Prairie Weather

Another Trump card

Donald Trump is driving the GOP nuts.

Trump’s surging campaign has pushed the party in a different direction, one that often clashes with free-market principles that have long underpinned GOP economic policy. Some establishment Republicans worry that the turn could damage the economy, and their party, for years to come.

Trump criticizes government, but he shot to the top of the GOP field by rallying voters against another enemy: immigrants from Mexico and low-wage workers in China, whom he blames for lost jobs and stagnant wages in America. He has proposed levying tariffs on imported goods, deporting millions of immigrants who entered America illegally and reducing the number of legal immigrants allowed in each year. In a further blow against conservative orthodoxy, he said recently that he favors higher taxes on the rich. ...WaPo

Of course, Donald Trump may be channeling his inner liberal (is in the race as a spoiler) or... he's in it to win and then, well, fuck you whoever you are.   Got the money, got the time, got the mindset. 

Go on, Donald:  take the test:

	I have a natural talent for influencing people. I am not good at influencing people.
	Modesty doesn't become me. I am essentially a modest person.
	I would do almost anything on a dare. I tend to be a fairly cautious person.
	When people compliment me I sometimes get embarrassed. I know that I am good because everybody keeps telling me so.
	The thought of ruling the world frightens the hell out of me. If I ruled the world it would be a better place.
	I can usually talk my way out of anything. I try to accept the consequences of my behavior.
	I prefer to blend in with the crowd. I like to be the center of attention.
	I will be a success. I am not too concerned about success.
	I am no better or worse than most people.

...and on and on.

___

Still, the flailing is underway in the territory of the right.  "Right Turn" editorialist at the Post,  Jennifer Rubin, looks at the "anti-Trump angst" in the GOP and spells out the likely consequences.

You gather the data on Trump’s problematic views and rhetoric, you use earned media to blast away one issue at a time and you dump rounds of ads to remind voters he’s a Democrat at heart and would be a train wreck for the GOP. But most of all, you need to present an alternative, these voices say. All the GOP needs is one or more candidates to step it up, look like a party leader and sell a conservative reform vision.

NSA refuses to come clean

Studies of that moment when GCHQ -- Britain's intelligence agency -- demanded the destruction of computer hard drives at The Guardian are now revealing that computer memory is hardly limited to the hard drive.  The NSA, for example, is invading parts of your life that you probably didn't know exists.

Two technologists, Mustafa Al-Bassam and Richard Tynan, visited Guardian headquarters last year to examine the remnants of the devices. Al-Bassam is an ex-hacker who two years ago pleaded guilty to joining attacks on Sony, Nintendo, and other companies, and now studies computer science at King’s College; Tynan is a technologist at Privacy International with a PhD in computer science. The pair concluded, first, that GCHQ wanted The Guardian to completely destroy every possible bit of information the news outlet might retain; and second, that GCHQ’s instructions may have inadvertently revealed all the locations in your computer where information may be covertly stored. ...Intercept

Of course, there are limits on what NSA can do over here... right?  Well, no.

These hidden memory storage locations could theoretically be taken advantage of, Tynan and Al-Bassam said, by a computer’s owner, hackers, or even the government itself, either during its design phase or after the computer is purchased. The Russian cybersecurity firm Kaspersky Lab has presented evidence that an organization it calls “Equation Group,” which is reportedly linked to the NSA, has developed ways to “create an invisible, persistent area hidden inside [a computer’s] hard drive” that would be virtually undetectable by the computer’s owner. This area could be used “to save exfiltrated information which can be later retrieved by the attackers.”...Intercept

No telling what hidden memory storage locations lurk -- beyond oversight -- in NSA computers.

Sunday morning? Maria's. South Lamar. 4 bean and cheese to go.

New Jersey’s governor, Chris Christie, said on Saturday he would combat illegal immigration by tracking foreign visitors like FedEx packages.

Christie, who is well back in the pack seeking the Republican nomination for president, told a campaign event in the early-voting state of New Hampshire that, if elected president, he would ask FedEx’s chief executive officer, Fred Smith, to devise the tracking system.

Immigration has become a top issue in the Republican campaign, with front-runner Donald Trump vowing to deport all the estimated 11 million illegal immigrants and to build a wall along the southern border.

“At any moment, FedEx can tell you where that package is. It’s on the truck. It’s at the station. It’s on the airplane,” Christie told the crowd in Laconia, New Hampshire. “Yet we let people come to this country with visas, and the minute they come in, we lose track of them,” he said. ...Guardian

We know that, don't we?

The neurologist, explorer and writer, Oliver Sacks died.  He left us with all kinds of wisdom, including this:

Dr. Sacks began his medical career as a researcher but gave up early, conceding that he had neither the temperament nor the eye-hand coordination for it. “I lost samples,” he told an interviewer in 2005. “I broke machines. Finally they said to me: ‘Sacks, you’re a menace. Get out. Go see patients. They matter less.’ ”...NYT

He was no cynic.  But he was realistic about the practice of medicine in the US.

