On the Acela Express from Washington to Boston, I am searching my hopper of words for one that describes the feeling of watching on television Donald Trump’s press conference in Florida. I am, as it were, dumbfounded by the braggart.

Watching Trump is like watching one of nature’s lethal creatures, say a mamba or a crocodile. One wonders at the deadly speed of the snake, coiled and ready to strike its victim: a thing of beauty in its lethality, mesmerizing; or the evil certainty of the crocodile, always ready to go from seeming lethargy to lighting assault, if the unwary should seek to share the river bank.

The man who would be president has the dubious appeal of a bombaster, as he trashes people who have given their lives to public service with success, like Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. Men and women who have earned high marks in the esteem of their professions and the nation. They are fools, losers, stupid and worse in the profane stream of venom that passes for campaigning from Trump. He is a man who has so little respect for others that you wonder what he does respect, besides his own money (which he refers to frequently) and foreign strongmen, like Russia’s Vladimir Putin.

Name-calling is part of the political dialogue, but this is something other again, this Niagara Falls of abuse, of disrespect of verbal infamy; this sick, sick performance of denigrating the United States so he can save it. It is a risible attack on Americans who have built America. It also is an attack on America, and an insight into Trump’s ignorance of the world. By the way, Mr. Trump, America is still the world’s most powerful country.

Trump calls everyone he encounters names. He also calls them liars; his opponents in the primaries were liars, as is his Democratic opponent now. He calls the media “scum.”

The big lies, though, are Trump lies. He is a fairground barker, telling people anything to get them into his tattered tent.

The United States is not despised in the world: We are admired. The economy is not a disaster: It has been growing to the envy of other advanced economies.

America is great right now, today. There are problems here in social equality and other things, and huge problems in the Middle East – some, but not all, could be blamed on policy under the former and current presidents. The world still looks to America to protect, to invent, and to do the right thing. 

Trump, who finds nothing good in anyone in public life and nothing good in public policy, has given us no idea of how he would govern and whom he would rely upon to bring about the Age of Trump. All he has released is a list of conservative judges from whom he will appoint Supreme Court nominees.

When it comes to policy, all we know is that he is going to build a wall across the southern frontier, abrogate a lot of treaties, engage in trade wars, leave Europe open to Russian aggression, and extract money for his schemes from our allies and friends.

Yet, sitting behind me on this train, a woman has been praising Trump to her two traveling companions, and only stops to call someone on her cell phone and further praise him. Since biblical times, serpents have been a source of fascination. The woman behind me would follow the political version into the White House. — For InsideSources

In the beginning, there was Rupert Murdoch. He created the formula.

Then he met Roger Ailes and installed him as head of what would become America’s most successful cable news channel, Fox News Channel, also known as Fox News.

And so the formula of conservatism and sex, pioneered on a newspaper in Britain, came to television and the rest, as they say, is history.

In 1969 Murdoch bought an ailing British newspaper called The Sun. He bought it from the Daily Mirror Group, then the publishers of the most successful tabloid in Britain, The Daily Mirror, and its sibling The Sunday Mirror (where I once worked). The Daily Mirror was firmly left-wing and The Sun, if anything, more so. It had started life as The Daily Herald and was owned collectively by the trade union movement.

The new owners, who used an old formula — the working class as exploited, downtrodden and hopelessly dependent on the largesse of their employers — failed to attract or excite readers.

Murdoch, fresh from Australia (although he had worked earlier as an editor in London), looked around and saw something quite different. He saw a new worker, who owned a car, took vacations in Spain (thanks to jet travel), and did not feel oppressed.

The British workers — especially working men — had thrown off the past and were now much more like the workers of Australia and the United States. It was also a period of sexual freedom.

These workers would be Murdoch’s target.

Overnight, without warning, he turned The Sun from far-left whingeing to triumphant far-right throatiness. Murdoch had realized that the working man had become a man of property.

As for sex, Murdoch would go further. British tabloids had always published “cheesecake” — pictures of busty, young women in bikinis. Murdoch took off the tops: Every day, on Page Three, he published a photo of an English rose blooming in a bikini bottom. It was bold and it was brave and it worked.

