I added the link, thanks to Lloyd Lofthouse.
Donald Trump sold himself to the American Public as the master of The Deal, the Master Negotiator.
Now we know that “his” book The Art of the Deal was ghost written by Tony Schwartz, who is a fierce critic of Trump, knowing that he never reads books and is profoundly ignorant.
The eminent journal Foreign Policy comments in this article that Trump is a very poor deal-maker. His idea of a deal is bullying the other party, confronting them, insulting them, verbally bludgeoning them. Maybe it works in the rough world of New York City real estate. But it doesn’t work in foreign relations.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The Don, Cheeto “Little Fingers” Trumpbalone may have learned his thuggish style–cheating, threatening, bullying, promising and then reneging–in “the business,” but he wasn’t even successful at that. He started with more than a half a billion dollars of Daddy’s money. If he had simply invested that in a stock index fund, he would be worth many billions today. But instead, he lost that money and had to borrow from Boris.
That’s funny! But The Don, Cheeto “Little Fingers” Trumpbalone is not really his name, you know. He’s not Italian. His real name is Herr Dumbhöld, Baron Von Little Cheese-filled Cocktail “Frankfurter Fingers” Drumpfullofit.
You tellin’ me the Don, the crappo di tutti i crappi, is not a made man? Gee, I may have to transfer my allegiance to one of my grandson’s gerbils. They are smarter anyway.
Just watch out for those gerbils with orange fur, that’s all.
It’s hard to have a semblance of intelligence when one, as POTUS, has diarrhea of the Tweet . . . .
All the levies, locks, and dams will not stop what gushes forth from Donald-stein’s monstrous mouth or keyboard.
LeftCoastTeacher: I’m dying laughing.
“He never reads books and is profoundly ignorant”
You realize, Diane, that K-12 teachers don’t have kids read nowadays to gain knowledge and thereby cure ignorance. The sole point of reading is to develop “reading skills” and do well on SBAC/PARCC tests that claim to test these reading skills, such as the alleged skill of finding the main idea. Knowledge is superfluous according to the current education orthodoxy. The corollary to this is that ignorance is actually OK, so long as one has “skills”. Our schools have deviated so far from common sense!
Tell it like it is!!!
Yes, yes, yes!!!
I would make one slight change. They have adopted the Common [sic] Core [sic] as common sense–common in the sense of “vulgar.” We need uncommon sense, of the kind that one gets kids to develop by having them actually read.
Thank you, Ponderosa, for making this important point. The typical English class exercise, these days, scraps reading altogether for these inane exercises in applying skills from the puerile Gates/Coleman bullet list.
Any teacher who goes along with this is a collaborator in the destruction of literacy.
Former Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis writes, about being a leader of our military: “If you haven’t read hundreds of books, you are functionally illiterate, and you will be incompetent, because your personal experiences alone aren’t broad enough to sustain you,”
Is the Reader of Hundreds of Books literate because he’s acquired “literacy skills” (as current K-12 orthodoxy would say), or because these books have delivered a trove of valuable knowledge? The latter half of the quote answers the question: reading gives you knowledge and vicarious experiences which deposit wisdom-building knowledge that you cannot gain through “personal experience” alone. This knowledge and vicarious experience enables you to “read” (i.e. be literate about) situations (e.g. the Sunni-Shiite split in Iraq) that the military has to face.
But our solons in the EdWorld, on the contrary, tell us literacy is really a suite of skills like “citing textual evidence” that are built up through mental workouts –it has little to do with knowledge. Funny how so many of my 7th grade students who come to me with thousands of hours of this kind of literacy instruction cannot understand most of what they read. A vast fraud is being perpetrated on the American public –by the “experts” in our education schools. We’re making the kids ignorant –and illiterate to boot –by fixating on this bankrupt “literacy” education. Teachers, please read E.D. Hirsch’s Why Knowledge Matters.
yes, yes, yes. See also this hidden gem by University of Virginia English professor and former Reading Director at the Core Knowledge Foundation, Matt Davis: https://www.amazon.com/Reading-Instruction-Keys-Matthew-Davis/dp/1933486031
I say this to my children all the time, Ponderosa. Your personal experience isn’t enough. If you don’t read, you will be ignorant. Period. And all the “skills” instruction in the world isn’t going to make you into a reader. Only reading will.
