A Blast from the Past

A post from Sunday, March 6, 2016, still has some timely elements. Of course, back then the Republicans had a massive primary field of 16 candidates, some of whom were competent. That is not so this time. The last time we had a herd of candidates, we got Trump.The comments below deal with the 2016 election. Perceptive Reader may judge which are timeless.

Notes from the Untergang

Dr. Boli gave us the following observation by

In debating his opponents, Mr. Trump uses a particular style of argument that is enormously effective on the third-grade demographic:

OPPONENT. I believe you are mistaken in your inference.
TRUMP. You’re ugly.
OPPONENT. What I mean is that there is overwhelming scientific evidence to support my assertion that vaccines do not cause autism.
TRUMP. I mean, seriously, who puts a face like that on network TV?

Because it is not usually encountered outside the playground, this rhetorical figure does not have a common name. Dr. Boli will therefore give it one, and call it the argumentum ad vultum, the argument against the face or countenance. 

A reminiscence of the Marge:

Some years ago, when the Incomparable Marge took our daughter to see The Nutcracker at Lincoln Center, she found herself two rows behind the Donald and his then-wife. They spent the performance necking and smooching and engaging in serious PDsA, pretty much ignoring the dancing on-stage until his daughter came out with the other children dancers. 

You know what that means?

That's right, sports fans, it's Political Season once again! For those who supposed it had always been political season, 24/7/365, well, now it's Prime Time. OK, Primary Time. TOF will now share some random thoughts of golden wisdom, some of them his own, and some of which (not necessarily his own) he may agree with.

1. Candidates should hold debates. They haven't done so since 1960.

No, really. Remember debate club in high school or college and how debates were carried out? Position, rebuttal, and all that? What we have now are joint press conferences, with reporters holding the whip. But as regards reporters, remember the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect, as enunciated by Michael Crichton:

"You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.

In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know."

Republican debate

These maestros specialize in asking questions designed to create drama, because the news paradigm of an election is the horse race. Or a boxing match. (Or in this year, a Battle Royale Cage Match.) 

2. The media's purpose is to sell beer and shampoo, and that means eyeballs in front of the tube, and that means scandal and drama.

So don't expect them to show many moments of candidates making cogent policy points or proposing important positions. Don't believe it? When was the last time they featured remarks by John Kasich on the news? They always lead with Trump for the same reason your local news always leads with a fire or a car wreck. Sooner or later, candidates looking for all-important tube-time give in and give the media what they want. The Democrats are more arch with their internecine put-downs, but they too are out to entertain the media.

3. Trump is popular because he takes on the media and political correctness.

People are sick and tired of being hectored, chastised, and condescended to by special snowflakes and all the rest. Trump does not back down and go all apologetic when called out. Hooray. Finally someone is talking back! Of course, Chris Christie was like that, too; but he was not a rich, coiffed Manhattanite cocktail partier. The problem is that political correctness is like Trump's Wall. In an effort to keep out the drug smugglers and terrorists that might mix in with the unregulated immigrants and refugees, Trump seeks to bar the everyone. And in an effort to bar genuinely hateful speech, political correctness tries to ban even the hint of a possibility that anyone might take offense.

4. Exit polls of Democrats on Stupor Tuesday revealed that the most frequently named characteristic looked for in a candidate was "caring." We are apparently electing an emo-in-chief. Among the uncaring Republicans, it was "competence."

TOF believes it should also matter what a candidate cares about and what he is competent at. The top Republican contender at the present time is a real estate wheeler dealer who, except for the real estate deals, has not been notably successful in his business ventures, so the definition of competent may be fluid. And what does it mean to "care" if the result of raising the minimum wage to $15/hr is that inexperienced youth will be unemployed from higher paying jobs?

Newlyweds Donald Trump Sr. and Melania Trump with Hillary Rodham Clinton and Bill Clinton at their reception held at The Mar-a-Lago Club in January 22, 2005 in Palm Beach, Fla. At the time, Trump was a Democrat and supported Clinton over Bush. In 2008 he would write that Hilary Clinton would make a great president. (Maring Photography/Getty Images/Contour by Getty Images)

5. Beware of politicians who want to be Leaders.

For that to happen everyone else must become Followers. Besides, we tried Leaders in the 30s and 40s and that did not work out very well.The idea that the Man will come and kiss our boo-boos and they will all go away is crazy. Yet in country after country, the answer to corruption or the perception of corruption has been the Man on Horseback on one horse or the other. Remember when "This is the moment when the oceans stopped rising"?

6. The Tea Party and the Occupy This movement are the same movement.

They both object that powerful money interests control the government. The answer of the Occupy movement is to give the controlled government more power. The answer of the Tea Party movement seems to be electing the money interest to be the government.

Off topic: What is the difference between occupying Wall Street and occupying an Oregon bird sanctuary during the off-season? Ans. In the former case a woman gets raped; in the latter case, an occupier gets shot dead.

7. Donald Trump claiming not to know who David Duke is was ludicrous in the extreme. That the media did not know that Donald Trump had denounced David Duke a decade and a half ago is not ludicrous only because a) the media are pretty much ignorant of anything that happened more than a week ago and b) it does not fit the narrative into which they want to shove Trump.

In 2000, Trump stated that he was leaving the Reform Party because of the involvement of "David Duke, Pat Buchanan and Lenora Fulani. That is not company I wish to keep." ("What I Saw at the Revolution," The New York Times OpEd, February 19, 2000), as per Wikipedia.

8. Trump is not part of the Republican Establishment.

True dat. According to Wikipedia, he was a Democrat until 1987; then he was a Republican from 1987 to 1999. He then switched to the Reform Party from 1999 to 2001. After a presidential exploratory campaign with the Reform Party, he quit because of the involvement of David Duke and others. From 2001 to 2009 he was a Democrat again; he switched to the Republican Party again from 2009 to 2011. An independent from 2011 to 2012, he returned to the Republican Party in 2012. Asked to name the best president of recent years in 2015, Trump picked Bill Clinton; and in 2008 he said that Hilary Clinton would make a good president or vice-president. 

So he is definitely not part of the Republican Establishment. But he is one of the Forbes 500 and definitely part of the Northeast Establishment.

9. Heard elsewhere: 'A frustrated public agrees that this election “absolutely calls for a really futile and stupid gesture to be made on somebody’s part. And we’re just the guys to do it.”'

Yes, it's the Animal House election!

10. Also heard elsewhere: 'Trump's entire campaign is “let’s get even with Obama and make America great again”. Many followers seem only interested in the first part. Of course, that's how we got Obama—hatred of Bush.'

In other words, this is about more hope and change.

11. Also heard elsewhere: 'Trump’s signature issue–and the only one he really needs to get Normal-Americans on-board–is “BUILD THE WALL.”'

The French built a wall, too. They called it the Maginot Line. How'd that work out for them? He says he will get Mexico to pay for the wall. Really? If Mexico could afford to pay for a wall, she could afford to pay her workers enough to employ them at home. In problem-solving, we teach managers to address the root causes, not the symptoms; but Trump is not a very good manager.

One way to help Mexicans stay at home and build their own country is to stifle American demand for drugs that go to enrich the gangs that terrorize Mexicans into fleeing. We're looking at you Wall Street and Hollywood. 

