Apparently, Donald Trump is now going around saying, “I watched in Jersey City, NJ, where thousands and thousands of [Arab] people were cheering” — in regard to the 9/11 attacks. (Ben Carson has said the same thing.) I’m beginning to wonder if the guy is just testing the nation. At what point will we say, “No! This is not acceptable!” I really question whether there is a bottom — at least when it comes to the Republican primary voters. There is just a hollow anger at the core of American conservatism that can’t be sated. As for Trump, I don’t think we can say whether he believes this stuff or not. He’s a narcissist and saying it gets him attention; that’s as deep as it goes.

PolitiFact looked into it and rated the claim “pants on fire.” There is no evidence of Muslims celebrating 9/11 anywhere in America. But the weird thing is that there is evidence of Israelis celebrating the attack. Five of them were arrested and interrogated for a couple of months, before being deported back to Israel. It looks like they were part of an Israeli intelligence operation. You can imagine what many people have made of that. One of the many 9/11 conspiracy theories claims that Israel knew about (and maybe even took part in) the attack. That seems about as credible as most 9/11 conspiracy theories.

But there is something that seems really interesting to me. When one of the men, Sivan Kurzberg, was questioned by the police, he said, “We are Israeli. We are not your problem. Your problems are our problems. The Palestinians are the problem.” I think he was telling the truth at that point. And I think that he and his comrades were celebrating the attack. I think they saw it the same way that the British saw the attack on Pearl Harbor: a great thing for their political interests.

It’s interesting, because I was listening to an interview earlier today by Max Blumenthal about his new book, The 51 Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza. I’m not totally in Blumenthal’s camp. I do still see a need for a safe haven for the Jews. Just the same, I am incredibly skeptical of Zionism at this point. I really do question whether it isn’t necessarily racist and therefore violent. And I think the United States’ absolute commitment to Israel is totally inappropriate. Not only is it bad to have this increasingly fascistic state tell us what to do, in the long run, I think this is all very bad for Zionism itself. And for Jews the world over.

So right now, I’m probably too open to the idea that Israeli intelligence officers would be happy that we got bombed. That’s not to say that they were happy to see Americans killed. But people have lots of ways of justifying these things: you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet and all that. One thing is for sure: if these five Israelis had been Iranians or Iraqis, they wouldn’t have been released back to their home countries — they’d be half insane for a decade and a half of torture at Guantanamo Bay.

People can be your friends and still not want what is in your best interests. I increasingly think that of Israel. I don’t doubt that they are our friends. Just the same, they seem more like that friend who is always making trouble and getting you involved in it. It turns out that Benjamin Netanyahu — the man who has done more to harm the US relationship with Israel than any other man — is actually a centrist in Israel. That should give you an idea of just how bad things have gotten in Israel. I’m beginning to believe that the only way to save the Jews is to destroy Zionism. But I’m not quite there.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump is telling people that thousands of American Muslims were dancing in celebration of 9/11. And if I had to guess the result, it would be that his poll numbers will go up.

I was recently listening to a lecture by David Cay Johnston, How Government Creates Inequality. It was brilliant as usual. Imagine if we had another hundred or thousand journalists like him! But anyway, he mentioned that when he got started working the 1960s and 1970s, people like him had no trouble finding work. But now college graduates really do have to worry. And in the world that Johnston was talking about, it wasn’t just college graduates who were at such an advantage. My father had no education to speak of. He was certainly smart and hard working, but at that time he was given a chance. What chance would he be given today? Stocking shelves at Walmart?

I was thinking about this with regard to some work I did a while back for my main client. She had sent me an article written by a young writer of hers. She said she didn’t like it and couldn’t say why. I read it and told her that there were many problems with it and that there were two options: I could fix it or mark it up for the writer. I suggested the second idea because I felt that the writer had potential. She agreed, and so I wrote about twice as much in notes as the writer wrote for his article. She and the owner of the company were thrilled with my notes.

Understand: I could almost be the grandfather of this young writer. And maybe I came off as nasty or like I knew it all or whatever. I thought I had been very nice. What’s more, I wrote to the writer as a peer — just a younger and less experienced one. But the writer returned a barely edited version of article — integrating at most one-tenth of my suggestions. And then he quit. What’s interesting is that about a month later, I was reading an article, and I told my editor, “This is great! Who wrote it?” And she told me it was the same guy.

