About that election

I stayed off social media since Black Tuesday. Trump's election really hit me hard. I had to rethink things.

Trump: Government raider

I've never had a good impression of Trump, not from the first time I read about the guy, sometime in Eighties. I'm stunned that enough people voted for him to put him into the White House. Even considering his opponent was Clinton. I won't say he really lost because he trails in the popular vote. To cite an analogy, she got more hits, but he got more runs.

How do the votes really break down between Red and Blue? Have a look. 

Blue Islands in the Red Sea

You can see on the election map that there's a serious divide in this country between the cities and the countryside. Cities everywhere, including the South vote Blue. Meanwhile, the countrysides have been neglected by Democrats, and they've been hit hardest by all the changes in the last forty years: outsourcing, downsizing. Often there was only one manufacturer in town, and Walmart came in and wiped out Mom 'n' Pop retail. Most rural areas and small towns are impoverished. They've been hit worst by trade agreements and outsourcing. Almost all government services go to the cities, which do have 5/6th of the population, but the surrounding areas might have worse problems. There's a huge level of poverty, aggravated by drug addiction.

I remember taking a vacation and going to a lodge in rural Missouri. It was a place Dad took me to 45 years ago. The river lodge was wonderful. But the town around it was just horrendously squalid. I went to the same gas station I saw as a boy, and it survived. Yet, to my amazement, the gas pumps were same ones from the early '70s. I could tell because they were mechanical, with the "slot machine" read out. They weren't kept like antiques, either. These things were almost rusted out. The surrounding town looked just as bad. Many boarded up businesses.

So, I could understand the desperation. There's nothing that racism or sexism would do to cure that. Building the border wall is not going to enhance anybody's economy. Unless it's infrastructure like a road, or a building, like the St. Louis Arsenal (built by the WPA), it doesn't get used, it gets maintained only. There's nothing deporting Hispanics will do to bring us jobs. When the median age of the White population (who voted for Trump) is forty-two-years old, it's not like a lot of those heavy manual labor jobs are going to be given to Caucasians. If you follow Trump's proposal and give rural farm jobs to urban Blacks, who might or might not want them, it sounds something like slavery. Registering Muslims and maintaining those records is going to be expensive, but since that's all computerized now, it's not going to create more than a few temporary jobs.

Trump's foreign policy is a different matter, and I need to do more research before I comment on it. Except for a few parts of it, such as Trump's denial of Global Warming. If he goes ahead and gets rid of the EPA, cancels the Paris Accord, and unleashes fossil fuel industry on the World, it probably means human extinction. My belief about that is that we have neither the time nor the statistical space on the charts to goof around with somebody like Trump.

Yes, I know I was wrong about the election and I could be wrong about all this. Rationally, I know the universe is intrinsically unpredictable. It's possible I can be right about the information available, right about my reasoning, and still be utterly wrong about what really happens. Still I can't help feeling a continuous sinking feeling about Trump. He's, at the very least, a very risky decision.

Then there's Trump's vindictiveness, already legendary, and his casual attitude toward nuclear weapons, which I find scary. Unless he does something to show any redeeming quality, I'm going to be living in fear for four years, at least. The majority of Americans certainly do have a different idea of what constitutes a leader than I do. It seems to be something closer to a bully with no ability to solve problems.

For myself, I'm going to try to be much more information-oriented with this blog. I'll write about information that I find, not just my so-witty commentary. However, I'm at the point with my work where I can't blog as much as I want. My entries are going to be scarce until my main project is finished.

(Not much of) An insurrection coming

I've always found Trump to be a revolting human being. So, despite the fact that we have a majority Republican Congress and most states now have both a GOP governor and legislature, if Trump loses the election is fixed. So, Trump calls on his Trumpies to rebel if Clinton wins. Not if cheating is demonstrated, but if Clinton wins, even if she's ahead in the polls. 

If Clinton is elected, it would be a miracle if Trumpies staged anything but the meekest armed rebellion. and the main reason why is actually sad.

Read interviews at any Trump rally. The ages you'll see are 36, 50, 62 and 65. As I pointed out in a prior post, the median age of the white, non-Hispanic population is 42, and white non-Hispanics are somewhere around 99.7% of Trump followers. They have a dearth of young, fit people. Same problem American businesses have, coincidentally. They can’t find enough native citizens to do heavy labor. Maybe Trumpies will have to recruit Hispanics (median age, 26) to rebel for them. That would be ironic.