BTW, ya like that hyphenate 'Normal-Americans'? TOF remembers when True Americans were trying to keep the Irish refugees out.

12. What has been, that will be; what has been done, that will be done. Nothing is new under the sun! Even the thing of which we say, “See, this is new!” has already existed in the ages that preceded us. (Eccl. 1:9-10)

In the 1800 election, Jefferson's supporters described President Adams as a "hideous hermaphroditical character, which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman." In return, Adams' men called Vice President Jefferson "a mean-spirited, low-lived fellow, the son of a half-breed Indian squaw, sired by a Virginia mulatto father." As the slurs piled on, Adams was labeled a fool, a hypocrite, a criminal, and a tyrant, while Jefferson was branded a weakling, an atheist, a libertine, and a coward. When TOF was researching his family tree, he had cause to read the Washington (NJ) Star of sometime in 1864 whose front page was headlined WE SUPPORT MCCLELLAN AND THE ENTIRE DEMOCRATIC SLATE and referred in the body of the "article" to "Abe the Ape, King of the N*****s." Only they did not use asterisks.

In case you think the media today is biased.

 13. Heard elsewhere: "There’s no use charging Trump with 'populism.' Direct election of the president is by definition populism.

Is it coincidence that Trump's major attacks have been on conservative news organs and he has boycotted conservative forums and been disparaged by conservative magazines and papers? Something is going on, and those who persist in thinking in terms of 'liberal' and 'conservative' may be missing an important realignment taking place. In the FIRESTAR series, TOF postulated two new parties: American and Liberty (the former nationalist/populist; the latter, libertarian) at right angles to the Democrats and Republicans and originally comprised of members of both.

14. Mass rallies of screaming fans are more appropriate for rock concerts than for politics.

But it is the tenor of the times. Cf. the audiences on the Tonight show compared to those of Carson's day; or the audiences on the plaza of the Today show. Nowadays, they cheer the monologue, more than they laugh at it. They are cheering and screaming for themselves and that they are being televised. Self-adulation is carrying over to these political rallies. A certain amount of rally behavior is supposed, but one should recall the rallies in Weimar Germany and proceed with caution.

15. Bernie Sanders has the peculiar superpower of actually enunciating policy positions through the media news blender.

Of course these positions are a caution. He wants to nationalize health care so that health care can flourish the way education and marriage have flourished since government has taken those in hand. He also favors the $15 minimum wage, which would effectively price low-skill workers out of the market. There is a difference between ideas that sound good and those that do good. See Venezuela for details.

16. Hillary still doesn't get it.

The question behind the email server is not whether sensitive material was leaked. It's why  the heck was she taking her work home at all? That's just basic poor judgment. 

17. Who knows but that the best candidates may not have dropped out?

Martin O'Malley on the Democrat side; Scott Walker, Bobby Jindal, Chris Christie on the Republican. All of these had experience actually governing a state. Of those presidents that history has judged best, most had previously been governors or generals; or those judged worst, most have been senators or representatives. There are exceptions to every rule -- Zachary Taylor was not so hot while LBJ was very effective -- but the presidency is an executive job, not a collegial one and the skill set required to make one a successful senator may not work too well in the executive chair.

Released into the Wild

Well, they're kicking me out tomorrow, but not until Monday do I see the surgeon about maybe putting weight on my let foot. That means I have to hire a wheelchair ambulance on Monday to go from home to doctor and back. This is Very Expensive, since the government insurance (Medicare) covers it not. Forget about pre-existing conditions, what about covering existing conditions? How I will hop up the steps to the front door with one leg ia currently undecided. Perhaps the ambuleers will carry me up, chair and all.

A local politico is running ads about how his opponent will gut insurance protections for pre-existing conditions. Boo. His examples are deceptive : diabetes, cancer. But this is not what is meant. Currently, one may opt to buy health insurance after getting sick or injured. That's not insurance, that's demanding other people pay your medical bills. That may be a good and desirable thing, but it is not insurance and it is not sustainable. That's why Obamacare had that provision that everyone had to buy a policy. So healthy people would be paying into the pool without drawing out. But people wanted coverage for pre-existing conditions without the ugly necessity of buying an insurance policy first. Hence, premiums and deductibles skyrocketed.

Meanwhile, I sit and watch TV, which allows my brain to rot. There are hundred of channels, but they are all running veterinary shows, home renovations, reruns of Roseanne, M*A*S*H, Gomer Pyle, and That 70's Show, as well as a variety of football games, car repairs, and Donnie Brasco: The Real Story. Tonight. reruns of Family Feud will be strip-run on two different channels, neither of them the Game Show Network. When I surf from channel to channel, I almost never see an actual show in progress but invariably a commercial. And they are the same commercials, on every channel.

The good news is that there are only twenty commercials. The bad news is that they run over and over -- and half of them are political. An incredible number of commercials are for prescription medicines. There are traditional commercials for cars, but we seldom see any for toothpaste and of course never for beer.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NybJiNihiZo
I assume we are to Ask Our Doctor about these wonderfuls drugs and their multitudinous side effects, including possible death. That's because the takers of these drugs are shown swimming, playing golf, reading to their grandchildren, and other activities that their hithero but now-cured illnesses presumably kept them from doing . Seldom are these activities related to the illnesses.

We are also instructed that the other candidate is a crook or in the pay of Big Pharma or even -- I am not making this up -- a sexual harasser and child rapist. Fortunately, the targets are politically situated such that such Credible Accusations will never have a Kavanaugh-like fallout. Like a breath of fresh spring air are those commercials which tout instead the ieas and merits of the candidate him (or her) self. Alas, in many cases, these ideas are lunatic.

The commercials seldom mention the party to which they belong. ("this commercial was approved by the Congressional Leadership Council".) Although in naming the orc or troll in opposition they will mention his benighted party so their own affiliation could be deduced. Often they are deceptive in subtle ways. One local candidate mentions that she was inter alia a chemistry teacher in an inner city school. Go go google. A web site detailing candidates with a scientific background notes that she was a teacher for an entire year before packing it in. She also announces she was "the CEO of a successful start-up", but the science site tells us further that the company was started up by her husband. So perhaps the skids to CEO-dom were greased?  Another commercial deplores the rich backers of his opponent, but an election site states that he has spent $9.5 mill. to his opponent's $1.0 mill. Another is the grandson of a former VP-USA, Henry Wallace.

PA is in the envious position of having brand-new Congressional districts imposed on her by the courts, replacing those that had been drawn by the legislature. These were suspected, indeed convicted, of being gerrymandered.

New court-drawn districts

Old districts

Yeah, no fooling. Well, it was a predictable consequence of racial gerrymandering. It didn't take the Republicans long to notice that when safe districts were created for black candidates, the adjacent areas became safer for Republicans. This enabled Republican redistricters to pose as both virtuous and self-interested at the same time. Throw in a few twists and turns to ensure an incumbent of his seat and you could even get bipartisan support!

The court-drawn districts actually look reasonable, since they better preserve geographic contiguity. But they are numbered all differently. The Lehigh Valley, for example, constitutes a single district, rather than parceled out as hitherto and conjoined to areas lacking common interests. The new 11th District amusingly comprises the counties of Lancaster and York, so we may predict a rosy future for it.

