White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

Call Me Madam — Women Who Would Be President

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Good morning class, draw near and listen ever so closely.

So, you all want to be president of the United States, arguably the most difficult and demanding job in the world?

Clearly, you feel that you have unique talents which will promote peace and prosperity and block injustice, racism and men hitting on women.

You are sure that you will be able to curb, gently, the imperial instincts of China and its canny leader, Xi Jinping.

And you have a sure-fire plan to contain Russian President Vladimir Putin’s ambitions in eastern Europe, Asia and the Middle East and to persuade our shaken allies that it is worth standing firm with us.

You might want to know what to do about Africa’s soaring population and declining prospects.

You, also, I trust have given thought to the future as the so called Fourth Industrial Revolution unfolds with huge consequences for the future of work (artificial intelligence taking away jobs); the future of transportation (autonomous vehicles, ships and airplanes); and remote farming (farms operated from city desks).

If you are all set on those things, we can get down to the ones that may decide the election: the social issues, including abortion, education, gender equity and gender equality; gun control; access to health care; immigration; and income inequality.

You might want to tell people how you will turn back the tides and solve global warming. Rich people are starting to worry about their oceanfront homes; that means it will become a fashionable topic with those who have been indifferent screaming for action

Now, ladies, step forward for little individual tutelage.

Elizabeth Warren: You have the pole position as the racers line up, but already there are troubling things. Ms. Warren, you must stop taking President Trump’s bait. How the devil did you get into getting your DNA analyzed? Bad move. Lead the debate, do not join it.

Kamala Harris: A few good notices and you are off and running. Just wait until the opposition research pulls apart the cases you prosecuted when you were a district attorney in San Francisco — and the things you said in court. Two former prosecutors, Rudy Giuliani and Chris Christie, have tarnished the brand.

Kirsten Gillibrand: The announcement on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” was, well, weak. It looked like you were there because you had just published a children’s book called something like “Snuggles the Rabbit.” Bold statesmanship was not to be heard. It is hard to look presidential on a comedy program. Looking presidential is worth a lot in the polls, especially at the beginning. Now to those giant flip-flops on guns and abortion. Were you not a darling of the NRA? What about your switching from pro-life to pro-getting-elected? Explain your double epiphany.

Tulsi Gabbard: Step forward and salute. Major, you are the only declared candidate with military service: the only candidate in sight who has worn your country’s uniform and seen active duty. Bravo! That is going to be a huge credential, but not quite enough to outweigh the fact that you are too exotic: born in American Samoa, raised in Hawaii and a Hindu. At 38, you have got time, lots and lots of it. Beware hopefuls. This lady may not be for turning.

To the whole class of four: Have you ever run a large organization? Have you a big scandal you think you can keep hidden (you cannot)? Do you know enough people to staff the Cabinet? Do you know how you will find 1,200 people to fill the positions that must be confirmed by the Senate? How is your golf game?

Three of you are senators, Gillibrand, Harris and Warren, and Gabbard is a member of the House. Hard to run against Washington when you already have contracted Potomac Fever.

Suggestion: Get a big idea and run with that. Keep out of the granular social stuff, it will bring you down. Prepare to be vice president and bide your time.

House, Senate, White House, America’s women are on the move, and may the best woman win.

 

 

Photo: U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren, D-Massachusetts, campaigns for Hillary Clinton at St. Anselm College in Manchester, N..H., on Oct. 24, 2016.

The Real Crisis: Stubborn Belly Fat

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A review of television advertising turns up keys to what is really bothering Americans — making them grouchy, despairing and causing them to vote in strange ways.

It is nothing short of a pandemic. There has been no word yet from the Republican or Democratic leadership on this debilitating national crisis that is causing more than half of us to act strangely and to seek to alleviate or conceal our affliction.

It is, of course, stubborn belly fat (SBF). We carry around, collectively, millions of pounds of it.