There are secondary reasons: logistical problems due to Trump supporters live mostly scattered in vast rural areas. Organizing that into an effective insurrection is going to be nearly impossible. Then again, they can make a lot of trouble in the countryside. Not to the point of toppling the government or even forcing it to negotiate, only to the point of being bigger assholes. 

 Now, say they create an insurrection despite those hurdles. They’ll try to rebel without damaging any private property. Remember how the Oregon Boys at the Malheur Wildlife Refuge pointed out that they weren’t damaging or burning anybody’s property, unlike those black protesters? Remember how the Oath Keepers showed up, armed and uninvited to Ferguson, MO, to help protect private property from an insurrection? More than private property, Trumpies think they’re better than “those people.” Rioting and burning would be a step down on status. For that same reason, they won’t block highways either.

They could march or drive down those highways and take over their state capitals, (without destroying property) but states’ rights are also sacrosanct to them, and they don't see their states as part of the problem, except about eminent domain. Besides, those legislatures are largely Republican already.

Then they all have jobs, farms or ranches. They pride themselves on hard work. Remember they used to tell BLM protesters to “get a job.” For an rebellion, they'd have to abandon their jobs, take a risk of being fired or miss a year's harvest.

So, even if they find enough people, their values place terrible limit their options. They could march on Washington, but everybody’s going to know they’re coming. Once they get there, un-supplied, they’ll face a professional army.

The only other things they can do is occupy Federal land in a strategically negligible location and wait until the feds come and take them out. I’ll call that the Bundy Plan. Or, they can go the tantrum/terrorist route. “I want it my way or some random immigrants are going to die.”

Guess what they’ll likely do? That’s right. I'd call it tantrum terrorism, except people will actually die. Yes, it is what right wing reactionaries have already been doing.

That and harass people at the voting booths. It looks like they'll do just that. They can spot an illegal immigrant on sight, and they can tell how many times an African-American has voted, I guess by the numbers stamped on their foreheads.
 

TMI! TMI!

This entry still needs some work, but I'm putting it up like this because I'm out of time. This was a comment I was going to put up on FB, but I decided it belonged here. I'll continue to do edits on it until it's not so Facebooky.


People are terrible with processing and communicating information. Evolution didn't mold our minds to be truthful. To varying, but to always significant degrees, we all make mistakes, we all lie, and we deceive ourselves. That includes every religion, every faction, every family, every nation, every group humans can form. I won't go into why this is, only to say it's inherent to our evolution and to the way our minds operate.

These aren't so significant in a tribal society. But imagine information roiling through millions of people, all of it filtered and altered, and you should see that there's a problem. There's no way the information stays accurate. Even solid evidence is subject to distorted and false interpretations, added to other false information to create or support a narrative. And since people lie, and in building cohesion of a group, they're subject to lying or distorting information that would compel others to join their faction. That's not even opposed or mischievous people who manufacture evidence.

Without taking these into account, people overestimate their ability to get accurate information and draw conclusions. Once they have solid opinions, there's confirmation bias. Discovering something that supports your opinion feels good. Reconsidering and retracting is painful, an instinctive shame because if you were in a tribe, you just lost status.

Don't think you or anybody you trust isn't subject to any of this. If you evolved as a human, you are. Whenever I see or hear any news, I always ask is it mistaken? Is distorted by self-deception? Is it a lie? Or is it two or three of the above. More than likely the answer to one of those questions is: unknown. 

Not just immoral, but ineffective.

Trump's website detailed his policy proposal for immigrants. Like any racist plan, it's not just wrong, but it's a failure at addressing the problem it's purported to solve.

It would seem so direct: if we don't have higher paying jobs in our economy, all we have to do is get rid of all the immigrants who are taking them. Trump's website adds a fascist twist: after "humane" ethnic cleansing of Hispanics, relocate all the black youth in the inner to do their agricultural work. One thing I immediately find wrong with that is has Trump asked any Blacks about this? How would they like to be shipped out of their homes to do farm work, probably for very low wages? Farm work is some of the heaviest, most dangerous work in our economy.