I note that in the early years of the old Republic, Penna. sometimes elected two or three Congresscritters from the same district and even elected Congressmen at large for the whole Commonwealth.That's a charming notion. Instead of laboriously redrawing maps, make the districts permanent and bump up the number of representatives it sends in.

Disbursements so far:
1st District (Bucks Co.)
Brian Fitzpatrick     $1,923,009
Scott Wallace         $8,396,873

7th District (Lehigh Valley)
Marty Nothstein     $567,484
Susan Wild     $1,563,222

meanwhile across the river, in the 7th NJ
Leonard Lance     $1,231,529    
Tom Malinowski     $3,673,046

Kav-enough?

The Manhattan Contrarian notes that the Democrats seem to acknowledge the failure of their teen-aged groping accusation on Judge Kavanaugh by shifting their pearl-clutching from his alleged teen-aged indiscretions to his "demeanor" in his response to the accusations and/or to whether he drank beer in college. (Quelle surprise!) If he had responded like Spock, the complaints would differ, but who can doubt that his demeanor would have been attacked, regardless?

Meanwhile, the media are in a hoo-hoo because Fred Trump managed to turn over many of his properties to his children and not pay as much in gift taxes as some think he should have. Much is made of 'undervaluing' the properties, although as the Contrarian points out, the values were still high enough that the IRS would have reviewed the transaction and signed off. Recall that, at this time, the Trumps were Democrats and big donors to the Clintons.

For a full discussion, see the link, above.

Gridlock in Washington

is a trade-off with bipartisan efforts to pick our pockets.

http://reason.com/blog/2018/09/28/while-you-were-watching-kavanaugh-congre

Meanwhile

For some reason, the internet here at the rehab does not allow Facebook through its door, so anyone looking for the usual tidbits will have to come here. If you like you can share that info at my Book of Faces. I don't know when I can get back on.

The Manhattan Contrarian has a post up about the Kavanaugh kerfuffle and how it fits in with the strategy of overturning the previous election. (He does not point out how it furthers the Russian agenda of discrediting democratic procedures by interposing essentially autocratic stalls and blocks.)

Apparently, among the Usual Suspects

there is the near total lack of interest in recent, credible, well-corroborated reports of physical abuse of two women by the Vice Chair of the Democratic National Committee, who is also the Democratic candidate for Attorney General of Minnesota.

So these sorts of charges generate national news depending on who is accused -- and how old and obscure the charges are.

Tarachódocracy

Beasts and their young in travel cages.

From the Greek, meaning 'rule by the obstreperous.'

It suffices for an intransigent minority –a certain type of intransigent minority –to reach a minutely small level, say three or four percent of the total population, for the entire population to have to submit to their preferences. 

-- Nassim Nicholas Taleb, "The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dictatorship of the Small Minority"

Note that the lion is not shown pouncing upon the zebra.
Although the zebra warily keeps the elephant between them.

RECENTLY, FROM THE NOOZ, TOF learned that the cover art on boxes of animal crackers has been changed to remove the cage bars (and the baby animals). This was not because a great wave of artistic preference swept through the body politic. Ask anyone the day before to list their top ten concerns -- indeed, their top 100 concerns -- and chances are that the package art for Animal Crackers would not have ranked very high among them.

This change came about at the behest of PETA, which apparently believed the old retro circus art was somehow double-plus ungood and possessed the causal power to entail extinctions. It did not come about because of a groundswell of grassroots demand. This illustrates a curious point:









Change comes about from instransigant minorities within societies, not from the majority or the "consenseus." This is not because the minority convinces the majority, but because there is frequently an asymmetry in choices.

Ratchets permit motion in only one direction.

The animal cracker artwork mattered terribly to the snowflakes at PETA, while everybody else didn't care much at all. Therefore, PETA (which is not concentrated in a mountain compound, but spread throughout the country and inexplicably not yet in cages. That makes it like a ratchet, permitting motion in one direction and blocking it in the other.










One example of the Ratchet is kosher soft drinks. Almost all beverages are kosher. The reason is that those who keep kosher will drink nothing else, while those who do not don't care one way or the other. Since the cost differential in minimal and those who insist on kosher are scattered throughout the population, bottlers find it much cheaper to just make everything kosher than to keep two inventories. (That is not always true for other rules; or for intransigant minorities who are concentrated in a few areas, or if the cost differential is large.)

National Helium Reserve

 ONCE AWARE OF THE RATCHET, we see its appearance everywhere and realize its explanatory power. Government subsidies and boondoggles, for example. Suppose a bill is passed -- remember when bills had to pass through Congress before we discovered the excellently swift power of the Executive Order and bureaucratic Regulation? -- and it provides lunches and conferences and salaries for the sugar industry, or advertisers, or Head Start, or someone else. We now have a minority -- say, the sugar growers -- who are intransigently opposed to cutting the subsidy, because National Security! (or the Children!™ or whatever rings the bell) The majority abides because it only costs them pennies at a time. That's why they are seldom repealed -- there is always a lobby to support them, not always a lobby to repeal them. That's how the national helium reserve, set up to ensure the Navy would have plenty of helium for its blimps, outlasted the Age of Airships itself. By 1996, it was evident that zepplins were not making a comeback and the use of helium was almost entirely private, so th ereserve was ordered privatized. But in 2013, lo!, the need evidently returned like the Walking Dead and federal control was reasserted. Similarly, the ATF was not disbanded when Prohibition was repealed. They just found other stuff to do. The telephone excise tax, enacted in 1898 to help pay for the Spanish-American War was renewed and revised repeatedly to pay for other wars or depressions and shortfalls in government revenue, until 2000, and only because the internet had mooted the concept of a "phone call." Even so, Clinton vetoed the repeal bill and it lingered unto 2011 or so.

Some folks don't trust GMO foods

Much is explained by tarachódocracy, from the trivial to the portentious. Taleb notes that transgenic-GMO eaters will eat nonGMOs, but not the reverse. Those who don't like GMO food, will usually not eat it. Therefore, much food is marketed as "Contains no GMO incredients." Likewise, books don't get banned by majority vote, but because a minority feels so strongly that they won't back down or compromise on it. The National Socialist Worker's Party never won a majority in any vote, and in fact lost seats in the Reichstag in the last election before the Machtergreifung; but Hitler was appointed chancellor nonetheless because shouting down speakers, rushing the platform, and the like were so effective and the Christian Democrats just wanted the disturbances to stop. "Once you have ten percent or more women at a party," says Taleb, "you cannot serve only beer. But most men will drink wine. So if you serve only wine, you only need one set of glasses."

Islam prevailed in the heartland of Christianity because of a Ratchet. If a Christian [or other non-muslim] man married a muslim woman, he had to convert. (Christian woman could be kept by muslims without converting.) But any children would have to be raised muslim, and no convert could revert under pain of death. This ensured that all changes in religion were one-way; and even if the original converts had done so cynically to avoid taxes or some other burden, their grandchildren were likely to be sincere.

