyzing what connects these folks, across state lines, geography and even social class should be the first priority of political thinkers, but Mad Dog sees no signs the public intellectuals who might do this analysis have the tools or modes of thought to do it.

Jill Lepore might have a chance, but she is more historian than analyst. 

Certainly  Nate Silver is just guessing.

David Brooks might eventually figure it out, but Mad Dog is not holding his breath.

If Trump appealed to only the white male who barely got out of high school, worked a succession of uninspiring jobs--delivering auto parts, stocking shelves, changing oil at Jiffy Lube or tires at Town Fair Tire, or maybe, if he was a little more successful, working in a garage or in the trades, then one could go to work understanding the phenomenon. Losers in the meritocracy, who felt humiliated in school, who ran with the wrong crowd in high school and were never going to be seen by their peers as anything but ordinary at best and losers at worst. And along comes Trump.

But that doesn't explain the rich folks in Bonita Springs, Florida or up at Frye Island in Maine who love Trump.

And now we know it's not just some subterranean 40%. It's 50% or very nearly.

Obadiah Youngblood, Salt Marshes North Hampton

The only real comfort is history: Read Howard Zinn, or "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee," or "A Bright and Shining Lie" or even "Gone with the Wind," and you will see that Trump part of America--resentful, feeling cheated, violent, every bit the same crowd who worked themselves into a frenzy over Adolf, right here in the USA. This hate, this intractability matches anything seen in Northern Ireland ("Say Nothing") or Palestine. 

Now, we are faced,  unexpectedly, with a Republican governor, Executive Committee, state House of Representatives and Senate, and we have no real explanation for this, in a state which sent a woman to the US House and another to the US Senate and a gay man to the House. 

What happened in New Hampshire?

Mad Dog has some idea, mainly what he wants to believe, that the powers that be in the New Hampshire Democratic party have failed to recruit the best candidates. But that's too simple. The best candidate or at least one of the very best for state House, Katherine Harake, a woman of poise, intellect and enormous promise did not make the House.

And the Pig Shall Lie Down with the Lamb

Then again, New Hampshire sent Maggie Hassan to the US Senate and to the governorship when it could have chosen Jackie Cilley.

And when it had the  choice between Terence O'Rourke, a sharp witted former federal prosecutor, a bronze star captain in the Airborne, and a man so mild mannered he tends to disappear into the woodwork, Chris Pappas, they chose Pappas. 

This may just be what makes politics an art, not a science. But it does not augur well for our future. 

The Origins of Trumpism: From The Best & the Brightest Through West Wing

 Twenty -seven years after David Halberstam published "The Best and the Brightest" Aaron Sorkin brought "The West Wing" to prime time TV.

If ever Santayana's  aphorism about learning from the past or being doomed to repeat it seems applicable, these two events would seem a case in point. 

Halberstam, writing almost a decade after John F. Kennedy's murder, was decried as a sort of second assassin, but that only reinforces the essential truth he described a decade after Camelot on the Potomac passed from the scene.

The assassins' bullets really did alter the direction of politics in this country, both in 1963 and 1968; they brought down the glamour and glitz which had invested the 60's service in government and not until Barack Obama was elected did large numbers of Americans again see the Presidency and the White House as glamorous. 

I am not speaking of history here; in my case, I'm speaking of memory. There is a difference between the history of a time written when every every last person who lived in those years has died, and histories written about the 50's, 60's and 70's, times people still alive remember.

I remember my parents smiling and being a little dazzled by the new President's men. My father was less impressed with Kennedy, who he knew as a playboy Congressman and Senator without much apparent interest in weighty issues. Adali Stevenson impressed my father, not JFK. But you judge a President, they said, in large measure by whom he brings with him, who he surrounds himself with,  and Kennedy seemed to be bringing the entire Harvard faculty, plus men who had stellar careers at various foundations and think tanks. This was an impressive crew, far superior to Eisenhower's worn out old hacks. These men carried academic credentials galore.

McGeorge Bundy was a wunderkind, who had gone to Groton, then Yale (Skull and Bones) and then Harvard, where a professor in the department of government said a paper Bundy wrote as a new arrival was so astonishing, he thought not more than one or two tenured Harvard professors could have written anything of that quality. Bundy was first in his class at Groton and so brilliant he did not want to waste his time in the drudgery entailed in a PhD but was placed in a program called Junior Fellows, and got appointed to the faculty of government without having taken a course in government and he was made Dean of Harvard College with head spinning celerity.  Then he decamped to Washington, D.C. where he could sit on couches in the Oval Office and exude brilliance. 