However, this brutal plan could still succeed if not for a different issue, one which is the real reason why Hispanics are flooding in to the US to begin with. Have a look at this chart of US demographics by ethnic group.

 That chart above shows: with a median age in the forties, the white population of the US is not very fit to do heavy, physical labor. People in that group are also not as inclined to look for such work, thinking that they've basically outgrown it. The Black population is better, with a median age in the low thirties. But really, the best one is the US born Hispanic population, with a median age of 19.

When employers say that they can't fill their positions without hiring Hispanics (citizens or immigrants) they are being factual. The White non-Hispanic population is not only declining in terms of numbers relative to the rest of the US population, but it's older, and is getting older.

I believe that an economy only grows from the vitality and energy of its people, as long as the infrastructure is present. If I'm right, the US needs immigrants, of any status, for the economy to grow.

Therefore, shutting off the borders, or trying to, is simply going to leave many jobs unfilled. Most of the White population isn't fit for heavy manual labor. The Black population is somewhat better, but probably not good enough, and not so willing to leave urban centers to do agricultural work.

Donald Trump, and his followers, do not understand the demographic issue. The problem is not immigrants taking jobs, the problem is not enough native-born people to fill them.

Debate beatdown and my sigh of relief

With the most important election for a century coming soon, I know I've been silent about it in this blog. I don't have a good excuse for it, other than I haven't had a lot to say that hasn't been said. To me there's no hard decision. Clinton is the only candidate, and if you've decided to vote for Trump, there's not anything I can say to sway you.

I approach an election by imagining I'm going to hire the candidate to do a job. What does any employer read first before an interview? The resume. I don't listen so much to what candidates say, I look at what they've done. Consider the campaign to be one long job interview, a hiring process where the applicants have a right to one-up and back-stab each other.

For a series of cutthroat job interviews, where undercutting the other applicants is completely fair, I need to use judgment. Hillary Clinton is someone who has been falsely smeared for close to twenty-five years. Remember Vince Foster and his suicide, or am I that old?  Republicans started out accusing her of murder, and then got nasty.

If the attacks on President Obama have been severe, it's because the Republican lie machine practiced up on Bill, then Hillary Clinton. Bill was caught philandering, (after Republicans investigated him on Whitewater for years, finding nothing.) The remarkable thing about Hillary is none of the attacks have proved out. Her "scandals" have been investigated multiple times. She hasn't escaped them because she's a criminal mastermind, she's escaped them because she's innocent. FBI Chief ______ told Congressmen this 349872 times, and they still brought him into another hearing to tell them that 934072 more times.

As the always found nothing, they then laid on a big layer of conspiracy theories to confuse things and inflamed suspicions. It really surprised and discouraged me when Sanders supporters promulgated them. BTW, I did vote for Sanders in the primary, but now I'm totally behind Hillary Clinton.

I've never been so relieved about anything political than I was on Monday night when President-Elect Clinton trounced the flim-flam pretender, wanna-be Generalissimo Donald Trump through the mat. Afterward, neither Trump nor his supporters seem to understand that she dismembered their leader like a werewolf shredding a deer. Neither did The Young Turks who seemed to think she lost the first half-hour.

No Cenk. She shut him out. She put him in a headlock, ruined his comb-over and smeared his orange greasepaint. The only reason why you think he won the first half-hour is because you didn't begin to notice how one-sided it had been until the second.

How did TYT's miss Trump's Nixon-esque scowl as the debate began? If he looked tense, paranoid, and mean, she looked composed, rational, and humane. I had a feeling right then that she would win big.


Since then, Trump is now a gaffe a day, a scandal a week, a lie-every-three-minutes candidate. I'm so relieved that he's heading toward prison and the ash-heap of history. I look forward to the long-awaited Hillary Clinton presidency. If the Democrats can also get the Senate, that would really help.

However, important as all this now seems, it's all a dream, and none of it is going to matter in ten years. That's when the country will be fighting for its life as Global Warming takes hold. I'm off subject there, but I'd rather go through the worst crisis in history with Clinton as president rather than Trump, or anybody the Republicans will line up for the job.

And really, the party of climate change deniers deserves to die along with Trump's presidential aspirations. Their names should be read in anger for the remainder of human history.

