Living in the Honey Boo Boo World

 

 

When people ruefully speak of the "post truth" world, they are speaking of the class divide between those who went to school, where they learned how to formulate an argument, which, of course, begins with assembling a set of "facts" to support your point and those who never quite got that far.
In his interview with David Remnick of the New Yorker, President Obama noted that when someone posts a comment which asserts Obama was born on Mars or in Kenya or when someone claims Hillary is a crook, it looks the same, same format, same font even, as the assertion that this is all foolishness. The internet validates every opinion, no matter how unsubstantiated or how absurd.
Which is another way of saying the authorities have lost control of the discussion.
Gary Trudeau hit on the problem with his wonderful cartoon showing passengers on an airplane listening to Donald Trump as their pilot saying he was going to fly the airplane and, of course, the passengers are distraught, because clearly he is incompetent to do this.  In this Trudeau highlighted the problem with incompetence.


But, of course, there are spheres of activity in which competence is necessary--flying an airplane, doing heart surgery or brain surgery, building a bridge, wiring a building for electricity, doing the computers for the office. And then there are spheres in which no license, no exam is required, like being President of the United States or being Commerce Secretary or Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, where all you need is to win.

The problems arise when the two spheres intersect: When you get an economic incompetent like Paul Ryan saying we need to make Medicare into a voucher program or when you get Republicans crying out to destroy Obamacare and to replace with a voucher program or no program at all, well, there may be some suffering, but it may take a few years and several election cycles before the unsophisticated figure out they've been hurt.

Well, we'll find out just how important competence is in government. Republicans have been saying since Reagan, government is not the solution, it is the problem. We are about to see government as the problem.

Donald, the Joffrey; Game of Thrones Comes to Washington

Look, ma! I'm a soldier! Aren't you proud?

Life does imitate art sometimes. For me it's an image I cannot get out of my mind--how very much the Donald resembles Prince Joffrey, not just in the blonde/blue eye way but the essence of the soul--the coddled child, petulant and nasty, a bully only as long as he has his mommy and her soldiers behind him, but he folds when faced with real threat.
I'm trying hard on my twelve step program to cleanse myself of my addiction to politics and will turn to art, to television series. When is the new season of Game of Thrones?
Will it tell the future for the "real" world, once again.
And where is that lady with her dragons?

Say It Ain't So, Donald

Exit Polls vs Reported Voter Counts (click to enlarge)

At the voting place in Hampton, New Hampshire on November 8, there were thirty odd Hillary Clinton supporters holding placards and banners but fewer than half a dozen of Trump's people.  This was no surprise; we hade seen no Trump supporters out on the sidewalks knocking on doors throughout the election, no canvassers.


But some of Trump's people showed up on election day, and rather desultorily held placards as voters lined up to vote. What really brought them to life was when the exit poll people showed up. Then the Trump agents sprang into life, surrounding the polling people, claiming they were interviewing only women (who were expected to vote heavily for Clinton) although the pollers were clearly counting voters as they exited and approaching every fourth voter.


We had expected men wearing guns at the polls, as Trump agents had done in Virginia for early voting, and there was speculation about how the Trump people might try to intimidate voters in Hampton, which voted for Clinton by less than 500 people out of over 9000 votes cast. But the Democrats were puzzled by the concern the Trump organization focused on the exit polls.


Now we see Donald bloviating that there was "voter fraud" in New Hampshire, California and Virginia, states he lost on the way to losing the popular vote.


Why would he care about this? The election is over and done.

The only speculation I've heard which makes sense is this is a smokescreen, a distraction. If you scream fraud, you expect everyone to rally to the flag of the credibility of the voting outcome.


But there is this peculiar finding: The exit polls show Hillary winning the key swing states the voting tabulations say she lost.


Until now, I've thought whoever might have fixed the election--the Russians, the Koch brothers, Parallax View, Inc.--Trump was just their cat's paw. He had no idea. But now, listening the stories about his Tweets, I'm not so sure.

America's Iliad

Some 60 odd Christmases ago, I opened one of the last presents of the morning, a present I had left toward the end because, from its shape,  under the tree, I could see it was plainly a book.  It was actually a "Giant Golden Book" a DeLuxe edition of the Iliad and the Odyssey. It had some very avante garde illustrations, and I had never heard of the story, and I flipped through it, asking my parents repeatedly, "What is this?" 