The point is not the quitting. I’ve had to do a whole lot of work on this guy’s half finished articles, and I really wish he were still around. For one thing, his politics are very much mine. For another things, he is very talented. I know that if he sticks with it, he will at least become a fine writer — maybe even a great one. If he were around, I could be part of that process. But the point is that this company is willing to pay me to work with writers. The company understands that you don’t get exactly the workers that you want or need. You as the company or manager must invest in the workers.

This is sadly not the way things mostly work in the modern world. And that’s especially true in the high tech world. It used to aggravate me when I was a programmer and a company would be looking for something really specific. For example, they had to have a Java programmer — a C++ programmer wouldn’t do, even though there is no real difference. Or a C++ programmer would have to have MFC experience. These are indications of companies that don’t want to invest anything at all in their workers. An experienced C++ programmer could be up to speed with MFC within a week. Transitioning from C++ to Java probably wouldn’t even take that much time. But the way these companies see workers is the same way they see widgets: plug them in and they should work.

That’s the sad thing about a college education. The truth is that most jobs don’t require a college education. I have spent about half my working life as a programmer, and I’ve never taken a course on computers or programming. But the thing about forcing people to have college degrees is that it is supposed to make them better workers. But it really doesn’t. The specifics of any job will require specialized training. The whole business of college degrees is just a way for the power elite to justify why it is that people don’t have jobs. “Oh, well you need a college degree!” And then, the kids get a college degree, and it doesn’t matter.

I constantly see stories about how companies can’t find the skilled employees that they need. This is what the whole thing about the H1-B visas is about. If an employer finds that it can’t find good help, it has two options. It can pay more or it can find inexperienced people and train them. The problem with both of those solutions is that they cost money. What such stories should actually be saying it, “Employer can’t find help at the wages it wants to pay.” But then it would be only too clear: the employer isn’t doing its job. Or the employer wants an unfair advantage by getting trained workers for less than the going rate. Much better to blame workers. In the 1960s and 1970s, when unions were much stronger, workers had an easier time finding work and (relative to comparable countries) they made more. We’ve given both those things up so that employers can make a lot more money. And as Johnston discusses in the video above: this isn’t an accident; it is due to government policy. We live in an oligarchy, folks.

Alan Abramowitz emailed Paul Krugman with nine reasons why he now thinks that Donald Trump just might become the Republican nominee for president. The details don’t much matter. Really it comes down to this: Trump is way ahead in the polls. The only “establishment” candidate likely to be able to catch him is Marco Rubio. No one really takes Ben Carson seriously — and for very good reason: he is a nutcase, and that becomes clearer and clearer every day. Other than the Christian nationalists, he has no base. So it really does look like a race between Trump and the even worse Ted Cruz.

Krugman noted this should come as no surprise. Why should the Republican establishment think that its base of voters would “be reasonable” about who they flock to. That very establishment has pushed a domestic policy of “death panels!” and a foreign policy of “Benghazi!” Thus, we have two kinds of Republican candidates: people who are crazy and people who pretend to be crazy to get elected. As Krugman said, “Primary voters are expected to respect that?” Actually, I think it is worse. How are primary voters even supposed to know the difference. From their perspective, the “establishment” candidates are just the ones who seem less authentic.

Under normal circumstances, a Trump or Cruz Republican nominee would be a good thing for Democrats. But I can’t help remembering that a lot of liberals were pleased when the Republicans nominated Ronald Reagan in 1980. “The people will never elect a McCarthyite freak like that!” Well, they did. And in a landslide. Will the American people, in their good sense, elect Donald Trump or Ted Cruz? Under the right circumstances, absolutely. This is one of the reasons I’ve been saying for years that the best thing for the Democratic Party is if the Republican Party started acting like a normal political party and less like a revolutionary power.

Let’s look at the political science of it. I expect the economy to continue to improve for the next year. The Federal Reserve may screw that up, but I’m betting not. Given that, the Democrats have a huge advantage in winning the presidency. If the economy tanks, the election will be the Republicans to lose — pretty much regardless of who they nominate. But my great concern is how the Democrats could lose the 2016 election, even with an improving economy. Sadly, it wouldn’t be that hard.