Ignorant and illiterate people are easier to fool and control and most if not all of the “Always Trump” supporters are the perfect example of how someone like Trump came to power and is still there.
Lloyd,
Sadly combatting ignorance is not on the K-12 agenda today. It’s all about skills.
Considering what I’ve read about most of the poverty wage-paying jobs available today, and in the future, that are replacing the better-paying jobs that have been automated, gaining those skills won’t take much of an effort.
Maybe that’s why the autocrats want to get rid of expensive public education that is supposed to teach children to think critically, develop active imagination, and solve problems because the always hungry-for-money tech-industry is developing AI to replace humans so they won’t need to learn those intellectual skills.
That way, in the future, most of those jobs will pay poverty wages that will force most of the people to work16-hours a day six or seven days a week so they can almost pay the rent and eat (genetically modified fast food that offers no nutrition for the brain).
Then most of the people will be too tired to have to think. Who needs a brain?
Between jobs, they can walk around texting and playing video games on the most dangerous addictive drug ever invented, smartphones.
Bob,
I take issue with the ubiquitous rhetoric about the glory of “creating readers”. Shouldn’t we really be saying “creating knowers”? Reading is a means, not an end. We’re confused on this head, it seems to me. We fetishize reading, a false idol. Knowing is the true god.
And I think it’s misleading to say, as many now do, that the act of reading is the royal road to literacy. This perpetuates the false metaphor that literacy is attained through a sort of mental muscle building, the sort that the “weight lifting” of reading provides. Literacy is a function of having knowledge ingrained in long-term memory. You know the word on the page, you understand the word on the page. Recognition, not application of muscular “reading skills”, is the essence of reading. Thus reading ability is often built NOT by reading, but rather by many non-reading activities (e.g. listening to your parents or watching a movie or building a tree house) instead. Whatever builds your knowledge base builds your literacy. Literacy is not a muscle. Reading builds your literacy only to the extent that it augments your knowledge base, not by bulking up the “reading muscles” in your brain. This is not understood by the vast majority of educators, including “reading specialists”. Or so it seems to me.
Studies show that the more we read the better we write and the more we write the better we read and understand what we are reading.
It would be a very good thing indeed for K-12 ELA instruction, if people scrapped this muscle-building metaphor. A lot of what I do as a teacher is to provide students with the knowledge that they will need, when reading a text, in order to make sense of it–to see what’s there.
But back to Mattis’s point–one that I often make–a person’s direct life experience is very narrow. Someone who does not read with not know much. He or she will be ignorant, or perhaps I should say, even more ignorant than the rest of us are.
There are no really good scholarly studies of American adult reading habits. Pew says that 24 percent of Americans did not read a book or any part of a book in 2017. In other words, they are like Donald Trump. But even among those American adults who do read, I suspect that the reading is typically of very low quality–Dan Brown novels and books about the Rapture, lol. I wish someone would do a definitive study of the reading habits of American adults. This would make for a good doctoral dissertation study. Some might argue that people get knowledge from other sources, like television programs. However, everything new that one might learn from a one-hour Nat Geo special might be put into one or two prose paragraphs. The information density of that stuff just is not high.
Albert Einstein said, “The more I learn, the more I realize how much I don’t know.”
The opposite is true too.
The less I know, the more I think I know.
That, of course, explains why Trump must think he knows more than God and therefore that means he thinks he is god because no one is smarter than him, and that probably explains why he said this recently. “I am the chosen one.”
I’ve read that later, he claimed he never said, “I am the chosen one.” That, he would later say, was another lie from the fake media.
When he says what he didn’t say or he was just kidding, he said, “I am the chosen one.” Look at what he did with his head. Watch and see him look at the sky as if he is talking to the God that made him the “Chosen One.”
Trump exhibits the behavior of a deeply insecure man who must be constantly flattered, praised, told that he is the greatest, the best, the most, the chosen one, the King of Israel, the Second Coming…..World leaders have figured him out.
Lloyd,
Trump was not joking when he said that he loves the poor and uneducated.
