I'm nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there's a pair of us -don't tell!
They'd banish us, you know.
How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!
As soon as the first Democratic debate ended, on 10/13, the race was on to declare the winner. For columnists and pundits, the answer was obvious: Hillary Clinton. She was "confident and poised," depicted herself as a "progressive who likes to get things done," and came across as the most "competent" candidate on the stage.
On the other hand, social media and online polls were unanimous in calling the debate for Bernie Sanders. It's a puzzling split though there are those who are quick to point out the inherent unreliability of online polling. And there is a grain of truth in that argument. Online polling is naturally self-selective; it lacks the randomness of traditional polling and, to an extent, serves mostly to gauge the enthusiasm of a candidate's supporters. By that measure, while Sanders's supporters were the most enthusiastic crowd when reacting to the debate, that doesn't indicate that Sanders was, in fact, the "winner."
That said, while online polling may not be terribly reliable, is it any less so than the opinions of a few score pundits and commentators? Perhaps not. But we have some additional evidence to take into consideration. For one, focus groups, which are a bit more aligned to the average voter than the collective wisdom of columnists and talking heads, declared Sanders the unequivocal winner. From Fox News to CNN focus groups overwhelmingly preferred the performance of Bernie Sanders. But again, as with online polling and media consensus, focus groups, while telling a useful tale, are hardly scientific evidence of a win.
Then there is the financial race. Since the debate, the Sanders campaign has pulled in close to $2 million in donations, an impressive haul. But again, as with online polling, this may only serve to point out the enthusiasm of his supporters. It doesn't say how much of that money came from new donors, nor does it say how much comes from those who had initially supported Clinton.
The fact is, who "won" the debate is a meaningless question because we were really witnessing two separate debates. Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton went into the debate with very different goals. And, in their own way, each candidate achieved what they set out to do. The problem for Clinton is what she set out to accomplish was essentially just to hold the line. Her campaign has been sputtering along, and the sheen of inevitability has long since worn off. The campaign has struggled to respond to Republican attacks and suffered a notable lack of enthusiasm. Her task in the debate was to try to change that narrative. She needed to appear, in that most intangible and useless of terms, "presidential." And she certainly did that, to the acclaim of Democratic pundits who have, in all honesty, never really taken the Sanders campaign very seriously. For them, all that was required for a Clinton win is for her to demonstrate enough competence to come off as a plausible candidate.
But Bernie Sanders had an entirely different goal: to introduce himself and his ideas to an audience that had not yet really begun to pay attention. For political junkies, who have been following the race for months, it is very easy to miss the fact that the Sanders campaign isn't really on the radar of most of the electorate. We read dozens of stories on the Democratic primary every day, see Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton smeared across our Facebook news feeds, follow every poll. But we are a tiny minority of the electorate. For most, Bernie Sanders is a name who is recognized, but little more. Outside of the early primary states of Iowa and New Hampshire, where Sanders has been campaigning heavily, his name recognition is still quite low.
What Sanders needed to do, in the debate, was to change his lack of recognition. And, I would submit, he more than succeeded at that goal. To that, there are two metrics that are more relevant than all the focus groups and fundraising and establishment opinions put together. The first of these is in the count of Google searches during the debate, where Sanders dominated from beginning to end:
"Sanders repeatedly saw spikes in Google interest after he spoke. After his intro. After he talked about guns. After basically everything else he said. About an hour after the debate began, Jim Webb attracted some attention after he complained about not having an opportunity to speak. But it was Sanders that drew attention the whole time. What's more, Sanders actually overpowered the long-term king of Google, Donald Trump. During the debate, Sanders continually attracted more Google interest than Trump."
That tells us that, as Sanders began to introduce himself to the broader electorate, they were interested enough in what he had to say to dig a little deeper. It is notable that, none of the other three candidates - Jim Webb, Lincoln Chafee, and Martin O'Malley - who also needed to break out to a wider audience, even came close to generating the level of interest that Sanders did. The second metric is in Twitter followers. Sanders racked up 35K new followers during the debate, nearly three times as many as did Clinton. So, not only were those new to Sanders interested in what he had to say, they liked it enough to follow him. And that is good news for the Sanders campaign. As he and his ideas reach a broader audience, they may prove to have real traction. (Which is probably why he is polling rather well in both Iowa and New Hampshire, where most voters have seen a lot more of him than the nation as a whole.)
There were two debates on Tuesday night and two winners. In her quest to reassure the establishment that yes, she is a viable candidate, Hillary Clinton clearly won. But Bernie Sanders achieved a more impressive feat: reaching 15 million or so voters who didn't know him and piquing their interest. In that debate, Sanders was the clear winner. Time will tell which of these wins counts for more.
