The Russia Thing

I don't think I've addressed The Russia Thing more than peripherally on this site. It always struck me as stupid to be blunt about it. Russians certainly had a hand in shaping some opinions about candidates in the 2016 election, particularly Hillary, but so what? So did a lot of other interests, national and corporate, and it shouldn't matter in the larger scheme of things that Russia and Russians were also involved. That's part of the political game in this country and it has been as long as I've been alive. And no doubt it has been true as long as the US has been a nation.

When you look at it from a historical perspective, the focus on Russia's involvement to the exclusion of just about every other national and corporate involvement is distinctly odd. Not only were they not the only ones attempting to gain advantage from the election (of Trump, but it's more complex than that), they weren't necessarily the main foreign interest in the outcome of the election. Oh no, far from it.

But in order to understand what happened, we need to understand what was going on. Trump wasn't expected to win. Not even he expected to win. The outcome was a surprise and a shock to the entire electoral system including the funders, media, and candidates. The voters were largely appalled. How did this happen?

It's not easy to sort out what was happening that led to such an unexpected outcome, but among the things I was aware of was a very concerted online effort to influence the influencers. This is tricky; it isn't self evident that influencing the influencers had much of an effect, but I think it did.

"Stop Hillary" was a really big thing online. Bernie was the great white hope, but he failed miserably. Whether or not he was robbed by the DNC and Hillary's partisans is a question I choose not to get into. I'll just say from personal knowledge that the Democratic Party apparatus is tailor made for selected outcomes, and there isn't a whole lot insurgents (or Bernie) can do about it. In a lot of ways, the Party has fossilized around a set of rules and requirements that almost always ensure that a selected candidate achieves the presidential nomination, no matter what. And who does the selection? A committee of old timers, in effect a Politburo. Hillary was the foregone nominee, despite the fact that she was opposed a large minority of party voters. Realistically, so was Bernie. If they'd had their druthers, I'm not sure who the Democratic primary voters would have chosen. The problem was that none of the 2016 primary candidates really represented the interests of a majority of the party's voters. The factional split between Hillary partisans and Bernie partisans was unbridgeable. The Party apparat went with Hillary and the rest is history.

The factional split left a wide opening for "influencers" to do their thing, and I saw it happening in real time online.  Of course it had happened before, but not to the extent I was witnessing during the 2016 election. What I saw was a relatively limited anti-Hillary drumbeat -- from somewhere, initially I thought domestic, but it turned out to be generated in Eastern Europe, with a source apparently in Russia -- hammering away at her many flaws and being picked up and amplified by all kinds of online sites and eventually by the mass media. I noticed it seemed to start with apparent Bernie partisans, particularly the canard that Hillary was going to start WWIII -- which to this day is repeated as an article of faith.

I say "apparent Bernie partisans" because I don't think they really were. I think they were using Bernie's campaign as a launch pad, but they had no interest in his winning the nomination or the election. They wanted to stop Hillary. Whatever it took to do so.

When I started seeing "Macedonian teenager" memes showing up on a number of supposedly "progressive" sites, and not long after that in the mass media, I really questioned what was going on. Obviously these kids in Macedonia (which was initially where these memes were thought to be coming from) had a more or less direct line to the internet backchannels which in turn led directly to mass media backchannels. And then right out to the public.

It wasn't just the "$100,000 in Facebook ads" that the St. Petersburg Internet Research Agency purchased. Oh my no. Those ads probably had no effect at all. What was having an effect was the meme generators, wherever they were located, trouncing Hillary for "starting WWIII", for Libya, for Syria, for Iraq, for "super predators," for her devotion to neo-liberalism, for her supposed illnesses, for Bengazi, for those damned emails, etc.

Here's the thing. It wasn't coming from the Trump campaign (which was just riding a little bitty wave), and it wasn't coming from the Bernie campaign, either. There had to be some other source. It was relentless and repetitious to the point of complete predictability.

Hillary, the Arch-Bitch, had to be stopped at any cost.

By whom? Why? I think those questions are yet to be answered. "Russia" is not the Answer, though it may be part of it.

Trump of course benefited from an enormous amount of free publicity, but it was widely thought that was OK because he would come across so badly. That kind of thinking was critically in error, but it seems to have been the underlying thought process of those who were giving him so much free airtime.

On the other hand, Hillary was given no quarter, she was criticized relentlessly for everything, and she got much less airtime, even as she spent wildly to buy ads and positive coverage -- or any coverage. She was thought to be the uncatchable frontrunner. Trump was being boosted to make it a horserace, but Hillary was going to win, hands down. Everyone was certain of it. Absolutely certain.

And yet she didn't. What happened? Officially, what happened was that less than 80,000 votes in three states meant that Trump won the Electoral College while Hillary won millions more popular votes. Yet again, the Electoral College handed the presidency to the candidate with fewer popular votes.

Among the factors that led to that outcome were voter suppression in Wisconsin and Michigan, to the tune of several hundred thousand eligible voters who either not permitted to vote or whose votes weren't counted. Pennsylvania had some very hinky voting machines that could not be audited. A recount was tried in all three states, and it was shown to be impossible. Jurisdictions refused to cooperate, machines could not be audited, votes could not be verified; in some cases there were no paper trails or any trail at all. You had to take the results on faith because there was no way to verify the counts.

Then there was the issue of "interference." Prior to the election we were told that the Intelligence Community and DHS would be closely monitoring the election for any "interference." Uh oh. To me, that meant they intended to interfere. I wouldn't put it past them. They could certainly do it. As I pondered that possibility, it occurred to me that a faction of those entities would very much prefer a jocular, macho racist idiot in the White House to Hillary, no matter what we might think. Indeed, there was an obviously strong anti-Hillary streak among the macho agencies, plain as day. Particularly true of DHS, but I wouldn't say that the other three letter agencies were much in favor of her. If they were going to monitor, there would be little or nothing to prevent them from jiggering the results themselves if they wanted to.

And when the tiny number of votes in three states made the ultimate difference, I nodded sagely. When it proved impossible to fully recount or verify those votes, I figured it was obvious.

But my thinking about it is distinctly in the minority.

"Russia!" was announced as the culprit. OK. Russia and Russians did do things, yes, and Trump is in thick with Russians and (especially) Russian money, things that were almost never mentioned during the campaign. But did Russia cause Trump's success? Uh, no.

No, what was happening was much more complex. What Russians and Israelis and many other foreign interests were doing -- and are still doing as far as I can tell -- is using every tactic they can to influence the influencers, hoping to set public policy in the US favorable to themselves. The people -- we -- have almost nothing to do with it.

And I suspect the focus on Russia! is part of an influence campaign itself.

We've been in a very decadent phase of the Republic, and realistically, we're near the endgame. Trump won't be Emperor, any more than Julius Caesar was. But his successor likely will be. The Republic will become extinct. And you know what? Most people will say "Good riddance."

On the Refusal to Stop Being Distracted

For some it's football; for some it's Facebook and Twitter; for me I suppose it's nostalgia and learning something about my ancestry.

These are distractions from The Other Things we're told are Very Important and To Be Feared. Media outlets compete with one another to generate the highest level of fear among the Rabble they can, and apparently one of the focuses of Fear, Fear, Fear is the Russian Thing (whatever it may be) and Putin-the-Devil.

Oh my goodness. I am all atremble.

I can't even count the number of years ago it became apparent to me that Our Dauntless/Faultless Media engages in Deliberate Fear Campaigns over anything at all (including Foreign Devils) on a regular basis, the point of which is to get the Rabble all hopped up about something and buying things -- including repeat doses of media propaganda -- to salve their Fear. You go back in media history, and fearmongering over just about anything at all has been a constant throughout that history. So has propaganda on behalf of government and propaganda against the ruling party in favor of the other party. Conspiracy theories have been rampant in the mainstream and the fringe media. As bad as it is now, it's been worse in the past.