The Sun, with its new brawny politics of nationalism, anti-European attitude, right-wing enthusiasm and topless beauties, was a triumph. It began a meteoric rise, almost entirely at the expense of the forelock-tugging Daily Mirror.

The formula was born: right-wing nativism and sex.

When Murdoch came to the United States, he found the society was less louche and he could not put nudity into his newspapers. Also, there was a tradition of editorial duality: Although the politics of newspapers was not concealed, readers wanted to think that the news was impartial. Murdoch bought newspapers in San Antonio, New York, Boston and Chicago, and he started a weekly supermarket tabloid.

None succeeded and gradually Murdoch sold off these properties, except for The New York Post. Murdoch’s daughter, Elisabeth, told me that he was the first to admit that he had misunderstood the U.S. market. That is probably why when he bought The Wall Street Journal in 2007, he was careful to respect that property and to change it incrementally — for the better.

But the formula was not dead. When Ailes applied it to television, it worked all over again. Except this time, the result was even more spectacular in political power and profit.

Fox News is the voice of raucous conservatism, all served up with sex appeal.

Ailes clearly has had a fascination with beautiful, blond women reading the news — and other channels are going that way.

Ailes has done more than apply the formula: He has applied it with brio. He has given the news pace. It moves along and little inventions, like “Around the World in 80 Seconds,” are part of that energizing.

I visited with Ailes when Fox News was just beginning its ascent. He was thrilled with the fact that it had just drawn slightly ahead of CNN Headline News. I do not think he realized then how potent the formula would be and what heights his creation would reach.

Just when it needs it most, the United States is losing its most potent weapon in the fight against climate change, which might better be called global pollution. One nuclear plant is closed in Vermont, two are under threat of closure in Illinois, and the only plant in climate-conscious California is to close.

Just these four plants represent a substantial withdrawal of clean, carbon-free electricity from the market, mostly to be replaced by natural gas, and some wind and solar. Gas will do the bulk of the generating, and it is a carbon- emitter — less than coal, but a carbon source nonetheless.

What is more, these plants are up and running, which means none of the pollution associated with construction, steel-making or quarrying will have to be repeated. Some, including Marvin Fertel, president of the Nuclear Energy Institute, have expressed fears that 20 more nuclear plants may yet close.

The ostensible reason for these closures is that market forces dictate them. That bald statement implies that electricity is bought and sold as freely as any multi-sourced commodity.

But electricity is not traded in any conventional way. And it is weighted in favor of the short term and political goals.

The trouble started when it was decided to deregulate electricity markets in the 1990s. The goal had nobility: Consumers would have choice. At least that is how it was sold by advocates, such as Enron.

Well, choice did not really work for consumers. But it has worked for some large industrial customers, who have been able to shop for price.

Mostly, deregulation has created two kinds of utilities: those that swallowed the deregulation pill, and those that did not, mostly in the South. The northern tier of utilities, under pressure from their state governments, deregulated, some even selling off their generating assets.

The result has been other than anticipated: Consumers have had little or no choice, and the market has set about exterminating long-lived plant, like nuclear, in favor of today’s cheapest fuel – at this moment, natural gas.

The utilities which have remained strictly regulated by their state utility commissions have been more secure financially and able to raise money more cheaply. The leader in this pack, the giant Southern Company, headquartered in Atlanta, has become a technological innovator as well as a builder of new nuclear plant.

Deregulation of the telephone monopoly — often cited during the passion to deregulate electricity — created a profusion of innovations. By contrast, deregulating electricity has just brought about a rush to the cheapest fuel of the day.

Electric utilities operate what are known as natural monopolies. Competing entities cannot install a new set of transmission wires, so the deregulated electric market had to be contrived. It was also subject to political and cultural manipulation, as the solar and wind lobbies insisted that their product get preference. Coal was edged out financially, before environmental concerns.

Deregulated utilities have formed transmission organizations to rationalize the system. These are the independent system operators, such as the Midwest ISO or PJM in the Mid-Atlantic. They auction power and the auction system favors the cheapest kilowatt on offer.