He spends some time over Murdoch's "real black president" tweet about his favoured candidate, Ben Carson. It resulted in the News Corp chieftain issuing an apology .
Then Taibbi gets into more entertaining stuff about the relationship between Donald Trump and Fox News.
Once the channel's favourite, he argues that Trump "is fast becoming the network's arch enemy… a traitor" for denouncing Fox "as a false conservative god." He writes:
"The orangutoid real estate mogul's presence in this presidential race is a real and hilarious threat to Murdoch's political influence…
Until Trump arrived, Murdoch owned the lowest common denominator in the media space. He didn't just play to our worst instincts, he wrapped both arms around them and squeezed as hard as he could…
Murdoch sold political coverage that could be digested directly by the stomach, bypassing the mind. He fed viewers a steady diet of southern strategy bromides about minorities and foreigners and queers and feminists and Sean Penn, all working together to steal the minivan out of Middle America's driveway.
From a production standpoint, this coverage strategy is a beautifully utilitarian thing. The stuff writes itself… You win by picking five to six news stories each week that fit the narrative, and just hammering the hell out of them…
Murdoch's genius is that he always found ways to hit new lows without hitting absolute bottom."
Then The Don came along, and – pun alert – he is set on trumping Murdoch. And the clash between right-wing ideologues seeking to be top dog with America's conservative audiences presents Fox News with a problem. "He's pitching voters on the idea that Rupert's news network is a sellout establishment plant," writes Taibbi.
Matters came to a head when Trump clashed with Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly who questioned him about his apparent misogyny during the Republican candidates' debate in August.
Then, according to a report in New York magazine , Trump was called by Fox News chairman Roger Ailes to assure him that the channel would cover him "fairly" in future. Why? Because of concern that Trump's views were more popular than those of Fox News.
"Fox was deluged with pro-Trump emails", said the report while Megyn Kelly got the thumbs down. It cited a Fox source who said: "Roger was not happy. Most of the Fox viewers were taking Trump's side."
Taibbi is scathing about how that problem is perceived by Ailes and Murdoch who, he remarks, have "spent a generation building an audience of morons". He adds:
"Their business model depends on morons; morons are the raw materials of their industry… The problem with morons is that you… have to keep upping the ante to make it work.
Trump is doing his best, but he's going to places now that make even Rupert Murdoch nervous. Meanwhile the 'respectable' candidate is Fox's own Ben Carson, a man who continues to be living proof that you don't need to have a brain in order to operate on one."
Taibbi argues that Murdoch senses his "beloved audience of idiots" are drifting away and "beginning to suspect the truth about him, i.e. that he isn't really one of them.
"Murdoch could go lower to prove his devotion, but that next step down is Trump. If he balks at that, he might lose his audience. Beautiful."
Source: Rolling Stone
Bernie Sanders won the Democratic Presidential debate before the first question was even asked. He won it in the first ten minutes, when the five candidates were each asked to introduce themselves. The other four candidates all considered this an opportunity to talk about themselves. They each bragged about their background, their credentials, and their family. Hillary Clinton fit right in with this self-centered approach, right down to touting her grandmother and grandchild.
Only Bernie Sanders broke this mold. He used his entire two minutes to talk not about himself, but about the issues that matter: income inequality, campaign finance, climate change, and the excessive incarceration of blacks and Latinos. His positions on the issues themselves were his introduction to the people. He spoke with passion and clarity. He set himself apart, above and beyond the conventional approach of the other four candidates. The entire rest of the debate was nothing but an extended series of footnotes to this decisive moment.
Why, then, did all the Washington insiders declare that Clinton won the debate? They did so because they evaluated it by the same conventional, superficial standards which Clinton abided by. Was she friendly and personable? Check. Was she at times tough and aggressive? Check. Was she confident and in command of her facts? Check. But was she decisively dedicated to articulating passionate positions on policy, rather than to making a "good impression"? No way. As palatable as she made herself seem, she was nothing more than vanilla ice cream, through and through. Sanders was chocolate rocky road, the authentic personification of progressive values, and the difference was unmistakable.
This is why the focus groups of actual voters on CNN, Fox, and elsewhere declared Sanders the winner of the debate, not Clinton. Actual voters are not looking for conformity to a conventional standard, however appealing it may appear. Actual voters want the real thing, not the appearance of it. Sanders' authenticity was unmistakable.