I just took some practice PARCC questions that the newspaper published. I failed the 8th grade ELA……of the 4 answers, 2 were correct, 1 was iffy and the 4th was a definite wrong. I picked what I thought was the correct answer (1 of the 2 correct) and I was wrong. How can they expect kids to do well on these tests? Read the paragraph and tell us what line 1 of the 1st paragraph means from the selection and read the whole text because other questions will follow. And then you have to scroll between the questions and the information. STUPID!!
Lisa,
I went to an elite college and scored 800 on the GRE verbal section. I cannot answer many SBAC questions. Something is gravely wrong here.
The test questions are ridiculous. In order to use multiple-choice questions to measure what these morons refer to as “higher-order thinking skills,” they have instructed their writers to create distracter answers that are “plausible.” So, the idea is that one of the answers is supposed to be “most correct.” However, the questions are so badly written, and the test writers so challenged intellectually, that very often there is no correct answer to the question AS WRITTEN or an answer that the test writer thought was “less correct” is arguably more correct. It’s a national scandal that the companies are getting away with this.
And consider this: you are seeing only the sample release questions, and, ofc, the companies work to put their best foot forward in the questions that they release for marketing and PR and training purposes. The ones you don’t see are most likely much, much worse.
The US is spending 1.7 billion a year on contracts for the tests alone, not counting the billions spent on test prep materials, computers to take the tests on, resources devoted to proctoring and interpreting the tests, data walls and data chats, and other such nonsense.
It’s a scam. And the fact that K-12 educators have not risen up en masse to demand an end to the scam is a national disgrace.
Ponderosa, I, too, got a perfect score on the GRE verbal. I have considered writing a lot of analyses of released questions for these tests in order to expose them, but I am worried about possible lawsuits from the test companies. I’ve done quite a bit of this, privately, to share with colleagues. The questions are a bad, bad joke.
So, the basic premise of his campaign was a complete lie.
Um, you’re just finding this out now? Just kidding–I know you knew this before, Bob.
See, that’s what I don’t understand about the media and a lot of politicians. They seem to be truly surprised about Trump’s failings. I’m not that smart, but I could see all of this from a mile away when he talked about running for president in 2008 or 2012. I was sobbing in fear for this country when he got elected. And yet, here we are almost three years into this catastrophe, and it seems like a lot of people are just now catching on to Trump’s complete failure as a person and as businessman.
HOW could they not see this coming? Were they being deliberately stupid? Obtuse? Willfully blind? I just can’t understand it.
I thought it obvious during the campaign, but I also thought when GW, Jr., was running that surely a guy who had gone AWOL from his military service, had driven several businesses into bankruptcy, had a history of drug and alcohol abuse, was a fanatical born-again fundamentalist, and couldn’t name a book he had read or a philosopher whom he admired couldn’t possibly appeal to enough people to be elected president of the United States. And before that, I didn’t think that a guy who called Social Security a communist plot and claimed that trees caused air pollution and had actively collaborated in the McCarthy witch hunt and made no bones about being a 1960s-style states’ rights racist could be elected. People surely aren’t THAT stupid, I thought. So, I keep getting unpleasantly surprised. There seems to be no bottom. LOL.
This is the link to the piece on Foreign Policy.com
What does Media Bias Fact Check.com say about FP?
Foreign Policy Magazine is one of the Least Biased publications and websites in the world and should be highly trusted.
LEAST BIASED
These sources have minimal bias and use very few loaded words (wording that attempts to influence an audience by using appeal to emotion or stereotypes). The reporting is factual and usually sourced. These are the most credible media sources. See all Least Biased sources.
Overall, we rate Foreign Policy Least Biased due to balanced reporting with a very slight lean right and High for factual reporting due to proper sourcing and a clean fact check record.
I always refer to the book as “The Art of the Steal”. Trump doesn’t know the first thing about deals and negotiations. He is pompous a_s that bullies people into giving in to his whims and then boasts and calls himself the best business man ever. He employs a very good accountant and business advisor who flies under the radar and is paid handsomely to do so. Fake deals!! Fake Businessman!! Fake President!!
Trump is thoroughly dishonest. It is impossible to make an agreement with someone that is dishonorable. Vendors should refuse to deal with him, and let’s hope the public will reject his lies and bigotry in 2020.
Diane, this article is from 2015 and is a terrific analysis of Trump’s MO.