They simply shook their heads and said, "Read it. Find out."

I set it down and ran around playing with my toys and balls and the things a boy likes, but ultimately, collapsed in a heap, worn out enough to focus on a book and started reading this book by Jane Werner Watson, illustrated by Alice and Martin Provensen, and was soon swept up into a world of warriors and gods and goddesses who watched mere mortals on earth and intervened in the affairs of mortals to satisfy their own egos and passions. This was before "super heroes" with super powers were much in vogue, although there was Superman and Batman, but these gods were something else again. They could change form and they were vain and flawed and very intriguing.

The Iliad kept coming up, as it is apt to do, through the life of a boy and man. 

My second son was much enthralled by fantasy novels, full of super heroes and conflict and he loved Greek mythology.  He was, in some ways, an indifferent student in middle school, struggling to get good grades, but after he won a wrestling match, upsetting a champion (who later went on to wrestle varsity at Harvard) I found him sitting in his chair, recovering.  After he won his match, the rest of his team mates started winning their matches and we watched his team stage an astonishing and unexpected victory.  "It all started with you," I noted. 
He shrugged, "Even Achilles had his heel," he said.
"What?" 
"You know: He was their greatest hero, and when he was brought down, the battle turned."
After I picked up my jaw off my chest I asked him again, not believing this ten year old had just made an allusion to the Iliad.

Later, when he was in high school, I spoke with his English teacher. She was notoriously severe in her opinions of her students. This was Sidwell Friends School, where the sons and daughters of Washington's elite were coddled, but not by her.  He was admitted, in great measure, because he was by the time he was ready for freshman year in high school, quite a well known wrestler and the school made room occasionally for a "gold level" athlete, who might anchor a particular team, basketball, soccer, lacrosse.  
The faculty knew who these ringers were.
This English teacher asked who my son was and when I told her she smiled and said, "You know, he said something interesting in class the other day."  
She said this as if she did not expect any of her students to ever say anything interesting, "He said he thought Zeus was intimidated by his wife, Hera. He thought Zeus was a little afraid of her."
"Isn't that why Zeus assumed different forms?" I asked. "Leda and the swan and all that? He didn't want his wife to know about his extracurricular lovers?"
"But I don't expect a freshman in high school to have that sort of insight," she said. "You son reads with more insight than most kids his age."
"Well," I said. "He lives in that world more than most."
"How's that?" she asked.
"He's a wrestler. He steps on a mat and and it's combat. He knows about Achilles and about Paris versus Menelaus. He's been there. These stories are not outside his experience."
She looked at me for a moment and said, "Perhaps I ought to go down to the gymnasium and watch one of his matches some day."
"Have you ever seen a wrestling match?"
"Never. I don't ordinarily go to sporting events."
"You know, I saw quite a few of the St. Alban's  faculty at the St. Alban's tournament last week."
"Really?"
"Yes, but of course that's a boys' school. The faculty there know they have to see boys outside the classroom to really know them."
"Are you saying women faculty miss the boat with boy students?"
"I'm just saying the Iliad means something to boys because it speaks to a part of them."

Later, my older son was applying to Columbia and I flipped through the catalogue and noticed they started off every freshman reading the Iliad. Nearly all the faculty members at Columbia came from the same twelve universities and we kept hearing faculty saying with pride that the freshman of 2001 studied the same curriculum Calvin Trilling had studied. 
"The place is ossified," I told my son. "They're still teaching the Iliad."
"Well," he shrugged, "You have to study something."
He wound up at NYU, where he read the Iliad in a course entitled "Anger."
"Why would you read the Iliad for that?"
"Dad," he laughed, "There isn't much in the Iliad but anger." 
Oh, what a rube his father was.

Now, when I consider our most recent election and the conflict and the outcome, I think of the Iliad and I realize, anger, conflict, the gods and the heroes and the fools are nothing new. My sons have, at the very least, taught me as much.