In the US, the "minority rule" is still largely compartmentalized. On most issues, the several states must decide for themselves. If, as some wish, the country became a unitary state rather that a federation (often expressed by "reforming" the Electoral College) then tarachódocracy would preveil acoss the nation and a stubborn minority could impose their desire on the whole country rather than on say Texas alone.

Nicholas Rashevsky, the "father" of mathematical biophysics, also wrote a book applying mathematics to historical processes, including what later became "tipping point" theory and incorporated the idea of "partisan" groups who could never be won over. But Warren Weaver, in his discussion of complexity in science, wrote that "organized complexity" consisted not only of many individual units but also the interrelationships among them. Readers my recognize thia as matter and form. Such systems were beyond the organizing power of mathematics or statistics or even human intuition and had to be grasped through models. But "all models are wrong," and the outputs of them are likely to be Wrong. Taleb points out that "in complex systems the ensemble behaves in way not predicted by the components." These are called emergent behaviours, or formal causes. That's because the connections among the units matter more than the units themselves. [See Warren Weaver, "Science and Complexity," American Scientist, 36:536 (1948)]

All good ideas originate with some small initial group that will not take No for an answer. The trouble is, all bad ideas start the same way.

All of this bodes ill for the long-term survival of the Republic. Tolerance of free speech means tolerating even those calling for the banning of some speech, and tarachódocracy means their views will come to dominate. Such minorities cannot or will not ever concede.

Reference
Rashevsky, Nicholas. Looking at History through Mathematics, The MIT Press  (1968)
Taleb, Nassim Nicholas. "The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dictatorship of the Small Minority,"
 Weaver, Warren. "Science .and Complexity," American Scientist, 36:536 (1948)

The Report from the Imperial Tailor

A morning newsitainment show with pretensions recently "interviewed" the Secretary of Energy over the President's decision to "withdraw" from the Paris Deal. Now, technically the US cannot withdraw because the agreement was never ratified with the advice and consent of the Senate, a requirement of that "scrap of paper" called the Constitution. (This document was once referred to as an "obstacle" to doing what was right by a constitutional law professor named Obama, who later won his way to higher office.) That's why it was called a "Deal" and not a "Treaty." The Constitution does not mention how Deals are to be handled, only how Treaties are to be handled. So, believing in Name-Magic, the handlers deemed that by calling it something else, it would become something else and the US could be committed to it by Executive Order alone. The other term for this sort of ruler is dictator, i.e., "he who dictates."

Now the pearl-clutching that commenced after the announcement of withdrawal was a wonder to behold. The NY Post ran the headline: Trump to World: Drop Dead, as if that would really, truly be the result of withdrawing from the agreement. But maybe not. Even if every jot and tittle of the agreement is carried out, even those things agreed to by China and Russia, the result might be a saving of 0.05°C by the year 2100. And that assumes that the models are correct. They haven't been yet; but who knows?

Anyway, on the TV show, the Sec Energy pointed out that the accord gives China, the world's biggest emitter of carbon (assuming CO2 to be a "pollutant") has promised to do exactly nothing while the US has pledged to reduce "greenhouse gas" emissions by 26-28% below 2005 levels by 2025 -- only 8 years away.  China, whose emissions are already about double those of the US, agrees to no reductions whatsoever, and only to try to reach "peak" emissions by 2030. At this point, the interviewer interrupted to point out that China had pledged to reduce emissions by 60% after 2030. He said this with a straight face, too, as if he believed a) China would follow through on that pledge; b) his network would remember by then to hold them to it; or c) it would be technologically feasible to accomplish. Well, TV personalities are seldom taught to think quantitatively.

Thanks to fracking, the US has already reduced CO2 by 7% below the 2005 baseline, but this success (which actually exceeds the more preening Europeans) frightened the activists so much that they started an anti-fracking campaign. The EPA's Clean Power Plan was to shutter cheap coal power plants and cover the landscape with wind and solar farms.  A version of the strategy that has led Germany to residential electricity prices about triple the U.S. average. This sort of thing can result in the collapse of industries dependent on cheap power: Paper down 12 percent.  Cement down 23 percent.  Iron and steel down 38 per cent.  Coal down 86 percent.

No wonder they wanted China and India to be exempt.

Never fear. California announced they would on their own try to abide by the Paris accords. In fact, in September 2016 California's legislature passed, and Governor Brown signed, SB-32 requiring a reduction of "greenhouse" emissions in California to 40% below 1990 levels by 2030.  That's about 12 1/2 years from now.

Now, California has been pushing to replace fossil fuels (boo) with "renewables" (yay) for 27 years, since 1990, covering the hillsides with wind turbines and the valleys with solar collectors.  So how much of the 40% reduction have they accomplished so far?  California's emissions for the latest year given (2014) were actually marginally above the 1990 level:

Does anyone really think California will accomplish this miracle in the next twelve years that it hasn't touched in the last 27? What will be the next strategy? Threats? Will household electricity become, as it is fast becoming in Germany, a luxury?

And will China, after doubling its emissions between now and 2030 really even try, let alone succeed in doing even more in the sixty years following?

If the Electoral College were abolished

Presidential elections would be decided as below:

Indeed, winning a large majority in CA was enough to secure bragging rights for the "popular vote" in the most recent election. (Outside of CA, the popular vote seems to have been won by the other candidate.) Although, had the election rules specified a simple popular vote, then

1. campaigning in CA and other places would have proceeded very differently, perhaps with different results; and
2. we'd still be going through the nation-wide recount.

(The map is a cartoon and is not to precise scale.)

Everything Old is New Again

The president fired the FBI director a few months after taking office.  (A director appointed, be it noted, by a president of the other party, and still had several years to go in his 10 year term.)  Perhaps the president had some skeletons in his closet that he did not want investigated. The excuse he gave for the firing seemed weak.  Surely, everyone remembers the uproar and outrage that followed  "A coup," said some. "A constitutional crisis!

Or not. The media accepted Clinton's sacking of Sessions in 1993 as being due to misuse of a government airplane (Oh, horrors!) and not due to any investigation creeping near to the Oval Office. Of course not. Alas, Clinton shortly thereafter got Ken Starr as a Special Prosecutor, so firing Sessions did not do him a whole lot of good.

 

Gary Varval in the Washington Times

But what is even more remarkable in the second-time-as-farce repeat of history, many of those now clutching their pearls over the firing of Mr. Comey were among those earlier calling for his sacking! Is a little bit of principled consistency too much to ask for? Granted, it is Washington and neither principles nor consistency are very thick on the ground there; but, still.

TOF feels lonely in stating that Comey was in a no-win situation once he saw the hand grenade roll into his foxhole. If he kept mum about the trove of emails that popped up in another investigation, after he had formally and publicly closed the Clinton email investigation, he would be accused of trying to influence the election by concealing possibly relevant information from the public. What if these were (some of) the missing 30,000 emails that had been subpoenaed and not turned over? OTOH, if he went public, he would be accused of trying to influence the election by keeping the email controversy alive. So he threw himself on the grenade. Keeping silent would have been worse.

David Horsey at the Washington Times

Despite the effort to blame her loss on anything and everything else, where are the post-election polls that show people switching from Clinton to Trump because of the last-minute email kerfuffle? Outside the Beltway and its aficionados, how many people were persuaded by that? Sure, anyone else who had handled classified material so carelessly would have had his security clearance revoked and kept far away from secured servers, and probably escorted from the building with his personal belongings in a box; but the real scandal is less the email contents than it is the privileged treatment of the offender. This, in a year when Privilege was an Issue.

