Matt Taibibi on that windbag with one idea, Thomas Friedman.

“The folksiness will irk some critics … But criticizing Friedman for humanizing and boiling down big topics is like complaining that Mick Jagger used sex to sell songs: It is what he does well.” –John Micklethwait, review of Thank You for Being Late, in The New York Times

With apologies to Mr. Micklethwait, the hands that typed these lines implying Thomas Friedman is a Mick Jagger of letters should be chopped off and mailed to the singer’s doorstep in penance. Mick Jagger could excite the world in one note, while Thomas Friedman needs 461 pages to say, “Shit happens.”

It is what he does; it is not what he does well.

We will remember Friedman for interviewing 76 percent of the world’s taxi drivers, for predicting “the next six months will be critical” on 14 occasions over two and a half years (birthing the neologism, “the Friedman unit“), and for his unmatched, God-given ability to write nonsensical metaphors, like his classic “rule of holes”: “When you’re in one, stop digging. When you’re in three, bring a lot of shovels.”

He tries too hard, and it’s incredibly grating. Friedman gets on my nerves so badly I can’t read him.

For nearly two decades now, Friedman has been telling us that something big is happening, technology is growing at a rate beyond the ability of humans to adapt (this is where the part about noticing everyone has a cell phone comes in), and that we have to stop doing things the old way and take a brave step into the future.

He wrote this column so many times that even four years ago – eight Friedman units – Hamilton Nolan wrote a piece in Gawker titled “Thomas Friedman writes his only column again” (Friedman’s “only column” has by now outlived hundreds of media outlets, Gawker and my own New York Press among them)…

A very conservative guess is that Friedman has written this column at least a hundred times. Maybe 200. Maybe more.

And he’s written all of them badly, I’ll wager.

Take the chapter about Mother Nature, which opens with a story about a day in July, 2015 when the heat index in southern Iran reached 163 degrees. That news item gives the author an opening to introduce the concept of a “black elephant,” an ominous (if you know Friedman) term apparently explained to him by environmentalist Adam Sweidan:

“[It is] a cross between a ‘black swan’ – a rare, low-probability, unanticipated event with enormous ramifications – and ‘the elephant in the room’: a problem that is widely visible to everyone, yet that no one wants to address, even though we absolutely know that one day it will have vast, black-swan-like consequences.”

You would think he could just say, “The climate change problem is a cross between a black swan and the elephant in the room – or, as I like to call it, a Black Elephant.”

You would if you didn’t know he’s Thomas Friedman.

Read the whole thing.

Awkward. The Kennedy School of Government sponsored a chat session with people from the Clinton and Trump campaigns yesterday, and it was as collegial as you’d expect.

As Trump’s team basked in the glow of its victory and singled out for praise its campaign’s chief executive, Stephen K. Bannon, who was absent, the row of grim-faced Clinton aides who sat opposite them bristled.

Clinton communications director Jennifer Palmieri condemned Bannon, who previously ran Breitbart, a news site popular with the alt-right, a small movement known for espousing racist views.

“If providing a platform for white supremacists makes me a brilliant tactician, I am proud to have lost,” she said. “I would rather lose than win the way you guys did.”

Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s campaign manager, fumed: “Do you think I ran a campaign where white supremacists had a platform?”

“You did, Kellyanne. You did,” interjected Palmieri, who choked up at various points of the session.

“Do you think you could have just had a decent message for white, working-class voters?” Conway asked. “How about, it’s Hillary Clinton, she doesn’t connect with people? How about, they have nothing in common with her? How about, she doesn’t have an economic message?”

How about, Kellyanne Conway is a lying sack of shit? What does Trump “have in common” with “white, working-class voters”? He has the white, of course, but so does Clinton. Does he have the working-class? No. His daddy was a prosperous real estate profiteer, and he himself is a worker-cheating builder of high-rises and golf courses.

The strangest criticism of the media, however, was by Trump’s former campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski.

His complaint: Journalists accurately reported what Trump said.

“This is the problem with the media. You guys took everything that Donald Trump said so literally,” Lewandowski said. “The American people didn’t. They understood it. They understood that sometimes — when you have a conversation with people, whether it’s around the dinner table or at a bar — you’re going to say things, and sometimes you don’t have all the facts to back it up.”

They understood that sometimes people get drunk and say what they really think about all those pesky Not Like Us people. But journalists aren’t supposed to report that!

Meghan Murphy points out what should be obvious: it’s misogyny to tell women to move over and shut up, but it’s the hip new thing to do.

Feminism! A movement by women, for women. Or is it something about… Equality…? For… People?

Depends on who you ask. According to a recent article at Bustle, it’s all pretty hard to pin down.

Suzannah Weiss writes, “A large part of feminism is obtaining equal treatment for women, so understandably, a lot of feminist efforts and rhetoric focus on women.”

You don’t say. Similarly, basketball players play basketball, and bankers work in banks, and bus drivers drive buses. Of course feminist efforts focus on women; what should they focus on, frogs?

Weiss goes on to explain that the way women talk about women’s subordination under patriarchy (also known as the reason feminism exists) can “unintentionally erase trans and non-binary people.” It’s a funny way of framing things… Similar to saying, for example, that Black Lives Matter “unintentionally erases” white people. Or that the labour movement’s focus on the working class “unintentionally erases” the upper class. Does the animal rights movement “unintentionally erase” non-animals? Do Indigenous rights activists “unintentionally erase” other groups marginalized by white supremacy and colonialism?

No. It’s only women. It’s only women who aren’t allowed to focus on their own issues in their own movements.

