monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

I admit I forget what I post, if I remembered every article I post, I would celebrate my memory skills and quit worrying I inherited my mother's Alzheimer's disease which killed her. Personally I don't find much humor in person's memory losses.

It was pertinent to the discussion and I wasn't aware Hightor posted it anyway.

Hell yes. A while ago, I went through some of my old blog posts from a decade previous and had zero recollection of many of them.

WP

I confess that I always liked this woman. She was a member of the Conservative Party and was it's final Prime Minister immediately before that party completely disappeared after an enormous Liberal Party win. But that wasn't her fault at all.

I sometime forget what I posted yesterday and have to go to my name site to reread something that was the most important thing I have ever posted. Do you think galloping old age is catching up with me?

"Catching up"! I suspect a tense error in there somewhere.

Wow. The years 2016-2019 are the first time in history a category five has spawned for four consecutive years and the President has never heard of them.

Yes. But what is missed in this short tweet is that fostering discontent with governmental institutions has been the operating principle of the Republican party for decades or longer. Where the primary ideological notion being forwarded is that "government is the problem", the only path they have to verifying that notion is to act to thwart government's operations and reputation. Thus healthcare MUST be killed.

But discontent and division is also, of course, what Russian trolling operations are seeking to achieve.

Yeah. It's his brain. It's a really strong brain. Maybe one of the strongest brains ever. That's what people are saying.

There have been (I think this is correct) five Cat 5 storms in the last four years.

Reportedly something similar happened when Trump visited the African American History Museum. A memoir by Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie Bunch wrote about Trump pausing in front of an exhibit about the role the Dutch played in Slaves:



https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/smithsonian-secretary-trump-did-not-want-to-see-anything-difficult-during-tour-of-african-american-history-museum/ar-AAGENuc?ocid=spartandhp

There is no depth to the man.

I have yet to go anywhere in Europe where people "love" Trump, most of us despise him.

I had not read that. Sociopaths are predictable in a general way. It is the specifics of this personality type - of how their pathology manifests in behaviors - that surprises.

Same here in Canada. You have to talk to a LOT of people before you bump into one who deems Trump anything other than a very fucked up and criminally dangerous idiot.

This guy is a grade A sleaze. And that's not even to mention that he's a theocrat. And, of course, that he's managed to accumulate some $13 million for himself playing that tried-and-true Sucker Stupid Christians For Fun and Profit game.
TPM

Yeah. Because, before Darwin wrote On The Origin of Species in 1859 (we'll ignore the many decades it took for that theory to become widely known and accepted, and then taught in schools) America (and the entire world) was the Garden of Eden. Take for example the sadly maligned, fake news version of the so-called American Civil War which, in reality, was like a big hippy get-together where bra-less teenage virgins put daffodils into the barrels of gattling guns which the drug and alcohol free soldiers blasted up into the heavens in tributes to Jesus.

This might even be a better solution for American males who get the notion that assault weapons and other guns are designed to kill lots of people real fast and who believe that they should use them for exactly that purpose - to save American purity and goodness.
https://cbsn.ws/2NNBuCD

Only China Can Save Us Now

With Trump in Washington and dysfunction in Europe, Beijing is holding the global economy together. Should we be worried?

By Adam Tooze
Mr. Tooze is an economic historian.

Sept. 2, 2019

In the last few weeks, the world economy has seen worrying turmoil. Whether or not a recession is imminent, there has certainly been a collapse of confidence.

What has investors so rattled? There are long-term factors in play, like demographic trends and a slowdown in technological change. But what seems finally to have dawned on the markets is that globalization is no longer supported by the combination of investor-friendly economic policy and congenial politics they have long taken for granted.

In the Trump administration, the nationalist theatrics of economic policy have reached new heights. The White House has responded to the wave of recession talk by pillorying the Federal Reserve Board and threatening more tariffs against China.

So incoherent is the Trump administration’s economic policy that no lesser a figure than Bill Dudley, a former president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, has said that America’s central bank should treat the prospect of President Trump’s re-election as a threat to the United States and the world economy. Mr. Dudley argued that the Federal Reserve chair, Jerome Powell, should refuse to cushion the effects of Mr. Trump’s protectionism through further interest rate cuts. If the president’s bluster sets off a recession, so be it. At least the Fed would not help usher in a second Trump term.