If you are gasping, it is because you know what I mean. You know the misery of that roll below the navel that will not go away despite extreme measures like jogging or eating African berries as recommended by Dr. Oz, who is one of the few men of his age who does not have SBF. Of course, he looks as though he has been in a Turkish prison all his life and has never had enough square meals to get the dreaded SBF.

My own research shows that SBF is followed on the Misery Index by cellulite and, growing in severity but still far behind SBF, crepey skin. Ugh! Happily, cellulite does not have to be shown: Avoid beaches and pools and if you are unsure, undress in the dark. There are myriad creams that offer to banish crepey skin. They may be mildly effective but the surefire fix, never patented, is long sleeves. Hide it.

Sadly you cannot hide that roll around the belly, just below the belly button and above the recreation area. It wobbles in your bathing suit, bulges in pants and dresses when you sit. There are various rubberized garments which will pull it in for as long as you can stand the constriction, but those only flatten: maximum discomfort for minimum concealment.

SBF is pernicious: It is like a tattoo, there for all time.

Now there are those who say that diet and exercise will banish it. Diet and exercise, those two imposters that are prescribed for everything from a broken heart to bankruptcy. The medical profession has an answer: diet and exercise. Lies! Americans have been running since the 1970s, have joined health clubs in the millions and have eschewed everything that tastes good. You know what? SBF is spreading.

Eat only lettuce and you will die of malnutrition, emaciated – except for that ring around the tummy, belly fat. Believe me, it will go with you to the grave, jiggling. The hips may shrink, the thighs contract, the chest disappear inside the rib cage but look down and – Oh, horror! — it is there wobbling, mocking, and taunting, keeping you from love, happiness at the beach or pool, a job promotion and defying the best tailors and dressmakers to wall it in.

It is even a sore political subject.

Former President Barack Obama did not seem to have any, which depressed his approval ratings. It made it hard for some to trust him. Another former president, Bill Clinton, who is a shadow of his former self and a vegan, knows all about it. I bet that skinny as he is now, compared with his time of serial hamburger intake, below his belt line, there is a strip of protruding fat that harkens back to days of indulgence: the irremovable scar of eating a lot.

As for President Donald Trump, with that front-facing bay window, you know there is a sack of SBF. I know how that feels. Mine wants a doughnut right now.

Trump’s Right About Wheels, Less So About Walls

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President Trump has sought to conflate walls with wheels. In a call-in to Fox and in several tweets, he declared both as having been around for a long a time and that they’ve proven themselves.

In a tweet last month, he said, “Democrats are trying to belittle the concept of a WALL, calling it old fashioned. The fact is there is nothing else that will work, and that has been true for thousands of years. It’s like the wheel, there is nothing better. I know tech better than anyone. …”

I’m with Trump on wheels. I’m a fan of wheels. They work, walls less so; walls are heavily invested in failure, as a psychiatrist might say.

You can get by without wheels, but you’d be ill-advised. The Incas built a great civilization without the round things. Amazing. Don’t try it. Likewise Great Zimbabwe, the center of a Southern African civilization in medieval times, was also wheel-free and has some beautiful walls, all built without grout. The stones just sit there, collaborating if you will. This construction isn’t recommended where stone-throwing is prevalent. You’ll get your wall thrown in your face.

When it comes to wheels, we are so deep into the wheel culture that one’s head goes round and round. The greatest invention of the last few years was, without doubt, adding wheels to luggage. What took so long? Well, the wheels do have super nylon bearings and are better than the old wheels, but even so …

There’s a downside: Bellhops, porters and others have been, well, wheeled away. Sort of like grain-grinders before the mill wheel sent them back to wherever old mortar and pestle people go —  probably into building walls.

There are forever new uses for wheels, like giant flywheels which can store untold amounts of energy. Nifty eh? These are the solution to the “alternatives,” like wind and solar, making too much electricity when everyone is at work or asleep. Downside: this wheel, with as much energy as hundreds of locomotives, is also an inadvertent weapon of mass destruction. If it gets loose and goes wandering through your town, wheelie mayhem.