All the agitation against it has done nothing to change it. We must come to the recognition, then, that Our Media, for all its good points and for all its ills, has never been the paragon we are expecting it to be. The media's function, for the most part, is to distract the Rabble from what's important.

What's important is the way government and finance capital collude to rob and exploit the people and suppress dissent and revolt in order to continue robbing, exploiting and destroying for profit.

What's important is that elections in the US -- as well as many foreign lands -- are farces. The pageants result in outcomes that the Rabble must accept on faith alone because there is no way on earth to verify the vote. It is what we're told it is, with no way at all to review and confirm that the tallies actually record the vote as cast by those who  are permitted to cast votes.

What's important is that the pace of climate change appears to be accelerating and our rulers have made no preparations for the well-being of the Rabble -- and don't appear to care what happens to them anyway.

What's important is that our warriors continue to expand their reach and continue precipitating calamity and chaos without end.

What's important is that our rulers rule contemptuously and contrary to the interests and will of the People, and they believe there is nothing the People can or will do that they need pay attention to.

What's important is that 2016 was the turning point whether anybody likes it or not, and it's now or never. Change for the better will come -- or it's not coming, and we may as well lie down and die.

If we are to be saved, it will be up to us to do it; no Savior is on the horizon.

I've said that "non-cooperation" is the key to changing things. Don't go along with the Fear, don't go along with what we're told to do, don't go along with what we're told is true.

Starting with the election outcome.

As I've said many times, the vote and the outcome cannot be verified. We have to take it on faith alone. I for one refuse. Everyone should. Refusing to accept the outcome, denying its legitimacy is the first step to undermining the legitimacy of the whole enterprise our rulers have been engaged in. Denying the legitimacy of the election delegitimizes not just the presidency but the congress, courts, state houses and even local governments. The whole rotten apparatus of rule starts to crumble.

The people don't have to engage in violent uprisings -- though I expect that will happen in some areas under some circumstances. There may be no way to prevent it. On the other hand, simply refusing to be distracted from what's important and sustaining that refusal can have powerful effects far beyond what's immediately apparent.

This year things will change for many millions of Americans and people around the world. We can't stop it, but we can affect what changes and how that change occurs.

We can-- and must -- make a difference.



Looking Back on 2016 -- Heightening the Contradictions

So far, this has been a winter without winter where we live. I'm writing at around 2 am on what should be a cold winter's night, but the outside temp is nearly 40, and there's been some rain. Rain. In late December, early January. In Central New Mexico, rather high in the mountains. While it's not unheard of -- little is -- it's not at all normal.

2016 was like that. Different yet much the same, and not at all normal.

In January, I started having severe symptoms of what turned out to be rheumatioid arthritis. Diagnosis was complicated by the onset of pneumonia. Looking back, I realize what a mess I must have been. I didn't know it at the time, but that's kind of how it goes. When I'm ill, I rarely realize how bad it is -- or if it is bad at all -- and as a rule I wait too long for treatment. In this case, the situation was complicated by multiple conditions needing treatment and by my own cussedness and contrariness.

I think all of that has influenced the way I look at what else happened last year.

"Ché What You Call Your Pasa" started as a political commentary blog back in 2007, and that's what it primarily still is though now mixed quite a bit with personal recollections, ancestry research, nostalgia, local interests, and my obsession with houses. Still the political nonsense of Our Betters and the resistance to their machinations provide the scaffold on which hang whatever insight I may have about what''s going on in the USofA and the world.

What a mess indeed.

Throughout the past many years, I've been highly critical of the policies of the White House occupants and the carefully engineered Congressional majority. I've run the electoral process in this country through multiple wringers. The courts have been subject to intense criticism, particularly the utter lawlessness that seems to have infected the judiciary at every level.

I've been a critic of much of the standard internet criticism of the Way Things Are and How Bad Our Rulers Are. This has been going on since before there was an internet, in much the same way, with the same concepts and criticisms repeated ad nauseum, and nothing (much) gets better. We are always just "starting" to see or believe something that is generally self-evident; the Empire is always on the verge of collapse; blamecasting and scapegoating for failures is a constant; but failures themselves are only steps on the way to ultimate victory. More than anything, the Democrat (sic) Party must be destroyed; the Republicans are generally blameless because they (at least) "tell the truth;" liberty means private sector or even individual ability to impose authority without government interference.

On the internet it's taken as axiomatic that the Clintons ("Clintoons!!") are the source of all corruption and evil.

The Democrats in Congress are worthless.

The media is little more than propaganda for one side or the other.

There aren't really two "sides" anyway. There's only one side with two faces.

Obama is a buffoon. So was Bush. So was Clinton.

In fact no White House occupant since FDR, and maybe not since Lincoln or Washington, has been worthy of the office.

The voters are ill-equipped to make a rational choice for President, thus the mess we're in.

Yadda yadda.

While some of this is rhetoric and cant, some is true enough. The problem is that nothing (much) changes for the better. It just keeps getting worse, no matter what.

Underlying it is the wish for a Savior to fix things once and for all. With the (apparent) election of Trump, much as was the case with the election of Obama, at least some Americans feel the Savior has Come.

Of course, I reject the very idea. Presidents have a particular role to play in the Pageant, but Savior is not one of them -- except among true believers whose touching faith is at the root of both major party's base.

So we've gone through a year of chaos, contradiction, bizarre obsessions, denial, and political theater such as has not been seen in this way previously. Much of the internet seems to feel vindicated by the (apparent) election of Trump. If he's not their Savior, he is what they have been waiting for -- for good and ill.

This belief seems to afflict both the "left" and the right as well as much of the libertarian cohort. They look to Trump to undo what's wrong and restore what's right, and in the end, to rule as a (somewhat) benign dictator/entertainer -- which is all they've ever wanted in the first place.

There is no doubt in my mind that the political system is rotten to the core, and to my way of looking at it, the problems are inherent in the system. It cannot be reformed. No dictator, benign or otherwise, will "fix" anything because they benefit from what's wrong. In fact, so long as the entire institutional establishment benefits from what's wrong or can be made to benefit them, nothing (much) will change for the better. Our system of politics and rule is set up to be that way. It cannot be changed from the inside, and the influence of the Outside (us, the Rabble) on events is slight or none.

The electoral pageant of 2016 had many elements of unreality. The candidates all around were generally execrable with the exception of Sanders whose candidacy was almost too rational for his own good, certainly for the times. Apart from being an old man railing against old problems and offering old solutions (my god, is there nothing new to meet the challenges of today and tomorrow? Nothing?) he was arguing, arguing, arguing, all the time, as if by rational argument alone the intractable problems of our times can be/will be corrected.

No. It doesn't work that way.

I think he knew that, but he was out there making a case that needed to be made-- no one else in the political hierarchy would dare to make it -- and let the chips fall where they may.

Eyes would be opened. The Butterfly Effect would be initiated and things would work out eventually.

Or not.

Mrs. Clinton conducted what looked to me to be a very odd campaign, one that was nearly secret because so much of it was conducted behind closed doors at high dollar fundraisers. Her absence from public view appeared to be strategic. Since everyone already knew everything about her, there was thought to be no need to show her to the public any more. All that was necessary was to defeat her rivals, which-- according to elite theory -- ought to have been a simple enough thing to do.

A clown on the one hand, vs a radical Socialist on the other. Piece of cake.

But it wasn't. Bernie got very close to defeating her in the primaries, and according to some opinion, his defeat was engineered by the Party hierarchy. In other words, had it not been for electoral fraud on a massive scale, Bernie would have won the Democratic Party nomination. Maybe. Maybe not.

Funny thing about our elections: we can't ever know whether those accusations are true or not. Our elections are riddled with faults, opacity, voter suppression, and opportunities for fraud (ie: fixing the tally to fit a pre-determined outcome). Our system is an anachronistic, opportunistic embarrassment and it should have been scrapped long ago. But certain interests benefit from the way things are, and nothing will change for the better so long as that is true.