All this brings to mind a scene in West Wing when Toby is discussing foreign aid, which the Republicans are assailing because they want the money spent on problems at home in the USA and Tobey, in the voice he uses when explaining something to really stupid, ignorant people who he thinks should stay out of governing and leave that to the  smart boys, says, "So you cut foreign aid for schools in Sudan and then 6,800 madrassas spring up to fill the gap; you cut aid for a farm program in Bolivia and the farmers plant 10,000 hectares of cocaine instead of soybeans and coffee and we've just blown our police and Coast Guard interdiction budgets for the next 10 years!"

This is just one moment among thousands in West Wing, where Toby or Sam or the President cite numbers, without reference to a study, which they use numbers as  sabers of expertise, to sound and look like they know so much more than their adversaries.

But, fact is, they do not know more than those hapless rubes in Iowa or New Hampshire who cannot understand the wisdom of spending money abroad to prevent problems from coming back home.  

What makes Toby think that if we spent money on schools in Sudan those 6,800 (such a specific number!) would not have sprung up anyway? Who spent the money to build those madrassas and would they not have spent money to compete with secular Western schools (sometimes taught by Christian missionaries) even if we had spent that money? We are talking about a lot of culture and context here. How far is Toby from becoming a Robert McNamara who thought he could calculate the number of tons of bombs he'd have to drop on Vietnam to win that war, as if culture and local belief and desire had nothing to do with it?

And what makes Toby think if we had just given money to farmers in South America those farmers would have grown soybeans or coffee rather than the much more profitable cocaine? Oh, the Americans are paying us $1000 so we will forget about the $100,000 we can make growing coca!

West Wing is all about quickness, telegraphic communication, not the teasing out of opposing points of view. Repartee, quick wittedness, sexiness is the currency of the power players in the White House, that and a sense of entitlement: We are the chosen ones. Our talents, to write great speeches which inspire, which can launch a thousand ships is rare. We constitute an exalted club: the Skull and Bones of American politics.

Sam Seaborne sends a new guy, Will Bailey, to Toby with the note, "He's one of us." And the context makes it clear that one of us means one of the few human beings on the planet who can write great speeches for the President and the world. Halberstam tells a story about Teddy Roosevelt sending a man to a Secretary of state with a note which said exactly that.  This is the old legend of the Sword and the Stone: Some people carry mystical powers which allow them to draw the sword from the stone and they are the people of destiny.

Toby and Will talk a lot about iambic pentameter. They talk about the craft of speech writing as if they are describing the parameters of some difficult neurosurgical procedure. They detect pentameter in the written opinion of a Supreme Court justice and Will does his homework as a speech writer for the President by requisitioning every speech the President has ever made so Will can get the rhythm of the President's speech. We are thus shown how very complicated, rare and extraordinary any human being writing for the President must be.

Of course, nowhere is it mentioned that Lincoln wrote his own best speeches and so did Obama. These are men who we listened to because their words were more than words or meter or iambic pentameter. These were the words from men who had been in the field of battle. We knew they knew something because they had been there.

This is the essential truth those knucklehead fans of Donald Trump have seized upon: All you Ivy Leaguers act like you've got some mystical right to rule. You try to prove it by quoting studies or statistics and sounding all academic and well educated but your knowledge is no more real, authentic or accurate than the stuff Donald Trump spews out at the podium at every rally. And he just makes it all up! We know that. But he doesn't have to prove it because we know he can't and we know you can't prove what you are saying either.

All those pundits: Nate Silver, who told us Hillary Clinton had a lock on the election in 2016, until she lost and then he said: But I told you she had a one in 3 chance of losing.  You just didn't listen to me or understand that a 1 in 3 chance is a substantial chance; think of a baseball player who gets a hit 1 out of 3 times at bat--he's a successful player! It wasn't me who was wrong: It was you. You failed to understand probability theory!

And we know, well, Nate, if you had said, "anything's possible" everyone would have turned away and rushed off to listen to someone who claimed to have Delphic prophesy powers and ignored you; so you sold us on your clairvoyance. Then you blamed us for buying it. 

Yes, Donald Trump is a con man who says there's an invasion of brown skinned rapists threatening white suburban women, that COVID19 was made in a laboratory in Wuhan and spread by pedophile aliens from Area 51 under the direction of Obama and Hillary Clinton to wreck Trump's Presidency and COVID is actually gone now but the doctors are trying to say it's still killing people because they make more money that way. 