She did not lose the election because the working class voters in the Rust Belt cared a great deal about Insider Football, but because they were worried about jobs and it seemed all she wanted to talk about was who could use which bathroom.

Russia Explained

If every person is the hero of his own story, then every country is the center of the world. Geography is not fate, but it will often do until Fate comes a-knocking on the door, so what does Russia look like when the world is centered on it?

An Archdruid Reports

On a blog called The Archdruid Report by a fellow named John Michael Greer, who styles himself Past Grand Archdruid of the Ancient Order of Druids in America and current head of the Druidical Order of the Golden Dawn -- So druids have grand archdruids. Who knew? -- In any case, he has some interesting comments on the recent presidential elections here in the US of A. (There were 50 of them, you may recall.) He believed the good guys lost and lost for reasons that no one has talked about.

He writes:

The point I think the Left tends to miss is that not everyone in flyover country is like that. A few years back, in fact, a bunch of Klansmen came to the town where I live [an old mill town in Appalachia] to hold a recruitment rally, and the churches in town—white as well as black—held a counter-rally, stood on the other side of the street, and drowned the Klansmen out, singing hymns at the top of their lungs until the guys in the white robes got back in their cars and drove away.  Surprising? Not at all; in a great deal of middle America, that’s par for the course these days.

To understand why a town that ran off the Klan was a forest of Trump signs in the recent election, it’s necessary to get past the stereotypes and ask a simple question: why did people vote for Trump?

The Archdruid goes on to give four reasons, based on things he's heard people say in his presence. 

1. The Risk of War. This was the most common point at issue, especially among women—nearly all the women I know who voted for Trump, in fact, cited it as either the decisive reason for their vote or one of the top two or three. They listened to Hillary Clinton talk about imposing a no-fly zone over Syria in the face of a heavily armed and determined Russian military presence, and looked at the reckless enthusiasm for overthrowing governments she’d displayed during her time as Secretary of State. They compared this to Donald Trump’s advocacy of a less confrontational relationship with Russia, and they decided that Trump was less likely to get the United States into a shooting war.

War isn’t an abstraction here in flyover country. Joining the military is very nearly the only option young people here have if they want a decent income, job training, and the prospect of a college education, and so most families have at least one relative or close friend on active duty.  People here respect the military, but the last two decades of wars of choice in the Middle East have done a remarkably good job of curing middle America of any fondness for military adventurism it might have had.  While affluent feminists swooned over the prospect of a woman taking on another traditionally masculine role, and didn’t seem to care in the least that the role in question was “warmonger,” a great many people in flyover country weighed the other issues against the prospect of having a family member come home in a body bag. Since the Clinton campaign did precisely nothing to reassure them on this point, they voted for Trump.

2. The Obamacare Disaster. This was nearly as influential as Clinton’s reckless militarism. Most of the people I know who voted for Trump make too much money to qualify for a significant federal subsidy, and too little to be able to cover the endlessly rising cost of insurance under the absurdly misnamed “Affordable Care Act.” They recalled, rather too clearly for the electoral prospects of the Democrats, how Obama assured them that the price of health insurance would go down, that they would be able to keep their existing plans and doctors, and so on through all the other broken promises that surrounded Obamacare before it took effect.

It was bad enough that so few of those promises were kept. The real deal-breaker, though, was the last round of double- or triple-digit annual increase in premiums announced this November, on top of increases nearly as drastic a year previously. Even among those who could still afford the new premiums, the writing was on the wall: sooner or later, unless something changed, a lot of people were going to have to choose between losing their health care and being driven into destitution—and then there were the pundits who insisted that everything would be fine, if only the penalties for not getting insurance were raised to equal the cost of insurance! Faced with that, it’s not surprising that a great many people went out and voted for the one candidate who said he’d get rid of Obamacare.

3. Bringing Back Jobs. This is the most difficult one for a lot of people on the Left to grasp, but that’s a measure of the gap between the bicoastal enclaves where the Left’s policies are formed and the hard realities of flyover country. Globalization and open borders sound great when you don’t have to grapple with the economic consequences of shipping tens of millions of manufacturing jobs overseas, on the one hand, and federal policies that flood the labor market with illegal immigrants to drive down wages, on the other. Those two policies, backed by both parties and surrounded by a smokescreen of empty rhetoric about new jobs that somehow never managed to show up, brought about the economic collapse of rural and small town America, driving a vast number of Americans into destitution and misery.

Clinton’s campaign did a really inspired job of rehashing every detail of the empty rhetoric just mentioned, and so gave people out here in flyover country no reason to expect anything but more of the same downward pressure on their incomes, their access to jobs, and the survival of their communities. Trump, by contrast, promised to scrap or renegotiate the trade agreements that played so large a role in encouraging offshoring of jobs, and also promised to put an end to the tacit Federal encouragement of mass illegal immigration that’s driven down wages. That was enough to get a good many voters whose economic survival was on the line to cast their votes for Trump.

4. Punishing the Democratic Party. This one is a bit of an outlier, because the people I know who cast votes for Trump for this reason mostly represented a different demographic from the norm out here: young, politically liberal, and incensed by the way that the Democratic National Committee rigged the nomination process to favor Clinton and shut out Bernie Sanders. They believed that if the campaign for the Democratic nomination had been conducted fairly, Sanders would have been the nominee, and they also believe that Sanders would have stomped Trump in the general election.  For what it’s worth, I think they’re right on both counts.

These voters pointed out to me, often with some heat, that the policies Hillary Clinton supported in her time as senator and secretary of state were all but indistinguishable from those of George W. Bush—you know, the policies Democrats denounced so forcefully a little more than eight years ago.  They argued that voting for Clinton in the general election when she’d been rammed down the throats of the Democratic rank and file by the party’s oligarchy would have signaled the final collapse of the party’s progressive wing into irrelevance. They were willing to accept four years of a Republican in the White House to make it brutally clear to the party hierarchy that the shenanigans that handed the nomination to Clinton were more than they were willing to tolerate.

Item #4 may be why the results were more due to lower Democratic turnout than it was for higher Republican turnout -- although Mrs. Clinton's utter lack of charisma may also have been a factor in that. 

A close attention to #3 as well may reveal that opposition to illegal immigration was less a matter of xenophobia or racism than an objection to corporations importing cheap labor to drive down wages. Bipartisan support for trade deals may also explain why Trump spent most of his time attacking and demolishing the conservative wing of the Republican party with apparently no ill effect on his support. They disliked the Republican establishment nearly as much as they did the Democratic establishment.

#1 and #2 were scarcely mentioned at all by the punditry. Hunh. But you might notice that the reasons the Archdruid heard bruited about amounted to the Old Democratic Platform and as the industrial belt had become the rust belt, the core of the Party has become disaffected. The Father of TOF told him once that he had voted for the first time for Franklin Delano Roosevelt and if they were to disinter him and reanimate his corpse, he would vote for him again. But in recent years he had voted for the likes of Reagan and Romney because they actually sounded to him more like the old Democrats than modern Democrats did.