Herself seemed stunned that it was so difficult to reach the goal she sought. It was incomprehensible to her that there was so much genuine opposition to her ascension; the opposition could only be the result of historic anti-Clinton propaganda and the inherent deplorability of the voters who opposed her. 

All her campaign thought they had to do was make mock of and denounce her chief rival, the Evil Clown, and she'd be home free. It was a campaign run like the front page of Daily Kos, and in the end it resulted in self immolation.

The opposition to her ascension, however, was more than matched by the opposition to the ascension of her chief rival, the Trump the Evil Clown. Ultimately, the opposition to him was even greater than the opposition to her, but the quirks of our anachronistic system once again allowed the loser to be declared the winner, and here we go.

Once again: the second time in 16 years that the Electoral College has elevated the popular vote loser to the presidency, once again defying the will of the people (well, at least those of the People willing and able to cast a vote) to install the Other Guy in the White House. This time it didn't require a Supreme Court intervention to reach that point, but courts did intervene, repeatedly, to stall or stop recounts of votes in crucial states. Courts ruled to protect the announced outcome, regardless of what really happened.

We don't -- and can't -- know whether the outcome was jiggered, nor can we know to what extent it was or is possible to jigger election outcomes.

Based on the shocked reaction to the outcome by all and sundry -- including the ostensible "winner" -- the outcome defied expectations. Either the election wasn't seriously compromised and it more or less accurately reflected the will of the voters, or it was heavily jiggered in the states that mattered and there was and is no way to be sure about it one way or another. Either scenario results in the same shock.

Ever since November 8, we've been in a situation where one faction of the Overclass is trying to figure out how to get out of this mess while another faction is trying to consolidate its power in the face of the Twitter troll in chief's chaotic hoo-hah.

In other words, things are flying apart, and it's only by chance that they seem to be holding together.

We're still on the edge of the precipice (another internet trope, btw). I would put it this way: it's another precipice. We've already fallen far. Crashed and burned. The survivors are now facing another drop.

Under the circumstances we really don't have a future to look forward to. The end is not so much nigh as it has long since come.

We're sorting through the debris, that's all.

Compared to the hell so many people around the world have been going through, our situation is mild. That may change at any time, but for now, even the worst of what's been happening domestically -- and much of it is terrible -- is nowhere near the catastrophic levels of pain, death and destruction faced by whole populations abroad. Need we mention the ongoing horrors in Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, Ukraine and on and on? We have had it lucky compared to so many others.

The contradiction between what those outside our borders go through and what Americans go through -- and complain mightily about -- is stark. We should acknowledge that but we don't.

The notion that somehow putting a made-man "billionaire" in the White House will tame or end corruption is absurd. But it's passionately believed by those afflicted with Savior-itis.

The idea that somehow wars will end because Trump wants "peace" borders on insanity. But it's believed passionately by those afflicted with Savior-itis.

One of the most persistent arguments in favor of Trump's ascension is that regardless of what happens domestically ("who cares, really?") his foreign policies will more than make up for any domestic deterioration. More than make up for it. Never mind no one knows what those foreign policies are. One can dream, can't one?

The idea is that since he won't start "Clinton's War" with Russia, it's all good. Nothing else matters at all. Of course, I've argued that Clinton wouldn't have started any such war, either. What she was doing was ham-handed and stupid, but it would not have led to a first strike against Russia. Period.

Trump on the other hand seems intent on fomenting conflict -- nuclear or otherwise -- with China, Iran, "ISIS" and others, and for some reason that's ok with his loyalists and defenders. Kill them all. "They're not like us."

Of course I recognize and point out the inherent and historic racism in this point of view. "They're not like us" is the key to understanding. One commenter posted about how the Chinese and Vietnamese and others of that ilk raise, kill and eat dogs, the implication being that for that alone they deserve to be exterminated. I'd say they beg to disagree.

Other excuses for mass extermination of the Other include the fact that they breed too much ("Look at Africa for god's sake!") and they don't obey their Betters.

Whatever the case, there are just too many of them and if they won't go quietly into the void, they must be pushed -- for the benefit of all of us.

Don't you see?

Getting rid of them will make our lives better somehow.

This is one of the basic tenets of White Supremacy, and during the Euro-American colonial/imperial period, getting rid of them was policy. Precipitating population control of the other by famine, war and other means (spreading diseases, for example) was routinely employed as a means of keeping their numbers in check. My Irish ancestors had plenty of experience with the tactic as it was constantly being employed by the British against them.

Of course it was policy in the United States against the Indians as well.

So will we see a return to it? I don't know, but all the mechanisms exist to do so, and White Supremacy has once again come to the fore. It's the unmentioned key to understanding the rise of the right in North America and Northern Europe.

They want their countries back.

And to the extent they can, they will get their countries back.

The rest of us had better hunker down.

During the year just past I quoted Robert Graves, "Let all the poisons that lurk in the mud hatch out."

That's certainly what's happening. Our supposed enemies seem quite content to let it be.

It makes the contradictions between the away we see ourselves and want to be and the way our rulers see us and their own future even starker.

I say the situation is unstable, inherently chaotic, and it will not end well.

But then we've been on this path for so long perhaps it's too late to change it.

Read Mao On Contradiction. See if he wasn't on to something, and see if centers of rivalry -- whether domestically or internationally -- haven't figured it out.

Happy(?) New Year.

On to the EC

I don't expect them to do their Hamiltonian Duty and refuse to seat DJT on the Throne. It would be too much for them to handle in their fifty or fifty one separate meetings around the country, and the Electors would face unknown risks if they were to follow something like a conscience rather than rote. Na ga happen.

But I think I've made clear that I believe neither Trump nor anyone like him should ever become president of these United States, and that I favor nearly any means to thwart his ascension.

If that means a coup, oh well. It's not as if there haven't been coups in the past. Somehow we manage.

The notion that were he to be denied the presidency there would be a civil war is silly, but the fear of it is a brake on the efforts to undo the outcome of the election. The fear of civil war was part of the rationale for seating Bush Jr on the throne back in the day, and the signs of its possibility -- if not probability -- were clearer then than they are now. I witnessed the armed insurrectionists gathering in their thousands at California's state capitol demanding that Bush be seated forthwith -- "or else" -- and I saw the children crying and heard the bellowing of cowardly men with guns threatening the peace and order of the nation if they didn't get their way.

This was happening in many capitol cities, and it was part of the reason why the Supreme Court intervened as they did to stop the recounts in Florida and hand the presidency to Bush Jr and his bloodthirsty cabal.

But the message of that lawless intervention was that the actual vote and actually counting the votes doesn't matter. An intervention will take place -- call it a coup, cause that's what it is -- if the outcome is either in doubt or because the vote doesn't comport with the interests of the owners and sponsors of the government. And there is literally nothing we the Rabble can do about it. Period. End of discussion.

Our Rulers took that tack in 2000 and they were right. There was nothing we could do about it or at least nothing we could do to change it. The catastrophe could not be stopped, and in the end, it could not be delayed or mitigated.

We are still suffering from the consequences of that fateful decision of 16 years ago. And not just Americans are suffering. Millions upon millions are suffering around the world because of it, many in existential crisis. Americans are lucky in that regard; at least most are not yet as bad off as the millions of refugees attempting to survive the horrors and crises brought on by the Bush Jr regime and kept going by Mr. Obama. At least there aren't yet millions of dead Americans due to the horrors and crises precipitated by the Bush Jr regime and carried on with only slight mitigations by Mr. Obama and his bloodthirsty cabal. At least... well, you get the picture.

The mythology growing up around Mr. Trump is that he -- alone -- wouldn't do these things, that he -- alone -- will solve the insoluble by main force (cause he's such an Alpha Male), and he -- alone -- has prevented nuclear holocaust, because he did.

It's horseshit. Pure unadulterated horseshit.

But it's the kind of horseshit that is necessary to prop up yet another illegitimate and destructive occupier of the White House. It's full frontal propaganda.