That sounds fair, right? Not quite. Some of the power comes from wind and solar, which has been subsidized by an array of tax preferences and other government supports.

Many states have renewable energy portfolios which decree that a percentage of the power has to come from these renewable resources. This is fine because they produce no carbon. But they do not produce that much reliable electricity either. It takes a lot of solar arrays or wind turbines — and then only when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing — to produce the same electricity as a nuclear power plant or an old-fashioned, coal-fired power plant. They need reliable backup – and that is natural gas, a fossil fuel.

Also to replace a nuclear plant with renewables chews up a lot of land, whether solar arrays or wind farms. Imperfect markets produce imperfect results. — For InsideSources

“Hello, dear. I’m the human resources director here at the network.”

“How do you do. I’m here for the reporter’s job. I have a demo tape I made for the chairman to see.”

“That’s nice, but we can get to that later — probably much later.”

“Won’t the chairman want to see my work?”

“He may ask one of the producers to look at it, or he may not. The chairman relies on his instincts and what he sees in his reporters.

“I see you’ve dressed for success: a short skirt and a gravity-challenged blouse neckline. These are important in television journalism; important to your reporting and the ratings.

“Good reporting and ratings are the same thing here. You know, gets you through the door. Gets you the job.

“The chairman is a great journalist and he can pick talent. That’s why he goes for former beauty queens. He has found they are uniquely qualified; besides with teleprompters and eager young producers, well, they can concentrate on their unique gifts.

“The chairman will assign you a hairdresser, a makeup artist and a fashion consultant. He may recommend you get those legs insured. Know what I mean?”

“You mean beauty before brains?”

“The chairman has enough brains for everyone on air. He believes in talking heads with legs. The ratings prove he’s right. Look at PBS: no legs, no ratings.”

“I was voted Miss Nuclear Waste in Las Vegas.”

“I wouldn’t mention the nuclear part. Just emphasize Las Vegas, dear.

“If you want some advice, watch those roots. Whatever you spend on your appearance, keep the blonde look. We don’t want the viewers to think you’re a brunette. The chairman wants graduates from Peroxide University.

“But I’m a brunette. People say I have beautiful brown hair.”

“There’s only beautiful blonde hair on this network. That’s in our style book, before the part about how we describe terrorists.”

“I have a BA in journalism.”

“I wouldn’t mention that around here. No, dear, no. The chairman likes to say, ‘Journalism schools are for losers.’

“If you want to work here, tell him something interesting like who you’re dating and what turns you on – you know, on dates. Lobster dinner, that kind of thing. Get my meaning?”

“You mean sex?”

“Don’t mention it. Let the chairman imagine your college years for himself.

“He’s nearly ready for you now.

“A few tips: Lean across his desk. Sometimes he doesn’t catch what you’re saying. Don’t sit before he does and, if you can, turn around a few times. He likes to assess how well you’ll do if you’re interviewing someone on a doorstep who doesn’t want to be interviewed on this network. That’s most people who aren’t on the same political wavelength: intellectuals, communists, and people from The New York Times.”

“I read all the newspapers every day: The National Enquirer, The New York Post and The Daily News.”

“The ability to read is important. Some of our biggest names use cue cards as well as the teleprompter. Also on talk shows, insults are important, like brain dead, pinhead, commie and, especially, loser.

“Just remember, television is a visual medium — and the chairman is very visual. But don’t worry, he’s not tactile.”

“What does that mean?”

“Don’t worry, dear, you’ll be reading the evening news in no time, if you don’t put on weight or have tattoos where they show.”

“Really?”

“Trust me, I know how the chairman thinks. He’s my husband.” — For InsideSources

In the neighborhood where I live in Rhode Island, Donald Trump is a hero. It is a solid, mostly white, community of working-class people.

They are fiercely patriotic, as the many veterans memorials that dot the landscape testify, as well as the solemnity with which they celebrate Memorial Day.

They are religious. Being mostly of Italian and Portuguese descent, they are practicing Catholics. Plaster Madonnas sit on many lawns.