PORNOGRAPHY: THE NEW REALITY part 1, (Introduction)

The most surprising change the Internet has brought about, unforeseen by its developers, has been the availability of pornography. It's been met with chagrin by most of society, yet it continues to be the profitable form of entertainment in the world. If Al Gore had foreseen the pornography flood, he probably would have never taken that initiative to create Internet. Smut that was once hidden in small stashes in basements, under beds or in garages is now ubiquitous, hardcore, high-definition, high-grade, and free. That situation is comparable to it being a public resource.

This represents a huge cultural shift. No doubt there have been a few consequences to this change. Revenge porn, for one. Child porn for another, mostly hidden (and pedophiles have been able to exploit the Dark Internet in other ways, but that is a subject to be treated in a future entry.) Even when the participants are adult and fully consent, A lot of questions simmer about children and teens so easily exposed to it. Of course some have concerns about its effects on adults. Gail Dines said in Pornland: How Pornography has Hijacked our Sexuality, that she could find the worst, most violent and demeaning porn with just four or five mouse clicks from Google. I tested that out, trying to follow the trail she gives, but couldn't find any porn that was terribly violent or misogynistic. She says that every page shows demeaning images. It's true that free sites offer a mind-boggling variety of porn, but most of it isn't what she describes. For the ones that are, she provides no details on how popular they are. Of course, she did her search in 2008, and many of the sites she found are probably closed. Pornhub's statistics of the most searched categories seem to contradict her: the top categories in 2015 were Lesbian, Teen (18-19), Stepmom, Cartoon and Milf. It seems mature women are out-competing the Teen category. It seems not every porn patron goes as young as he can. (I'll compare Pornhub's statistics to stats given by other sites in the next installment.) 

Even after reading Dines's book, I can't tell exactly what she and other antiporn activists really want to ban. Yes, seems a simple thing until you get down to the details. She says porn has become more hardcore, demeaning and violent toward women since the Internet came around. Of course, the Meese Commission, Andrea Dworkin and Catharine McKinnon all said the same things in the eighties. I would think that they would have surpassed necrophilic, bestial, genocidal orgies by now. Contrary to what Dines says, you go to Pornhub, Xhamster or any of the other porn sites, and they seem to mostly cater to vanilla tastes.   

Are two protesters, even feminist protesters, really on the same page about a porn ban? Do they mean that all references and depictions of sex should be purged? Or are they willing to destroy all of it if it means censoring the work in the categories they find objectionable? Or do they mean just a specific work or category?

I'll give a working definition of pornography IMHO: it's a work of literature or recorded media (audio or visual) that's created to motivate or enhance masturbation. This also means you can't have legally- sound definition of pornography without confirming the intent of the creator.  

Note I define it by intent of the creator and not the use. Due to the wide variety of kinks in human sexuality, and the wide variance of people's sex drive, almost anything can be used to motivate or enhance masturbation. Also, there might be movies and literature that have pornographic scenes where the rest of the work has a different purpose.  

Any avid reader or movie fan has at least one work that they have to consider borderline. Novels or movies with sex scenes but aren't made to be fapped to from beginning to end. I'm a reader of Stephen King, and imagine my surprise in the book It when you child sex scene. Not just any child sex scene, but one where the eleven-year old girl aggressively insists on  a gang-bang with the boys. This takes place in the pitch black, in a sewer they've been crawling in for hours. Though the book doesn't say this, you could imagine them being covered with shit. That's a scene by one of the greatest authors today. It's apparently not made to prompt or enhance masturbation, though I'm thinking it turns on some dark souls somewhere. I do wonder how antiporn crusaders feel about that scene. Wouldn't you know, most would-be censors are neither avid readers nor movie fans (though they might lead an anti-porn movement). They wouldn't be sacrificing anything they find of value.

Then there's a philosophical question: how honest and relevant can any genre or any style of work be if it totally avoids sex? It's only the principal drive in every species. If you cleanse sex out of media and art, won't it, as a practice, ring false and finally, uninteresting? For one thing, you can't have a good story about teenagers that doesn't deal with sex or at least attraction at some point, and teenagers would be the least interested in it.

By comparison, a totally salacious work does have a use.  

People have tried to ban porn before with some temporary success, but it had some unexpected effects. One problem they encountered was images that previously had no sexual interpretation suddenly became fap material. In the 1930s, during the Hays Code, what censors cut out the most were feet.

Here's the way it goes: if you cover up pussies, thighs become sexually stimulating. If you cover up the thighs, knees become exciting. If you cover the knees, the feet suddenly cause a full boner. It's not the body being uncovered that's driving the porn, it's the arousal of the person, and their money. Yet, there was always some guy you could find on the street corner who sold pictures of women displaying everything. Law enforcement never got rid of that guy, because it only takes a guy and a woman who want or need to make money, and a camera. Also, it's impossible to attack him without also attacking her. No legion of decency, production code, trade groups, vice squads or volunteer censors are going to stop that. 

The tension over how to depict sex, or whether to depict it at all, really goes back to the advent of writing, and possibly back to cave painting. People were having sex, but new media always presented the question of how a personal thing like sex should be depicted in persistent works that would be spread widely, and would probably outlive their author? 

I can't write about such a topic briefly, so this if going to be serialized. Next installment, I plan to present some graphs that show some unexpected things about pornography now.

Why you probably shouldn't laugh at Anthony Weiner yet.

It seems Anthony Weiner has ruined his life because he can't stop sexting. He even sexted with his young son in the room. The story is so bizarre. The really odd thing is, he didn't have any behavior like this in his history before 2011. I realize that Sexting was something new, but it isn't just sexting. Somebody this obsessed with sex would have been doing other things to get his rocks off, like joining Adult Friend Finder. 

It sounds to me like Antony Weiner might have a physical brain disorder. A malignant tumor would be doubtful because it would have killed him by now. Maybe a benign tumor. It could also be a rare side-effect of some medication. He was a workaholic and might have worked through a headache which was actually a stroke, that then went undetected. He definitely hasn't been like this his entire adult life, or there would have been a lot more stories about him that came out about him after the first sexting scandal.

No, he changed suddenly, so much so that people who knew him (like Jon Stewart) thought at first the original sexting scandal to be a hoax. It seemed to me that everyone was taken aback by his behavior. Also, he can't alter it, and it's becoming worse, despite his own expectations. Not even when his young child comes into the room does Weiner stop himself from sexting. The results were very disturbing. Not child porn, but close enough to make you fight down lunch.

NY Post: Just be happy you don't see a face

Brain cancer and brain trauma have been known to cause behavior changes like this. And even when a brain pathology makes a person do something, the person will still rationalize it as there choice and make arguments about it.

Maybe instead of laughing at Weiner and shaking our heads, we should urge him to get to neurologist. He might be seriously ill. If it is a physical pathology, he really can't help his behavior, but he might get it cured and be able to reclaim his life.

That would certainly be a story.

Political ramble: Trump, a Batman Villain?

Admit it: doesn't Trump look, sound and act like an old-time Batman arch-villain? I mean, he has Joker-like makeup, but orange-face rather than green with whites around the eyes showing like a school-girl's slip. He wears that . . . solar panel thing on his head which apparently is supposed to boost his intelligence but fails spectacularly. He surrounds himself with beautiful women and his spoiled, long-neglected, grown-up kids, probably have nothing better to do but scheme to assassinate Dad and take over the family empire.

I'll just say I'm relieved that Trump is going down in fireball that could take the GOP with him.  Maybe I was foolish to ever think he was competitive, but in a world where the Repubs nominate Trump, anything is possible. That's still true. At the time that he was the de facto nominee, of course I was thinking how bad this could get?

There was this woman, this activist, who was a Bernie supporter. Then she came out and said she was voting for Trump and tried to explain this in a column. I just said, “No excuse,” and unsubscribed (that was on Twitter).

It's funny how none of the allegations against Hillary Clinton are sticking. Either she is greatest super-criminal mastermind ever, or she's always been innocent of anything Conservatives have accused her of. 


Failing at the newest email dump, the strategy now is to attack her health. (They shouldn't go there when their candidate resembles a radiation mutant.) The Boston Globe has run a story about how Hillary Clinton sometimes blanks out for hours. Guys, she's only been campaigning around the country for fourteen months. She's got to blank out some time. Remember when Obama babbled that there were 57 states?