Believe it at your own risk.

I'm not sure whether the Trump apologists and online defenders actually believe the horseshit they spread day in and day out, but whether they do or not really doesn't matter. It appears that there is a much stronger and more widespread nihilist component among the online critics of the status quo than I would have thought. Always before, they tended to caution against too abrupt change, generally claiming that the ship of state takes time to to turn, and that revolution or overthrow or violence of any kind is ill-advised as a political tool; best to go along with the rule of Our Betters while cogently criticizing their actions. It was better to engage in intellectual exercises than actually do anything against the Ruling Clique.

All that went out the window when it became clear that Trump and Hillary would contend for the White House. Everyone believed that Hillary would win in a walk, so attacking her and hailing Trump as a Savior was not seen as disruptive or destructive, it was seen as part and parcel of cogent criticism. Since the status quo was not actually expected to change, all sorts of hyperbolic hoo-hah was allowed and puffed up charges against the Hag and puffed up defenses of the Evil Clown became the standard of political discourse online and in the campaigns themselves.

The opposite was just as true among Hillary believers and Trump attackers.

The outcome was supposed to be a Hillary win, and she was supposed to be weakened by an R majority congress. It was all gamed out.

When that didn't happen, panic ensued. Panic especially among the faction of the Ruling Clique who had done their due diligence preparing for the continuation of the status quo. But there was also panic among a wide cross-section of the public who recognized the clear and present danger to them that the advent of Trumpian rule of an undivided government represented.

Trump defenders do not recognize the danger, or if they do, they insist the danger was greater with Clinton -- who  everybody knows would have started WWIII with Russia -- and thus the casualty toll under Trump will be less in the end. This is an extraordinary level of foolishness and nihilism, but there you are.

One has to have that sense of disinterest in what happens to others in order to defend Trump and it is nearly universal among his defenders.

As I say, I don't expect the Electors to do their duty today, and I do expect them to elect Trump with somewhat less than the 306 Electoral votes he was credited with on election night.

The next proper step to thwart his ascension is at the initial meeting of Congress in January, when all it would take is one senator's and one house member's challenge to cause a "question" over his election. That will probably happen, as it should have happened with Bush Jr, but no senator stepped up, and so there was no question. This time is different.

We'll see.

The coup seems to have fizzled out for the moment. But you never know.

ADDING:

While the results of the EC vote are not surprising, there was an interesting twist in the whole affair. I'm not sure of the details, but from a quick skim of the news about it, apparently Hamilton Electors were not allowed in several states where Electors wanted to cast protest votes. They were "ordered" to cast votes for the state's popular vote "winner" -- we really can't say who actually won because of the opacity of voting and vote counting -- and when they refused, they were replaced with alternate Electors (that's a new piece of the puzzle.)

Who was in charge of this process is a mystery, but I imagine the information is out there. Some Electors were able to vote their conscience -- and not for Trump or Hillary -- but the majority of those who wanted to go Hamiltonian were prevented from doing so.

Interesting.

The Follies

Looks like Trump sent his Harpy Kellyanne Conway out to the Twitterverse and the Sunday Shows to denounce and disparage the Clintooon Recount that is being promoted and funded by the Green Party and Jill Stein, who are no friends of the Clintons.

Ah well, it doesn't matter. What matters is that the very idea of a recount be delegitimized in the eyes of the public, but oops. When (apparently) Himself insisted that "he woulda won" the popular vote too if it weren't for all the "millions" of illegals who voted for The Hag, he blew the whole thing wide open.

Now he and Kellyanne have boxed themselves in. The only way to find out what happened is if there's a nationwide recount.

Of course, that's highly unlikely, but they have thrown shade on their own side by claiming something essentially impossible about the other. We'll call it projection, because that's what it is. It's a bind I don't think they can get out of, and if calls for a nationwide recount are picked up, the consequences could be very interesting indeed. Since both Hillary and Trump made wild claims about election rigging and foreign interference, they've both set up a dynamic that requires a recount.

At this point, I'll lay even odds that there won't be an inauguration on January 20, 2017, regardless of the outcome of the first three recounts (assuming they even take place.) What looks at least possible is that the EC will be unable to reach 270 for either candidate, and the matter will be thrown to the House, but the House won't be able to do anything about it before January 6 when the new congress is supposed to be seated.

They won't be likely to pick Trump or Hillary. They might go with Their Good Friend Pence, but they might not have that option. Then what?

Who knows? Chaos ensues.

But then we have that already, and Our Fearless Media is scrambling to normalize it. Good lord, their cartwheels are impressive. Let them laugh while they can, though, this is not a sustainable situation.

Something like this level of chaos was taking place during the recount in 2000; armed militants were gathering at state capitols and public squares demanding that their boy Bush be declared the winner, and it was Scalia who took up the call and scared the rest of the Court into doing just that. Even though they had no real jurisdiction, and they knew it. The excuse was that if they hadn't intervened there would have been a civil war.

Well, maybe. I actually don't think so. Most of the threats were empty, but just the chance that there might be "civil disorder" was enough to goose the system to find a solution. So what if it was outside the bounds of law and custom? It worked, didn't it?

Such may be the case this time, too. I don't expect the Court to intervene again, at least not like they did in 2000 (for one thing, there isn't a majority for one side or the other). Some other kind of intervention, though, is more than possible, and I'm sure TPTB are gaming it out. What can they get away with without triggering wholesale insurrection by one side or another?

What can they get away with this time?

I dunno.

Whatever happens, I suspect one of the consequences down the line will be a greater level of state autonomy. The South and parts of the West have been demanding it for a long time, and they're liable to get their wish. The coasts are likely to demand autonomy as well, regardless of the election outcome. That could mean the Mountain West where I live is left to fend for itself, though some wags have proposed that we rejoin Mexico. Na ga happen, but still the idea is out there. We haven't really heard that notion since the days of Aztlan, though I thought that was always supposed to be independent of Mexico.

Will we see the republic suspended ? That actually seems more likely every day, and if that happens, it would almost require a General in charge and the institution of quasi- or actual martial law. Oh it could happen. The mechanisms exist. And they could be triggered by... elite fear of the masses?

We'll see won't we?

Electoral Myths

Now that things are heating up once again on the electoral front -- partly because of the inherent chaos in the process of electing presidents and such -- we're likely to be treated to another few months of... erm.... entertainment over who actually won the presidential election and possibly others.

Entertainment and lies.

The myths abound. For example, that the popular vote doesn't matter in presidential elections. If that were so, why do we bother with elections for the presidency? Of course we know from bitter experience that if the popular vote in particular "battleground" states goes the "wrong" way, the vote can be  -- indeed will be -- canceled, adjusted or revised until it produces the "correct" result. Because of the arcane, anachronistic Electoral College, only the popular votes in the individual states matter in presidential elections, not the overall popular vote nationally. A minority vote getter nationally can be elected to the presidency by the Electoral College -- as it looks like it will be the case with Mr. Trump, as it was the case with Mr. Bush2 and as has been the case previously (too lazy to research it right now) -- if enough voters in enough states vote for him or her, regardless of the total popular vote in all states.

That can happen, but it doesn't have to happen. The Electoral College is actually free to elect anyone they want -- or no one. The Electoral College could deadlock. It could refuse all the candidates before it. It could select someone the People did not have the opportunity to choose themselves. At least in theory, it doesn't even have to take a vote.

Hillary's national popular vote lead continues to grow. Right now it's edging up on 3 million and could conceivably better that. It's actually quite stunning. Despite all the yabbering and narrative creation about the election and the irrelevance of the popular vote, Mrs. Clinton is bidding fair to achieve one of the highest popular vote margins in recent history. That ain't nothin'. Far from it.

Thus there is a myth that once she conceded, the "election was over." Not so fast, Sparky. A concession is a courtesy, it's not a legally binding capitulation. On the other hand, there is every sign that Mrs. Clinton intended her concession as a capitulation, and that until recent events intervened, she had no intention of contesting the election outcome.