The Archdruid continued:

Those were the reasons I heard people mention when they talked in my hearing about why they were voting for Donald Trump. They didn’t talk about the issues that the media considered important—the email server business, the on-again-off-again FBI investigation, and so on. Again, this isn’t a scientific survey, but I found it interesting that not one Trump voter I knew mentioned those.

What’s more, hatred toward women, people of color, sexual minorities, and the like weren’t among the reasons that people cited for voting for Trump, either. 

The media seemed unable to grasp this and continued to interpret matters in terms of their favored paradigms, as in the bed of Procrustes. But the same set of facts can mean very different things when viewed from the perspective of different theories.

Example: The media recently reported as if it were a contradiction (or "controversy," as they are wont to put it) the statement of Trump that he saw no evidence that the Russians had interfered in the US election and the CIA's conclusion that Russia had released the DNC and Clinton Campaign emails in order to encourage the election of Trump.* But if the vast majority of Trump supporters really didn't care about the emails, but were more concerned about Mrs. Clinton's bellicose posturing over Syria, triple-digit increases in health care costs, job loss, or (among disaffected Democrats) the suppression of the Bern, then both could be correct because Mr. Trump and the CIA were actually speaking to two different issues: Yes, the Russians were messing around; no, it didn't affect the election.  

Basically, most voters other than the extremes didn't care about the issues that the elites thought were central -- boutique concerns, let us call them -- but more about bread and butter issues.
__________________________________
(*) CIA. Just this morning, TOF heard to his astonishment, the mainstream media rush to the defense of the CIA after Trump had badmouthed them for being wrong about Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq (so why believe them over Russian hacking?) Who are you? he asked the screen, and what have you done with the real NBC? A day or two before he had heard the media defend big corporations against Trumpean tweets accusing them of overcharging the government or putting profits over jobs. (This could affect your 401(k) plans. Yes, yours!) No one warned us of this possibility when investigative reporters accused corporations of overcharging, nor worried overmuch when the Usual Suspects accused the CIA of masterminding All the Evils in the World. Have we fallen into Bizarro World?

The Magic of Donald Trump

He has succeeded in getting NBC and the Democratic Party to leap to defend the honor of big corporations, job loss, and overcharging on government contracts.

It's Never as Bad as Some People Think

Never believe your own propaganda. The opponent may not
be what you imagine her to be.

Never blame on malevolence what can be adequately explained by "the arrogance of complacent incompetence." One of the problems with having the media in the tank for you is that you never get the hardball questions and you come to accept the rosy picture of adulation and worshipful inevitability they present. Brandon Watson at the philosophy blog, Siris, tells us:

Let us be quite clear from the beginning: The Democratic Party deliberately nominated a candidate who was undergoing federal investigation for matters under national security law, and who was associated with a charity, the Clinton Foundation, that was also under federal investigation. The Clinton campaign actively worked to make sure that Donald Trump would get the Republican nomination and be on the ballot. Clinton then ran a campaign heavily governed by an algorithm. In the meantime, both the campaign and the party failed to make any serious attempt to re-integrate Sanders supporters, despite their vehement complaints about her tactics during the primary campaign. The campaign repeatedly assumed that it could turn out blacks and Latinos in the neighborhood of Obama's turnout while doing almost nothing specific to help local groups make it happen; and she passed over several Latinos to pick as her running mate the weak and barely helpful Tim Kaine. They did next to nothing shoring up the Democratic Party in Wisconsin despite the fact that it was known that the state party there was in disarray, and despite warnings that the entire Rust Belt was in imminent danger of being captured. One could make the list much, much longer. If one wishes to find something to blame for the rise of Donald Trump, one need not look beyond a campaign whose chief characteristic was the arrogance of complacent incompetence.

Both the winners and the losers in the recent presidential election have been talking as if there had been some enormous swing in the country; but the electorate was, by and large, the same electorate that had elected Barack Obama in two previous elections. They were not suddenly spirited away by the Flying Saucers and replaced by pod people.

Photograph circulated by Hilary Clinton staffers in early 2008.

Generally speaking, half the electorate prefers blueberries and half, strawberries; that is, half blue, half red, and has done so for a long time. In various elections, more of one faction turn out at the polls or more of the other; but it's been a coin toss for several election cycles now. No one is entitled to crow, "I won, you lost; deal with it," as B. Obama was said to have said.

Never believe your own propaganda. The opponent may not
be what you imagine him to be.

In the most recent election, 107,000 people in three states decided the election. Trump won the popular votes in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania by that combined amount, securing a collective 46 electoral votes. Had Clinton shifted this relative handful of voters, she would have sealed the presidency with 274 total electoral votes.

The Glass Ceiling

Everyone was expecting an historic breakthrough in elective the Nation's First Woman President. Because of this, many folks were looking past the election itself to the big party afterward. This is always a mistake. When you are driving down a highway, it is best to keep your eye on the road ahead and not think of all the fun you'll have when you get home.

But in the general caterwauling that ensued afterwards

or celebration

what was overlooked was that the glass ceiling had indeed been shattered. Never again will a serious woman candidate for president be overlooked or marginalized solely on the basis of her sex. Mrs. Clinton accomplished that, even if she did not win, and we ought to tip our hat to her for that.

The Electoral College

Naturally, in any election this close, the loser always calls for elimination of the Electoral College. It is, we are assured, an anachronism. But some years back, when it appeared as if George W. Bush would win the popular vote total but Al Gore would secure an electoral majority, Mr. Gore took to the waves to declare that the rules were set and we had to abide by them. In the end, so razor-thin was the election that it turned out that Gore had more popular votes and Bush more electoral votes. But Mr. Gore stuck to his principles and graciously conceded.

Ho, ho! TOF jests. Gore did a 180 so fast he could dispense with chiropractors for the next 25 years. Instead, he contested the election, fantasized about "butterfly" ballots, and brought suit demanding selective recounts in those FL counties where Democratic votes might yet be discovered behind potted plants or under the bed. Alas, with each recount, Bush's margin in the Sunshine State grew.

Abolishing the Electoral College is effectively a desire to be ruled by California.

In the popular vote, Mrs. Clinton received a nationwide margin of 1,341,642 votes, but in California, her margin was 3,168,486 votes. This means that in the rest of the country outside California, Trump had a majority of 1,826,844 popular votes. Similar, though not identical figures are here.

2016 Election map, adjusted for electoral vote

The increasing use of vote-by-mail, early voting, late voting, absentee voting, and so on, means a lot more paper ballots and so a lot less automatic tabulation.

As of November 11, according to the state’s updated “Estimated Unprocessed Ballots” report, more than one million ballots were as yet uncounted in Los Angeles County. Two days later, San Diego County reported that it has more than 600,000 ballots to count. 

The opportunities to discover previously unknown buckets of ballots are obvious. And a national popular vote would increase the incentives to do so. Presently, once a state is won, there is no benefit to be had from discovering new ballots under your hat or in the trunk of your car.

So the Electoral College is a way to force candidates to pay at least some attention to wider regions of the country rather than to concentrate only on areas of high population density.