The Wah of Stephen Bannon: The Allure of Darkness

Read that interview Stephen Bannon gave the Hollywood Reporter and you can't help but feel its magnetism.
It's the same guilty pleasure you get looking at those renegade anti everything boys dressed in their black SS uniforms. There's a certain glamor to the nasty, dark crowd.

Bannon told how confidant he was when Hillary was off the campaign trail, talking to donors on the high dollar circuit and Trump was out there in the hustings talking to crowds of 30 or 40 thousand, day in and day out, Bannon was sure they would win.
"Hillary would get off the donor circuit and talk to a crowd of 300 or 400 students. We were talking to crowds of 40,000." 
That had to mean something.
That had to translate into something.
And none of the chattering class saw any of that.
Not Mark Shields, not Joe of "Morning Joe" not even David Brooks, who kept himself busy reading polls and "538."
And certainly not Nate Silver, everyone's favorite high tech oracle.
How sweet it must be to be Stephen Bannon who insisted on his contrarian view of life and was vindicated on November 8.
It was Muhammad Ali beating Sonny Liston. It was Broadway Joe Namath beating the Baltimore Colts in the Superbowl. It was the dark genius, the boy from blue collar Virginia who knew what was happening.

Of course, Mad Dog Democrat  had been reading Michael Moore, and he was unsettled: In his October 27th post he said,
"Watching Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, David Gregory and all the pundits on TV this morning I thought I was seeing Trump in a rope a dope.  No more mention of building a wall, kissing women, fat women, disgusting, nasty women, no more mention of forbidding Muslims from crossing our borders--now it's all about bringing back the factories for all those Ohio and Pennsylvania workers. You can all just go back to the factories now, get your paycheck. Ain't America great again. 

Never mind when those factories re open the 3,000 jobs once held by your fathers will be done by 2,000 robots and 100 workers.

Donald has learned what works and in the last two weeks he's lulling everyone to sleep, playing rope a dope. All he has to do is simply not be outrageous, and people forget all those wild things he said. He looks calm and a safe option.

Republicans come home--your boy is all grown up now."

Bannon's man, Mr. Trump, told Blacks in their hell hole ghettos the Democrats were taking them for granted. People laughed. The Blacks are too smart to fall for that line. But, the smart part was, Trump was not speaking to the Blacks in the ghettos--he was speaking to the Whites in their territories in the Blue Wall.
Nice play that. In football, it's called a "Counter Trey" play--you get everyone moving in one direction, but there's this one fullback who just sits and waits until everyone is committed--then he takes the ball and runs the other way.
So you get HRC and all her surrogates running West to Arizona, and South to Georgia and North Carolina and Texas and then the play goes right up the middle to Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin and Western PA.
Some say it worked. 

Rigged: The Movie

Oliver Stone, where are you?
Here's the pitch.
A hacker dude talking with his hacker friends wonders about whether the Trump election could have been rigged.
He is dismissive and says, even if it was,  it's good to just have it all over.
But his girlfriend, a rabid Hillary acolyte, presents him with what she calls "The Four Points" or as he puts it, "The Four Horseturds of the Apocalypse."

1. Exit polls showed HRC winning in Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin. But all polls have been called into question, given the limitations of their methodology.
2. Trump had railed about election rigging before the election, triggering a storm of derision from the left, who claimed even raising the concern was an attack on the integrity of democracy.  Wouldn't this have been a clever ploy? Now his opponents are in no position to cry "Foul!"
3.The week before the election a widespread hack paralyzed computer systems which took down not just Amazon and Spotify but previously thought to be impregnable electronic medical record systems from Maine to Maryland.  The attack occurred on a company in Manchester, NH, called DYN and rippled through the system. This demonstrated, if we didn't know before, how widespread mischief can be wrought by simply penetrating one point of attack.

4. The main argument about the impossibility of rigging an election centered on decentralization of data:  Fifty states, and you'd need to attack so many points. But the election turned on just five states. And, depending on how the system is constructed, the data from thousands of polling centers, at some point, has to be fed through smaller and smaller numbers of pipelines. If you got to the point of collection, that's all you'd need to do.

Ultimately, the hacks are traced back to the point of attack and from that back to the attackers, who cannot be identified.