Political scientist Lynn Vavreck explains what needs to happen in her book, The Message Matters: The Economy and Presidential Campaigns. Most presidential elections are about the economy. So if the 2016 election is about the economy and it is doing well, the Democrats win the election. I’ll bet a thousands dollars on that right now, and I am neither a rich nor a betting man. But if Trump or Cruz become the Republican nominee, they may not make the election about the economy. Obviously, what an election is about is not entirely up to the candidates. But they would both push immigration and terrorism. And if they could get the country to care about that and talk about that, they could win. It wouldn’t be a large win — it would be a squeaker. But it wouldn’t matter; it would still be a win.

Still, would that work? There is a second part of Vavreck’s analysis: the issue that Trump or Cruz would run on would have to be one that the Democrat would be vulnerable on. Let’s assume the Democrat is Clinton. I don’t see her all that vulnerable. Sure, when ten Republican candidates stand on a stage by themselves, they take it for granted that she’s been a terrible Secretary of State. But I don’t think that’s generally believed. If anything, most Americans think Clinton is a bit too much of a hawk.

The main thing is that a Trump or Cruz candidacy throws a random element into the campaign. Regardless who the Republicans nominate, I will be nervous for the next year.

Over at Raw Story, Tom Boggioni reported on an amazing interview that Sam Harris recently gave. We all knew that the Paris attacks would make Harris more offensive than usual. But he is definitely upping his game. You’d almost think that he was running for president as a Republican. You may remember back a few years, Harris claimed that the Europeans “who speak most sensibly about the threat that Islam poses to Europe are actually fascists.” He likes these kinds of claims and then nitpicks those who claim that he is siding with fascists or whoever it is he is talking about at that point.

Well, in this recent interview with Douglas Murray, Harris asked and answered his own question, “What percentage of Christians will be jihadists or want to live under Sharia law? Zero.” Well, given that Sharia law is the basic Islamic legal system, that’s not too surprising. There are lots and lots of American Christians who want to implement Biblical law. This is the kind of sloppy mistake that Harris would never make if discussing an issue that he was not blinded by because of his hatred and fear. In general, I’ve found Harris to be a fairly smart guy. I found his article length book Free Will quite good. But if the discussion is Islam, there is no amount of nonsense that he won’t haul out to achieve his predetermined conclusions.

This was said in defense of Ted Cruz and his preference for Christians. But as is always the case with Harris, he claims to be making a fine tuned argument, “I hope you understand that I am expressing no sympathy at all with Ted Cruz’s politics or with Ted Cruz.” Yes, no sympathy for Ted Cruz’s politics — just his policies regarding Muslims? I’m not sure what to make of that. I think what he is really getting at is that the process by which Ted Cruz gets to his bigotry is different from the process Sam Harris uses. Cruz gets there by being a “religious maniac.” Harris gets there through his special blend of pure logic and fearlessness in the face of PC criticism. Because if you listen to him, his argument for why other intellectuals don’t agree with him is always just that his detractors let their manners get in the way of their clarity of thought.

But the big moment was when Harris compared Ben Carson and Noam Chomsky:

This is typical of Harris in that he isn’t actually saying that he would vote for Carson over Chomsky. He’s saying that regarding this one issue. But given how much Harris cares about this stuff, you would have to wonder. Regardless, I know that Harris will make a big deal out of people claiming that he said he would vote for Carson over Chomsky, and he clearly did not say that. I don’t care. The issue is not who he would or wouldn’t vote for. He said that that Carson understands these geopolitics better than Noam Chomsky. That’s one of the most fatuous claims I’ve ever heard. You don’t have to agree with Chomsky to see that.

What’s more, he’s simply wrong to say that Chomsky doesn’t understand that the jihadists are the enemy. Chomsky’s been very clear about that. The fact that Chomsky sees the jihadists in a broader context that is nuanced is only a reflection of the fact that Harris is wrong to say that Carson understands what is happening now better than Chomsky. It’s all just amazing and I do not think I have ever thought so lowly of Sam Harris. I didn’t think he was capable of making such an obviously unjustified claim.