These people — these good, hard-working God-fearing Americans — vote Democratic in a heavily unionized state. There are deep labor roots, and a history of struggle between the mill owners and the workers in the days when New England was home to the textile trade.

But sharing the small, neat lawns with Madonnas are blue Trump campaign signs.

These people are a near mirror-image of the working people in the north of England who voted for Britain to the leave the European Union. They are also working class or, as we have abandoned that term, middle-class people who saw their textile industry implode.

In Rhode Island, these exemplary people clearly are falling for the false music of Pied Piper Donald Trump. His wild, anti-trade siren song appeals here, invoking the time when New England was a manufacturing hub and China was place you read about in National Geographic.

Their twins in the blighted north of England followed another piper with another myth: the former mayor of London and showman, Boris Johnson. He preached freedom from Europe: a halcyon dream of Britain free of entangling regulation from the European administrative capital, Brussels.

Now Johnson’s bluff has been called, and it is dawning on the good people of the north of England (think of it as England’s Rust Belt) that their well-being — such as it has been — has been largely as a result of the European Union. The North, so much less prosperous than the South, where London holds hegemony, depends on European Union investments and grants. Now free of Europe, they are free to be poor.

In Rhode Island, after years in the post-industrial doldrums, a zephyr of new hope is just rising, and it has attracted the General Electric Company’s digital division. It will sit alongside another global mainstay of the U.S. economy, Textron, headquartered in Rhode Island.

So even as Rhode Island is beginning a new chapter, its citizens are flirting with drinking the Kool-Aid being peddled by Trump.

Johnson and others, mostly Conservatives, peddled the myth that Britain was being hogtied by Europe and was yearning to be free and trade with the world – a sharp contrast to the Fortress America Trump is peddling, but appealing to workers who, on both sides of the Atlantic, want a fairer shake.

Johnson says: Europe has hindered us and is undermining our national sovereignty. Trump says: the world is stealing from us. Both are political myths: dangerous, toxic myths. Both share a common lack of coherence, as is now so evident in Britain.

The sin of Johnson against the British people is that the campaign was based on lies, and there was no plan for how to proceed after victory: a well-known political trap (see G. W. Bush and Iraq).

No one I know believes that after Trump presumably gets the Republican nomination in Cleveland he will go on to win. But neither did I know anyone in Britain who thought the country would fall for the wiles of devious leaders who play on patriotism and frustration for their own ends: glorification and power.

The blue Trump signs outside the modest but proud houses on my street may not get Trump elected, but — and here is the danger — they may draw his putative opponent, Hillary Clinton, towards the same trade poison that he is advocating. She already has backpedaled shamelessly on the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which she helped negotiate, and who knows what anti-trade deals she will strike with the unions?

When politics is informed by myth not policy, democracies are in danger of hurting themselves. We do not need a special relationship with Britain founded on mutual folly. — For InsideSources

The English appear to have laid down the burden of sanity. They have voted to leave the European Union.

It was never about Great Britain; it was always at its kernel about England. There was always a primal, nativist, historically-seated English antipathy to Europe and by extension to the European project.

I should know. You could say I was there in the beginning.

Way back in the early 1960s, as a young journalist, I worked for Lord Beaverbrook, the Canadian-born newspaper publisher who led the early fight against the European Economic Community, also called the Common Market. There were then, in 1962 and 1963, just six members and the rival outfit, the European Free Trade Area had seven.

I believed when Britain finally joined what is now the European Union in 1973 that a decade earlier we had been wrong. And I believe that leaving the European Union today is terribly wrong, a ghastly self-inflicted wound that will hasten the end of the United Kingdom, cause a surge in right-wing bigotry in Europe, and leave no one — not one individual in any country of Europe — better off, particularly the residents of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

In the wreckage that now has to be sorted out across the Atlantic, two lessons stand out: first, referendums have no place in a representative democracy and second, today’s political parties, across the world, no longer represent the feelings of their electorates. In Britain, as in America, and most recently in Italy, it is now apparent that the old left-right divide does not address a smoldering anger that affects the democracies of the world.