Those recent events include Dr. Stein's efforts to fund and undertake recounts in three  "battleground" states where the results are... questionable.We know that our elections are ridiculously opaque and arcane, and that the results can be jiggered pretty much any way by forces inside or outside of the electoral process. Even a recount -- when they are possible at all -- can't necessarily clarify and verify what happened. This is, I'm convinced, a deliberate design flaw to thwart the People's will, the People being so mercurial and untrustworthy and all.

What Emma Goldman said so long ago still obtains:

If elections changed anything, they'd be illegal.

Indeed.

But they are entertaining, so there is that.

Dr. Stein threw a spanner in the works  by funding and calling for recounts in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania where the popular vote margin for Trump was slight and there are... anomalies in the vote and the result.

The fact that she could raise millions of dollars in a few days to undertake these recounts shocked the complacent political class who were all in for Trumpian Things To Come, settling in to their "peaceful transition of power," and normalizing Trumpism as if it were just the coolest thing in school.

Back in my day, monkeywrenching on this scale -- the scale that Stein did it -- was not uncommon at all, and many of those in the political class as well as among the resistant public engaged in it routinely. Every president since Kennedy has been monkeywrenched when you get down to it.

The issue here is that without a recount, the public can't be sure that the outcome in these three states reflects the actual will of the voters in these three states. The margins are so close, and any number of questionable acts and omissions have already come to light. Better to be sure, no?

Well for some in the political class, the answer is clearly NO!!!!! They've been running around with their hair on fire demanding that this effort not take place, and insisting without evidence that Dr. Stein is scamming the public and somehow will not go through with the recounts.

The "scam" accusation became ingrained in the mythos of this election's monkeywrenching first on the Democratic side and then picked up yesterday and blared forth by Trump hisownself.

Ah yes. Dems in high office and low said "Just accept it," and appeared to do nothing whatever to interfere with the "peaceful transition of power" to Trump and his cronies. Obama himself has been extremely accommodating and determined to "help (Trump) succeed." He has validated the election results in his own mind and has repeatedly said that he supports the announced outcome. Hillary has said much the same thing.  And essentially all of the Democratic establishment concurs. The media as a whole is fully on board with the Trump Transition, as if nothing at all were questionable about it.

As I've said many times, the winning side in our elections doesn't care how they achieve that victory, just that they win. In this case, the "winning side" appears to be the political class in general; ie: Dems and Reps together. Clinton, Obama and Trump as a unified voice against the People.

Interesting.

Not surprising, though.

It took an outsider -- with Standing -- to make the Political Class as a whole pay at least some attention to the People this time. The recounts -- so far -- are going forward, and who knows what will be found?

The Clinton campaign belatedly entered the Wisconsin recount effort when Dr. Stein filed for and was granted a recount on Friday. They said they did so "in the interests of fairness for 'all sides.'" Interesting indeed. One would expect the Trump campaign to do likewise in the by and bye. 'All sides" indeed. After all, who knows what they might find? Eek.

No, I'd say it's an obvious attempt by the Clinton campaign -- joined soon by the Trump campaign? -- to thwart the recount in every way possible. Why? Well, why not? The Clintons have already pledged their fealty and been given provisional absolution from criminal complaints against them. Key word, "provisional." What they had to agree to do in exchange is anyone's guess, but I'll bet it included such things as denouncing and/or thwarting the recount efforts.

And so it has been.

When Trump came out with his statement about it on Saturday, it strangely echoed the statements of certain Clintonite element on TV and in the media generally that insisted that Dr. Stein was "scamming" people, and that there was no merit in doing a recount at all because... "the election is over."

The myth that the election was "over" the minute the media called Mr. Trump the "winner" on November 9 is one of the more pernicious ones that has been retailed to the public. That's not how our (s)elections work as anyone who has even a casual familiarity with the process understands.

All the results are subject to review and adjustment following the election night scramble to get the tallies to the media. It doesn't take a recount, though that can happen too. As we've seen, the totals are constantly being supplemented and adjusted even now. This is how Mrs. Clinton has been gaining a substantial lead in the popular vote. More votes are being counted and tallied each and every day.

The numbers change, day by day, hour by hour. And in the battleground states, Mr. Trump's lead has shrunk as more votes are counted, more adjustments made. In Wisconsin there were incidents that appeared to be "vote padding" wherein thousands more votes for Mr. Trump were recorded than were cast. And so it goes. The (s)election is not "over" when a news network "calls" the election, nor when a candidate concedes.

The Electoral College doesn't meet until December 19, and their vote -- if they ultimately have one -- isn't official until certified by Congress in January.

Ah, the Majesty of it All!

A whole lot can happen between now and then, but the fact is that the media have no legal standing or authority to declare a winner, and a concession is not a legally binding contract.

In this case, the entire process of choosing a candidate for the presidency has been chaos. Deliberately induced and maintained chaos in my view, but there you are.

So let the Chaos continue and let it settle out in its own way in its own time.

I'm no fan of Mrs. Clinton, let me tell you, and if I had my druthers, there's no way she would be allowed to run things from the White House, but I'm not in a position to do anything about that. I voted for Bernie and Stein, but my vote didn't matter in the end.

I would not, however, under ANY circumstances, vote for or support Mr. Trump and his band of thieves and mountebanks. Never. Much as I don't want Mrs. Clinton in the White House  (again), I don't want him anywhere near it.

What I've seen is that the Democratic nomenklatura has almost all lined up in support of Trump's ascendancy. They have made their peace with what is to come and appear to be looking forward to another four years of bashing away at their political rivals. It's what they do. It's essentially all they do: hold the Rs up to ridicule and promote fear. They have shown that they have little or no interest in serving the People. They are instead the Peanut Gallery, booing the Bad Guys. That's where they want to be. That's where they are comfortable.

At the present time, they seem to have no interest in winning elections, either.

If I had my druthers, I'd RICO both major parties into oblivion. But that's not my choice to have, and we live with what we've got.

That's a mess.

One of the clarifying factors to emerge from the chaos so far is that all the hooey from both Trump and Clinton about "rigged elections" and "foreign interference" prior to Nov 8 has suddenly become "inoperative." They now both deny there is any evidence of rigging or foreign interference, despite their absolute certainty of it prior to Election Day. For a good long time after Election Day, there was no mention of it at all. As if, with a wave of the hand, all these accusations of electoral fraud and foreign interference made by both candidates could be made to go away as if by magic.

Well no. What they did was open a Pandora's Box which cannot be shut again -- though they are trying like mad to do so. What they did was expose how screwed up and vulnerable our electoral process is. People can't unhear or unsee it. And what Dr. Stein has done is open it to view by anyone who cares to look... Ooops. Maybe the candidates should have been a little more careful in what they said, but it's too late now, isn't it? I've said that Trump sowed the wind and will reap the whirlwind, but I think that goes for Mrs. Clinton as well. Indeed, we could witness something much more profound than the routine delegitimization of the Other Party's rule.

Huh.











Thankful for....

This is a rough time for a lot of folks. It could be worse, and I'm thankful that it's not, at least not so far.

Of course this is a Day of Mourning for Native Peoples, who apart from sheer and bare survival, have too little to be thankful for. Nevertheless, not only are they still here, but they continue the struggle against the forces lined up to take from them what's left. Their bodies and their spirits are strong and millions of allies around the world stand with them. How can we not be thankful for that?

"Thanksgiving Day" is for the White Folk. It's a folk holiday for the Invaders, Colonists and Settlers, who see no reason for everyone else not to celebrate with them... after all, it could be worse! Ha ha.

Yea and verily, it could be worse.

From a personal point of view, I'm thankful that I'm still here, and that despite my increasingly frail physical state, I don't feel like my end is nigh. It may be, but the doctor I saw yesterday disputes it, and my treatments took a step up, both palliative and corrective. Because I have a "complicated" condition that can affect all kinds of organs besides my joints -- and is currently doing so -- it's going to be a challenge from here on in. Well, I've certainly faced those before and somehow got past the worst of them. How this one will go I can't know in advance, but I'm up for the challenge.