This raises a really important question for me, “Why does anyone listen to Sam Harris on such matters?” He has nothing more to say on geopolitics than Dick Cheney does. In fact, he has the same things to say, as well. He shouldn’t be taken seriously. He’s nothing but an ideologue who continues to push us to do things that have not only hurt us internationally but also domestically. The opportunity costs of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars — not to mention the “war on terror” — have been enormous. We have wasted trillions of dollars that we could have invested in our people and our infrastructure. And the result of wasting all that money has probably been worse than a wash in terms of the state of terrorism in the world.

I could go on and on. Harris’ reasoning is totally messed up. His ideology is bankrupt. I think there is a lot of psychology going on here, because in his highly publicized email “debate” with Chomsky, Sam Harris came off as an idiot except to all his worshipful fans. But the main thing is that I see no reason to pay attention to Sam Harris anymore. I’m sure he won’t miss me. There’s a lot more money in appealing to people’s hatred and fear. Appealing to people like me would lose him far more readers. But it’s sad for a man who certainly thinks of himself as a serious intellectual.

Josh Barro wrote a really interesting article about a week ago, The Tax Code Can Be Simpler. But Not Three Pages. It leads off with Carly Fiorina’s idea that the federal tax code could be replaced with three pages. This is in reference to the Hall-Rabushka legislation which, at 1,120 words would fit on three pages. It is also a flat rate tax plan, of course.

Before getting into it, I have a question: would Americans care that the tax code just got much smaller if it meant their taxes went up? Way up?! Indeed, other than demagoguing politicians, I don’t know anyone who cares what size the tax code is. That’s something for bureaucrats to worry about. The rest of just know the small bits of the tax code that we have to know. And if our taxes are really complicated, we get a professional. No one cares if the tax code is “73,000 pages.” (In fact, the tax code itself is 3,728 pages — but anyone who listens to Carly Fiorina for facts deserves the ignorance they get.)

But the thing about the tax code is that it is as complicated as it needs to be. Barro quoted Columbia Law School tax professor Michael Graetz saying, “The minute it’s passed, I’m going to call my dean and tell her to pay me only in goods.” Because in order to keep the tax plan to 1,120 words, there are no taxes on benefits. There is nothing about bartering. There is also, of course, nothing about enforcement. What happens if you just won’t pay your taxes. Oh, detail, details!

But that’s the point. I know lots of conservatives who are outraged about the carried interest loophole. How can it be that hedge fund managers can take what is clearly earned income and have it be taxed at capital gains! Very simple: the tax code allows it. But these are the very same conservatives who rant about the number of pages in the tax code — not because they care but because demagogues like Carly Fiorina have made them think that it is a great concern. Do you really doubt that after Hall-Rabushka was passed that every CEO in the nation would see their salaries go down to $1 per year? Of course they would! They’d do everything to avoid paying taxes, just like they do now.

The rest of Barro’s article is about how the tax code could be simplified and made fairer. Hooray! That’s true. I think some of the ideas are great like having the IRS automatically fill out people’s forms and then letting the tax payer make changes. But this is the fundamental problem with the so called reformacons like him: all they do is give cover to the truly vile plans of the conservative movement. If the tax code is actually going to be made simpler, it isn’t going to be done so by Barro’s party: the Republicans. I don’t see the Democrats doing it either, but they stand a much better chance of doing so.

Tax “simplification” and tax “reform” are just euphemisms on the right for changing the tax code so the middle class pays more and the rich pay less. Fiorina is not pushing Hall-Rabushka because it is “simple”; she’s pushing it because it is a flat tax. As the Tax Policy Center put it, “The family exemptions make the flat tax progressive for low-income households. But at the high end of the income distribution, the tax is regressive, just like sales taxes and VATs.” In other words: middle class tax hike, upper class tax cut.

I’m all for discussing better ways to run the country. But I find it vaguely offensive when Josh Barro does it. The truth is that his actual policy positions put him well inside the Democratic Party. Yet he still carries the intellectual water of the Republicans. So candidates like Fionia can run around talking about how “conservatives” have all these great ideas for tax reform. Great propaganda! But they will never get into any Republican tax proposal.