Besides, how can you add up all the popular votes? Each state has its own rules for collecting and counting votes. Take felons. In Maine and Vermont, felons never lose their right to vote, even while incarcerated. In Florida, Iowa and Virginia, felons and ex-felons permanently lose their right to vote. Virginia and Florida have supplementary programs which facilitate gubernatorial pardons. In other states, ex-felons automatically gain the right to vote upon completion of their sentence, or they must wait for a certain period of time after the completion of their sentence before rights can be restored, and in some states, an ex-felon must apply to have voting rights restored. There are also differences based on 1st time vs. repeat offenders, nature of offense, etc. In Maryland, voting rights are restored automatically at completion of sentence, unless the conviction was for buying or selling votes, in which case voting rights can only be restored through executive pardon.

So the popular votes in these states cannot be added into a "national total" because they are not based on the same definition of "eligible voter." There are a number of other items like residency requirements, citizenship, and so on, some of which may vary also from state to state or may not be verified in some states.

In addition to defining an "eligible voter," there are also operational definitions regarding a "valid ballot." Does anyone remember the hanging chads? Counting paper ballots differs from machine tabulations, from computerized balloting, from punch-card readers, and so on. Each method has its own characteristic error rates, or "capability" and makes it problematical to compare or add the returns from different states.

"You don't like a particular policy or a particular president? Then argue for your position. Go out there and win an election. Push to change it. But don't break it. Don't break what our predecessors spent over two centuries building. That's not being faithful to what this country's about."

-- Barack H. Obama

The Election Explained

Click the map to create your own at 270toWin.com

Years ago, Pauline Kael, a TV critic, expressed amazement that R. Nixon had won the election by famously saying, "But no one I know voted for him!" A similar cri du coeur from the bubble was heard a few days ago from the punditry. The polls had all been solidly for Mrs. Clinton. How could this outcome have been possible? Everybody they talked to....

The dirty little secret of polling, as Zogby once called it, is non-response. The polls did not, indeed could not, take into account the preferences of people who refused to answer the questions. Nor could they account for those who lied. 

Perceptive Reader will note that the states in blue represent where the Pundits live or play. New York/DC, Chicago, and LA/SF plus their playgrounds in Maui, Taos and Vail. (MN is the stronghold of the Democratic Farmer-Labor Party.) So being immersed, so to speak, in the water of their own milieu, they became through confirmation bias oddly unable to perceive the amphibians around them.

The county-by-county results: 

which curiously resembles this map:

IOW, the most highly populated areas voted blue -- and these were about half the country.

The Economist writes: "American politics appear to be realigning along a cleavage between inward-looking countryfolk and urban globalists." (That is, between the farmers who sell their grain to Russia and the city dwellers who seldom venture far from their apartments?) They call Trump "a uniquely divisive candidate" as if Clinton were not also divisive. But they make a curious remark that reminds us that "only Nixon could go to China." They say that Trump, being himself an urban sophisticate who has aimed his appeal at country and small town people, "he is both perhaps the least likely politician in the country to build bridges across that gap and also the only one who has the capacity to do so."


The reason was not some imaginary swing toward Trump. The people in these states, by and large, are the same people who were living there four years ago when they elected Obama. They did not change suddenly from Enlightened to Deplorable. It was more like a swing away from Clinton. Both candidates were very unpopular, and the turnout this year was the lowest in twenty years. Only 57% of registered voters cast a ballot and in 14 states more did so for "down ballot" races than for president. But while Trump received only 1% more white votes than Romney, Clinton scored significantly less well than Obama among blacks and Hispanics. She swept Philadelphia like a tsunami, but not by as wide a margin as Obama had in the previous two elections. Trump did better among Hispanics than Romney had when all the theory in the world said he should have done zilch. This has already led to dark e-mutterings about the election being "stolen." (This, from people who had grumbled when Trump yanked their chain by being coy about accepting the results of the election.) And the riots and damage to property of innocent bystanders are being wrought by people who were predicting that very behavior from the Deplorables once Hillary had won her famous victory.

NYTimes exit polling.

Even among women, who were supposed to vote the strong, independent woman who is her Own Person set to Make History by Breaking the Ultimate Glass Ceiling, only 54% of women voting did so. And 42% voted for the Vile Lecher Trump. This is similar to the breakdown in previous elections: 55%-44% (Obama-Romney) 56%-43% (Obama-McCain). That is, Hillary received a smaller share of the women's vote than her predecessor.(Though, knowing how little a few percentage points mean in polling, this is probably a permanent blue-red split, independent of the candidates; and it might could be that women make voting decisions the same as men: based on issues and interests.

Were TOF Emperor of the World, he would issue a decree that no one can babble about mandates or political revolutions when all that has happened is that a few thousand votes have gone one way rather than the other. In a democracy, that's supposed to happen now and then. Governing is not an entitlement. Neither are the interests of a constituency necessarily best served by this policy rather than that policy. The margins in this election (as in others recently) was razor-thin and had a few more people come out to the polls here or there, it could easily have gone another way. Ninety million people did not vote this year, more than enough to swing the election either way.

So before we crow about "winning" this state or "losing" that, stop and ask, "By how much?" The last time I looked at New Hampshire on Election Night, the margin was 19 votes. Margins were correspondingly narrow (relative to population) in Minn., Wisc. Penna., and other states. Sure, in the end each wound up as Blue or Red. That's the purpose of the Electoral College system. But when Obama said eight years ago that because "We Won," he could freeze the Republicans out of the process of reforming the health care system [and thereby come up with the kludge that was implemented piecemeal so that its impact was not felt until just recently and thus cost Clinton the election] he was trying to pretend that his narrow margin of victory meant he had a Mandate. It did not. It meant the American people had hired him to manage the executive branch for the next four years, with an option for renewal.

TOF's Fearless Predictions. 

None of the hysterical imaginings giving people the vapors and driving them to clutch their pearls is going to materialize. It's always a mistake, Heinlein once said, to believe your own propaganda. That's even more foolish than believing your opponent's propaganda. The author of The Art of the Deal knows that you always start your negotiations from your most extreme position and then bargain toward something both sides can live with. There won't be any mass deportations, for example. The American people don't like illegal immigration, but it's the illegal part they don't like. When the process is unregulated bad stuff can happen. Obamacare won't be completely repealed, but those parts of the kludge that were necessary and useful will be kept. (Portability, for example; coverage of college-age children.) Other aspects will need closer inspection. (Coverage of pre-existing conditions is popular, but this is precisely what's driving the prices up, because young, healthy people are smart enough to pay the fine and only buy the policy when they do fall sick. Read Shaw's "The Vice of Gambling and the Virtue of Insurance" for insight on why insurance pools work.) Don't expect the Wall of Trump along the border; but expect that the existing walls will be improved and maintained. Maybe even enforcement of existing laws against employers. But a better and more open process for immigration is possible. Don't expect prohibitive tariffs on US companies importing goods they have manufactured in China or Bangladesh. Bringing manufacturing home is a good idea, but it will make products a great deal more expensive for Americans and almost impossible to sell overseas.

TOF and the Ballot

Today was Election Day, when we celebrate puny particles with negative charges whizzing around in a cloud of quantum uncertainty about a nucleus of massive, positive particles bulked up with neutral particles of no charge, or bureaucrats. Unless they are waves.

