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Clinton: Unhinged?

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Hillary Clinton in Concord, New Hampshire
Hillary Clinton in Concord, New Hampshire (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Following multiple damning email leaks and disclosures, Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign decided, in the weirdest attempt at damage control I’ve ever seen, to  invoke the late Allen Ginsberg’s “America”:

“America it’s them bad Russians.
Them Russians them Russians and them Chinamen. And them Russians.”

Forget the content of the leaks. Just focus on their alleged (not proven, alleged) source. IT’S THEM RUSSIANS!

Never mind that one of the leaks uncovered the Democratic National Committee’s secret program to deliver its party’s presidential nomination to Clinton at all costs. Did I mention that Donald Trump MIGHT BE WORKING WITH THEM RUSSIANS?

Never mind that another disclosure gave the public a glimpse of Clinton’s corrupt “pay to play” scheme,  in which high-dollar donors to the Clinton Foundation got special goodies from the Clinton State Department. Who cares? The Ukrainian government (installed in a 2014 coup funded by the US and orchestrated by Clinton’s protege,  Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland) just happened to conveniently “discover” “evidence” linking Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort to THEM RUSSIANS!

Servergate? Never mind FBI director James Comey’s announcement and testimony revealing that she’s at least recklessly negligent  and almost certainly a felon who only avoided prosecution because her name is Hillary Clinton. LOOOOOOOK! THEM RUSSIANS!

It’s all so maladroit and ham-handed that it would be laughable if not for the stakes:

Clinton’s strategy for distracting attention from her corruption and incompetence, so that she can win the White House, is an all-out attempt to re-start the Cold War (at the risk of one or more very hot wars) and resurrect Joe McCarthy between now and November. And it just might work.

No, I can’t bring myself to support Donald Trump. But it’s getting harder and harder to peg him as the distinctively harebrained, irresponsible, unhinged one in the race. Clinton is still a game down to Trump in the World Series of Crazy, but it looks like the series will go all the way to seven.

It’s been noted over and over, by pretty much everyone, that Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are the two most roundly despised presidential candidates since polling became a thing. How either one of them got within spitting distance of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is a mystery for the ages. And one of them almost certainly moving in come January sounds like an establishing shot for next summer’s top-grossing horror film.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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Op-Eds

Blockchains: Going Mainstream, Still Revolutionary

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Even if you haven’t seen The Graduate, you’ve likely heard some ham recite Mr. McGuire’s pitch to Ben Braddock, immortalized as #42 on the American Film Institute’s list of most famous film quotes:

“I just want to say one word to you. Just one word. Are you listening? Plastics.”

Probably good career advice for a newly minted college graduate circa the mid-1960s.

I suspect that 50 years later, newly minted college graduates are finding themselves cornered poolside to hear the other one word of another Mr. McGuire: “Blockchain.” Probably good career advice for them, too.

Born less than a decade ago as the backbone of a then-novel electronic currency scheme, Bitcoin, and the darling of crypto-anarchists like myself, the blockchain concept now finds itself the spoiled pre-teen adoptee of the big business and entrepreneur sets alike. It’s a simple and seductive idea:

Blockchains store information in databases distributed around the world instead of in single locations with perhaps an off-site backup or two at most. The integrity of that information is protected both by the redundancy of distribution and by strong cryptography. It’s very difficult to destroy or illicitly modify information stored in a well-designed blockchain. The blockchain is maintained by “miners” whose computers do the work of storing and constantly updating the database. The miners are paid in bits of cryptocurrency created by their own work.

How big is the blockchain market? There are more cryptocurrencies out there than you can shake a stick at, but the top five alone (Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ripple, Steem and Litecoin), as I write this, boast a combined market capitalization of nearly US $10.5 billion.

There’s money in blockchains. More importantly, there’s opportunity in blockchains. While the first and most obviously killer app is processing financial transactions (and, done rightly, keeping the details opaque to busybodies), new ways of using the idea pop up daily.

Schemes like “smart contracts” and “Digital Autonomous Organizations” are emerging as tools for  moving law and corporate governance standards out of the hands of states and into the more objective universe of (theoretically) unalterable, (hopefully) ineradicable digital code.

Steem, currently fluctuating between third and fourth in cryptocurrency market cap, is a social media project built around the interactions of three cryptocurrencies. Not only “miners,” but content creators and curators as well, receive rewards from the blockchain process. Think of it as something like getting paid to use Reddit or Facebook.

Years ago, I wrote that Bitcoin might or might not be the killer cryptocurrency app, but that the idea was here to stay. I had no idea how right I was. Bitcoin is still top dog and some of its progeny will certainly fail  (some of them spectacularly). But blockchains are going all kinds of places, and society will go with them.

Will blockchains replace state control and regulation of markets? I’m less optimistic about that than I used to be. Worried bureaucrats and  big business power players are are working overtime to co-opt the technology and suppress that aspiration. But we can hope.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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Op-Eds

Holiday Greetings From Planet Elizabeth Warren

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US Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) addresses the 2016 Democratic National Convention [public domain via Wikimedia Commons]
It is an election year and I am a political junkie. Therefore my inbox runneth over with political emails. Recently I’ve received numerous such emails (from avowedly “progressive” organizations) alerting me to US Senator Elizabeth Warren’s latest hobbyhorse. “Election Day should be a holiday,” says the Massachusetts Democrat, “so no one has to choose between a paycheck and a vote.”

How exciting! A new “birther” controversy motoring over the horizon in our direction! Senator Warren passed on a presidential run this year but enjoyed considerable buzz and may well reconsider in 2020 or 2024. So I’d like to see her birth certificate — long form, please — with a view toward contesting her eligibility. She’s obviously not from this country, and probably not even from this planet.

The federal government recognizes ten holidays:  New Year’s Day, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday, Inauguration Day (in years following presidential elections), Washington’s birthday, Memorial Day, Independence Day, Labor Day, Columbus Day, Veterans Day, Thanksgiving and Christmas.

How many of those do you get off work?

Unless you’re a government employee (or work for a bank), the answer is almost certainly  “not all of them.” And the further down the income and prestige scales your job is, the more likely the answer is “only a few of them, and usually without pay.”

Senator Warren would presumably know this if she was from, or lived in, or even spent much time visiting, the United States.

Surely she would have, at one point or another, shopped at Wal-Mart, or eaten at McDonald’s, or taken in a film (most theaters are open EVERY day, Christmas being the busiest day of the year in the movie business), or traveled by air, or hailed a taxi, on a holiday.

And when she did any of those things, how could she conceivably have avoided noticing the people who make it possible for her to do those things? You know, the workers whose job title isn’t “US Senator?”

Warren’s proposal wouldn’t it make it any easier to vote for anyone who has a hard time voting now. The people who have a hard time voting are the people who don’t get new government holidays off work with pay just because  a light bulb comes on in Elizabeth Warren’s head.

Early voting makes voting easier. Relaxed rules for absentee voting make voting easier. Voting by mail makes voting easier. Turning “Election Day” into two full days, 48 hours from midnight Friday night to midnight Sunday night, would make voting easier.

Calling for Election Day to be made a federal holiday, on the other hand, just gives people good reason to wonder if perhaps US Senator Elizabeth Warren is proof of extra-terrestrial life. And disproof of extra-terrestrial intelligence.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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