I read three articles last night about David Brooks: one by Martin Longman and two by Matt Bruenig: one more recent (Why Not Shame David Brooks for Divorcing?) and another that I want to focus on, On Civility. I didn’t know that Brooks had divorced a couple of years ago. And it isn’t the point it. No one actually thinks that people they know should suffer through bad marriages. And no one pretends to know what David Brooks has really gone through in life. I’m sure he’s like everyone with his good days and bad days and secret horrors.

The problem is that David Brooks has made a career of telling vast classes of poor people that if only they would act more like middle and upper class people — people like him — then they wouldn’t be poor. The one core principle of David Brooks is that economic inequality is due to cultural inequality. His is the more intellectual sounding version of, “If those kids would just pull their pants up, everything would be fine!” Or if you want to go back five decades, “If those kids would just cut their hair!” Although Brooks would never admit it, it is poor shaming. People like Brooks never want to admit that their success has anything to do with luck.

Bruenig’s argument in the earlier article is that it is uncivil to shame David Brooks. He’s a human being. He has feelings. But he and his conservative colleagues Reihan Salam and Ross Douthat are never attacked for their incivility toward the nameless poor. In fact, all three men are held up as “moderates” because they are for things like paternity leave. But that is all part of the underlying philosophy that people aren’t poor because of their situations in life and social factors that have working against them long before they were even born. No, it is because they don’t have those middle class mores.

This is also the beat that uber-racist Charles Murray has been on for years. When he isn’t telling us people are poor because they are stupid, he is telling us that they are poor because of their cultures. This is the state of sociology in the conservative world. Correlation does not imply causation, unless that correlation can be used to justify the same old policies you always want — namely those that continue to enrich your social class at the expense of others’.

But the situation is worse than even Bruenig indicates. The truth is not just that we can’t be uncivil to David Brooks because he’s an actual man. I don’t know David Brooks. For all I know, he’s a computer program — the newest version of CleverBot. The truth is, because of my “colorful” life, people have had no problem being uncivil to me — in much more intimate circumstances than David Brooks has to put up with. The truth is that we can’t be uncivil to David Brooks because he is one of society’s winners. And to attack him would be to attack the whole society.

On the other side of it, attacking the poor is to protect the whole society. It is a way of saying that the society is great. The problem is that these poor people just can’t get it together. It’s like Singapore, which is generally thought the cleanest city in the world. Yet it still has rats. That’s what the poor are to these apologists for the perfection that is the American economic system.

The argument of these social conservatives is that people are poor because they don’t stay married and get a good education. But David Brooks is now divorced. What’s more, he isn’t that educated — as you can tell by the depth of writing. But he must be moral and educated enough — he’s rich! I have a PhD in physics, I am divorced, and I am poor. Aha! That must be related. David Brooks only has a Bachelor of Arts, is divorced, and is rich. Aha! That must not mean a thing.

I suspect that I am too lose with my definition of racism. By it, pretty much everyone — very much including myself — is a racist. And that makes the word useless. My interest in this has been to allow people to see their own blind spots. But perhaps that time is over. Still, I’m really not that interested in the Mississippi Burning form of racism, because it is something that is largely dead. And I want to avoid the situation where we define racism as some old man using the term “negro” — which doesn’t mean much in itself other than the speaker being out of it.

This bothered me last year with Cliven Bundy. He famously said, “I want to tell you one more thing I know about the negro.” I’m afraid that what most offended people was his use of the word “negro.” But that was more a function of him being in his late 60s than anything else. Yet I don’t think there would have been nearly as much of an uproar if he had said, “I want to tell you one more thing I know about the African American.” But it should have! Because in that statement is the most clear example of racism that you will find: African Americans aren’t some arbitrarily defined group; they are this one monolithic thing.

But at least when it comes to African Americans, we have a chance of seeing it. Someone like Bundy might say that, but you wouldn’t have anchors on CNN saying something like that. Yet when it comes to Muslims, you see this without a hint of realization. Treating members of a religion that is over a billion and a half strong as a monolith is perfectly fine. Here are John Vause and Isha Sesay interrogating civil rights leader Yasser Louati. Louati even starts by noting that there were Muslim victims of the attack. But the anchors aren’t interested in that. Vause follows this by asking him, “Why is it that no one within the Muslim community there in France knew what these guys were up to?” It’s almost unbelievable:

What’s also interesting in this segment is the discussion of why it is that the Muslim community is not denouncing these attacks. This is something I hear from conservatives all the time. It doesn’t matter how quickly and forcefully and loudly Muslims denounce such attacks. The fact is that it isn’t presented much on MSNBC, much less on Fox News. Therefore, it doesn’t exist. There might have a been a billion Muslims mourning the 9/11 attacks, but it was video of two dozen of “those people” dancing that got rerun over and over again on the television.

