Common Infirmities

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(Free parking)

A proposal for a partial unified theory of Trump scandals.

There has been considerable speculation about whether Donald Trump’s $916 million loss from 1995 may be something other than unadulterated “economic genius” (as Rudolf Giuliani called it, because that’s what you usually call it when someone manages to lose nearly a billion dollars in a single year). In particular, some commentators have suggested that these were not real losses, but an example of “debt parking”: Instead of allowing the losses in his bankruptcy to be written off (in which case, the debt write-down would count as income, cancelling the tax benefit of the loss) it got transferred to an offshore entity controlled by Trump

But here’s another possibility: What if the offshore entity is not controlled by Trump, but by Vladimir Putin and/or the Russian state. Since he hasn’t gone through personal bankruptcy, the debt remains valid, and the creditor can choose to demand repayment at any time. They would essentially own him. That would explain a lot.

Donald Trump’s prodigious prostate

Let us accept for a moment the claim that Donald Trump’s medical condition is uniformly excellent. You might still expect that random medical test results should be about average for a healthy man. (Not meaning BP or heart rate or god-forbid testosterone, which you would expect to reflect his hyperpowerful masculinity.) I was looking at this report, released a few weeks ago, which included Trump’s test result for PSA (prostate-specific antigen). High levels can be signs of an enlarged prostate, or prostate cancer. But Trump’s doctor reports his level at 0.15. According to this study men over 70 with normal prostate have a median level of 1.9 (it doesn’t seem to depend much on age above 70). If we make the very conservative assumption that the distribution falls off linearly from 1.9 down to 0, we would estimate that less than 1% of men have PSA scores below 0.2.

Maybe Trump has no prostate.

Alternatively, he should really be compared with a younger reference group, because his pact with Mephistopheles and/or regular consumption of the blood of virgins keeps him youthful.

All-you-can-eat

Ars Technica reports on testimony by Mediacom, a large US cable company, explaining why they should not be required to stop capping data usage:

People thus shouldn’t complain when Internet providers impose data caps and charge more when customers go over them, he wrote. “Even though virtually every other industry prices its products and services in the same way, some people think that ISPs should be the exception and run their businesses like an all-you-can-eat buffet.”

“Virtually every other industry”… Yes, it’s pretty hard to think of any industry that offers all-you-can-eat buffets. Who could possibly afford to offer all-you-can-eat? It’s a fantasy.

Expectations

Commenting on tonight’s Republican presidential debate, RNC chair Reince Priebus

declined to go into the “details” on Trump’s preparation, but emphasized that Clinton would be held to higher standards because she’s spent over 30 years in the political sphere.

Is that how it works? Do people show up for a job interview and say, “I realise I wasn’t as good as the other candidate in the interview, but I really think you should hire me, because I have a lot less experience in this field”?

When real Americans protest

Republicans are shocked by what they see as the self-destructive fury of “Black Lives Matter” protestors. These people are driven by pure hatred of white people, they say. The land is descending into unprecedented chaos, they say, from which only Donald Trump can rescue us.

I was just reading Rick Perlstein’s history of the US in the 1970s, The Invisible Bridge, and came across this report about events immediately surrounding the 1974 election:

In West Virginia the Thursday before Election Day someone exploded fifteen sticks of dynamite under the gas meter at the school board building just minutes after the superintendent left… Dozens of white men patrolled Campbell Creek with shotguns, following rumors over citizens’ band radio that carloads of blacks were on their way to burn churches. The next day school buses were shot at, and a car owned by parents who insisted on sending their kids back to school was blown up. A police cruiser escorting a school bus was punctured by a rifle shot.

This was all because of disagreements about the choice of school textbooks. When things became more serious — a stabbing incident in a high school in South Boston — it led to this incident:

A mob of white parents formed a blockade around the school to trap the black students and made ready to storm the building. Shattering glass; police horses charging. “Kill the niggers! Kill the niggers!” “Niggers eat shit! Niggers eat shit!” A chorus of mothers led that cheer. President Ford put the 82nd Airborne on alert.

Like fascists everywhere, the Trumpsters work hard to gin up the disorder that they claim alone to be able to master.

Birtherism: Is it doping or unfair wage competition?

