George HW Bush is dead, and there is no hell, so the best I can hope for is that he faded away on his deathbed despairing that his legacy, what there is of it, was thrown away by his fuckwit sons.

This is why I can never be president. Barack Obama was far more charitable and generous and diplomatic in his remarks.

America has lost a patriot and humble servant in George Herbert Walker Bush. While our hearts are heavy today, they are also filled with gratitude. Our thoughts are with the entire Bush family tonight – and all who were inspired by George and Barbara’s example. pic.twitter.com/g9OUPu2pjY

— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) December 1, 2018

One thing I’m hoping for is that Trump will deliver a eulogy. I’m expecting something that compares the relative sizes of their electoral college votes and inauguration crowds.

I am deep in the Upper Midwest. I am in that part of the country where you can drive for mile after mile and see nothing but fields of corn and soybeans stretching to the horizon, and where sometimes that drive will take hours because of all the combines and grain trucks plodding along the highway. Bad news about the crops trickles reluctantly into our local newspapers.

After President Donald Trump imposed tariffs on about 800 products from China and China responded with a 25 percent tariff on American goods, many of them agricultural products such as soybeans, it appears soybeans grown this year in the county may not be headed to China this fall.

The loss of an important market has implications for farmers, grain elevators and down the line, businesses in ag-centric areas such as Stevens County.

“Any issue with tariffs making it more difficult to trade our resources such as soybeans and other ag commodities does put a stress on the market,” said Rob Fronning, vice president of insurance and commodity marketing education with Ag Country Farm Credit Services. Fronning covers a territory that includes Stevens County. Fronning said some analysts have said the tariff will cause an $11 billion hit to farmers.

“Normally at harvest, 70 to 80 percent of the soybeans are brought to the elevator. If there is no market…,” CHS New Horizons manager in Morris Terry Johnson said. “The problem for all elevators is the soybean market normally goes to the West Coast and on to China. Now, there is not a new crop market.”

This is a problem everywhere in the country.

Across the United States, grain farmers are plowing under crops, leaving them to rot or piling them on the ground, in hopes of better prices next year, according to interviews with more than two dozen farmers, academic researchers and farm lenders. It’s one of the results, they say, of a U.S. trade war with China that has sharply hurt export demand and swamped storage facilities with excess grain.

In Louisiana, up to 15 percent of the oilseed crop is being plowed under or is too damaged to market, according to data analyzed by Louisiana State University staff. Crops are going to waste in parts of Mississippi and Arkansas. Grain piles, dusted by snow, sit on the ground in North and South Dakota. And in Illinois and Indiana, some farmers are struggling to protect silo bags stuffed with crops from animals.

U.S. farmers planted 89.1 million acres of soybeans this year, the second most ever, expecting China’s rising demand to give them better returns than other bulk crops.

But Beijing slapped a 25 percent tariff on U.S. soybeans in retaliation for duties imposed by Washington on Chinese exports. That effectively shut down U.S. soybean exports to China, worth around $12 billion last year. China typically takes around 60 percent of U.S. supplies.

It’s a good thing I’m not a farmer, or…wait a minute. University enrollment is down this year. One reason? We’ve lost many of our Chinese students, who have elected to attend universities in places that do not have a repressive tyrant who demonizes China in charge.

Student visa data show that the number of international students at U.S. universities declined last year after years of substantial growth. Professionals in international education attribute the decline to a range of factors, including reductions in scholarship programs sponsored by foreign governments, issues of cost and affordability, uncertainty about visa policies and the future availability of poststudy work opportunities, concerns about physical safety and, yes, perceptions of the U.S. as a less welcoming place to foreign nationals under the Trump presidency.

The president reportedly called “almost every” Chinese student in the U.S. a spy at a recent meeting with CEOs. And various Trump administration policies on immigration have been broadly seen by many in U.S. academe as unwelcoming and counterproductive to the cause of recruiting talented students and scholars to American campuses. Among them: the travel ban barring entry to the U.S. for nationals of multiple Muslim-majority countries, new restrictions on the duration of visas for Chinese graduate students in certain high-tech fields and changes to how “unlawful presence” is calculated for international students and exchange scholars in the U.S.

In 2016, 52% of the Stevens county population voted for Donald Trump; we’re in the western red part of the state, full of big corporate farms that rely heavily on subsidies but who’ve been indoctrinated to hate government. We’re actually a little better than the surrounding counties, which were at more like 60% Republican, because our population is modulated a little bit by the university and by students.

Well, at least those farmers get to go back to the farmhouse at night and console themselves with how much they hate the gays and abortion, after doing such a good job of demolishing the economic foundation of their beloved homestead and conservative culture. Then they wonder why they can’t keep their kids on the farm and why they flee for the degenerate life of the city.

We’ll have to see if they wise up by 2020.

Forbes. Fucking Forbes. They’re doing a great job of painting a smiley face on a dystopia. They have an article up titled Surging Wealth Inequality Is A Happy Sign That Life Is Becoming Much More Convenient. For whom, you might ask? Does it matter? It benefits the rich, so the peons don’t matter.

Crucial about all this is that the commercial seers who get the future right will grow stunningly rich for being right. The more convenient life is, the more unequal are the living. But as opposed to a sign of hardship, the happier truth is that life is truly cruel when the talented aren’t getting rich. That’s when we know that no one is devising ways to make our lives easier, cheaper, healthier, more productive, and everything else good. Life without rising inequality is very much like life with socialism.

“The talented”…who might they be? The examples he gives are a) Pizza Hut is testing self-driving delivery cars and pizza-making robots that will get your pizza to you faster, without the expense of pizza delivery drivers. Yay! No more tipping college students struggling to make ends meet! And b) Walmart is making an app a digital map to find the toy or TV they’re looking for, then make the purchase right in the aisle where they find it. Bravo, capitalism. So the “talented” are a couple of big corporations, not people.

That last line, though…he’s completely oblivious, I can tell. You mean I can have life with socialism, and life without rising inequality, at the same time? Yes, please. And you want the opposite? Well fuck you very much.

But don’t you worry: Turning Point USA is on it. They made a list. Strangely, most of them seem to be women and minorities, but hey, I made the cut. There is a grand total of SIX (6) dangerous professors in the entire state, which is kind of a tiny group to be responsible for overthrowing the state and destroying capitalism, and we’re rather scattered all over the place — I haven’t met any of my revolutionary cadre.

We should get together and do lunch, Jim Bear Jacobs, Marlon James, Shannon Gibney, Wayne Bendickson, and Barbara Gorski. We could also invite Jack Russell Weinstein, the sole enemy of the state in North Dakota (there is no representative in South Dakota. They’re all running dog lackeys there). It might be difficult since some of us are hundreds of miles away.

This is no way to run a revolution.

I had this recommended to me as a video I might like. Guess what? I do!