Shouldn't owning a gun be as legal and easy as owning a car?

The overwhelming rush of freedom and possibility, the sense of autonomy—no need to request a lift, no UBER app to press—is overwhelming. You get in, and you go. This in turn made me realize, a little more empathetically, what I had only intuited before—that guns, for many Americans, are a sort of secondary, symbolic car: another powerful symbol of autonomy and independence. ...AdamGopnik,NewYorker

Aren't they both pretty much the same when it comes to independence and freedom?  That feeling of "being in charge" even as your power increases?

For the deeper truth is that cars are not, or not only, symbols of autonomy. They are, in every sense, vehicles of it. Guns, however, have an almost entirely symbolic function. No lives are saved, and no intruders are repelled; the dense and hysterical mythology of gun love has been refuted again and again. (The incident last week on the French train is good evidence of this point: unarmed defenders disarmed a terrorist with a military-style weapon. A huge proportion of luck and an inestimable supply of courage aided them. But the possession of guns played no role at all.) The few useful social functions that guns do have—in hunting or in killing varmints, as a rural man such as my father has to do—can be preserved even with tight regulations, as in Canada. Cars have to be, and are, controlled: we license their users and insist (or should) that they regularly prove their skills; we look out for and punish drunken or reckless users. If we only achieved, in the next few years, a regulation of guns equal to that of cars, we would be moving toward the real purpose of autonomy, which is to secure the freedom from fear as much as the freedom to act. Symbols matter. Lives matter more. ...AdamGopnik,NewYorker

In the end, capitalism wins (and kills)

It's not just about the free-enterprise, open-market drug business.  But, oh baby, that's what killed your dad and it'll probably get you (one way or another) in the end.  And I'm not even mentioning the horrendous relationship of elected politicians and legal pharma in Washington. 

The market for Mexican poppies here in the US is so huge now that more and more Mexican children are working in the fields, the New York Times reports.

Though shy, she perks up when describing her craft: the delicate slits to the bulb, the patient scraping of the gum, earning in one day more than her parents do in a week.

That she is only 15 is not so important for the people of her tiny mountain hamlet. If she and her classmates miss school for the harvest, so be it. In a landscape of fallow opportunities, income outweighs education.

“It is the best option for us,” Angelica said, leaning against a wood-plank house in her village, where nearly all of the children work the fields. “Back down in the city, there is nothing for us, no opportunities.”

As heroin addiction soars in the United States, a boom is underway south of the border, reflecting the two nations’ troubled symbiosis. Officials from both countries say that Mexican opium production increased by an estimated 50 percent in 2014 alone, the result of a voracious American appetite, impoverished farmers in Mexico and entrepreneurial drug cartels that straddle the border. ...NYT

The demand is so great up here in El Norte that refusing to provide the supplies would seem absurd to the average capitalist.  We welcome the trade.  We pave the paths north with money.

And we-the-people are increasingly addicted to legal, prescribed painkillers.  But, of course, the prescriptions have limitations.  What happened to actor Philip Seymour Hoffman 18 months ago tells the story.

Details are still emerging about the last days of Philip Seymour Hoffman, the actor who died last week at 46 of an apparent heroin overdose. Yet Mr. Hoffman’s case, despite its uncertainties, highlights some new truths about addiction and several long-known risks for overdose.

The actor, who quit heroin more than 20 years ago, reportedly struggled to break a prescription painkiller habit last year. Experts in addiction say that the use of medications like Vicodin, OxyContin and oxycodone — all opiates like heroin — has altered the landscape of addiction and relapse, in ways that affect both current users and former ones.

“The old-school user, pre-1990s, mostly used just heroin, and if there was none around, went through withdrawal,” said Stephen E. Lankenau, a sociologist at Drexel University who has surveyed young addicts. Today, he said, “users switch back and forth, to pills then back to heroin when it’s available, and back again. The two have become integrated.”...NYT,2/14

We just don't want to stop.  And the Mexican economy would just as soon we don't  stop.

The same holds for Afghanistan.  We like to think we've done something to curb the  poppy fields in Afghanistan but we haven't.

Neither of the U.S. antinarcotics approaches have yielded success. From 2001 to 2009, the U.S. tried an eradication strategy, giving the Afghan government resources to wipe out poppy crops. This only eliminated a tiny percentage of suppliers, and led to more local corruption: Meaning governing warlords got richer as individual farmers got poorer.

"The whole system is criminalized. It runs through the police, the courts, through the whole government system," Shansab said. "When we talk about corruption in Afghanistan, which is rampant, now this is part of it."

The current approach offers farmers the chance to substitute their opium crops with legal crops, thanks to billions of dollars in U.S.-funded agricultural development. ...NBCNews

"It appears to only be making Afghanistan's problem worse by not giving farmers all the tools they need to grow," the NBC report concludes.

Afghanistan was a "war of choice."  Which kind of tells us that even when we choose wars, we not only don't win but we gain the reputation for bad choices. 

Oh sure: capitalism "wins" every time. We don't.