An Essay for the Day After John Lennon's Birthday
Back when I was a teenage boy, ardently seeking the shedding of my hapless status as a skinny kid unacquainted with the mystery of sexual congress, I took a job as a grocery delivery boy. I was 16, I had a new driver's license, and a head full of fanciful stories about things that happened in the world of grown ups. One such story was that grocery delivery boys were commonly met at the door by lovely bored housewives wearing negligees. Lacking any handy cash, these women were said to quite frequently offer sex in lieu of a tip.
I didn't like that job much. The owner of the store was grouchy, and he liked to take out his frustrations on the lowliest of his employees. That was me. And the pay wasn't good, nor were the monetary tips very generous. As for the more carnal tips, they just never materialized. After one summer, I gave up my quest for those horny housewives. Perhaps if I'd made a career of being a grocery delivery boy, I might have realized that dream by now, but I kinda doubt it.
A similar dream, the dream of inheriting a fortune from a distant relative I didn't know I had, also failed to materialize, and I didn't abandon that fantasy until a couple of years ago.
Ditto the dream of winning the lottery, Irish or otherwise.
Once in awhile, I envisioned myself on a TV game show, winning the kind of prize that would set a record for such prizes. And I often dreamt of an unbeatable run at baccarat in Monte Carlo, or a similarly stupendous night on the craps table in Vegas. I've been to Monte Carlo and to Vegas, played baccarat and craps on more than a few occasions, but that big unbeatable run never happened, and time for it to come true is about up.
I might also include the dream I once had of living in a castle, smoking a pipe by a fire in my beautiful book-lined library, with the wind outside howling across the heath. Though I have a lot of books, my abode is nothing like a castle, and the view out my window is not a stormy, moon-kissed heath, but a drought-stricken forest in California. It ain't bad, but it's not exactly a dream.
Though I don't play a music instrument, I used to dream of being asked to sit in with guys like Miles Davis or the Rolling Stones, and being rewarded with the looks of astonishment on their faces when I began to play.
Though I don't speak a foreign language, I often dreamed of being addressed in Mandarin Chinese, or Farsi, and startling the person who had spoken to me by answering, quite eloquently, in their language.
Though I was a blond kid, I dreamt that when I got to be the age I am now, I would have the head of hair I'd seen on my Italian barber, dark, lush, and full, with just a dash of distinguished gray at the temples. That dream has not been fulfilled in the fullness of time.
And there were times, lots of them, when I dreamed more broadly and less selfishly, times when I dreamt of a two-party system of governing in America where one side didn't so frequently seem weak and uncommitted, and the other side didn't so frequently seem venal and/or insane. I dreamt of a Democratic Party populated by politicians and operatives with less fungible values, with more courage, and with less willingness to pander to the same sources of money that caused their Republican opponents to go down on their knees to the rich and powerful, the oligarchs who seemed unconcerned about nearly everything except profit and the elusive attempt to satisfy their insatiable greed.
There were other dreams, too, probably more than I'll ever recall. But once, a long time ago, I took my little girl to see the Moscow Circus. It was at the height of the Cold War, and when the circus performers entered, they were led by two men on two flanking elephants, one carrying an American flag, and one carrying the flag of the Soviet Union. With my daughter beside me, I teared up. My dream of peace was symbolized by the flags preceding that processional, and I was moved, both by the dream, and by how far it always was from being realized. The dream of the reconciliation between these two countries seemed essential to the future of the smiling and innocent little girl who sat beside me.
And now that little girl has grown to middle age. The Soviet Union is no more. But still her future is imperiled by tensions now arising between Russia and the U.S. in the tinderbox that is Syria.
And now I don't know what kind of dream I should dream that will quiet the fears and the horrors being generated from that place. I don't know what flags I can envision, marching side by side.
I once dreamt, too, of an America where the racial rift was healed, where the races—black, white, brown, red, and yellow—all lived in proximity, in harmony, with mutual respect and even affection, in equality under the law.
I dreamt that I would grow old in a nation where poverty had become a thing of the past, with a populace governed by politicians who served the good of all, rather than the profits of a select few.
I dreamt of living in a nation where at least as much was spent on things like education and pubic works as on the military.
I dreamt of a less fearful place to live, where being armed was not a prerequisite for walking the streets, or going to the store, or getting on the bus to go school, or setting out to worship in a church, a synagogue, or a mosque.
As a boy, when Senator Joseph McCarthy was sowing fear, hate, and division, I dreamt of a time when our politicians inspired the best in us, rather than the worst. Alas, Joe McCarthy would seem moderate in today's loony bin.