Many chase scenes and explosions ensue. The girlfriend keeps pushing the hacker to reveal what he knows but he argues:
1. Nobody wants to believe this, most especially the Trump people. But even among the Democrats, there is little appetite to believe it.
     Watergate was known before the voting and nobody believed that for the same reasons.

2. If the election was hacked, would there be any way to assure the population that any future election was not rigged?

3. The only way to get a halfway credible accusation of hacking would be for the FBI or the NSA to endorse it and what do you think the chances are that would happen, given the politics of those two institutions?

So, the equations are solved, the technology exposed and validated, but the human factor, the willingness to believe thwarts the "right" outcome.

Hey, all we have to do is to start casting.

click to enlarge

The Illusion of Control

Kate McKinnon, Saturday Night Live

Canvassing for Hillary, I was paired with a neighbor who is in every way admirable. If I had a daughter, I would want her to grow up to be just like this woman.

When we were not knocking on doors, she was back at Hampton Democratic headquarters working the phone banks, calling for Hillary.
Most of the time people she called did not even answer the phone, so she called using her personal cell phone, and sometimes they answered but finding she was calling about the election, they were most often not receptive.
Most of the doors we knocked on were not answered. Frequently, we could see people approach from behind windows or doors and seeing we were canvassers, they did not answer.

He's not listening to us

People here in New Hampshire were more often annoyed by our harassment, our attempts at friendly persuasion.
One man demanded to see our permit to solicit, which he insisted is required in the town of Hampton. Of course, he had just made that up. Or he had heard we needed a permit from Breitbart or from Fox News or Rush Limbaugh. We could have pointed out to him no town is allowed to pass a law or ordinance which forbids either political or religious canvassing: It's a Supreme Court Case, "Watchtower vs Village of" Something. You can outlaw solicitation for commercial purposes, but not for political or religious evangelism.

Who Is In Control Here?

We never saw a single Trump canvasser in Hampton, New Hampshire or in any of the other towns where we canvassed and only once did we find door nob literature from the Trump campaign. We frequently saw other Hillary canvassers in the streets and waved to them.
But we saw Trump lawn signs which outnumbered Hillary signs.
How did Trump do that? 
How did he reach and convince all those people who we met who were already persuaded to vote for him?
This fact was beyond our control.  Mr. Trump was getting to and persuading people somehow and our old fashion methods were simply no match for whatever it was he was doing. 
Not that stopped us from trying.
I watched in amazement as my partner in canvassing listened to a man who we had down on our computer list as a Democrat and likely Hillary voter. He said he was voting for Trump. Why? Because we need to build a wall. Why did he think that would work? He didn't know. We just needed a wall. But you know, they would just go around it. Well, Hillary is a crook. Why did he believe that?  
My partner patiently listened and without getting in his face, played the role of a loving older sister who was sympathetic to his pain and his anger but was trying to bring him back to the right place. 
Finally, as we left, he said, "Well, of course, he'll probably start World War Three."
"Then we know how you have to vote," she said.
"Yeah, I guess."

"He'll probably change his mind," I told her.
"Maybe," she said. "Or maybe not."
"There aren't enough of us to get to every one of them and do this."
"I know," she said. "But what else am I going to do? Sit home? Give up?"
The cast of "Hamilton" tried to make a statement to Mr. Pence. 
Did they think they would emancipate his mind about gay marriage, the value of diversity?
"Well," another friend told me, "You just cannot allow Trump to be normalized." 
But what does that mean? 

If we protest in front of Trump tower before he has called for a single piece of legislation, we are protesting his campaign rhetoric, which he disavows almost as soon as he says it, if he can remember what he just said a few minutes earlier.
If Trump says, "Muslims all hate us."
If General Flynn, his new National Security Adviser says, "Fear of Muslims is rational," and if we can grab a microphone, then we can object. 
The problem is, we cannot grab the microphone.
And the trouble with Trump is he says so many things and says them so fast, so stream of consciousness and his positions are forgotten so fast, it's hard to register objections.

The fact is, we cannot change the minds of those coal miners in Pennsylvania or those assembly line workers in Wisconsin whose factories have shut down. 
There aren't enough of us to sit down with each one and persuade them.
There are things beyond our control, as private citizens, out here in the hustings. 
Either the Democrats will find someone, will find a voice, or they will not. 
But little acts of defiance, individual statements of protest will not alter the direction of this freight train. 