But, fact is, how do we know anything is true? The Best and the Brightest guys from Harvard quoted us numbers, cited studies in journals we couldn't see, Foreign Affairs, Scientific American, Nature. And they were as full of vaporous hot air as Trump.

We know we can't believe him. We don't take him literally. But we take seriously the proposition we cannot believe you. So we'll just believe whatever we want to believe.

We know he is all spoof. His schtick is all lampoon. He's saying, "Look a me, up here in my expensive suit and tie speaking at the podium. I'm a clown. I'm the court jester. But the court jester gets at a truth the serious courtiers cannot dare to say."

No child was killed at Sandy Hook. It was all just a TV set, like the moon landing. How do you know anyone was killed there? Were you at the school? At the morgue? 

I actually heard Alex Jones's lawyer say that on NPR. "Were you at the morgue?"

And that is the basic question: How do any of us know anything unless we were at the morgue ourselves?

The Electoral College: When Is a Savant Not a Savant?

Definition of savant

1: a person of learningespecially : one with detailed knowledge in some specialized field (as of science or literature)

Marilyn Savant has been writing a little column for years in Parade magazine and she answered a question, arguing for the Electoral College: 

"We are the United States of America, and our states--starting with the original 13 colonies--are separate entities.

It is understandably unacceptable to states with smaller populations to have their affairs decided by other states simply because more people live there. Suppose there were a United Countries of Earth. Would we like the idea of China (population 1, 439 billion) and India (1,380 billion) running the show? (The U.S. has 331 million people.) Or would we want a leveling factor?"

It is a daunting task to dispute a woman savant, one whose IQ is reportedly higher than anyone on the planet, or, at least is quite high, but let Mad Dog take a stab.

Ms. Savant begins at the beginning, which is probably a good idea. 

Where, after all, did the Electoral College come from?

This explanation is necessary because Americans have the odd, some would say revolutionary idea that we live in a free country which has a government of the people, by the people and for the people, which is to say, a democracy, where the government represents the will of the people.

Our form of democracy is not a direct democracy, where all the people vote daily on every issue, but rather, a Republic, and that is fragile enough, as Benjamin Franklin famously suggested when a woman outside the Constitutional Convention asked him, "What sort of government have you given us?" and he replied, "A Republic, madam, if you can keep it."

This was, of course, a departure from the rule of a king, where only one man's opinion mattered. Truth be told, King George III did not really rule quite as autocratically as all that--he had a Parliament, but even there you had a group of white men of property making the rules. What mattered was the vast estates, the land they owned and the wealth they controlled, when it came to being granted a voice in the affairs of government.

In the 18th century, when our Constitution was signed, the Southern delegates were aristocrats who owned vast estates, run with slave labor. And those states were huge: Virginia included what is now West Virginia and geographically was larger than Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Vermont and Delaware combined. And it was expected the population of Virginia would grow bigger than that of those 4 states combined.

And the states were more like nation states at the time, separated by distance, by economy and not much united at all. New England considered seceding from the union over tariffs and many Virginians considered themselves unblushingly to be Virginians first and Americans second. 

But then we fought a Civil War for "The Union" and the United States of America "is" replaced The United States" "are."

There is still much which divides regions of the country.  A look at the election day maps with that huge coherent mass of the states of the old Confederacy joined by the Mountain states of Montana, Wyoming and Idaho-- all in Republican Red --and the coasts usually solidly Blue with the Midwest in deep purple, confirms there remain division among the states. 

But the divisions are not simply state by state any more.

The fact is, Mad Dog has less in common with the resident of the North Country in New Hampshire than he has with a resident in a suburb living Maryland or New York. 

That popular description of  Pennsylvania--Pittsburgh and Philadelphia and Alabama in between--applies to many, if not most states now. What we have is a rural/urban divide, which is why talk of the Northeast and the Northwest seceding from the union is fanciful. They fly Rebel flags in rural New Hampshire now. New Hampshire!

So what makes us a country at all?

Mad Dog would submit, it's no longer shared values. If the last 4 years has taught us anything, it's that Americans no longer share an identifiable core of shared values. 

There is precious little the Proud Boys would cherish that Mad Dog embraces. Even the very idea of pluralism--the idea that more than one idea about a subject is acceptabe--is no longer a commonly held value. The idea that our society should be multiracial is no longer acceptable as even debatable by the Proud Boys.