Give angry people something to smash and they will smash it. The angry English have just smashed up the place where they live. It is ineffably sad for those who have followed Europe’s attempt to come together, to boost trade, and to end war in on the continent.

During the long and campaign leading to Thursday’s vote, every shibboleth about sovereignty, faceless bureaucrats, money transfers and European skullduggery was trotted out.

When the facts do not fit, harken back to another time: That is easy enough to do in England with its storied history. They never said it, but the triumphant Leave campaign implied every day in every way: We’ll make England great again. Donald Trump could have ghosted the Leave campaign.

When Britain joined the Common Market in 1973, the country was often referred to as the sick man of Europe. Today, Britain is the world’s fifth-largest economy and it has been the strongest advocate for free markets and free trade in Europe. Not only will Britain be setting a new course, but so will the European Union.

Europe, including Britain, has a massive migration problem which fed the anxieties of the English, particularly in the depressed north of the country. But Europe has yet another problem that will not go away: the euro has failed. Britain wisely never adopted it, but the 19 countries of the eurozone are paying a high price. Weak economies on the southern flank of Europe, most notably Greece, cannot devalue to make their goods and services more salable and the strong economies, most importantly Germany, are the beneficiaries of a weak euro in their exports.

The British vote will spur reforms in Europe and if they are not fast enough and far enough-reaching, the European Union itself will break apart. Italy is an early candidate to bolt, but so are its southern neighbors.

It is not Europe as a free-trade area they should be trying to escape, but rather its benighted currency. Consider: If the euro was fazed out and the old currencies were to reappear, Germany would have an increasingly hard currency, the mark, and Italy and Greece, with the lira and the drachma, would produce goods and services that were very affordable to their customers.

But that is not Britain’s problem. It has to find new markets and a way of living with the strictures of European trade without a voice in the writing of those strictures.

Political folly has led Britain to be lesser. “Little England” and Little Englanders always have been pejoratives in British political invective. Today the Little Englanders are triumphant, having chosen insignificance and poverty over importance and wealth. Shame.

The British (read English) electorate has signed on to a dream. The nightmare begins now. — For InsideSources

 

Dear Candidates,

Even as you strain to tell us the wondrous things that will come about if you are elected in November, may I tell you some wondrous things that are happening anyway?

My contention here is twofold: First, not everything that changes our lives is political. Second, not all technological change has to do with the internet.

In the same vein, not all progress will come out of the established agencies of private change, like Amazon, Apple, Google and Tesla.

Of all things, an electric utility has moved into the world of innovation. It is the Southern Co., under the dynamic chairmanship of Tom Fanning.

Southern is on the cutting edge of utility technologies, including carbon capture and storage, and advanced coal combustion. It is also building two state-of-the-art nuclear plants in Georgia.

Fanning believes the remit of the electric utility runs beyond the flow of electrons. Hence, one of Southern’s newest and most revolutionary undertakings: the vertical, urban farm.

According to Fanning, the idea is to go to blighted city areas where there is a shortage of fresh produce — the kind produced by truck farms — and convert old industrial and office buildings into urban farms. “We’re taking vacant, commercial buildings and creating farms that are vertical. There, produce can be grown more efficiently with our light and water systems. One of the best things is that you don’t need to use pesticides,” he told me.

Other things that are coming down the pike include the capture of carbon after combustion in power plants, steel mills and cement plants. What was a crazy scheme is almost a reality: So, be careful before you join the lynch mob of fossil-fuel haters.

Then there is the revolution in manufacturing. Now, with additive manufacturing, we can build up goods rather than cutting them to shape: no more wasted glass, plastic or steel. Houses, bridges, even guns have been printed.

It ain’t gonna be your father’s factory. So if your plan is to bring back the factories of the Industrial Revolution, better think some more. The new factories will be smaller, more dispersed and, in many cases, may be in or near workers’ homes.

And before you lay into cutting government, be sure you do not cut out vital organs like the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Livermore, Los Alamos, Oak Ridge and Sandia national laboratories that maintain our nuclear weapons and have harnessed things like the seismic technologies that have changed energy supply and kept us as the world’s leader in physics.