Walls are really without equal for houses and buildings. After that, their history has been troubled. Emperor Hadrian, something of an architect, built a wall in order to keep undesirables out of Rome’s Britannica province. It stretched from sea to sea across northern England, only 174 miles. Yes, he had the army build it along with a ditch. They put it up — using stone, earth and wood — in six years. Its greatest use has been as a tourist attraction.

Ditto the wall around China, all 5,500 miles of it. A lot of China’s enemies, like the Mongols, Japanese and British, found it easy to get over or to come by sea. It, too, is a big tourist attraction nowadays. The story of walls is they pay for themselves, if you can wait a couple of thousand years.

As for the purpose of keeping people in or out, the Berlin Wall must get a prize. It was a great concrete-and-barbed-wire job, but the thing that made it work were the shoot-to-kill guards. No rushing it a second or third time.

In Cyprus, Belfast and Israel walls have been erected to keep people apart. Trump wants keep people out and apart, but he has no idea how this will stimulate people to get around, over, under or just to find new access.

Most walls that have stood the test of time have been built of masonry because it lasts. Steel has a short life: It rusts and requires constant expensive painting or maintenance.

All references to the Trump wall suggest that it sticks up, maybe 30 feet. He might investigate a ha-ha wall. They are the wall equivalent infinity pools. The ground looks level and verdant, but a deep ditch or trench faces an impregnable vertical wall below the surface level. These were favored around Australian lunatic asylums in the 19th century. When the poor inmates tried to make a break they were, in fact, walled in — hence, the ha-ha. Maybe it’s what we need on the southern border, inconspicuous and effective.

 

Photo: A man ride a bicycle pass the hole in section of ruined Berlin Wall. By Tossapol Chaisamritpol

 

The Coming Convulsion of the Fourth Industrial Revolution

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It isn’t starting with a bang, but don’t be deceived: The Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) is underway, and companies and institutions that ignore it will be overwhelmed by it. Individuals will adapt to it as best we can, as we always have.

In short 4IR is the fusing of the digital, physical and biological spheres. It’s the interconnection of everything, bringing change in companies, jobs, schools and eventually government. Government won’t to be able to stand idly by when it sees traditional businesses upended and huge changes in how we work and study, and where.

As 4IR moves ahead one can reasonably contemplate a time when body parts will be printed, robots will prepare restaurant food and drone taxis will take us to the airport, where departures will be handled without human intervention — because you were verified through facial recognition when you bought your ticket on your smartphone, you won’t need to do anything but walk through security and onto a plane, which has a cabin crew to look after you but no pilots.

Behind and driving the revolution is artificial intelligence, commanding everything from farms, where tractors will start themselves and plow or reap without a human in sight, to street lights that turn off when nothing is moving and back on as needed, to manufacturing that will be dominated by 3D printing, better referred to as additive manufacturing.

The troubadour of 4IR is Klaus Schwab who created the World Economic Forum back in 1971, the world’s most important ideas mart known as Davos, after Davos-Klosters the Swiss resort where the forum meets every year. This year Davos kicks off on Jan. 22 and will be devoted to what Schwab, 80, a German economist and engineer, has called “Globalization 4.0”.

The first forum to look at 4IR was in 2016. Schwab has written two books on the subject — the “The Fourth Industrial Revolution” and “Shaping the Future of the Fourth Industrial Revolution” — and has been ceaseless in promoting the future while warning of it. He told Gerard Baker, the former executive editor of The Wall Street Journal, in a TV interview that enumerating the challenges wasn’t enough, there need to be solutions as well.

A note: Don’t think you can join the 3,000 participants this year. It’s by invitation only. And if you get one, Davos hotel rooms — plain vanilla rooms – can cost $900 a night and suites can go for $5,000 a night. When I checked, there were few vacancies. The movers and shakers start early.

The three past industrial revolutions are listed by Schwab as the replacement of animal power by water and then steam power, the latter at the beginning of the 18th century; the deployment of electricity, starting in the late 19th century; and the digital revolution of the last part of the 20th century.