That old bromide about "I disagree with what you say, but I will fight to the death your right to say it," is, for me, at least, no more.

The Proud Boys/Trumpists are now the American Taliban: They do not believe in my right to say anything; they reject the right of anyone other than white guys like themselves having any rights.

Should the country be run by whites rather than a multiracial government?

Should the country have a government which can tax its citizens?

Can the nation restrict the right of individuals to own and brandish firearms? 

Should the nation allow women to have abortions?

These are just a few of the questions which divide neighbor against neighbor, even in my New Hampshire town. 

It is true the answers  coalesce in the Southern part of our country but the answer of intolerance, unwillingness to believe in an obligation to a community has morphed into an impenetrable divide. 

So, on what basis do we have a country? And what sort of Republic makes sense here?

Mad Dog would submit America today is like a bad marriage which should continue. We may not love each other any more. We may not be able to even stand in the same room together, but we are so inextricably tied by economy, finance and ownership we cannot extricate ourselves.  

Obadiah Youngblood

While it is true a Blue Country consisting of the East Coast north of the Potomac and the West Coast could function happily enough and would thrive economically, likely prosper more richly than now, freed of the burden of supporting the dirt poor South, even with its Texas and Gulf oil wealth, the fact is that New America would be weaker without the Old Confederacy than with. And people like the idea of having an entire continent where you can travel freely, without internal passports, invest in business, own property in other parts of the country. Having the geography of a continent is liberating.

But, the fact is, when it comes to representation in a government and taxation, it's people, not sage brush, who pay taxes. And the idea rankles that those empty states like North and South Dakota, Wyoming, Idaho get 8 senators to represent less than 4 million people where California gets only 2 senators to represent 10 times that number, nearly 40 million.

Why should a US Senate, where Senators representing less than 40% of the nation thwart the will of senators representing more than 60% of the people?

The original swindle was who got counted as being represented, so those bewigged 18th century gentlemen got to count 2/3 of all the slaves in the state for representation, while the farmers of New Hampshire did not get to count 2/3 of their cattle, goats and chickens. 

Ms. Savant's argument is that we would not want to be governed by the will of other people who don't speak or language, share our values or have economic or land or property interests in common with us. 

It's that old question asked of the Swede who is appalled that Americans do not care enough for each other to provide for a common health care system which cares for every American.  But when you ask the Swede if he is happy to pay for the health care of the Spaniard, he recoils and says, "Of course not!"

Who we are willing to spend money on, who is in our national family defines what a nation is.  To say the citizen of North Dakota would not want the citizen of Maryland deciding about a common health care system is to deny the Union of our country.

And, Mad Dog would submit, if we are going to be a country, the country IS the people, not the rivers or the streams and the citizen of the United States in New Orleans cares just as much about the Mississippi River as the guy in Minnesota or Missouri who may dump his waste into it.

Republicans have won the popular vote only once in the last 20 years and yet have controlled the presidency for 12 of those 20 years. GOP 53 Senators represent 40% of the population. "A Republic, madam, if you can keep it." No we have not kept it.

The argument about China and India is a better argument for maintaining immigration control of our borders than it is about the Electoral College. If we are a country distinct from China and India, we had better develop some internal cohesion and recognize what makes our Union preferable to our dissolution. 

We may have wanted an Electoral College as a prenuptial agreement back in 1789, but the time has long since passed when we can pull apart and unless we are willing to go through the expense of a messy divorce, we had better give the people what they want. 

Lessons from Denmark: Borgen Blows West Wing Out of the Water

 For the first half of "Borgen" I watched not because the story lines grabbed me all that much, but the faces of the characters were interesting and the glimpses of life in Denmark were tantalizing. The story lines of family life were prosaic, but set in the Danish model of actually providing for families they were exotic enough to keep me in the game.

Figuring out the Danish parliamentary system, and accommodating to the accommodative style of Danish mores took a while. Watching "West Wing" on my morning treadmill and "Borgen" at night, the counterpoint became positively psychedelic. Ye Gads, these Danes know what they are doing.

Denmark is roughly the size of Maryland and has roughly the same population--around 5 million souls. But the Danes are far whiter than Maryland and have no predominantly Black city. They do have a problem dealing with immigrants, given their location. Trump talks about the "threat" from the Mexican border. Denmark is looking at the Middle East and Africa the way Sarah Palin looked out her window at Russia.