That has a lot to do with the Light of My Life, Ms Ché, with whom I just celebrated our 47th year of marriage, our 49th together. What a wonder. You think I'm not thankful for that? Oh, but I am. Nothing in my life prior to becoming Mr. Ché to the Missus came close to the feeling of love and devotion and mutual regard we have for one another, nothing over such a long stretch of time has given me so much education (let's say!), extraordinary commitment, and so much serenity. She continues on, despite her own conditions -- diabetes being the main one, the chronic settler-disease of so many Natives -- setting a pace and an example for the young ones at IAIA that is nothing short of amazing. She may be an Elder, but she out performs many of the young pups there, many of whom have become part of her "Posse."

Even our elder friends are astonished at her strength and endurance, but that's who she is, that's who she's always been. God Bless Her.

It's hard for me to express how thankful I am that we live in New Mexico rather than California. Every now and then I have a hankering to return, to see friends -- before they pass on -- and to sort through the things we left in storage there, selecting what few items we need to bring back to New Mexico with us and disposing of the rest. But each time I get to the point of scheduling a trip to CA, something comes up, and whoopsy, I can't go. And  here we go again. Something has come up -- RA lung disease in this case -- and it's not looking much like I'll be able to go back to California anytime soon.  if ever. C'est la vie.

I prefer New Mexico, out here in the country, in the middle of nowhere when it comes down to it, where there are more prairie dogs, cattle, and antelope than people, living in an old and beat up pioneer (settler!) adobe, with friends we can count on, salt of the earth neighbors -- who largely voted for Trump, and I'll try to get to that  -- but with whom we have little or no animosity, despite our Outlander/Outlandish California ways. This is our home place, and it really feels like it, and like we've always been here.

California had its merits to be sure, but for us it became almost unlivable.

The California we knew, Ms Ché and I, when we were young (she born into it, I being brought from Iowa when I was 9 months old) had a population barely 20% of the current number, actually closer to 15%. There were big cities, yes, but there was a lot of wide-open country too, and the seashores and mountain retreats were not the exclusive playgrounds of the rich. In those days, too, the rich -- or at least some of them -- had a social conscience which appears to have gone absent in the contemporary conception of California, despite occasional efforts at pretense.

Population density kept increasing. Ms Ché was born out in the country, but her family's place became surrounded by suburban development starting in the 1950s and was finally absorbed by the suburbs they'd held at bay.

I first lived in a little town north of Santa Barbara, a kind of idyllic place, full of flowers and surrounded by strawberry and broccoli and sugar beet fields, where everyone knew everyone else, and... well, things happened that I won't go into now. I'll only say that it wasn't easy for a single mother like my mother to cope with both making a living and looking after a squalling brat like I was, heh. Even though this was her home place from the time she was five years old. It wasn't easy, and she did what she had to to get by and get along.

That meant moving to Los Angeles, albeit suburban Los Angeles, out in the San Gabriel Valley, which was at that time, mid 1950s, still out in the country, and it was filled with orange groves. For a little while more, anyway.

Sam Shepard wrote about the transformation of the San Gabriel Valley in his trilogy of Family Plays, "True West," "Buried Child," and "Curse of the Starving Class." It was the strangest thing. I didn't know what his background was, that he'd been raised on a country place in San Dimas, a few miles from my home(s) in Baldwin Park and then La Puente. And he lived through the traumatizing transformation of these little towns and outposts in the Valley into tracts and tracts of post-war suburban housing. And that's a big part of what he was writing about in those plays. I didn't know about that when I first encountered "Curse of the Starving Class" -- I just knew that I immediately related to the characters and the story. Oh yes, I knew these people. They were neighbors, friends, people down the street and across from my school. I knew them well. And when I later worked on a production of "True West," it was as if I were being transported back to where I once lived, hard against the San Jose Hills (I think they have a different name now, "South Hills" or something) which was still very wild country when I was a lad. He lived hard against the San Gabriel Mountains -- which formed the stunning view (on clear days) out my living room window eight miles to the north. Oh my yes. I could feel the connection but at the time, I didn't know what it was, and when I mentioned it during the production, no one could understand what I meant because they hadn't been there and didn't know. Those who lived through it, as I did and Sam Shepard did, knew. But for others, it was like peering into a telescope at an alien land populated by strange and incomprehensible entities.

I'm thankful that I eventually came to understand Shepard's understanding of what we in our separate little child-worlds knew for a fact was true.

But I'm also thankful that I've been able to find a whole lot of documentation about my family and ancestors that I knew little or nothing about when I was young, partly because either my parents didn't know much either, or if they did know, they didn't want me to know. My father told a grand fib about our ancestors which I believed -- why not? -- until I found out the truth (only a few years ago) which was quite different. In the process of research, I was contacted by a cousin I didn't know I had who corrected some of my information and shared some of her experiences, including the bogus story my father told me about our ancestors. Her mother, my father's younger sister, had told her essentially the same story of prominent Irish-American ancestors who were pivotal in the Revolutionary War, blah, blah, blah, and how we were their direct descendants.

Only the fact is, we aren't. We couldn't be. They emigrated from Ireland in the 1600s. Our direct ancestors arrived in or about 1850 according to the records. The best I could come up with -- and the information is spotty -- is that we and they have common ancestors back in the 1600s and before in Ireland, but who they were and how we are (or aren't) related is a mystery we may never solve. When I told her that, she seemed momentarily nonplussed, but when I explained that the story we'd been told could not possibly be true, but the actual story (so far as I could piece it together) was if anything even more interesting, she seemed to be mollified. Somewhat.

Then it got more interesting for me. I thought my mother was of Irish ancestry -- she wasn't sure but she had red hair like me -- and that therefore I was probably 3/4 Irish and 1/4 German (through my father's German American mother). Turns out no. My mother was actually of British ancestry all the way down. Her father, her biological father, may have had some Scottish heritage, but that's uncertain. At any rate, on his mother's side, she was every bit the English dame. On my mother's mother's side, all of her ancestors were of British origin, going back to the deepest mists of time, and most of the early ones arrived in America if not on the Mayflower (apparently some might have), then shortly afterwards. Oh.

There is also an Indian Princess connection on my mother's side. Yes, she's really called "Princess" *Snowflower* but whether she was actually an Indian or not is subject to some dispute. The story that she was an Indian Princess is told in great detail in lore and legend, but those who dispute it say the tale was made up in the 19th century years after her death, and is not backed up by fact. It was just a romantic something or other to pass the time away.

People did that in those days. As was demonstrated by my father's family's tale of colonial ancestors.

And so, while I probably know far more "truth" about our ancestors than my parents did, there's a whole lot I don't know and may never know. That's quite all right!

Trump voters, yes. Let's consider that a bit. One of the established myths of the (s)election was that "rural, white male voters" were the deciding factor, and it was the failure of Hillary to appeal to that constituency on economic or other terms that lost her the presidency.

It's a convenient myth, but I think it's wrong. First of all, there aren't enough rural voters, period. The United States has long been 80% urban and 20% rural -- just about the same split as in New Mexico, btw.

[Note: I got my county's demographics wrong, thanks to misremembering an outdated City Data chart. According to the Census Bureau, my county reports  a decline in population from 2010 -- from 16,383 to 15,485 in 2015. The bureau also reports that 90% of the remaining population state that they are white, while 42% state that they are Hispanic. 53% say that they are non-Hispanic white. There are 4.2% Native, 2.2% black and .05% Asian. 2.8% claim two or more races. Median household income is $34,720, poverty rate, 27.6% in 2015.

My rural county, like many in New Mexico, is 70% Hispanic *mostly citizens*, not Anglo at all, and many of the other rural counties in the United States are nowhere near as white/Anglo male as the current mythos of the (s)election makes them out to be.