No, I don't live in the America I so often dreamt my generation would create back when some of us were marching against the war in Viet Nam, or leafletting on behalf of farm workers, or campaigning in the American south for voting rights for blacks.
Like generations of dreamers before me, the nightmare overwhelmed the dream, and now new dreamers must begin dreaming anew. I dream they will make more headway than my generation made, that they will stay focused, will be infused with the passion they will need to sustain them, and will produce leaders who are up to the increasingly daunting challenges they face.
I've always been a dreamer.
But I'm not the only one.
Along with Donald Trump, Dr. Ben Carson is way ahead of the pack for the Republican presidential nomination. When Trump, an alumnus of the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, says that climate change is a hoax, I can believe it's a cynical lie pandering to the Republican base, rather than an index of his ignorance. But when Carson, a retired Johns Hopkins neurosurgeon, denies that climate change is man-made, or calls the Big Bang a fairy tale, or blames gun control for the extent of the Holocaust, I think he truly believes it.
It's conceivable that the exceptional hand-eye coordination and 3D vision that enabled Carson to separate conjoined twins is a compartmentalized gift, wholly independent of his intellectual acuity. But he could not have risen to the top of his profession without learning the Second Law of Thermodynamics (pre-meds have to take physics), without knowing that life on earth began more than 6,000 years ago (pre-meds have to take biology), without understanding the scientific method (an author of more than 120 articles in peer-reviewed journals can't make up his own rules of evidence). Yet what does it mean to learn such things, if they don't stop you from spouting scientific nonsense?
This hasn't hindered his campaign. Participants in focus groups of Republican caucus and primary voters in Iowa and New Hampshire, conducted in recent days by Bloomberg's Mark Halperin and John Heilemann, used these words to describe Carson: "deep," "thoughtful," "intelligent," "smart," "brilliant," a "top mind." I get this. According to a recent Public Policy Polling report, 46 percent of Carson supporters (and 61 percent of Trump supporters) think President Obama was not born in the U.S., and 61 percent of Carson supporters (and 66 percent of Trump supporters) think the president is a Muslim. Carson's being called brilliant by that base ain't baffling.
What I don't get is how his rigorous scientific education and professional training gave Carson's blind spots a pass. Was it, in George W. Bush's memorable phrase, "the soft tyranny of low expectations"? Or was it the tyranny of fundamentalism over facts?
In the humanities, the equivalent conundrum is the failure of a deep appreciation for masterworks of art, literature and music to instill virtue. I first came across this disturbing indictment when I was an undergraduate at the chief rival of Carson's alma mater. My field of concentration (Harvard's pretentious term for "major") was molecular biology, and I would have quickly flamed out if I'd maintained that science was consistent with creationism, or any of the other canards that survived Carson's education. But I was also in love with literature, and ended up with a doctorate in it. On the way there, what troubled me about my studies was an essay called "To Civilize Our Gentlemen" by George Steiner. Its thesis ran so counter to the bedrock of an elite education -- the belief that the humanities humanize -- that I went to England for two years to study at Cambridge with Steiner, as passionate an embodiment of academic high culture as could be, in order to reconcile my love for humanistic learning with its apparent inability to prevent barbarism.
My copy of the essay, and the book it appeared in, Language and Silence, is full of a 20-year-old's underlining and marginalia ("right on!"). These are some of the passages that jangled me:
We know now that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to the day's work at Auschwitz in the morning. To say that he has read them without understanding or that his ear is gross, is cant... The simple yet appalling fact is that we have very little solid evidence that literary studies do very much to enrich or stabilize moral perception, that they humanize... Indeed, I would go further: it is at least conceivable that the focusing of consciousness on a written text... diminishes the sharpness and readiness of our actual moral response... The capacity for [moral response]... is not limitless; on the contrary, it can be rapidly absorbed by fictions, and thus the cry in the poem may come to sound louder, more urgent, more real than the cry in the street outside. The death in the novel may move us more potently than the death in the next room... [S]urely there is something terrible in our doubt whether the study and delight a man finds in Shakespeare makes him any less capable of organizing a concentration camp.
When Wolf Blitzer asked Carson if he wanted to amend or take back his comparison of Obama's America to Nazi Germany, he replied, "Absolutely not." Am I comparing Carson to Nazis? Absolutely not. I'm comparing the compatibility of a scientific education and intellectual ignorance with the compatibility of a humanistic education and moral ignorance.
The simple yet appalling fact is that we have at least some solid evidence that a top scientific education and a distinguished career in medicine does not make a man any less capable of believing untruths to be true and truths to be false.