None of this is to say that the feelings and rights of people who identify as trans or “non-binary” don’t matter, it is only to say that the purpose of the women’s movement is to liberate the class of women, who are oppressed, as females, under patriarchy. (In other words, if you are female and you also identify as trans or “non-binary,” yes, this is still about you.) This should not be a controversial statement for anyone who claims interest in the feminist project, but nonetheless countless do-gooders have taken it upon themselves to condescendingly explain to women that they need to sit down and shut up about their own material reality, within their own movement.

Is that because everybody, deep down, secretly does think that women are stupid and feeble and really shouldn’t liberate themselves from oppression?

Your identity is your own choice, but that doesn’t change the fact that patriarchy exists as a means to legitimize male power over females (i.e. the class of people capable of giving birth). The notion that we should degender conversations about feminism suggests we pretend not to know who is oppressing whom, and why — a mindfuck if there ever was one. (Is it just folks vs. folks? Who are the folks? Why are some folks raping other folks?! It’s a mystery…)

Power to the folks.

The Independent reports another study that finds global warming is happening faster than thought because researchers hadn’t taken into account the carbon in soil.

The report, by an exhaustive list of researchers and published in the Nature journal, assembled data from 49 field experiments over the last 20 years in North America, Europe and Asia.

It found that the majority of the Earth’s terrestrial store of carbon was in soil, and that as the atmosphere warms up, increasing amounts are emitted in what is a vicious cycle of “positive feedbacks”.

The study found that 55bn tonnes in carbon, not previously accounted for by scientists, will be emitted into the atmosphere by 2050.

“As the climate warms, those organisms become more active and the more active they become, the more the soil respires – exactly the same as human beings,” said Dr Crowther, who headed up the study at Yale Climate & Energy Institute, but is now a Marie Curie fellow at the Netherlands Institute of Ecology.

He says it’s definitely already happening, and will make a difference…not in a good way.

Dr Crowther, a 30-year-old Cardiff University Phd graduate originally from North Wales, predicts climate change will lead to widespread migrations and antagonism among communities.

It will you know. Coastal flooding; rivers drying up; crop failures; more and worse hurricanes and typhoons – all of it will mean mass migration, and that will mean unimaginable levels of violence – what the Indy delicately calls “antagonism among communities.”

“This study is very important, because the response of soil carbon stocks to the ongoing warming, is one of the largest sources of uncertainty in our climate models,” said Prof Janssens, of the University of Antwerp.

“I’m an optimist and still believe that it is not too late, but we urgently need to develop a global economy driven by sustainable energy sources and start using CO2, as a substrate, instead of a waste product.

“If this happens by 2050, then we can avoid warming above 2C. If not, we will reach a point of no return and will probably exceed 5C.”

Good luck, people of the future.

AC Grayling notes that the hijackers of Brexit and the Trump win may be using the research of Daniel Kahneman and others to grab public opinion.

What Kahneman and other researchers have empirically confirmed in their work is that the majority of people are ‘System One’ or ‘quick’ thinkers in that they make decisions on impulse, feeling, emotion, and first impressions, rather than ‘System Two’ or ‘slow’ thinkers who seek information, analyse it, and weigh arguments in order to come to decisions. System One thinkers can be captured by slogans, statements dramatised to the point of falsehood, and even downright lies, because they will not check the validity of what is said, but instead will mistrust System Two thinkers whose lengthier arguments and appeals to data are often regarded as efforts to bamboozle and mislead.

That certainly fits Trump himself. He clearly wouldn’t know System Two thinking if it bit him on the ass. He thinks System One is all there is.

I hesitate to use the term, but ‘coup’ comes to mind in relation to what has happened with the Brexit referendum. UKIP and the minority of the Tory party in Parliament knew they would never get a Brexit by Parliamentary means or at a general election; but at long last, having made life hell for every Tory Prime Minister since Edward Heath, they succeeded in getting one of their leaders to promise a referendum. And they then went to town with those manipulating lies and distortions – such as the £350million promise for the NHS, and massive misinformation about immigration – helped by their non-resident billionaire newspaper-owner allies. Having achieved a very small majority of votes cast on the day, actually constituting only 37% of the total electorate (26% of the British population), they have run with it as vigorously as they can, claiming it as an ‘overwhelming’ demand by ‘the people’ that both mandates and binds the Government to take the UK out of the EU.

And Trump and his gang are doing the same thing.

In effect, Farage, Gove, Johnson, Fox and Davis, with their 60 or so supporters in the Tory party, are trying to stampede the UK out of the EU on the basis not just of the falsehoods and distortions of the Leave campaign and the 40 years of tabloid venom against the EU, but by continuing to lie about what the referendum really means, deliberately ignoring challenges over its advisory nature and the lack of effective mandate it offers, among other things ignoring the Remain vote entirely and the fact that nearly three-quarters of the British population did not vote to leave the EU.

One of many examples was provided by Leaver Tory MP Owen Patterson on the BBC Today programme recently. Describing the Leave vote in the referendum as ‘huge’ – which is dishonest use of language by any standard – he made a veiled threat that there would be trouble on the streets if the Leavers did not get their way.

Again, exactly like Trump and Co! Veiled threats and unveiled threats.

Patterson put this point obliquely by saying that disgruntled Leave voters would feel ‘betrayed by the Establishment’ if Brexit does not happen – thus aligning himself with one aspect of Leave rhetoric which is as risible as it is dangerous: figures of the Establishment and the elite such as himself and his Oxford-educated leader, the Prime Minister, who is married to a wealthy hedge-fund manager but who has claimed that she is championing the cause of the System One demographic against ‘the elite,’ aka the Establishment, of which she and Mr Patterson are shining examples.

Again. Trump the “populist” with his Solid Gold Living Room.

Pardon me while I lapse into despair again.

A little break from Trumpnews: