to me and perhaps others.

There's really no excuse for a reasonable person who wants to preserve the earth for all life to consider voting for Clinton. She's had ample opportunity to prove her worth and has failed time after time.

you wrote about and didn't know this particular important role Penn played. There's new material here that I am happy to have and thank you for providing it.

is not only did her heinous and bots initiate all of this, but that the MSM spins it out verbatim from the campaign as fact. If they, the MSM had at all any integrity left this wouldn't be happening.

They are all (adjective, noun) in this together.

from NC, scary as hell as to what we will get from here heinous.

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/10/the-clinton-goldman-speeches-no-s...

Here is the part I thought scariest.

The Problems Are “Wicked,” but Clinton Will Be Unable to Cope With Them

Finally, this little passage from the first Clinton Goldman speech caught my eye:

MR. BLANKFEIN: The next area which I think is actually literally closer to home but where American lives have been at risk is the Middle East, I think is one topic. What seems to be the ambivalence or the lack of a clear set of goals — maybe that ambivalence comes from not knowing what outcome we want or who is our friend or what a better world is for the United States and of Syria, and then ultimately on the Iranian side if you think of the Korean bomb as far away and just the Tehran death spot, the Iranians are more calculated in a hotter area with — where does that go? And I tell you, I couldn’t — I couldn’t myself tell — you know how we would like things to work out, but it’s not discernable to me what the policy of the United States is towards an outcome either in Syria or where we get to in Iran.

MS. CLINTON: Well, part of it is it’s a wicked problem, and it’s a wicked problem that is very hard to unpack in part because as you just said, Lloyd, it’s not clear what the outcome is going to be and how we could influence either that outcome or a different outcome.

(I say “cope with” rather than “solve” for reasons that will become apparent.) Yes, Syria’s bad, as vividly shown by Blankfein’s fumbling question, but I want to focus on the term “wicked problem,” which comes from the the field of strategic planning, though it’s also infiltrated information technology and management theory. The concept originated in a famous paper by Horst W. J. Rittel and Melvin M. Webber entitled: “Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning” (PDF), Policy Sciences 4 (1973), 155-169. I couldn’t summarize the literature even if I had the time, but here is Rittel and Webber’s introduction:

There are at least ten distinguishing properties of planning-type problems, i.e. wicked ones, that planners had better be alert to and which we shall comment upon in turn. As you will see, we are calling them “wicked” not because these properties are themselves ethically deplorable. We use the term “wicked” in a meaning akin to that of “malignant” (in contrast to “benign”) or “vicious” (like a circle) or “tricky” (like a leprechaun) or “aggressive” (like a lion, in contrast to the docility of a lamb). We do not mean to personify these properties of social systems by implying malicious intent. But then, you may agree that it becomes morally objectionable for the planner to treat a wicked problem as though it were a tame one, or to tame a wicked problem prematurely, or to refuse to recognize the inherent wickedness of social problems.

And here is a list of Rittel and Webber’s ten properties of a “wicked problem” (and a critique):

There is no definite formulation of a wicked problem
Wicked problems have no stopping rule
Solutions to wicked problems are not true-or-false, but good-or-bad.
There is no immediate and no ultimate test of a solution to a wicked problem.
Every solution to a wicked problem is a “one-shot operation”; because there is no opportunity to learn by trial-and-error, every attempt counts significantly.
Wicked problems do not have an enumerable (or an exhaustively describable) set of potential solutions, nor is there a well-described set of permissible operations that may be incorporated into the plan.
Every wicked problem is essentially unique.
Every wicked problem can be considered to be a symptom of another [wicked] problem.
The causes of a wicked problem can be explained in numerous ways. The choice of explanation determines the nature of the problem’s resolution.
[With wicked problems,] the planner has no right to be wrong.

Of course, there’s plenty of controversy about all of this, but if you throw these properties against the Syrian clusterf*ck, I think you’ll see a good fit, and can probably come up with other examples. My particular concern, however, is with property #3:

Solutions to wicked problems are not true-or-false, but good-or-bad

There are conventionalized criteria for objectively deciding whether the offered solution to an equation or whether the proposed structural formula of a chemical compound is correct or false. They can be independently checked by other qualified persons who are familiar with the established criteria; and the answer will be normally unambiguous.

For wicked planning problems, there are no true or false answers. Normally, many parties are equally equipped, interested, and/or entitled to judge the solutions, although none has the power to set formal decision rules to determine correctness. Their judgments are likely to differ widely to accord with their group or personal interests, their special value-sets, and their ideological predilections. Their assessments of proposed solutions are expressed as “good” or “bad” or, more likely, as “better or worse” or “satisfying” or “good enough.”

(Today, we would call these “many parties” “stakeholders.”) My concern is that a Clinton administration, far from compromising — to be fair, Clinton does genuflect toward “compromise” elsewhere — will try to make wicked planning problems more tractable by reducing the number of parties to policy decisions. That is, exactly, what “irredeemables” implies[2], which is unfortunate, especially when the cast out amount to well over a third of the population. The same tendencies were also visible in the Clinton campaigns approach to Sanders and Sanders supporters, and the general strategy of bringing the Blame Cannons to bear on those who demonstrate insufficient fealty.

From a governance perspective, watch for many more executive orders acceptable to neither right nor left, and plenty of decisions taken in secret. The bomb that could explode here is the legitimacy of a Clinton administration, depending on the parties removed from the policy discussion, and the nature of the decision taken.

Conclusion

I don’t think volatility will decrease on November 8, should Clinton be elected and take office; if anything, it will increase. A ruling party in thrall to finance, intent on treating government functions as opportunities for looting by cronies, blinded by neoliberal ideology and hence incapable of providing truly universal health care, and whose approach to problems of conflict in values is to demonize and exclude the opposition is a recipe for continued crisis.

NOTES

[1] Matt Taibbi takes the view that “Speaking to bankers and masters of the corporate universe, she came off as relaxed, self-doubting, reflective, honest, philosophical rather than political, and unafraid to admit she lacked all the answers.” I don’t buy it. It all read like the same old Clinton to me, and I’ve read a lot of Clinton (see, e.g., here, here, here, here, here, and here).

[2] One is irresistably reminded of Stalin’s “No man, no problem,” although some consider Stalin’s methods to be unsound.