But in this case, we aren’t talking about some ignorant television viewers. We are talking educated, intelligent news presenters who are at the top of their fields. They aren’t being told to present Muslims in this totally bigoted way. It just comes naturally. Yasser Louati is a Mulsim! In France! Why didn’t he stop the attack?!

Can you imagine two CNN anchors asking Obama why no one in the “black community” didn’t stop some crime committed by an African American? Of course not! It would be outrageous. In fact, it would be silly — as if all African Americans had a secret handshake and a special Facebook Black where they communicated.

This, my friends, is the face of racism at its most pure. In a form that will make people look back in two decades with horror. How could they not have seen it? But they don’t. This form of racism is so common that people haven’t even learned to spot it.

My first wife was a privacy fanatic. And like most privacy fanatics I’ve know, she had nothing worth hiding. She had a boring life. (She married me!) I, on the other hand, have lived a very colorful life — often in a very public way. So I’ve long ago given up on the delusion that I had much in terms of privacy. I find myself in a curious position of now living a very boring life, but not caring too much about this issues on a personal level. But in terms of politics, I care a great deal.

Andrew Fishman and Glenn Greenwald wrote a really good article this last week, Overwhelmed NSA Surprised to Discover Its Own Surveillance “Goldmine” on Venezuela’s Oil Executives. What it shows is that the NSA collects so much data that it doesn’t even know what it has. It reminds me of the ozone hole.

NASA was collecting data of total column ozone levels in Antarctica. The geophysicist Joe Farman and his little team from Cambridge were studying ozone levels at the south pole and they noticed a huge decrease. But they were really skeptical. They knew that NASA had been studying this stuff for decades. Why hadn’t anyone published it?! Well, the reason was a kind of computer bug. The scientists at NASA wrote some code that said, “If ozone levels get below a certain level, put it aside for humans to look at it.” The humans never looked. After “Large Losses of Total Ozone in Antarctica Reveal Seasonal ClOx/NOx Interaction” came out, NASA found that they had an enormous amount of data that showed the ozone hole and its increasing trend.

In general, it is not a good idea to collect data just to be collecting it. This is something I’ve ranted about for years with video stores that want your Social Security number. Why? No reason. They are just collecting every kind of data they can think of — just in case. But with the NSA, you have to wonder, shouldn’t they be doing targeted investigations? It isn’t a good idea to just collect everything they can so later they can say, “Oh yeah, the information on that terrorist attack was in our archives.”

But what really bugs me is that in this case, the NSA has been collecting data that can only be described as corporate espionage. Ever wonder about that? Why we hate certain questionable regimes like Venezuela while we love truly horrible regimes like Saudi Arabia? It’s all about our government working in the interests of huge corporations. ExxonMobile is making billions in Saudi Arabia. But ExxonMobile was thrown out of Venezuela. Thus: Venezuela is bad.

At least the NSA isn’t spying on us, right? Well, no. The NSA says that it only collects metadata — basically the public information of our email and phonecalls. But that means nothing. This revelation about corporate espionage isn’t the first. Previously, the NSA was caught spying on Brazil’s oil company, Petrobras. Before that, the NSA said, “The department does ***not*** engage in economic espionage in any domain, including cyber.”

It seems that the NSA sees part of its job as being lying to the American people. So I think we have to assume that the NSA does, in fact, read every email we send — that they know exactly what you read on every website and when. Which, as I’ve noted, is probably not a big deal. But it does mean that if the government ever decides it doesn’t like you, you are toast. But fear not: this is the behavior of a dying empire. Your great great grandchildren won’t have to worry about the NSA, because the United States of America will be a backwater, having lost relevance because it focused on maintaining its power by any means necessary rather than improving the lives of its people.