I don't know how I'd react if a shooter opened fire in my classroom. Maybe I'd risk my safety to protect others. Maybe I'd be too petrified do anything. But I do know the feeling that would devastate me if someone I loved became "a body with bullet holes"; it would not be the feeling that the Second Amendment is in jeopardy. It is at least conceivable that the clinical detachment required by a doctor to deal with the deaths in this room makes the deaths in the next room less urgent, less real.
I know plenty of physicians of whom that is not true. But when Ben Carson blames a mass murderer's victims for failing to foil him, I know of at least one man of science whose capacity for moral response has been absorbed by fictions.
THE HABIT OF BEING CONTENT
By Joe Martino
This is something I feel is very important for each of us and I'm going to get a bit personal about it because I have seen what it can do to lives, including my own at times.
My long-time girlfriend and I recently mutually ended a relationship that we experienced together for 5 years. During that relationship I had gone through moments of feeling like "Is this it? Is this what a long-term relationship should feel like?" I was 22 years old when the relationship began, so learning how long-term relationships felt was something I wasn't accustomed to yet.
Not knowing what something should truly feel like, especially since everyone is different and in the end it only comes down to your own true feelings about something, I allowed my mind to play at various points over the 5 years. Sometimes I would feel like I wanted more, that maybe I wasn't getting enough out of the relationship and so it wasn't right for me. Maybe there wasn't enough excitement or things to do or to talk about. Should there be more? I reflected on this and remained open to how I felt. But of course at times that feeling of discontentment would creep in.
On the flip side, from my perspective, my partner had challenges in the relationship as well. At times she would experience similar thoughts as myself but also she felt like not enough was happening in life for it to be enjoyable or fun. That more needed to happen and needed to be happening often or else things would be boring. I think this is actually something many of us go through in life and it can be the reason why we're always searching for external stimulation.
To be clear, it isn't that we should be doing nothing, a look at my own life would suggest I do not feel that way at all, but I believe we shouldn't have such a hard time finding peace and joy within ourselves just because we aren't "doing" anything.
How many times have you heard people look at others and say "I wish I was like that." Or "I wish I had that, was doing that or could have that." Behind many of these statements is a feeling that emerges that makes it clear that the person is not content with their current life and situation. You might be asking, what is so bad about that? I'll explain the never-ending challenge with this mindset.
For the purposes of this piece I want to clearly define contentment. I'm not saying we should settle or not strive for something we dream of or love to do, but I believe we should ultimately find peace within ourselves as we go or we will forever be searching for excitement or stimulation outside ourselves. If we don't do this, our minds and egos will always be searching for more, and things we have or experience will never be enough.
Instead of going through an experience fully, taking it in and enjoying it from a place of peace, we will instead go through that experience as a means to experience enjoyment but also to fill a void. Although we may not recognize it, that's often a big part of why we get caught up in wanting to do things that everyone else is doing. You could say our entire consumer culture, including the "American dream" stems around preying on the discontentment people feel inside.
Again, I believe in doing things, experiencing life, having adventure and trying new things, but I believe we will experience a lot more peace and joy from these experiences, and regular day life, when we are able to do them from a place of contentment within ourselves as opposed to doing them because we are not content with our current lives.
I say 'unlearning' because I believe deep down, beneath all the stories and struggles we each have within us, we are already at peace -are content and are experiencing joy. These feelings and states of being are simply covered up by all of our ego desires and belief systems of what we must do to experience these states.
I've learned over the years of exploring myself that the only things I can control about life is how I feel about what is going on in my life. I'm not talking about emotions here, more so feelings. I, and we, are not a victim to our emotions and what belief systems run throughout the course of our lives. We have a choice as to what we want to believe is 'us' and the more we recognize that, the more power we have in finding peace and joy in our lives.
As we become aware of how this all plays out within ourselves, we have a chance to unlearn these emotions and states of being that are stuck in discontentment. When we unlearn it, we reveal the peace that is already there. To me, this is the simplest way to experience peace as opposed to artificially trying to create it in other ways. Simply remove the source of the issue.
And if GOP Rep. Peter King of New York is right, it may already be too late for the establishment to prevail.
King said Boehner's departure was essentially "throwing raw meat" to a "small but loud faction" of the GOP and was bad news for the party.
"It signals that crazies have taken over the party," King told CNN. "This has never happened before in our country. Where a person doing a job, the Speaker of the house, was removed from office, by a small faction because they want these unreasonable demands that if you don't agree with them you shut the government down. This is insanity."
There is a principle which is proof against all information, which is proof against all arguments, which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance; that principle is contempt, prior to investigation. ~Herbert Spencer
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