Thankfully, I'm going on vacation next week. My plan is to completely disconnect from the news - and from screens in general - for five glorious and revitalizing days. (There will still be new episodes of the podcast on Wednesday and Sunday.) Instead of news, I'll be spending my time reading something entirely different: one of the novels of the great Anthony Trollope. He was a prolific 19th century British author who wrote books that were warm, funny, moral (without being moralizing) and above all, deeply kind. If that sounds like a nice break from political news to you, I recommend starting with The Warden, the first book in his six-novel Chronicles of Barsetshire series. Some people will suggest you start with The Way We Live Now, which is certainly a great book, but it's not entirely characteristic of Trollope's work.

Trollope is my all-time favorite author. If all you know of 19th century British fiction is Charles Dickens, give Trollope a try. (Which you can do for free, since he wrote long enough ago that you can download all of his novels for free at Project Gutenberg.) If I can introduce even one other person to his wonderful body of work, I'll feel I've done a very good thing.


Mike is the founder and co-host of The Politics Guys. He's an Associate Professor of Political Science at Northern Kentucky University, specializing in American politics, public policy, and media. He's the author of Navigating the News: A Political Media User's Guide, which he thinks is a really useful book, though he wishes his publisher would set a lower price for it. He's also a big Pittsburgh Steelers fan, though he reluctantly admits that, for most of the last decade and a half, the New England Patriots have been better than his team.

I will give the Rightwing Circular Firing Squad & the Progressive Media kudos for damaging Milo Yiannopoulos. I am always impressed how “my side” can throw its proponents under the bus in about 10 minutes, at the urging of the Press & Social Justice mob. All under the theory that “THIS IS AWFUL!  YOU MUST DENOUNCE XIM/XER IMMEDIATELY!” And then we do.

As to “reporting” mostly this week I have articles about the Press.

Let’s begin with this bit of reportage. Man, I’d just let go some of those layers & layers of fact-checkers & editors if I were the Associated Press. You can save yourself some money & STILL get the story wrong. Dare I mention xis name, but Rush Limbaugh once said that much of reporting is about what reporters WISH was happening, not what IS happening. And here we have a prime example. Everyone KNOWS Trump is a Fascist Authoritarian just waiting to deploy troops in the streets, to the satisfaction of his howling mob. So, obviously, he’d do this….except he didn’t & it was never a plan.  But it plays well in the heads of reporters.

Don’t just take the word of an obviously partisan & addled tRumpkin though.  See what a former Village Voice reporter has to say about the American Press. In the title are the words “…Death of the American Press…” here’s a bit of a spoiler, it’s not a murder mystery, it’s about a suicide. Because again, “we” know all about “those people”, those people being Trump & his merry band of compromised Muscovite Fascists. Again, the Press is sounding more & more like Southerners in the late 1950’s talking about Civil Rights, Desegregation & the like. They just KNOW about the threat of “those people”, or to put it in terms modern college students might grasp, the Press have “Otherized” Trump & his supporters. Or as Edward Said might have put it, they have “Orientalized the Other”.  Once you know what the Other is about, facts become pretty optional.

That traitor to the Cause, Scott Adams has some words of wisdom as well. 

From the annals of cluelessness comes this bit of reportage. No really, well I know I am gob-smacked, to use a turn of phrase from my favourite British blogger & his spaniels!  You mean to say that this gibbering buffoon has NOT started World War III already?  Again, the little tRump homunculus living in the National Security/Foreign Affairs Press was not “Trump”, it was their little simulacrum of Trump. Do you mean to say that a realist humxn being, used to negotiating is capable of dealing with & negotiating with other realists!  What, get out of town! Land o’Goshen, I never reckoned on that. And to think of the money I had invested in that bomb shelter & MRE’s.

What, UNPOSSIBLE…bipartisanship working the other way? Remember when the President & the Speaker are Democrats, Republicans need to understand reality & work with Democrats. And when the situation is reversed, Republicans need to be bipartisan & work with Democrats. This, this is unprecedented. But don’t worry friends, though I like to scare you, if you read the questions it involves compromise on issues that they can agree on. And since tRump & his cabal are merely the Boot Heel Grinding the Face of Humxnity, we have NOTHING to agree with them upon and hence we need not compromise!  