View at Medium.com
hurricane. n. A hurricane is an uncontrolled, blustering, completely amoral, unreasoning, unstoppable, over-the-top, costly, randomly and intensely destructive event, driven by hot air, that captures national media attention and brings about considerable misery, like the impromptu statements to reporters that Donald Trump makes on his way to a helicopter waiting to take him, at enormous expense to taxpayers, on one of his remarkably frequent trips to carry out the important national business of hitting little balls across grass with sticks.
On the question of Trump’s sanity:
We all know that he is a liar, even if (like some Fox news reporters) we are paid to pretend otherwise. But it seems to me that these days he is an unusual KIND of liar, and this is troubling.
If there is a sine qua non, an essential, defining trait in psychosis, it is delusional distortion of reality. I was once challenged to write a short story in six words. My entry:
No meds, thank you. –Jeanne d’Arc
Interestingly, in the past year or so, there has been a turn in Donald Trump’s lying. In the past, he lied plausibly (well, plausibly if you happened to be fairly simple minded). His typical lie was of the “I have no business in Russia” variety (a claim the made during his campaign at a time when his representatives were actively negotiating on his behalf to build a Trump Tower in Moscow).
Now, his lying has become, APPARENTLY, completely brazen. Of course he was always a liar. That’s what a con man does–he lies purposefully, in an attempt to achieve some end. That’s what the whole “I started with a small loan from my father and made billions because I understand the Art of the Deal” shtick was. But now, Trump says, repeatedly, what EVERYONE knows to be false at the time when he says it, and he doesn’t even seem cognizant of the fact that everyone knows or will know that he is lying.
Just last weekend, at the G7 Summit, he said, among other things, that Melania has met and likes Kim Jong-il, that China called him to ask to go back to the negotiating table, that he is an environmentalist, that being president has cost him 3 to 5 billion dollars, that the other leaders of the G7 want to readmit Russia, and that he wasn’t at the climate meeting because he had other important meetings with G7 officials scheduled for the same time (the last of these false claims was made through representatives). He also repeated his common trope, these days, that China pays the tariffs he has imposed on Chinese goods. All of these statements are false and easily shown to be. Why would someone do that? Why would someone assert complete implausibilities when there is no chance, at all, that anyone would believe them?
Well, people with Borderline Personality Disorder often cannot separate ideas to which they are emotionally committed–their fantasies–from reality. Whatever the person with BPD is committed to emotionally becomes, for him or her, a reality.
Using bs to manipulate others is antisocial. Believing one’s own bs–actually believing it/distorting reality–is psychotic. So, the question of Trump’s sanity can be approached in this way? Does he believe what he is saying? Increasingly, it seems that he does.
Well, … “being president has cost him 3 to 5 billion dollars” might be true because as president he lives under a microscope and probably isn’t laundering money for the Russian Oligarchs and Saudi Princes.
Trump is pure evil. Why do intelligent, educated people support this freak? I think Fox is a major contributor towards blind ignorance since it bends the news. As my brother proclaims, “Trump is the best president this country has ever had.”
…….
Southern Poverty Law Center
The list of cruelties that the Trump administration is inventing in its zeal to punish migrants and their children keeps getting longer and more extreme.
This week, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) announced that, beginning on Oct. 29, U.S. government employees and members of the armed services who are overseas will no longer be considered to be “residing” in the United States.
Shockingly, that means that, for some service members, if their children are born overseas, those children are not automatically granted citizenship. They would have to apply for it.
The announcement, which came a week after President Trump mused about ending birthright citizenship, caused widespread confusion and consternation among military and diplomatic groups.
“Forcing [members] to go through bureaucratic hurdles for no apparent reason, just to get their children naturalized as American citizens, does a great disservice to people who have dedicated their lives to serving their country,” tweeted American Foreign Service Association President Eric Rubin. “Frankly, it is hard to explain and deeply worrying.”
CNN quoted a Navy officer who said the policy was causing anxiety among military spouses. “You should go onto a spouse Facebook page and see the freakouts,” the officer said.
It wasn’t the only new policy that came to light this week, in a major departure from longstanding policy, critically ill children who have been granted special status to get medical treatment in the United States are being told to leave the country within 33 days.