My rural county in New Mexico is relatively poor -- as it has always been. People get by however they can, and that can take some clearly or potentially illegal routes. Oh well. If there are no other viable economic activities available, then that's what people will do. Too bad, so sad. The primary economy here is based on ranching and farming, and there are a few very wealthy and prominent "ricos" in the population. They are mostly Democrats. Some of them are High Party functionaries, former electeds and so forth.

On the other hand, most of the party registration in the county is Republican or Libertarian. Gary Johnson, for example, got 11% of the county vote. Trump got 60%, and Hillary just under 30%. That's pretty much what I expected.

So why would a largely poor 70% Hispanic rural county, vote 60% Trump and 11% Johnson (I was one of 66 voters who voted for Stein in the General, whoo-hoo!)

Isn't it obvious?

This is what the myth-makers of the Rural White Rural voter revolt typically ignore: what the majority of the people in my rural county want and wanted was to be left alone, first, and not to have to pay for other people's well being -- or incarceration -- when they can barely get by on their own. Hello? Isn't this obvious, for criminy sake?

Their racial/ethnic origin (ie: the much derided "identity politics") doesn't make nearly as much difference as is widely believed under the economic circumstances for rural voters in general, which for too many, for too long has been a form of imposed poverty and extraction of any surplus to pay for the well being of others (not just welfare recipients, oh no) and the incarceration of their friends and family. Hello?

That's not to say that racism has nothing to do with it, because for some it does. Of course it does. This is America, racist at its foundation, racist to its core. But that's not the sole or the chief reason people voted for Trump or Johnson over Clinton or Stein in my county. I would extrapolate that to many other counties as well.

It wasn't primarily racism at all. It was much more that Democratic political and economic policies, whatever their intention, simply made life harder for people on the margins and in rural areas with little or no mitigating effort or even mitigating thought for that matter. Trump and Johnson at least said they wanted to lighten that burden. Ok, then. Easy to understand, no?

But even if every rural voter voted for Trump or Johnson, there wouldn't be enough of them to cancel out an urban vote for Clinton.

Not only are not all rural voters white and male, not nearly all the rural voters voted for Trump or Johnson, not even close. Except, interestingly, in those counties in Pennsylvania and the upper Midwest where -- at least initially -- more votes were recorded than were cast, and other peculiarities and anomalies, such as 90% or greater turnouts and so forth were reported. There "whiteness" -- even if only phantoms -- may have been a determining factor.

The myth of what happened is false, through and through, but it's the Narrative that's being sold to Americans in order to explain how Trump "won" when in fact he may not have.

Jill Stein is raising money to challenge the outcome in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, simply because there are too many questionable anomalies to accept without question. Good on her. Somebody has to do it, and according to what I read last night, she's already raised enough money to begin the challenge process in those three states. Whether it will change the results is highly doubtful, largely because there is no way to be sure the counts or recounts are accurate. In many cases there simply aren't any reliable audit or checking mechanisms -- and that is by design. Our voting and tabulating systems are too often grossly and deliberately opaque. There's no way to know for sure whether the outcomes reflect the will of the voters or not.

But if Jill does challenge the outcomes in those states, and the issue is aired thoroughly, regardless of the ultimate result, then I will be thankful that it has been brought to public attention once again that too many voting systems in this country cannot be veritfied and because of it, Americans cannot be assured the outcome is actually what they voted for.

This has been true for a very long time, and it's long past time for it to change. But given the way the outcome seems destined to go, the situation is likely to get worse, not better.

So. We'll see. It's going to be an interesting few months, that's for sure.

Meanwhile, I'm thankful for the Water Protectors in North Dakota who will not give up the fight. I'm thankful for the people in the streets who refuse to accept the results of the (s)election without question or resistance. I'm thankful in fact to be living in such interesting times, even if there isn't a lot I can do any more to change things.

Overturning Myths and Expectations

If nothing else, this election has kicked the complacent in the butt. The complacent have had a number of these kicks lately, but it's not entirely clear the lesson has been learned. This is quite a different country, it seems to me, than conventional wisdom would have us believe, and as all the hue and cry and schadenfreude and what have you over the outcome continue unabated -- no, no, they're redoubling! -- it doesn't appear that many observers or opinion leaders have the least clue to what is really going on. It's all about confirming bias and believing falsehood, in other words being willingly conned. And that goes for pretty much all "sides" in the "national conversation" about what happened and where we go from here. I'm as guilty of that as anyone, though of course I see myself as a font of wisdom and objective reasoning. Of course. Don't we all?

I've been through these kinds of elections many times -- going back to Ronald Reagan's California gubernatorial victory over Pat Brown in 1966. The shock then couldn't have been any greater than the shock is now,  I didn't notice at the time, but I've heard that there was a similar shock nationally when JFK defeated Richard Nixon in 1960. The whole Nixon impeachment/resignation drama was certainly shocking at the time, but previously the shocks of the assassination of President Kennedy, and the undermining of LBJ's administration by anti-war fury among other things, followed by the multiple assassinations of 1968 acted as one shock after another. Nothing has been the same since.

Perhaps the most appalling shock of a presidential (s)elecction was the elevation of G W B thanks to the lawless intervention of the Supreme Court in 2000. Nothing like that had ever happened before. A naked power grab, quite simply, with the open connivance and participation of a faction of the sitting government. It was a coup, right before our eyes, and nothing was done about it.

The popular rebellion that tried to get going several times from the beginning of the Bush2 Regime fizzled out, partly because the media ignored it, being as it was fully in the tank with the usurpers. And the media was in the tank until the whole appalling mess unraveled when the economy collapsed.

The Obama elections and administration haven't been particularly shocking -- except to the white supremacists who never accommodated the notion of Negroes in the White House as anything but doormen and butlers and such -- it's been mostly a pause, a breathing space, before the next set of outrages and shocks, and here they come!

Oh yeah baby. Reversion time it will be. Reversion to America's Greatness, with White Men in charge the way they're supposed to be. You betcha. Hillary wouldn't have been a White Man (damn her all to hell!) and she wouldn't have undone the diversity progress that's been made in the government for a generation, but I have to agree with some observers that her administration, the permanent US government, and US society as a whole would still be dominated by White Men, and that white supremacy, while more or less subdued, would still be the dominant belief of many, perhaps most Americans.

Trump merely makes it explicit. Oh boy, does he.

Assuming he takes office -- and there is still some marginal doubt that will happen -- he will govern as a White Supremacist without a doubt in my mind. However, so would Hillary. And to a great extent, so has Obama.

They pretty much have to because it's baked into America's "Greatness." The US wouldn't be what it is and what it wants to be without White Supremacy.

A reversion to White Supremacy as it was as recently as the 1950s looks to be in the cards, and that's not a good thing in my mind. To many white people, the way White Supremacy operated outside the South in the 1950s was very benign and benevolent, and even in the South, as long as the colored didn't get uppity, it was tol'able.

As long as the colored and other inferiors didn't cause trouble, so the story went, they didn't get trouble.

Of course it wasn't true, but that's the myth of the era.

That's the era that Trump came up in. He's a little older than me, so he got a headstart. Of course he was born into wealth and raised in privilege (white privilege supplemented by the privilege of wealth) and was educated in private boarding schools at a time when the people who went to them were considered the offspring of the cream of the crop. He got in trouble, though, for misbehaving at one school and was then placed in a military boarding school connected with West Point to learn discipline and correct behavior. As far as anyone knows, the lessons didn't take, in part because the New York Military Academy saw his misbehavior -- particularly his bullying and "persuasion" -- as an asset rather than something to be trained out of him, and he was pretty much allowed his head.

I didn't have anything like that background. No. Not much. I was raised by a single working mother in California (who at one point said she wanted to send me to military school to train the rebellion out of me), and until I was ten years old, we always lived in lower or working class mixed race neighborhoods. When I was ten, I encountered middle class and upper middle class and then upper class "all white" society for the first time, and I recoiled -- still do, really.