The Davos meeting will examine the upheaval besetting the world with 4IR and how it’ll be managed. It’s what Schwab calls Globalization 4.0. “We must develop a comprehensive and globally shared view of how technology is affecting our lives and reshaping our economic, social, cultural, and human environments. There has never been a time of greater promise, or greater peril,” he says.

Andre Kudelski, a Silicon Valley veteran, now head of the eponymous Swiss high-tech company that bears his name, says, “A skilled engineer can take control remotely of any connected ‘thing.’ Society has not yet realized the incredible scenarios this capability creates.”

Says Robert Shiller, a Yale University economics professor and 2013 Nobel Prize winner, “We cannot wait until there are massive dislocations in our society to prepare for the Fourth Industrial Revolution.”

Others dream of a cleaner, safer and healthier world. Dileep George, an artificial intelligence and neuroscience researcher, quoted by the forum, says, “Imagine a robot capable of treating Ebola patients or cleaning up nuclear waste.”

Leon Trotsky, a veteran of the Russian Revolution, said, “You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.” He might well be paraphrased to say, “We may not be interested in the Fourth Industrial Revolution, but it is interested in us.”

 

World’s Glitteriest Conference

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On Jan. 22-25, 2019, in Davos-Klosters, a Swiss resort, the World Economic Forum meets. It is the glitteriest of conferences. The great and the good, the rich industrialists and the glamorous public intellectuals get together to sort out where humanity is headed.

Just to be invited is a kind of credential, a sort of honorary degree, a statement that you are world-class important.

There are politicians, CEOs, so-called thought leaders and the top non-governmental organizations, environmentalists and academics.

The world’s most important international conference it is, but does it work? At some level, yes. At others, no.

It stimulates thinking, but does it change anything? Reading the news coverage year after year you are inclined to think that a lot of the participants come to rehash things they have said before or ideas that have been with them for a long time. Others are stuck in ideological dogma and try to bend the facts to fit the dogma. Think socialist; think Republican.

Yet it has no competition. It is the place to float an idea. Probably no one floats more ideas than the man who founded the forum in 1971 and serves as its executive chairman, Klaus Schwab. He is a visionary German, who holds doctorates in economics and engineering from universities in Germany and Switzerland and a Master of Public Administration from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.

It was Schwab who, in 2016, launched the idea of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) by making it the subject of the forum that year and writing a book on it.

The 4IR is the concept that all of science and technology — from biology to nanotechnology, from quantum computing to artificial intelligence — are coming together with stunning and, at times, frightening visions of the future. A 3D printer may be making a body part while a robot is helping treat Ebola in Africa. New metals are being formulated for specific needs without human input, and farms are operating with few farmers.

In that way, with all science melding and communicating, 4IR may have consequences far beyond the previous three: first, mechanical power from water and steam; then electrical power for manufacturing; and followed by computing power and communications. Now, in the age of the Internet of Things, unity of things from artificial intelligence to advanced medicine.

Enter governments. Schwab sounds a note of warning: Will they grasp and facilitate, or will they frustrate what is happening? Will they regulate when regulation is needed? In short, will the global political class comprehend that it is in the throes of something big — bigger than it can imagine? Will it allow it to flourish while checking its Frankenstein tendencies (as with the social media companies), or will it try to subdue it or let it run to excess?

If the Davos forum has a structural weakness, it seems to me, it is that executives who are mostly middle-age and older are dealing with ideas that have been generated by young scientists, researchers and thinkers. The average age of the people in the control room for the first manned moon launch, Apollo 11, was 28. By the time NASA had become more grown-up, the average age of the control-room operators for the first space shuttle launch was 47.

Call it the sclerosis problem. I have often wondered, as civilian, large airframe design is dominated by two companies, Boeing and Airbus, whether a young engineer with a better idea would get a hearing.

It takes new companies to pursue new ideas. Those that do not grasp the speed of change fall by the way, or are just reduced in size. Half the companies of the Dow in 2000 are not there now.