What caused that? Exhaustion. Obama hides it so well, you could only tell it by the nonsense line.
I hope she'll catch up on sleep some time before the inauguration. 

8/28/16: Edited for syntax and clarity (end of first paragraph)

Trump is an Il Duce-bag

   Only three weeks have passed from the day Republicans chose Donald Trump as their nominee. Like a suicidal man who repudiates his choice one second before hitting the pavement, Repubs have been regretting nominating Trump ever since. Unfortunately, they can't pick up their brains from the sidewalk and put them back in. They will even more ashamed on November 8th, and long afterward.

    Trump is a fascist. The real McCoy, not some Godwin analogy in an argument over Final Fantasy. If you don't believe me, see his policy papers. Unlike Benito Mussolini, who had fascism defined and mapped out, Trump didn't become fascist by thought or design. (In Il Duce Mussolini's era, Fascism was cutting-edge evil.) No, Trump arrived at fascism due to beliefs his father passed on to him, beliefs that Trump has always been too narcissistic and stupid to re-examine. Those quaint World War II totalitarianisms (fascism, Nazism and Bolshevism) are especially attractive to sociopaths, including narcissist sociopaths like Trump.  

     So far, besides selling himself as a Messiah come to save our country from doom, Trump has made vindictiveness the theme of his campaign. He couldn't let it go with Khizr and Ghazala Khan, insulting them and the memory of their son. He had to sink himself and his party further and further with it. I can't wait to see how this guy will use nuclear weapons. No, actually, I can wait forever. And he has to tell Hilary Clinton that he'll get revenge if he loses. His followers might go 2A on her ass.

    Then there was the baby. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WEeY8ENxPDwIf you watch the video, Trump's tone when he said “get that baby outta here” was practically a snarl, and he makes fun of the woman for believing him momentarily.

   Aren't politicians supposed to kiss babies? A cliche I know. Not that Trump could have done it (I mean even infants have their standards and would recoil from Trump's orange sleaze.) Yet, he should have, at least, taken his cues from that very old politicians trope: you don't have to kiss your supporters' babies, but dote over them. Make your constituents admire your forbearance toward their kids. (What? You think they'd believe you'd like a crying baby? No, they just want to know the candidate is willing suffer with them. It's a bonding experience.)

    The GOP leaders didn't have much of a choice accepting Trump after their base fell in love with him. Still, it's impossible to feel sorry for the leadership. They did it to themselves from years of propaganda, much of it from Roger Ailes at Fox News, who fortunately has now been dismissed. They scared their base for years over terrorism, Islam, race, immigration, the Clintons, Obama, our foreign policy, our economy, our debt, taxes, and our military, and so on. How could they be so thunderstruck when their voters acted like scared rats and forced the nomination of Trump?

    Frightened people want a want protection, a “strong” leader. A muscle-head. A bully, but on their side. We have a word for this: a strongman. A guy who makes grandiose plans to displace whole human populations never realizing nor caring about the suffering that would entail. A leader who can't be bothered with pesky details like how many people his deportation plan might kill. An iron-fisted blockhead who will build a wall, and by God, force Mexico to pay through warfare, dirty tricks . . . or nukes. A man who revels in the use of force: the more extreme the better.  That's Trump: a man who asks about nuking countries three times in a one hour national security briefing, like nukes are his new toy, and he can't wait to try it out.

  
  (Of course, Trump denies this now, because “deny and lie” is his “shock and awe.” Politifact gives him a truth rating of about 15%. Fifteen percent of what he claims is true, or mostly true.)
  
    People who are voting for Trump should just ask themselves how they would like working for Trump. How would they like working for a boss who only tells the truth less than fifteen percent of the time?

    Ailes and the rest of the GOP lie machine were so good at scaring people, the GOP base is acting like scared Germans in the 1920s-30s. Germany's situation was far more dire than anything we're going through, and the threats it was facing were far worse than immigration and terrorism. Devastated by war, isolated by the world, having faced starvation and economic chaos three times. The Germans had good reason to be terrified that the Soviet Union was about to roll in from the East. Stalinist operatives, not liberals or progressives, were within their country wouldn't let the German people forget the threat.