Big demonstrations in the 60's did not alter the freight train of war. Elections did.
The Weathermen felt the impotence of not being in the majority, not being in power, and they blew things up, buildings, and one explosion killed a janitor, but it did nothing to stop the war.

Sometimes an image can start an awakening 

Trump does not control everything. He may not even be able to control his adoring crowds.  He certainly does not control what just over half of the people who voted think.  

He has power now, and largely unchecked power.
But if he is brought to heel, in any way, it won't be from actions from us little people, the little people who pay the taxes and go to work every day, and go man the phone banks. It will be from people in positions of at least some power, like Bernie Sanders. 

King Joffrey, Uneasy rests the head the wears the crown.

Reading the biography of John Randolph, one can see this play out in the early days of our republic. Randolph hated the idea of a central (federal) government which had the power to affect things in his home state of Virginia. He hated the idea of a standing army, which could be used to exert the will of a government outside Virginia on practices in Virginia. He hated the idea of a Supreme Court which could invalidate laws passed by Congress because he presciently perceived the Court was simply an unelected political instrument of the President who appointed the justices. He opposed the idea of adding new Congressmen to the House of Representatives as new states joined the union because with each new state, he saw Virginia would become less important and less powerful.  And he hated the idea of a federal government which could add a 38% tariff to imports from Britain which would hurt the export of Southern cotton once Britain responded to this. 

Randolph opposed a resolution sponsored by Henry Clay and John Calhoun, which would simply have declared America's sympathy for Greece as it tried to assert its independence from the Ottoman Empire, centered in Islamic Turkey. We have no understanding of this conflict and less understanding of Muslims, he said. We should stay out of such entanglements. 

Sometimes images are powerful

We are still arguing the same issues today, in one form or another. 
But even John Randolph, who debated Daniel Webster and Henry Clay, who was a force in the House of Representatives, was unable to control the direction of our government, which inexorably moved toward a central, federal government which could over rule state laws.  And he was in Congress.
In a republic, we do not have a direct voice. We don't even elect our President directly.  We have a system, ironically, put in place to prevent a reckless choice of the unwashed ignorant masses, moved by passions, and that very system has ensured that is exactly the President we got.

But it is not under our individual control. 
It's not that we should be singing, "It Don't Worry Me," but no number of speeches on Broadway, protests on Fifth Avenue or in the Pacific Northwest will slow the freight train headed toward Washington, D.C. 

Jon Stewart: Apocalypse Not Yet

Jon Stewart, interviewed by Charlie Rose, actually surprised me. 
By the time he left Comedy Central, he struck me as getting a bit weary of the shitck.  Stephen Colbert seemed more original and energized.
But listening to him now, I was struck by his insights, which are at once obvious and missed by most people, hiding in plain sight.
1/ Oh, the fear: We may have an anti Semite (Stephen Bannon) in the White House now. Well, Stewart asks, "Have you ever listened to the Nixon tapes?" We've had anti Semites in the White House for generations.
2/ We are the same country now we were two weeks ago. The same people who voted for Barack Obama in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin and Iowa voted for Trump. We have not suddenly become more racist overnight.
3/ Liberals decry characterizing Muslims, Blacks, gays as a monolith, all with the same values, and yet they look at people who voted for Trump and say they are all racists, all deplorable all xenophobic. Trump voters are a mix.
4/ America is an anomaly: A democracy which is multi racial, multi ethnic which works.  Friends who work in Europe have always told me, "You think America is racist? We don't hold a candle to Europe."  Germany, whose leader, Angela Merkel, has admitted Middle Eastern refugees, is in turmoil from the conflict of cultures and races. Same for England, which has become much more diverse over the past four decades, but that transition has not been a blissful one.

This is a truth which was staring me in the face as I rode on subways in New York City this past week: You could not have designed a more diverse group of citizens if you were the casting agent for "Starship Enterprise." All these people, post election, riding the subways together without a trace of conflict, listening to their I pods, reading their newspapers, focused on their electronic devices. For them, the world had not changed. 
Stewart also noted the Republicans have for the past decade insisted government is the problem; government does not work. Of course, they made it not work, but they could always say: See, we were right. Look how broken government is. But now they have all the government. If it does not work, it's going to be pretty hard to blame anyone else.