To be fair, the Fed distanced itself from Mr. Dudley’s suggestion. But he was merely stating what is painfully obvious. The Trump administration — and the Republican Party — threatens the institutions of economic policymaking in the United States. Historically, it’s been radical governments in Europe and Latin America that elicited a hard line from conservative central bankers. It’s extraordinary that this possibility is now being canvassed in what remains the heart of global capitalism.

The world economy needs leadership from Europe: No one has more to lose from a collapse of multilateralism. The eurozone is perched on the edge of a recession — a hard Brexit will make matters worse — but a sharp slowdown in Germany means that for once the interests of North and South are actually aligned. The eurozone needs investment. But it has its own deep political dysfunction to deal with.

Even today, when bond markets will pay the German government to borrow, it is not clear whether Chancellor Angela Merkel’s ailing coalition government can agree on an expansive fiscal program. It would need the Bundestag to declare an economic crisis to release it from the strictures of its austere fiscal policy.

The fact that the world has not yet tipped into recession must in large part be credited to China. This is not to impute superhuman powers or monolithic unity to Beijing. The Chinese government has its hands full managing a nasty combination of slowing growth and a dangerous credit boom. China’s shadow banking sector is a worry, as are the country’s growth-addicted regional governments. China’s corporations piled up cheap dollar debt and are now subject to the erratic upward trajectory of the dollar. And behind the scenes, there are persistent rumors of tension between President Xi Jinping’s clique and that of Premier Li Keqiang.

And yet, in handling both its internal and external problems, China, unlike the United States, at least appears to have a playbook. It is not only synchronizing fiscal and monetary policy but is also using banking regulation and foreign exchange controls to contain the risk of capital flight. Once criticized for resisting the upward pressure on the value of its currency, Beijing is now expected by Washington to pull every lever to stop the yuan from devaluing. And even setting aside the contradictory noises from the Trump administration, there are few in the West who would want to see China liberalize its balance of payments and risk the kind of capital flight that rocked global financial markets in 2015 and 2016.

Tightening economic controls is the opposite of how Western pundits once imagined China’s integration into the world economy. But it is a tool kit that served both Beijing and the rest of the world well by preventing a further downturn. Though the West still pays lip service to the cause of “market reform,” it has come to depend on Beijing’s maintaining its grip. But there’s an unavoidable question: What are the political consequences of a growing reliance on Beijing’s control over the Chinese economy?

The question could be dodged when it was assumed China would converge with the West. Now both parties in Congress pose it in geopolitical terms — key Democrats have pivoted to viewing China’s economic growth as a threat to American security. The repression in Xinjiang poses the question as a human rights issue; the turmoil in Hong Kong raises the stakes. The world watches with bated breath to see whether Beijing will use force to stamp out Hong Kong’s remaining autonomy.

Even if a bloody showdown is avoided, the outlook is disconcerting. Beijing has made clear with its bullying of the management of Cathay Pacific that Hong Kong-based multinationals are no longer exempt from Chinese pressure. Large corporations that chose to locate in Chinese territory and profit from China’s growth will be expected to play by the Communist Party’s rules.

The prospect of a world economy divided among a sclerotic Europe, a nationalist United States and an authoritarian China is a gloomy one.

Adam Tooze (@adam_tooze) is a professor of history at Columbia University and the author, most recently, of “Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World.”

She also insists that she and her husband don't do it up the ass, anymore. OK, she didn't really say that

As any responsible and dedicated President would do at this time, Trump is closely monitoring the Cat 5 hurricane threat from the back nine



Photo taken today at, you guessed it, Trump's golf course, so that's what? Another three million bucks or so going out of the national coffers and lots of it going into Trump's pocket.

It keeps his mind free from worry over his Florida enclosures.
If the Doral is destroyed and the bungalow/villas floated away, where oh where will he have the G7/8 (9?) summit?

Ah, that's why he's up in Jersey swinging away!

(was it just me, or did anyone else notice how quick he was to declare Florida in a State of emergency?)

red states are a top priority for The Occupant... blue states (like CA) can go to hell...