Lastly, this…..and  longish explanation.

What this can’t be right!  And anyway, Truth & Justice & Gaia’s Way are not simply subject to the whims of Popular Opinion. I know & I agree. I simply throw this in to put a spoke in the wheel of the “Demography is Destiny” Posse. Sorry, Hugh Hewitt or James Carville or Dr. Baranowski…. Demography is Demography & Destiny is Destiny, they may or may not be correlated. I include it because we all like numbers, numbers that “prove” our case. Because when “we” have numbers; we can console ourselves that Herstory is on Our Side & that even though they may have triumphed on Pelennor’s Fields TODAY, we know that in the end, Demography shall Triumph. 

It’s why Marxists love Laws of Herstory, after all. But Humxn Reality is a bit more complex than all that, something that Carville or Hewitt must be aware of, now….Next year, this number will change and suddenly the Karmic Wheel Shall Have Turned, and the Arc of Herstory Will Once Again Bend Towards Justice or not…and really none of that matters, what matters is who turns out to pull the lever in November, get a message & messenger that gets more of YOUR team to the polls, “you” win…if you don’t you lose. 

Final note, as a prognostication, IF Elizabeth Warren & Keith Ellison are “you” in 2018 I would imagine you’ll have the same results you had in 2016.  But still New York City is very nice, & who doesn’t like a trip to California?  

“Joe” is an ink-stained wretch, at a firm that specializes in public policy analysis & advocacy. Xe/xhe has BA in political science from the Flagship University of the Commonwealth of Kentucky. Xe/xhe is blessed with the most wonderful, capable, & loving partner any person or otherkin could ever want.  Joe is an Apostate Conservative, having been cast out of the High Church during the Great Rectification of 2015 & avid Trumpkin. Xis/xer focus will be on the creation of a “Subversive Counter-Narrative” to the Intersectional Progressive Establishment Narrative to be found in today’s Corporate Media & faculty lounges. Current interests include the phrases “This is how you got Trump” and “This is how you get MORE Trump.” Joe also has an interest in Defense Affairs, with a focus on Herstory & Logistics & Program Evaluation. Xe/xhe finds any media source that includes: 1) person-hours of maintenance/flight –hour or 2) discussions of optimal depot maintenance schedule of almost any Infernal Device to be a fascinating read.

The big news this week is the fall of Milo Yiannopoulos. Milo would quickly go from CPAC (Conservative Political Action Conference) speaker to resigning from his day job at Breitbart over comments about pedophilia. Matt Lewis over at The Daily Beast does a great job of looking at why conservatives were so interested in a guy who was so seemingly not conservative.

Part of what makes this so fascinating for me as a political observer is that the Republican Party, the conservative party, seems to be caucusing with a lot of individuals who are not particularly conservative. In fact it is difficult to say in what meaningful ways President Trump is conservative.

One of the things I think that Lewis misses — as does everyone else who is examining the Milo issue — is an examination of what conservatism is. That is why this week I am also recommending a longer, deeper, older read: Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind. Please click through, the link is free for those who like electronic reading. If you want a big paperback you can head over to Amazon.

It is a problem that I don’t believe is going away anytime soon: is the Republican Party conservative? Part of the problem is defining conservatism is no easy or small matter. Part of the inherent problem is that conservatism is opposed, on ideological grounds, to general or abstract theory. As Leo Strauss and Joseph Cropsey remarked on Edmond Burke, “To summarize Burke’s political thought in a series of abstract propositions, therefore, is inevitably to distort the perspective in which he originally expressed it.” (Strauss, Leo and Joseph Cropsey. 1963. History of Political Philosophy p. 601) Conservatism arrises from the historical and the practical, yet, it is necessary to think about it in abstract form to understand it as an ideology. Like Strauss and Crospey on Burke, we must necessarily distort conservatism to digest it.