His remarks are worth listening to. 
Here's the Link:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUkv_jPgTeg

All The President's Men: Chick Magnets at the White House

Steve Bannon and the hot women who can't resist him

Am I missing something here?
Or do these three confidants and locker room buddies of Donald J. Trump share something with him beyond his approach to women?

Oh, be still my heart! What a hunk!

Rush Limbaugh says, "Feminism Was Established So As To Allow Unattractive Women Easier Access To The Mainstream Of Pop Culture"

Stepen Bannon says, "would you rather your child had feminism or cancer?"


Newt Gingrich says, "I read 'Men Who Hate Women and Women Who Love Them' and I found frightening parallels to my own life."

Donald Trump says, "Grab 'em by the pussy."

Where has he got his hand?

Now, looking at these three guys, I have to ask: How would any of these guys do at a bar with the women?
Do women feel their animal magnetism?

I'm not asking if their money is attractive to women.
I've never really been able to understand what makes men attractive to women.  I'm sure I must be missing something here.
But these guys clearly think they are hot items with the ladies.

I'm just asking.

Gwen Ifill

Gwen Ifill died today and somehow, I feel a personal loss. 
It's been a strange week, a stunning election upset, a super moon and now this.
Watching her over the years, I was always struck by her intelligence and her ability to sit through a politician's smoke screen of words, evading her pointed question, and I could count on her to say, "Well, but you did not answer the question about trade," or whatever the question was about. She smiled when she did that. And as one of her colleagues remarked on the News Hour tonight, you could read books by the light of that smile.

It's always bothered me that I was talking with one of the mucky mucks at the News Hour once, some (now 10) years ago, when I still lived in Washington, and got to go to dinner parties among the media set,  and I mentioned how Gwen Ifill had listened to some politician give his bogus answer about some question and she said, "Well, but just six months ago, you said..." and she completed eviscerated the guy, who deserved it. 

"Well," huffed the executive, "She read her briefing  notebook."
"But she remembered what was in the briefing notebook," I persisted.
"That's her job," the executive, a woman, said. "That's what she gets paid for."
"Then why don't other news people, who are also getting paid, do what she did?"
"I can't speak for other news programs."

Watching The News Hour tonight, it is clear Gwen Ifill was well loved. That executive retired some years ago. I think Ms. Ifill persisted and prevailed. 

It's been a sad week. 
But, as Ms. Scarlet would say, "Tomorrow is another day."

Frederick Banting: From Darkness to Light

Best, Banting and subject

Frederick Banting is a name you probably don't know. 
But in a time and place where we despair of a halt to progress, a reversal of progress, it's good to remember that sometimes, maybe oft times progress occurs without the government helping, progress driven by an individual who was driven to succeed.


When Frederick Banting was doing his work in Toronto Canada, in 1921, it was the roaring 20's in America.  There were famous people in America playing, partying, drinking boot leg liquor.
Most Americans, now and then could name F. Scott Fitzgerald, Babe Ruth, Woodrow Wilson, but who ever heard of Frederick Banting?
School children in America to this day cannot say who Frederick Banting is.
Most of their parents haven't a clue.
But millions owe their lives to him.
Google, God Bless, did run a banner today about him today, the 121st anniversary of his birthday.
Frederick Banting was a trauma surgeon, back from the Great War, with a failing practice in the hinterlands, when he read an article about an experiment in which the pancreatic duct was tied off, destroying the pancreases of dogs and what happened next to the dogs looked a lot like diabetes mellitus.
Banting planted himself in the office of a  Dr. MacLeod at the University of Toronto, one of the leading lights in diabetes research and as a leading light, he believed the core lesion of diabetes was a problem in the liver, which even then was known to produce glucose, blood sugar.
MacLeod gave Banting some lab space at the Univeristy of Toronto, a few dogs, and an assistant, a graduate student named Charles Best. Beyond that, he made no commitments. He did not believe in the pancreas.
Together, while MacLeod went off for summer vacation in Scotland, Banting and Best worked on dogs all summer, sweltering in their un-airconditioned laboratory. It was dirty, discouraging work, but eventually, after many failures, they demonstratie the pancreas did, in fact, produce something which lowered blood sugar, and when it was lost, diabetes ensued.
The story is one of the most thrilling, inspiring, wonderful stories in human history, and little known, because it's, well, it's science and therefore boring.