Bess Levin wrote in Vanity Fair: “When you’ve already separated families, thrown children in cages, and held them in conditions that “could be compared to torture facilities,” it’s a bit of a challenge to come up with your next act. Evil takes creativity, and once you’ve forced migrant kids to go weeks without a shower or change of clothes and fed them expired food, it’s tough to continue nailing those Hitler comparisons. Somehow, though, the Trump administration always rises to the occasion.”
This policy was also hatched by the USCIS, the same agency that came up with the new idea for the children of diplomats and members of the armed services. The agency is now headed by Ken Cuccinelli, who has been dubbed the “new Stephen Miller” by The Atlantic. Cuccinelli, a former Virginia attorney general, is a longtime anti-immigrant, anti-LBGTQ ideologue and “birther” who once proposed legislation to make speaking Spanish on the job a fireable offense and defended a state law prohibiting sodomy.
Lately, he’s been a reliable Trump cheerleader on cable TV.
“Cuccinelli may well have been created in a Trump-branded petri dish,” wrote Elaina Plott for The Atlantic. “He’s spent decades advocating for far-right positions on a variety of social issues, and the 50-year-old practicing Catholic enjoys widespread support among conservative evangelicals.”
Thousands of children, including those with leukemia, cystic fibrosis and muscular dystrophy, could be affected by this new USCIS rule. Some of them will likely die as a result.
Mariela Sanchez, a native of Honduras, told The Associated Press that her 16-year-old son “would be dead” if he had not gotten permission to be treated in Boston for cystic fibrosis. His sister already died of the disease. Now, he is being told to leave.
“Can anyone imagine the government ordering you to disconnect your child from life-saving care – to pull them from a hospital bed – knowing that it will cost them their lives?” said Anthony Marino, who is representing immigrant families at the Irish International Immigrant Center in Boston.
Yes, we can imagine.
We’re battling the administration in the courts on numerous immigration policies.
Last week, we filed a class action suit on behalf of migrants who are being denied health care and disability accommodations while being held in inhumane detention centers. Through our Southeast Immigrant Freedom Initiative, we’re providing free representation to migrants held at some of the largest detention facilities in the South.
We’re also representing migrants in administrative complaints against the federal government to help them receive compensation for the physical, mental and emotional harm caused by the administration’s family separation policy.
We don’t know what the Trump administration will do next.
But, over these last two years and seven months, if there is one thing we’ve learned, it’s to expect the worst.
The Editors
Trump understands none of this. Miller understands it but doesn’t care.
Apparently the movie “American Factory’ is having an influence in China. “Many Chinese viewers took to social media to express their fascination with the sharp contrast between Fuyao’s factories in America and China.”
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From Inkstone: news from Hong Kong
‘American Factory’: What Chinese see when they watch China go to Ohio
For American audiences, the Netflix documentary American Factory reveals the life of US workers on Chinese-owned production lines.
But for Chinese audiences, the film serves as a reminder of the human costs behind China’s rise as a manufacturing superpower.
The film, backed by Barack and Michelle Obama’s new production company, documents how Chinese auto-glass company Fuyao built a factory near Dayton, Ohio, where thousands of workers were laid off when General Motors closed its plant in the Rust Belt a decade ago.
Fuyao brought not only new jobs to Ohio, but also the high expectations and harsh management that are customary in factories across China. It most notably spent more than $1 million to put down a unionizing campaign…
The film has generated strong interest in China since it premiered on Netflix last week. (While Netflix is not available in mainland China, pirated and Chinese-subtitled copies have been widely circulated.)
Many Chinese viewers took to social media to express their fascination with the sharp contrast between Fuyao’s factories in America and China.
The Ohio employees worked eight hours a day, five days a week. Some made enough to rent their own apartments. They complained about the low wages and safety hazards despite the difficulty of finding other factory jobs.
In the southeastern Chinese city of Fuqing, however, migrant workers lived in dormitories, worked 12-hour shifts and went home once or twice a year. They chanted slogans every morning pledging to work hard. They picked up shattered glass with minimal protection…
https://inks.tn/xazn?utm_source=email&utm_medium=share&utm_campaign=share_button
& let’s not forget the awful working conditions at Amazon.