What then is conservatism? It is an ideology that eschews ideology, because it views itself as emerging from the actual circumstances. It views itself as the inductive form of political reasoning. One might turn to Russell Kirk's The Conservative Mind for his definition:

Conservatism is not a fixed and immutable body of dogma, and conservatives inherit from Burke a talent for re-expressing their convictions to fit the time. As a working premise, nevertheless, one can observe here that the essence of social conservatism is preservation of the ancient moral tradition of humanity. Conservatives respect the wisdom of their ancestors; they think society is a spiritual reality, possessing an eternal life but a delicate constitution: it cannot be scrapped and recast as if it were a machine.

Conservatism, due to its nature then, is not an easily definable matter. Kirk himself laid out the propositions which he argued bound conservatives together. Conservative are: primarily concerned with tradition; the community of the past, present and future; the organic nature of the state; belief in the transcendent and spiritual order of life; the importance of prescription; the dangerous nature of change; and, finally, the importance of property in the conception of liberty.

None of this sounds like Milo or Trump. Yet President Trump represents the Republican Party and Milo was one ugly statutory rape comment away from speaking at CPAC. Let me leave our readers with a question this week: are Republicans conservatives anymore? What is a Republican Party defined by Milo, Breitbart, and Donald Trump?

Externalities… “Externalities” is an economic misnomer for an incomplete, insufficient accounting of the costs of production whose results can be either positive or negative. It is a misnomer, because the word external itself suggests that the thing which is being discussed is outside of the economic process, rather than being a part of the process that was not calculated for, or simply ignored. The IMF here says that

"Externalities pose fundamental economic policy problems when individuals, households, and firms do not internalize the indirect costs of or the benefits from their economic transactions. The resulting wedges between social and private costs or returns lead to inefficient market outcomes. In some circumstances, they may prevent markets from emerging. Although there is room for market-based corrective solutions, government intervention is often required to ensure that benefits and costs are fully internalized”.

Notice how they say “indirect costs”? That’s because they are accepting of the garbage base assumptions of neoclassical economics which say that the shit that I dump in your water supply that makes you sick while making my widget is external to the actual costs of making said widget. Obviously, waste disposal, runoff, air pollution, water contamination, etc. are all part of the process itself when looked at from any reasonable, objective calculation. However, these are all things which the accounting for, and prevention of, cost the individual producer money and thus place them in a disadvantageous position within the sphere of capitalist competition.

So, now that I have stated my position on why externalities as a concept are BS, let’s look at some scientific findings that would be considered, from a neoclassical perspective, “externalities”. First up, this article describes how "Scientists have discovered “extraordinary” levels of toxic pollution in the most remote and inaccessible place on the planet – the 10km deep Mariana trench in the Pacific Ocean.” One of the highest concentrated pollutants found in that 6 mile deep abyss were PCBs.

"PCBs were used widely in electrical equipment like capacitors and transformers. They also were used in hydraulic fluids, heat transfer fluids, lubricants, and plasticizers. The primary company that made PCBs in the United States was Monsanto Inc., mainly using the name Aroclor. Commercial production of PCBs ended in 1977 because of health effects associated with exposure.”(source here)

Obviously this is purely a result of corporate, for-profit production.

Another “externality” which was reported on by the Guardian recently was air particle pollution. Some of the air particles are the result of the heating of, and cooking of food in, private residences in the developing world where they still rely heavily on burning organic matter. However, plenty of this also results from industrial production.

Obviously, the granddaddy of all “externalities” is climate change with the vast majority of both historical, as well as current emissions, coming from the developed world. The negative results of climate change will fall disproportionately upon the global south who are historically the least culpable for “failing to account” for this massive mess of an “externality”. One news organization that is especially vigilant about environmental issues and presents them in a very accessible manner (ie. on TV) is Vice News. They have nightly and weekly news shows on HBO but I highly recommend the weekly one whose new season started this past Friday. Most of the previous season’s episodes are online, like this one on Climate Change. The trailer for the new season can be seen here.

John Bellamy Foster is one of the leading Marxian thinkers about the interaction of Capitalist production and Climate Change and here he provides a long, but important and sobering prediction, of how America’s new joke of a president will further accelerate the warming of the planet and the extreme weather and misery it will bring in its stead. Monthly Review is an important journal and I highly recommend checking it out.

I hope I’ve provided some food for thought regarding what is involved in the obfuscatory concept of “externalities” and their often dire consequences for all of the occupants of this planet.