These labs are the muscles in the strong arm of American technology. Never forget that the Internet was invented by an arm of the Department of Defense. So do not malign government science and research.

Spare our technology, please, and do not get policy from the old tapes or old demagogues. The world is changing a lot faster than the talking points. If you are to lead it, you ought to understand that what was needed 10 years ago is not needed now, and technology will shape the future as much or more than you think you will, if elected. — For InsideSources.com.

Memo to environmental activists: It’s the oceans, stupids.

This summer, hundreds of millions of people in the Northern Hemisphere will flock to beaches to swim, surf, wade, boat, fish, sunbathe, or even fall in love. To these revelers, the oceans are eternal — as certain as the rising and setting of the sun, and a permanent bounty in an impermanent world.

But there is a rub: The oceans are living entities and they are in trouble. Much more trouble than the sun-seekers of summer can imagine.

Mark Spalding, president of The Ocean Foundation, says, “We are putting too much into the oceans and taking too much out.”

In short, that is what is happening. Whether deliberately or not, we are dumping stuff into the oceans at a horrifying rate and, in places, we are overfishing them.

But the No. 1 enemy of oceans is invisible: carbon.

Carbon is a huge threat, according to ocean champion Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I. The oceans are a great carbon sink, he explains, but they are reaching a carbon saturation point, and as so-called “deep carbon” resurfaces, it limits the oxygen in the water and destroys fish and marine life.

There is a 6,474-square-mile “dead zone” — an area about the size of Connecticut with low to no oxygen — in the northern Gulf of Mexico. Dead zones are appearing in oceans around the world due to excessive nutrient pollution (especially nitrogen and phosphorous) from agribusiness and sewage. Two great U.S. estuaries are in trouble: the Chesapeake Bay and the Long Island Sound.

Warming in the North Atlantic is disturbing fish populations: Maine lobsters are migrating to Canada’s cooler waters. Whitehouse and other Atlantic coast legislators are concerned as they see fish resources disappearing, and other marine life threatened.

Colin Woodard, a reporter at The Portland Press Herald, has detailed the pressures from climate change on fish stocks in the once bountiful Gulf of Maine. He first sounded the alarm 16 years ago in his book, “Oceans End: Travels Through Endangered Seas,” and now he says things are worse.

The shallow seas, like the Baltic and the Adriatic, are subject to “red tides” — harmful algal booms, due to nutrient over-enrichment, that kill fish and make shellfish dangerous to consume.

Polluted waterways are a concern for Rio de Janeiro Olympic rowers and other athletes. Apparently, the word is: Don’t follow the girl from Ipanema into the water. The culprit is raw sewage, and the swelling Olympic crowds will only worsen the situation.

My appeal to the environmental community is this: If you are worried about the air, concentrate on the oceans. It is hard to explain greenhouse gases to a public that is distrustful, or fears the economic impact of reducing fossil fuel consumption. If I lived in a West Virginia hollow, and the only work was coal mining, you bet I would be a climate denier.

The oceans are easier to understand. You can explain that the sea levels are rising; that it is possible for life-sustaining currents, like the Gulf Stream, to stop or reverse course; and you can point to the ways seemingly innocent actions, or those thought of as virtuous (like hefting around spring water in plastic bottles) have harmful effects.

Plastic is a big problem. Great gyres of plastic, hundreds of miles long, are floating in the Pacific. Flip-flops washed into the ocean in Asia are piling up on beaches in Africa. Fish are ingesting microplastic particles – and you will ingest this plastic when you tuck into your fish and chips. Sea birds and dolphins get tangled in the plastic harnesses we put on six-packs of beer and soft drinks. They die horrible deaths. Sunscreen is lethal to coral.

It is hard to explain the way carbon, methane and ozone in the atmosphere cause the Earth to heat up. It is easier, I am telling my environmentalist friends, to understand that we will not be able to swim in the oceans.

I have met climate deniers, but I have never run into an ocean denier. Enjoy the beach this summer. — For InsideSources