The 4IR is underway here and now — it is not something in the out-years. A microcosm of 4IR is in the emergence of smart cities where telephones, computers, electricity and social welfare are fusing.

All of this raises the two great questions of our time: What is the future of work and can we save the environment in time? You will hear on these from Davos, no doubt.

A contradicting footnote to the idea that the young are the only big idea merchants: Klaus Schwab is 8o.

 

 

Photo: Visions for the South Caucasus and Central Asia. BAKU/AZERBAIJAN, 8APRIL13 – Klaus Schwab, Founder and Executive Chairman, World Economic Forum. Copyright World Economic Forum (www.weforum.org)/Photo by Elmar Mustafayev. This photo is used under the Creative Commons license Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0

A Holiday Message for ME/CFS Sufferers and Caregivers

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There are two holiday seasons. There is the one of joy, the one I’m lucky to celebrate. And there is the one those who suffer all year endure. It is also the one their caregivers struggle through.
At the end of the year, no matter their religion, the lonely find themselves lonelier, the confined more boxed in, and the broken more irreparable. The holidays can shine with love and they also can hurt.
Those of us who don’t have Myalgic Encephalomyelitis, also called Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, can only lend our hearts to those who do. We can seek to comfort and tell them that we know what they’re going through, but we don’t know. We can look, but we can’t know the terrible incarceration mandated by the disease: the life sentence.
A word about caregivers: The families, lovers and friends who know that these dear people, so loved, exist in a cruelly unequal world, isolated by pain and immobility. They are the people who must draw from the well of compassion over and over: today, tomorrow, next week, next month and next year, on and on. We can all be compassionate for a while, but to care for another permanently is noble, saintly and hard, hard work.
There is a glimmer (Is that too strong a word?) on the horizon as the pace of research into ME has picked up in the last several years and as has funding, much of it raised privately, has increased, though the effort is still a bit incoherent.
While there is research, there is hope. Maybe a new discovery will transmute endless misery into glowing joy. Maybe it’ll be in the biology of the disease, maybe in a compound that will hold it at bay, and maybe in a cocktail of compounds.
One of the priceless bounties of this time of year is hope. It is almost the only salve for the pain.
When I was 19 years old in Rhodesia, which is now Zimbabwe, I was working on a weekly newspaper. One night, just before Christmas, one of the African pressmen caught his hand in the press and it was crushed, mangled, three fingers gone. I had to drive him to the hospital and I grabbed the linotype operator’s Morris Minor. After having persuaded the other African workers that they couldn’t all get into a small car, five of them and the victim squeezed in and I began driving through deserted streets the few miles to the hospital.
For the life of me, I didn’t know why the four workers were insistent on weighting down the car. Then they began to sing, and I knew. The whole way they sang pain songs in Shona (they were of the Shona tribe). The songs – dirges, if you will – were an ancient analgesic to help the injured man endure the pain as he headed toward the Western world of morphine and surgery.
I hope that all who suffer this season will find the equivalent of their song to help with the pain, physical and emotional.
Yours warmly,
Llewellyn

Campaigning for Neckties and Against AI in 2019

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No New Year’s resolutions this year. Nary a one. Instead I am throwing myself, body and soul, into campaigns — campaigns designed to halt the slide in civilized life.

Here are my campaigns:

—Rescue the necktie: More and more men are going around naked about the throat but wearing a pocket square. Now I love pocket squares, very useful if you should meet one of those famous actresses who is always in tears. Whip it out, get it soaked and presto! It goes on eBay.

The thing is neckties are disappearing. Only businessmen on the perp walk and some politicians wear them. Even former President Barack Obama appears to have abandoned them almost entirely — a serious regression.

Ties are important. They conceal protruding Adam’s apples, turkey necks and dirty shirt fronts. Also, they are used to wipe eyeglasses and to twirl when listening to people who go on and on.

—I am pushing to get airline executives to ride “basic coach” on at least one 10-hour flight. They will learn that they are the agents of physical cruelty and weird perversity.

They have ordained travel without luggage because the fees for luggage on “basic” are so high you would be paying for another class of service if you take a suitcase.