Same Child, Before and After Insulin

But Banting walked past the children's hospital every day and he saw children dying of diabetes, skeletal wrecks as their parents sat by their beds, helpless.
What Banting and Best discovered was "insulin." 
Progress is not always a straight line;sometimes we slip back, sometimes we take a leap forward, and nothing is ever the same again. 
The back sliding is not what matters.  It's the the steps forward that matter.

Darkness may envelop us, but determined people can light a way forward.
A hopeful note for our present situation.

Thriller

Did you know there is a genre of film called, "Political Paranoia?"  The "Parallax View,"  and "Klute" belong in this. These were 1970's era films made in the wake of the assassination of the 1960's, when astonishing, unexpected things happened on the national stage, and events turned in unexpected directions on a dime. 
Now, with the campaign of 2016 over, I'm going to have some time on my hands, so I thought I'd run a treatment by you, for the next "House of Cards," or "West Wing" in the "Political Manipulation" genre. 
Move over Beau Willimon. Take a hike, Aaron Sorkin. I got this.

How's this:  Deep in the bowels of the Kremlin, the Russian leader sees the walls closing in on him. His former Soviet empire has collapsed, and while he has had some success in reclaiming parts of the former union, he is stymied.  Former member states are more attracted to the West, his oil based economy is collapsing with the price of oil as America has found its way to energy independence and Western Europe is shifting to renewable energy. NATO is stronger than ever and Western Europe is seducing away the best and the brightest from Russian universities. It's like before the wall fell--Russians are turning their backs on mother Russia and voting with their feet, going West. 

Muslim fundamentalists are skulking about Moscow and Chechnya. 

His first move is obvious--keep the civil war in Syria going, create refugees who flood by the hundreds of thousands across the open borders of the European Union, destabilizing Italy, Greece, straight through to Germany and Sweden, even on to England, This proves to be so much easier and more successful than he had anticipated, he decides to go for a bigger fish.  What brought down the European Union so quickly? Financial strains set up a sense of foreboding, but in Europe the race card is always available and easy to play, and looking at America, our anti hero thinks: Why not?

All he needs is a dedicated team of hackers, and the right man. He thinks he may have just the guy--a rich playboy who has all that money can buy, but he has grown weary and bored with the limited powers and pleasure money can buy. What this man yearns for is respect and the power only a head of state can claim.

But standing in his way is a famous politician who seems to be President in waiting. There seems no path to block her, until our Russian reads a posting by a renegade movie director, outlining the path to victory through the rust belt states of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin and Michigan, where white men have lost factory jobs and are looking for someone to blame. Throw in a twist of fear of Muslim terrorists and mix a dollop of racism aimed at the Latinos streaming across the Rio Grande and you've got a formula for success. 

It's a long shot, but timing is everything in politics and getting hacked leaks suggesting the opposition is guilty of some unnamed crime, enlisting sympathetic FBI agents and the whole structure begins to crumble. 

The one element the Russian cannot control is the polls, which still show the opponent safely ahead, which is where the hacking talents of the Russian security forces come in handy, as voting places feed their data into central  banks.  There are fifty states, but only those four rust belt states, Florida and North Carolina are necessary. You don't have to crack all 50.  

A week before the election, the hackers try a dry run, cracking a little known New Hampshire company which manages data for Amazon, Spotify, electronic medical record systems and suddenly one Friday all of these systems stop working. Curious stories about how this was done using electronic devices as diverse as baby monitoring things to garage door openers, all made in Korea by a single company which uses a single plate with a single engraved password. The hack is eventually uncovered, reversed, but not before the entire East Coast has been paralyzed. 

The Russian knows his system is big enough and effective.

On election night, the surreal, shocking victory unfolds to the horror of half the nation, and the delight of the other half.  It just seems surreal, because it is not truly real. It's been plotted out. 

Nobody suspects a thing. Not even the Russian's cat's paw.  

All we need now is a good title.