About halfway through the first season, this smooth ride along an asphalt road in a Volvo station wagon suddenly explodes into a moon shot on Apollo 13. The show which had been a sister to the tale of a Danish school teacher "Rita" suddenly opened a door to something more akin to "The Wire" meets Aaron Sorkin. 

Now in the third season, our heroine (and a fine piece of work she is) Birgitte (pronounced somewhere down below your vocal cords, BAWR-ga) founds a new party.  Her own Middle Party has not just drifted to the right, but has set full sail toward deporting immigrants for crimes like littering. On the left, there are wackos enough to make Toby Ziegler start searching for a flame thrower.

Birgitte opens an office, at no small personal financial risk and the space fills with enthusiasts of every persuasion, who see in  the advent of a new political party their own personal Nirvana. "We are not a mass movement," Birgitte's friend tells her "We are movement of masses."  She has her acolytes post on a bulletin board their most beloved policies and some are anti abortion, some pro choice; some want to see taxes raised; some want them lowered; some want immigrants to be welcomed and assimilated; some want them deported.

Brigid needs dues paying party members and she is desperate for money. But when a party founder finds a wealthy banker to donate 1.5 million kroner, solving the cash flow problem, she balks because it means money men will control the policies of the party. The banker tells her he wanted a 7% reduction in corporate taxes but the party man agreed to only 5% and that was okay. Politics is about compromise and negotiation he says, a very Danish sentiment. But not for Birgitte. She gives the money back and calls a meeting.

Birgette founded the new party, "The New Democrats" and she insists she will shape its ideals: She looks right at a woman in the crowd who is anti abortion and says, "We will not deny women abortions," and she looks to a man who has written a manifesto for the party which would nationalize most industries and says "We will not make war on capitalism, but only guide it and restrain its anti social excesses."  And so forth. 

And she  watches people walk out, as each sees his or her most important issue dismissed or diluted.  But Nyborg is willing to be rejected. She knows what Trump knew: Better a cohesive, dedicated army than an aimless mass of disparate dreamers.

Of course, I sat there watching, saying, this is what we face in America: The old Democratic party is a movement of masses, an unstable nucleus with protons and neutrons which cannot stay attached. We need a New Democrats party here, but if we get that, we will likely lose a lot of folks. We have staunchly pro Israel folk who are appalled by Muslim Congresswomen in head scarfs who rail about the Israeli lobby spending "Benjamins" to buy votes for Israel.  We have people who want to defund police, whatever that means, alongside folks who fear crime in the suburbs.

There is a wonderful scene in West Wing when Toby has to talk to street demonstrators who shout him down calling him a tool of big pharma and big oil and corporate kleptocracy and he notes these are kids on Spring break who will go back to the dorm rooms their parents have paid for at the end of the week and he loathes these phony privileged children who do not have to function in the real world. Brigitte is faced with all that. 

What is not in Borgen which is so prominent and pernicious in West Wing is elitism. Birgitte is denounced for elitism when she puts her daughter into a private psychiatric hospital having championed a law to reduce the deduction for private health insurance. An especially vile Rush Limbaugh type reads the lunch menu at the private hospital which includes items the average Dane cannot afford. That is elitism in Denmark. Brigitte's wonderful, savy "spin master" Katrine, makes her remove her expensive watch before going on TV.  Flashing swag is very un Danish.

But, if Denmark has a caste system, it is nowhere near as pervasive or obvious as America's castes. We get a glimpse of it in "Rita" where a mayor wants her son to get accepted at a more competitive university, but there is none of the name dropping of Ivy League colleges, SAT scores, National Merit finalist awards that flash up every thirty seconds in West Wing.  The Danes do not wave that sort of "meritocracy" in your face the way Americans do, at least if these TV shows reflect the real world.

But tiny Denmark leads the world in wind turbines, wind power and green energy. Somehow, without the graduates of an Ivy League, they succeed where America fails.

And, oh, of course, their mastery of languages: Birgitte (the actress and the character) flips in and out of fluent Danish, French and English effortlessly. I can attest from brief forays into Denmark, most people there speak English, or at least their English is way better than my Danish. 

There is some chatter about David Simon, who did "The Wire" doing an American version of "Borgen." I cannot imagine Simon being able to comprehend the Danes and their delicate dance between wanting to succeed but not being seen as being more successful than their countrymen. 

Borgen is not to be missed. It holds wisdom for us, here in America, if we are only smart enough to comprehend it.