Please patronize brick-&-mortar stores (well, perhaps not Walmart so much).
Never patronize Walmart.
Joe Biden has a commercial out in which he talks about the truly terrible past health crises in his family and then knocks Medicare for All, which he doesn’t call by name but simply refers to as “tearing down Obamacare.” Obamacare, btw, was Romneycare before it was picked up by the Obama/Biden administration. It was a REPUBLICAN program.
Of course, despite being gaffe prone, Biden is smart enough to get it about healthcare. He does. But he’s just too beholden to the big money from insurance companies and other healthcare racketeers in the United States. If given a chance, he will put in place a mandatory private insurance program, like Obamacare, that will place burdens on the poorest among us and leave many millions uninsured and many more under-insured. But rest assured, under Biden’s plan, the U.S. healthcare RICOs will still siphon off half our healthcare dollar into obscene private profits.
Joe Biden: Making America safe for healthcare profiteers/racketeers to hold onto their heliports, yachts, and vast holdings in offshore accounts. Just call him “friendly Joe”–VERY friendly if you happen to be a CEO-level banker.
& Joe!, like others, didn’t exactly give “thoughts & prayers” to victims/families of today’s latest mass shooting, but he came close by saying…not much of anything that was significant.
BTW, reportedly, he is tied w/Warren & Sanders in the latest polls.
(Sanders & Warren really have to decide which one is going to stay in, because they’ll continue to split the Progressive vote, & Joe! will sail on in. Huge mistake.)
Looser gun laws is just what is needed. How STUPID can politicians and the population get?
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Texas gun laws to go into effect today
The shooting happened hours before a series of firearm laws go into effect in Texas, where four of the 10 deadliest mass shootings in modern US history have occurred.
The new measures will loosen gun restrictions and allow weapons on school grounds, apartments and places of worship.
I thought this talk by a Lakota elder was a beautiful view of life on earth. It certainly puts all living things in perspective. Our western civilization tried to decimate Native Americans. The state of the world would be in a much better place than it is now if their culture had flourished and dominated. Imagine life if we all treated each other equally and respected each animal and plant.
….
Raised by his maternal grandparents and now in his 70s, Joseph Marshall embodies and transmits the essence of Lakota wisdom. Toward the end of our conversation, he had this to say about the Lakota worldview:
“What is most important for people to understand is how we relate to other forms of life. We, as human beings, are no better or no worse than any other form of life. Whether it is a shrub or a bird or a snake or any other form of life, we are equal because all of us are born into this life: We live our lives, fulfill our purposes, and then our lives end. And no creature, no form of life—especially us humans—can circumvent that one reality. That’s what makes us all equal. We don’t regard humans as having dominion. We don’t regard ourselves as being the one species that is in charge of all other species. We are no more and no less. That is the one reality that I think the world needs to understand in relationship to the Earth. Most people do not accept that—they look at life from a different viewpoint. That has an impact on how we treat one another, how we treat other forms of life, and how we treat the Earth. I think if there is one thing that other people can learn from the Lakota, it is that understanding.”
Trump had to go golfing at taxpayer expense, trash a journalist, and deride WaPo. The Orange IDIOT never changes.
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Trump tweet storm dominates presidential weekend
09/03/19
Trump tweeted Sunday that South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia and Alabama were likely to be hit by Dorian — a message that might have caused some confusion since the storm was too far east to affect Alabama. The National Weather Service in Birmingham quickly refuted the president’s tweet with one of its own.
The president later criticized ABC News anchor Jon Karl over a report that referenced his inaccurate forecast.
“Always good to be prepared!” Trump tweeted late Monday, defending the tweet that included Alabama. “But the Fake News is only interested in demeaning and belittling. Didn’t play my whole sentence or statement. Bad people!”..
The president lavished praise on Fox News host Sean Hannity and lashed out at New York Times columnist Paul Krugman. He derided The Washington Post after the paper published a report that recounted the controversies that dotted his summer…
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/459701-trump-tweet-storm-dominates-presidential-weekend
There is an old saying, “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks” and Trump is a perfect example of that saying. Trump cannot break out of his old management methods: lie, cheat, bully, brag about Trump, and insult anyone that tries to stand up to him, but not always in order.