The airline bosses should be squeezed into the amazing shrinking toilets (too small for grown-ups); they should have their knees in their faces and have to sit up as straight as a drill sergeant. They should then try to stand up after hours of contortion.

—I want a punitive tax for banks who will not speak to you but will put you through hours of automated telephone hell, in the hope that you will give up and leave them alone (with your money and their fees with which they steal that money).

—Hedge funds that shred the lives of workers and deny customer service in the name of “shareholder value” should be prosecuted for hate speech for those words. “Shareholder value” can be roughly translated as, “We’re going to screw you.” How about “customer value” or a little “social value”?

You have been on the line for hours and are begging the artificial-intelligence recording to let you hear a live human voice, even if it is originating from a faraway country and its owner is speaking English as a third language. The machine says, “Do you want to hear the main menu again?” You slide to the floor, defeated, crazed and suicidal.

I want it to be a federal crime to have a machine with a woman’s voice. They are cursed routinely with foul expletives that even a machine should not have to hear, let alone one that thinks it is a woman. #MeToo should get on this one and demand that the programmer gets the sack without pension.

—I will be working for honesty from automated systems. I do not want my computer to “welcome” me when I turn it on. I believe that it does not care, that it is not sincere and that it is, to this point in time, inanimate and has no feelings. Therefore, when machines say things like “Have a nice day,” even “thank you,” they are lying.

This will change as artificial intelligence is given artificial emotions and machines talk to us in ways so crafty we will not know whether it is a machine or a person. We may not even know if the damned thing has captured the affections of our loved ones. Some states still have an “alienation of affections” common law tort that allows the thwarted lover to sue for stolen love.

Already, you may have a good case for filing a lawsuit against Facebook for running off with your children. Albeit in plain sight.

Happy New Year.

Christmas Is Coming — I Know Because There’s a Cake!

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Christmas is coming. I know this because of indelible evidence in my own home. My wife, Linda Gasparello, has just baked a Christmas cake. If I doubt that this is the month of Christmas, I just have to look at it, cooling on the kitchen counter, declaring itself, in its way, the harbinger of the holidays.

The cake can’t be eaten yet. No, no. Linda, who’s a phenomenon at the range, explains when she sees me circling with a knife, the cake needs to “cure” for at least a week. Rum must infuse the cornucopia of fruit that has bonded with flour and eggs and whatever else makes a cake a cake. I don’t know all the fruits and nuts that go into The Great Christmas Cake, but I do know there are dried apricots. Linda gave me some as a bribe to get out of the kitchen while she was baking the cake.

All year we eat very little cake in our home. Desserts are avoided for the usual reason: keeping down the calorie count. But recently, for a party, Linda made a carrot cake. Not because she’s my wife, but because I adore carrot cake, I can say that hers is the best ever.

How come I indulge in carrot cake when I eschew sponge, hide from German chocolate and, with a heavy heart, have even shaken my head at Sachertorte (chocolate cake covered with apricot jam and chocolate icing) in Vienna — a crime against Austria, practically an act of war? (I must confess, though, that I once ate the cake in the Hotel Sacher in Vienna where it was invented.)

The answer is carrots sound so healthy. “Good for you,” my mother used to say. She was a frightful cook and so raw carrots were better than anything she tried to do to them, which was mostly boil the life out of them until they were soft and spongy, most of the nutrients gone.

This year I read “Hotel Sacher,” a novel by Rodica Doehnert that traces the role of the great hotel at the end of the 19th century — how it was a kind of headquarters for the events that led to the end of Austro-Hungarian Empire and to World War I. If you want to research this in chilling detail, read Max Hastings’ book “Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War.”

Back to cakes and Christmas. Linda’s cake has so many things in it I wonder it doesn’t cause a criticality incident or spontaneously ignite.

There seems to be a boom in cooking and baking in particular. It all goes back to Julia Child, “The French Chef” on television in the 1960s, who whet the nation’s palate for cooking. Julia showed that cooking could be fun (especially if you cook with wine and imbibe as you go) and challenging — so much so that today we have an abundance of cooking shows.