    What do we have stacked up against us? At least Islamic terrorists have no armies of real consequence, and couldn't move them here even if they had them. To the other side of their country, the Germans had the intransigent French, Belgians, and the worldwide British Empire. Post-war, the French (with Belgium) invaded Germany in 1923, creating the German hyperinflation that wrecked the economy and starved the people over two years. This is only a few after the starvation caused by the allied blockade. To sum up, their everyday situation was more dire than ours.

    Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, Alex Jones and company have made the US people feel as desperate as the post-WWI Germans, an astounding accomplishment. They way they've lost control of that frightened, angry base might be an object lesson to why propaganda is no substitute for news. This election has to represent the biggest long-term political-strategy failure in US history. It's enough to make Patrick Buchanan pull out his pubic hair, or Rush Limbaugh swallow one his cigars.
   
    A week ago came a rumor that Trump might drop out. That would be the best outcome for everyone involved. I'm certain he must have talked about it. He has a terribly thin skin. However, the story disappeared and has the hallmarks of being just a rumor. If so, it's hard to see how the GOP will ever recover from Trump. Whether they do or not, already the Republicans can write off the 2016 election. Anybody else they put up against Clinton now is bound to lose by twenty points. They can't get on the ballot this late in most states. I'm expecting most of the Trump supporters to stay home if their strongman quits. 

    By running for the presidency (which we're led to believe is an entry level position) Trump is taking a tremendous risk. He's not going to deal with a loss well. Moreover, Trump University looks like it ruin him financially, and even put him in prison. That's why he's using goon threats and saying if he loses the election must be rigged.


 
For as long as I've been alive, people have been hoping for third party. At the rate things are going, the GOP is going to be the third party in 2020. If not the fourth. And Trump will have his Trump Party then. If he's out on parole.

    Last Note: As I was writing this blog, I saw that Wikileaks has released 23,000 more of Clinton's Secretary of State emails. They're marked with a “C” for classified. There's some dispute about whether she knew it meant classified. When I was in the military, we stamped things “Classified,” no acronyms or abbreviations about it. I know I would have seen the letter and presumed it probably meant “copyright.” I know if it were drawn to my attention, a few seconds of thought would  have told me it didn't mean copyright, but the point is, I wouldn't have assumed it meant classified. Because it seems stupid to me that anything like that should be marked with single letter.

   Today it came out that Judicial Watch, a conservative operation, found indications of Clinton cronyism in an email just released. But Clinton didn't send the email, and what's described there is someone seeking a job and being recommended by a few people at the Clinton Foundation. Somehow, this didn't compete well with Trumps threatening innuendos to Clinton.  

    About Wikileaks: does Julian Assange want Trump to win? I realize he has every reason to despise Hilary Clinton, (and probably more than I know about) but surely he wouldn't endanger the world by putting Trump in office, . My question is why isn't Wikileaks or Anonymous getting dirt on Trump? It would be damaging to Wikileaks integrity if it's now being used as Assange's instrument of revenge.

    And we should also ask: has Trump made a deal with Assange? He certainly seems to have an understanding with Putin.

The ominous trend hidden in mass shootings

I don't need to remind everyone of the Orlando shooting. Everyone is shocked over the sheer number of casualties, and surprised about the targeting of the LGBT community by an undoubted Islamic terrorist. Those two things will make this atrocity linger in the public mind. The tragedy is taking us through another tour of the well-worn debate over the availability of military-grade guns under the Second Amendment. Never mind these are weapons that could kill fifty people in five minutes, argument always ends the same way. The gun lobbying and PR kills any action. Yet, both the shock of the massacre and the familiarity the aftermath ritual obscure a disturbing trend in mass shootings, one that should be getting more attention.

(Continued after the break.)

If you're writing in Bernie Sanders

As a Bernie Sanders supporter from the very first, I'm disappointed that he's not going to get the nomination unless there's a violent coup in the Democratic Party. Violent coups are not recommended, nor expected. However, now that question of nominee is basically settled, I've voting for Hillary Clinton.

I've heard a lot of complaining from the left, people who say that they'll write in Bernie's name, or just won't vote, or (saving throw) are voting for Donald Trump just to prove their wishes can't be ignored any longer.

If you're in that camp, I dare you to try this: wake up every day from now until the election, and say aloud, "President Trump." Then when you walk into the voting booth, say to yourself, "President Trump, for four years." Then think of some of the things he's promised: deportations, the Mexican wall, and reneging on US debt, etc.