Consipiracy theories tend to be long on motive, short on coherence. The Elders of Zion may be hard to pin down, but it’s not hard to understand what they stand to gain by manipulating international commerce and news media. But Birtherism — the theory, mostly associated with Donald Trump, that Barack Obama was not born in the US, hence is no more an American than Ted Cruz — has always struck me as particularly lacking in motivation. Why would the Democrats take the risk of putting their fates in the hands of a non-citizen who could be unmasked at any time?

One theory is that this is a kind of unfair competition, like doping in sport: The rule requiring the president to be a natural-born US citizen is not a way of ensuring proper loyalty, but rather a guard against unfair competition. Of course, the thinking goes, Americans have little chance in a political competition against the inherent advantages of a Kenyan usurper. (Women, similarly, famously have such a structural advantage in politics that all manner of laws and customs have been required to level the playing field. Trump has pointed out the uphill struggle he faces, running for president as a wealthy white male, but garnered remarkably little sympathy.)

Another theory is that Obama is just another illegal immigrant, undercutting American workers on wages. The presidency pays only $400,000 a year. You can’t expect a qualified American man to work for that. That’s why only Trump, with his original proposals for monetising the presidency (derived from post-Soviet and Latin American models — who says he’s insular!) can be the great white male presidential hope.

How to do it, according to Donald Trump

Last year I wrote a post about the kind of table-thumping simple-minded blather that you sometimes hear about public policy (what the Germans call Stammtischgerede), that reminds me of the Monty Python sketch about a children’s show “How to do it“, which explains to the audience in one two-minute episode

How to be a gynecologist… how to construct a box-girder bridge, … how to irrigate the Sahara Desert and make vast new areas of land cultivatable, and… how to rid the world of all known diseases.

When expressed by the male working classes the simple HTDI solutions that no one is willing to put into practice typically involves violence, stringing the appropriate people up, or use of nuclear weapons. It’s all vague blather, but needs just enough spurious detail to give it the verbal form of presenting a solution. I wrote in this post about the version of HTDI that tends to belch forth from mostly right-wing veterans of the business-lawyer-finance trenches, who like to think that their experience holding meetings and berating subordinates has been far more meaningful than actually doing anything

is the completely generic “I’d get the both sides into the room and tell them, c’mon guys, let’s roll up our sleeves and just get it done. We’re not leaving here until we’ve come up with a solution.”

I didn’t have a particular example to cite at the time, but of course Donald Trump has followed the script exactly. Speaking yesterday at a “National Security Forum”, Trump was pressed on his claim to have a secret plan for defeating ISIS. Despite having previously stated that he knows “more about ISIS than the generals do”, in a speech on Tuesday he said

We are going to convey my top generals and give them a simple instruction. They will have 30 days to submit to the Oval Office a plan for soundly and quickly defeating ISIS.

It’s no wonder some Republicans think President Obama is intentionally betraying the country. If he couldn’t even be bothered to instruct his top generals to come up with a plan. And the 30-day deadline is pure genius…

Pollster infallibility

I was reading this article by John Cassidy of the New Yorker about the current state of the US presidential election campaign, according to the polls, and was surprised by this sentence:

Of course, polls aren’t infallible—we relearned that lesson in the recent Brexit referendum.

It hardly requires any major evidence to argue against the straw man that the polls are infallible, but I didn’t recall any notable poll failure related to Brexit; on the contrary, I was following this pretty closely, and it seemed that political commentators were desperately trying to discount the polls in the weeks leading up to the referendum, arguing that the public would ultimately break for the status quo, no matter what they were telling the pollsters. I looked it up on Wikipedia:

So it looks like the consensus of the polls was that Leave and Remain were about equal, with a short-term trend toward leave, and about 10% still undecided. Hardly a major case against the polls being infallible when Leave won by a few percent…

Thinking out loud

Trump is now predicting massive voter fraud, usually something you do after you’ve lost. There’s a theory that people tend to accuse others of what they are ashamed of planning or having done themselves. I don’t think he has any shame, or that he’s strategic enough to be planning anything so complicated himself. But his backers? How hard would it really be for a top-notch state hacking operation in, say, Russia, to crack the locally organised election computer systems?