The ones I hate are those that weaponize cooking — with contestant chefs who are sent home in tears because their sauce separated or, horror of horrors, their souffle collapsed.

Anyway, it seems 2018 is the bakers’ year. Linda is an exception because she bakes and tames meat. She can make a delectable osso buco as easily the tiramisu that follows. Mostly, there’s a divide between the flour people and meat people. Pretty much in the same way, when I worked at The Washington Post, there was a divide between the pot smokers and the drinkers. Me, the latter.

I can tell baking is in by the number of recipes I find people exchanging, and I put it all down to “The Great British Baking Show” on PBS, which entertains and makes baking exciting. Here contestant chefs also are sent home, but with such teary reluctance that if you want a hug from the whole cast and the other amazing chefs, you deliberately add a cup of salt instead of sugar to the cake. Tears and hugs all round.

We’re planning a Great British Christmas Tea at our house with Devonshire clotted cream and jam on scones, little sandwiches and — play the drums and trumpets fortissimo — the fruited cake that is curing very nicely, thank you.

And for Christmas itself? We’re going out to a restaurant. Happy holidays!

Christmas in Europe Coming Under Leaden Skies

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AGRINIO, Greece — There is not a dark cloud hanging over Europe. There are a bunch of them. Taken together they account for a sense of foreboding, not quite despair, but a definite feeling that things are unraveling and, worse, that there is no leadership — second-raters at all the national helms. That was the near consensus at the annual Congress of the Association of European Journalists here in lovely western Greece.

In a class by itself in worries in Europe is Russia. It is creating trouble all over Europe, but especially in the countries that made up the former Soviet Union. It has a propaganda effort the likes of which has not been seen since the days of the Cold War — except modern technology and its social media manifestation have made it more deadly, surreptitious and deniable.

The problem is one that affects news organizations directly. Fake events vie with pernicious posting on social media and relentless cyber-undermining of systems and processes.

Disparaging democracy seems to be a primary Russian goal, making it appear unworkable.

When will Russia move from soft war to hard war? The current standoff over Crimea augers badly for vulnerable Russian neighbors, particularly the Baltic states of Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia. They are battling massive Russian undermining of truth and wonder whether they will fall again to the Russian bear.

Add to this fear a new dynamic: What will America do if Russia moves? The fear is it will do nothing. President Donald Trump’s haranguing of the NATO allies is not reassuring to them.

After the existential worries about Russia, comes Brexit. It is here and now. It is, in the eyes of continentals, a ghastly mistake that is going to cost all of Europe dearly. And what for? The vague shibboleth of “sovereignty.” Euros remain sadly hopeful that somehow there will be a second referendum in Britain and that everything will be as it was: Britain being a stabilizer among the 28 nations that make up the European Union.

Since Britain’s entry in 1973, it has been a fundamental side of an iron triangle of the three big economies: Germany, France and Britain. Britain has been an older sibling, the sensible one. Now the odds are that it will be gone, headed for an uncertain future leaving behind the wreckage of a broken marriage and squandered hope for what Tony Blair, the former Labor prime minister, used to call the “European Project.”

Hungary and the ultra-right policies of Viktor Orban are a very great worry in Europe. Similarly, Poland’s shift to the right and the success of right-wing, near fascist parties across Europe, including Austria (heretofore a center of cautious reasonableness), add to the sense of disintegration.

Two other worries are France and Italy. Along with Hungary and Poland, Italy, with an amalgamated government of the ultra-right and ultra-left, looks as determined as the other two to thumb its nose at the European Union and its rules, maybe to withdraw even. Hungary does it over press freedom and human rights, Italy over fiscal probity and open hostility to the EU.

France is a different story. Emmanuel Macron, the young president was, briefly, the great hope of Europe, but his popularity at home has slid and he has had to turn back his ambitious reforms after street demonstrations, violence and fatalities.