If you can still write in Bernie Sanders, who you know can't win, when you also know you're asking for your consolation prize to be Donald Trump instead, then you will have proved you're a person of conviction, and you're not just thoughtlessly making the world much worse.

No, you're making it much worse with a purpose. And that purpose is [fill in the blank].

If you can fill in that blank with anything that makes sense to you, then ought to vote for Donald Trump.

I dare you to try it.

Vote. Please Vote

The Republican Party has shown by their obstructionism in Congress and their outrageous laws in the States that it shouldn't be a political party. Never mind that the base is now taking it apart. I have to admit the 2010 and 2014 elections were two of the most shocking I've ever seen. How can a party that's as irrational, anti-science, anti-education, obstructionist, who actually closed down the government, win majorities?

Their latest insult to rights, morality and intelligence is the defunding of Planned Parenthood for no reason whatsoever. The Center for Medical Progress's videos have been refuted, the people who made them are up on charges, and they'll probably have to stand charges of defamation as well.

This is the very same tactic Republicans pulled on ACORN, which also turned to be nothing.

It's apparent that among their other foibles, Republicans believe in government as a bully. It's odd the party of small government and no regulation would harass Planned Parenthood with arbitrary regulations. But they absolutely believe in that as a role for government.

A second state, Ohio has now defunded Planned Parenthood. Governor Kasich, that moderate, has signed the bill.

I'm beginning to get that same feeling helpless distressed feeling I had under George W. Bush. If you're a Liberal, Progressive or Socialist, please remember to vote.  

Things will continue to deteriorate until we fire these people:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fw41BDhI_K8

The truth is . . .

This has little to do with the article. I'm just plugging Colbert.

There's a lot I could write about with the primary process underway, Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton locking horns, and the Republican field being culled. (I like how Stephen Colbert has called the process the "Hunger for Power Games.") For the record, I would be very disappointed if Bernie Sanders didn't get the Democratic nomination. I think we're about equally Left. However, I don't feel that there's much for me to discuss about the candidates that isn't covered quite well elsewhere, sans the real issues.

I prefer to look at the underpinning issues that determine how somebody will vote. I friend of mine has said that you could predict whether someone is conservative or liberal by their answer to one question: how complicated is life?  If they say it's simple, they're conservative. If they say it's complicated, they're liberal. However, I haven't been able to find any research confirming that.

That's true of philosophical matters, like the truth, not just something you say that's true, or logically true, but the Higher Truth. I got into a discussion on Facebook that where a woman argued that the Higher Truth isn't relative. Higher Truth, like complete perfection, a myth, but those are two categories that believers, especially of the conservative stripe, think their religion answers. Simplistic? You betcha.

This was my answer:

Really? First, the term when applied to the entirety of existence is over-broad, like the number 42, if you get the reference. Second, the universe works by probabilistic laws at the quantum level. So, chance and luck are intrinsic to existence. Third, from the smallest scale to the largest, the universe is a chaotic system. Our minds function to find order, or truth, but outside of that niche, they are very poor. (Hit the enter button early. I hate that.) Fourth, even if there is something called "the truth" our senses and our minds are too limited to perceive it, in fact. We are adapted to survive, regardless of the truth. So, what you're saying is mostly false.

A caveat: "the truth" should not be conflated or confused with the word "true," which is always provisional. The former should not be given the inarguable, mathematically sound status of the latter.

And her rebuttal was she didn't believe anything of what I said. Do you think she votes conservative, that she insists that her higher truth includes "knowing" a fetus is an unborn baby, and just sacrifice her and other women's reproductive rights without having to prove anything? You betcha. People who "know" there's a higher truth usually feel very entitled due to their knowledge. Even if that entitlement makes their life worse.

It isn't so much that some people believe that there's a higher truth. It's the entitlement it gives them, and the fact that this belief looks very much like plain ignorance compounded with error. That people even cast a argument as higher truth vs. relativism shows that they don't know what they're talking about. Evolutionists have run into this problem with Creationists: how do you argue against something when the premises buried beneath touch on reality only in the most distorted way? I suppose closing your eyes and groping is a simpler process than actually opening your eyes and looking. Aw, but I'm too parallel.