No, wait. Elections, not Electrons. Sorry.

Heeding the old Chicago adage to Vote Early and Often, the sundry strongholds of Clan na Fhloinn struggled into action as Rosy-fingered Dawn diddled us this morning with the most remarkable choice since the Crook vs. the Naïf, back in 1972.

The American People want to know if their President is a Crook, the Crook once declared, and assured us the he was not with all the sincerity that a later president would assure us that he did not have sexual relations with that young woman. At least that later president had had the perspicacity not to discuss the matter on tape.

Speaking of which, this video refers to an earlier campaign that we would now like to think was more genteel.

Early this morning, Daughter of TOF (DOTOF) texted the Incomparable Marge saying that she might need a ride to work because the line at the polling place was longer than a TOFian reminiscence. Apparently Granddaughter of TOF (SAMBBITU) was still nursing a hurt over the Bern and his endorsement of the Wall Street toady vis a vis the Wall Street toad and intended to sit this one out. Who knows. She still has to EOB today to change her mind. There ought to be a ballot choice labeled "I abstain" to distinguish such voters from those who simply forgot or didn't care.

In any case, DOTOF got through the line faster than the Incomparable Marge got out the door, so that at least we were spared. But when we got to the South Side Neighborhood Center, the throbbing heart of democracy on the cliffs above the Lehigh, we found the parking lot parked up. (It was nice to see something knew what it was supposed to do.) And the streets around the Center, too.

The path from the parking lot was lined with campaign sign, which someone had taken the trouble to arrange with Democrats to the left and Republicans to the Right. TOF wondered if these signs have ever changed anyone's mind as he or she walked to the polling place. 

The path to the door in the rear of the Center, where the voting traditionally takes place, was newly paved and widened; and a good thing, too, since the line was out the door and along the path. Nor did it get any shorter. As people did their business and departed, others came to take their place.

A front loader rolled past and dumped a load of dirt onto a pile. TOF believed this to be a post-modern commentary on the entire election, perhaps an "installation" of "performance" "art."

There was a millennial fellow ahead of TOF who wore, backward in the approved style, a baseball hat admonishing America to get great again. Behind TOF, was a burly fellow with a gray-white Santa Claus beard wore a similar hat celebrating the 82nd Airborne. His jacket, from which both sleeves had been ripped, exposed a tattoo of the shoulder patch of the 82nd permanently etched just where it should have been. By this, TOF understood he took some pride in his service.

There were others in line or emerging from the building. A white guy in a mechanic's uniform and the logo of a trucking company; a black guy in similar garb. An Indian couple elegantly dressed in kurta and pyjama with a look of pride and satisfaction on their faces. An elderly black woman walking with the aid of a cane -- tottering, really -- was escorted past everyone else. When they reached the millennial in the Trump cap, he stepped back and graciously let her pass.

Inside the Center, the line snaked past the Books and zig-zagged to the booths. The procedure hereabouts is that you print your name on a slip of paper in the indicated boxes and present it to the first person. She records you in a registration book and writes a voter number on the slip. TOF was the 353rd voter in the ward to have entered today. The Judge of the Election mentioned to the waiting voters that the number so far entered exceeded the grand total of all voters who had showed up for the primaries earlier in the year. TOF suspects it exceeded the total in previous general elections, since the clerks of the Election commented that never had they seen so many voters, ever.

At the next book, the clerk checked the name against the voter registration list and TOF countersigned by his name. He noted that his aged father had already voted. One woman kept trying to show her driver's license but the clerk insisted she did not need to see it. But I have to show this to do just about anything else. Another woman was voting for the first time and was receiving instruction on how to use the 'touch screen' equipment. A third woman could not be found in the Register and had to pass over to another table. She, TOF overheard, was in the wrong place. Her ward, which had previously voted at the old junior high was now shifted to the elementary school. This had happened since the previous general election, two years ago. They made sure she knew where the elementary school was and she left.

This explains why the Incomparable Marge was assigned a lower number than TOF. Such names had been whited out in the numerical list, and they must leave no blanks. 

In addition to the clerk who was resetting the machines after each voter, there was a Pennsylvania Constable standing by and assisting. Neither city police, county deputies, nor state troopers, the Constables are a group perhaps unique to the Commonwealth: elected peace officers. Constables are charged by Pennsylvania statute with maintaining order at election polls and ensuring that no qualified elector is obstructed from voting.  Constables are the only peace officers permitted at the polls on Election Day.  In fact this duty is mandated upon constables; failure to protect the polls, or provide for their protection through appointed deputies, is punishable with a fine.  





As each voter left the booth, he or she was thanked by the Judge of the Election, by the Constable, or other official. There were stickers one could take and wear proclaiming I VOTED. (Back in colonial days, the county clerk would announce in a loud voice, "(NAME) HAS VOTED!" Voting was a communal activity hard to capture in vote-by-mail.)


All told, the degree of amiable and neighborly behavior was a marked contrast to the ugly behavior of those at the heads of the two main tickets. The American people, TOF is convinced, are better than their leaders.

In addition to the Harpy and the Narcissist, the ballot featured a few other candidates: the Libertarian, Green, and Constitution parties and Write-In. Colorado, by contrast, has 22 different candidates. The Libertarian, Gary Johnson, is delightfully clueless. When asked to name his favorite foreign leader, he drew a blank. But asking a libertarian to name his favorite foreign leader is like asking a vegan to name his favorite cut of steak. He also apparently failed to recognize Aleppo, perhaps because he regarded foreign entanglements as none of our business. Still, one ought at least recognize what's going down in the world.

Of the Green candidate, neither her hide nor her hair has been seen on the news. Perhaps there is fear that she might become the Ralph Nader of 2016 and pull votes away from the Media Fave.

There seems to be a significant chance that Utah's electoral votes may go to an Independent Candidate. Evan McMullen has been consistently outpolling Clinton and runs neck-and-neck with Trump.

Meanwhile, back in the Commonwealth.

In the 2012 election, the three Pennsylvanias are relatively clear. The Democrats own Philadelphia (the deep blue county in the lower right) and the Main Line. They also have a stronghold in Pittsburgh (the lighter blue on the left, center). The difference is that Philadelphia and the Main Line are socially liberal while Pittsburgh is old style blue-collar union people who are more interested in economic issues than in, say, social engineering. More often than not, they "cling to their guns and bibles," as Obama put it. The other blue outposts are former manufacturing centers like Erie, W/B-Scranton and the Lehigh Valley (who are more attuned with Pittsburgh) and University (Centre County, in the center) and Government (Dauphin County: Harrisburg, the State Capitol). These are more aligned with Philadelphia. Lately, the lighter blue areas have been experiencing a red shift.

Philadelphia is the key. It is a significant percentage of the total voting population and went for Obama 85-14%. Obama's vote in Philadelphia was 10% of all votes cast in PA that year; so the question is whether Ms Clinton can pull off the same kind of margin this year. The most recent string of polls show her leading, but by very small margins within the bounds of sampling error (assuming no effect from non-response and other non-random factors).

I see the media have already started declaring winners in a few states. Good thing we have them or we'd have to wait for someone to actually count the ballots. Good thing they would never shade their projections.