Add to all this shifting sand the uncertain future in Germany where Chancellor Angela Merkel is on her way out and, suddenly, she seems a more desirable leader than she was thought to be during her tenure.

Feeding the swing to the right and as far from resolution today as it was when it began, illegal immigration is an undermining pressure, un-addressed on the left and exploited on the right.

Meanwhile, across Europe press freedom is teetering: a big issue at this congress. As a Bulgarian delegate said to me, “When the press goes, so goes democracy.” Then she added, “We thought that, in some way, America would help, but not now. We are on our own.”

Europe will have a fine Christmas — it does Christmas so well. Next year though, some of the stresses may reach breaking point and the carols will have given way to uglier, discordant notes.

 

Photo: Germany: Bundestag building decorated on Christmas holidays.

Time for a Little Trumpish Positive Non-Believing

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I’d like to introduce you to the power of not believing. There is, as President Trump has pointed out, too much believing going on and it is time for a national re-evaluation.

Take, for example, all this erroneous believing about sea-level rise. Guru Trump doesn’t believe in that, so it’s not happening. Billions of dollars are being wasted in cities, from Boston to Miami, to harden against something that isn’t happening. All that’s needed is a little non-belief.

Some admirals in the U.S. Navy have failed to get the message and are alarming their commands about sea-level rise on the East Coast of the United States, endangering naval installations. Particularly they’re suggesting that Naval Station Norfolk, the huge base in Virginia, is in trouble. These admirals and their adherents in the ranks should be reassigned and given shore duty on mountains so they can see the sea level is actually down.

In some quarters, the doctrine of not believing is losing ground and believing is seeping in. Wall Street stands out. Something should be done, maybe another tax cut.

While it was bastion of the power of non-belief, Wall Street has been backsliding; heresy has shown its ugliness. Masters of the Universe, to use Tom Wolfe’s designation, applauded the tax cut, ran wild, overdosed on Chateau Haut-Brion, went crazy rebuilding their summer compounds in the Hamptons, winter cabins in Vail and pieds-a-terre in Paris. President Trump smiled, his chief economic adviser of the day — a temporary job — beamed, and first lady Melania bought a new wardrobe. Everyone upgraded their private jets and joined a Trump golf club. Life was good for non-believers and there were bigger apartments in the skies over Manhattan.

Now some of those same worthies, those who believed that their guru had pointed the way to eternal and growing wealth, are muttering about huge deficits, rising interest rates and unsupportable debt service. Ingrates. They should be taken, along with the traitor former chief economic adviser Gary Cohn, to a place of re-education to learn again Trumpanomics and how to con the Arabs into buying condo glitz.

Just turn on the television and see the happy faces, the fulfillment, the sense of purpose, the smug certainty of the precious individuals who are wholly invested in non-believing. Take the happiest of all, Kellyanne Conway. What confidence, what assurance, what sense of inspired mission; how exquisitely she extinguishes facts, lays waste to data and bullies the truth. Or her colleague, the redoubtable Sarah Sanders, a devoted non-believer, who goes against an army of rude fact-pushers whenever she steps into the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room.

Non-belief defends Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia. What a sweet, dear young man, famous in royal circles for his humanitarianism and his interest in cadaver surgery.

Or raise a glass to that leader of men, sower of harmony, supporter of due process and virtuous murder squads, Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte. Non-believers can see the good in this man, so warmly embraced by Trump himself.

Non-belief gives you strength in all situations: defeat is victory, failure success and troubles melt away. Take North Korea: non-belief has wrought its masterpiece there. Where there was war and fear, now there is love, two great minds declaring their verisimilitude. A little more non-believing and the nuclear weapons will melt away like the trillion-dollar infrastructure project or the Mexican payment for the wall, which will restore our national dignity and save us from a deadly invasion of those begging to work.

The U.S. Border Patrol, the army and militias are doing a great job. But in the interest of non-believing, the president should dispatch his crack non-believers to the border: Rudolph Giuliani, lawyer on television; Peter Navarro, trade fantasist; and Kellyanne and Sarah.

Facts wilt before them.