It was crazy, and the beliefs that insulated white people had of their inferiors (and make no mistake, in all white society, the colored are most definitely considered inferior) were ridiculous and wrong. But since they only knew them as servants and field hands, how were insulated white folks to know that? They couldn't, right? And they didn't. And they had no better beliefs about lower and working class white folks, either. This was in the late 1950s, so I experienced it at its apogee before its fall. Or rather, its retreat. It never fell.

This is not to say that some of the white supremacists I encountered and knew weren't in many ways "good people." They were. some of them. They had no open animosity toward their inferiors -- but they didn't mix with them, either. Some employed Asians, Blacks, or Hispanics as servants, without any sort of conscious prejudice toward them, but many who had servants at the time only employed white people. Again, there was likely no conscious prejudice involved, it was just the way things were. They were following the precedent set by their parents and grandparents and the expectations of their class. That's all.

For the most part, these white-rightist-supremacists were ideological Progressives. I've tried to clarify the nature of Progressivism in other posts, but I don't think I've quite hit the spot. California was, until Reagan's terms as governor, as fully a Progressive state as there has ever been in the United States, and it still echoes some of that past, despite Reagan's successful efforts to dismantle Progressivism as California's governmental operating system.

Progressivism was a Republican innovation to counter the spreading threat of Populism that the Democratic Party was utilizing for political purposes. The basic Progressive theory was "rule by managerial elites" with the "consent" of the ruled. Experts in many fields would be called in, they would study problems and make expert recommendations regarding solutions, the public or their representatives would be given a chance to say yay or nay -- always under the assumption that they would say yay, which is what they usually did when allowed to opine -- and the expert cadres would be set to work. Previously intractable problems were indeed addressed and many were solved to the benefit of all. On the other hand, democratic principles were subverted, the "consent of the governed" part was often skipped in practice, and in operation, Progressivism was deeply intertwined with white supremacism. It was taken for granted without question. "Everyone knew" whites, particularly Anglo-Saxons and so called Nordics, were superior. Not only were they superior to the colored races, they were inherently superior to other whites, and they were meant to rule.

The reason for the withdrawal of consent for the continuation of Progressive Rule in California was simple enough to understand. By 1966, there had been numerous student rebellions in public colleges and universities (there was even a walk out in my high school) and there had been spectacular uprisings of the disincluded in urban environments, just then becoming known as "ghettos." And of course, the hated Hippies were arising.

Pat Brown, who had been a very successful Democratic and Progressive governor for two terms, was unable -- and perhaps unwilling -- to bring various rebellions under control. He was seen as feckless and ineffective against the urban blacks and rebellious white students. Both groups were seen by many Californians as "undeserving" of the privileges and benefits they had been granted by their Progressive overlords.

So the voters rebelled and installed a nonentity in the Corner Office, a nonentity who proceeded to crack down on the rebels as harshly as he and his cohorts felt necessary, to the cheers of many. Meanwhile he was instituting policies and programs to cripple public education, starting at the top and moving downwards, and insofar as possible eliminating the state hospital system for the mentally ill and insane. In the process his administration began the dismantlement of the Progressive operating system of government, substituting an advance on a prior form of government which was typical before the Progressive Revolution (essentially re-opening government to rule by corporate interests for their pecuniary benefit.)

Democrats, to their undying shame, largely went along with it. It was all based on a theory that government existed primarily to punish the lower orders and to reward the rich and powerful.

That set the pattern for what was to come nationally under Reagan when he became president, but under Democrats, too.  And here we are.

Trump in some ways is the natural culmination of that theory of governance.

But Hillary, had she been able to capture the prize, wouldn't have been so much different. She wouldn't have the trappings and the glitter that Trump brings with him, but essentially their politics and policies are very similar, they just have different targets for their "wrath" as it were.

The key difference between them, I think, is that he was always sheltered and showered with the privileges of his wealth and whiteness, and she was not. He started out on third base, as they say, and succeed as a conman and gangster to reach the top of his field -- and then (apparently) become president. She worked her way up from next to nothing -- she wasn't poor, but she was brought up in a very abusive household -- and she made many indelicate compromises along the way.

What I've said about the two of them is that he is a crude and rude representative of his class, and she is the model of those who work for them.

Sigh.

I don't expect him to be any less destructive of the public good than his predecessors, but I wouldn't have expected much good to come from Hillary's reign had she succeeded. As I say, they had different targets, but in the end they both favor the already rich and powerful.

It's a complete myth that she would start WWIII; just as it's a myth that he will prevent it. It's one of the more pernicious myths of the election season, and it's unshakable among believers.

But there are many others. There's been a great deal of projection onto both candidates, most of which has nothing to do with them and everything to do with the unmet needs of the hoi-polloi. Neither candidate would actually meet those needs, however. Both would try to bamboozle their way along.

I believe the plug was pulled on Hillary primarily because she showed she was not much of a bamboozler when it came to the end when she might have turned Comey thing around. She didn't, she blew it.

Trump, on the other hand, showed himself to be 1) a master entertainer; 2) a master conman. Those are two absolute necessities in the Post-modern Presidency. Hillary just didn't come up to snuff.

Well, enough of that. We'll get through this one way or another.

As The Protests Grow

This could get very ugly.

I haven't really been following the continuing nationwide protest actions against the outcome of the election, but what I have seen indicates that they are spreading, growing, occasionally result in "violence" -- ie: property damage, vandalism, police overreaction -- and involve a wide range of mostly young people who see no future for themselves under a "President" Trump.

Police repression so far is relatively light, but the indications are that is soon going to get heavier under the joint control of the incoming and the outgoing regimes. Their first level of cooperation will be to crush the incipient revolt in other words, and thus ensure the traditional "peaceful transfer of power" -- by any means necessary.

Oh dear.

I think the young people who have taken to the streets are brave as heck. Good for them. I hope they don't back down -- but I would understand if they do back down under the paramilitary assault that is sure to come their way. I myself am too old and infirm to join them in more than spirit, but they have my support to the extent I can give it.

On the other hand, I'm hearing (some unconfirmed) reports that violent racist outbreaks are taking place all over the country, proliferating like never before in recent times (of course they're part of a long history of violent racism in this country that has only recently been tamped down a bit).

I live in a majority Hispanic rural county in New Mexico, and if anybody tried that racist shit here there would be the devil to pay. This backwater voted for Trump over Clinton to be sure, but not for the Trump package of racism.

In fact, most of the Trump voters I know, either in my family or among my friends and acquaintances, did so out of their own personal sense of being ever more constrained and in some cases overwhelmed by government interference and impositions. They are for the most part small business people, operating farms, ranches, various businesses of many kinds, most doing relatively well -- some are quite well off -- but they feel increasingly overburdened by taxes and increasingly complex regulations that are "crushing them."

In some cases, they are deeply fearful of crime and criminals and of terrorists and terrorism. Why that is so, I have no idea. I don't know anyone who has actually been a victim of either crime or terrorism, but they sure fear it in their bones. They want protection, and they feel Trump will give it to them, whereas Hillary would just make things worse.

The immigration question is somewhat dicey. Most of New Mexico is pretty laissez faire on immigration from Mexico because of long cultural and social ties. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was never really accepted as binding in some ways, nor has the border really be a barrier. Until recently, anyway, and then more rhetorically than actually. I'd put it this way: they don't see the border as worthy of all the focus there is on it.

That's because the numbers of immigrants from south of the border hasn't been very high in New Mexico, at least not since the first waves of invasion that seized the land from the Indians and made of them foreigners in their own territory. There were far more Anglo invaders following the War of aggression that took the territory from Mexico in 1846. New Mexicans have long, long memories, and those events among others still resonate. Being of the Anglo persuasion myself, I'm well aware of the discomfort my mere presence can sometimes cause. Not necessarily hostility, just discomfort.

So while "illegal" immigration is sometimes seen as a problem, it's more theoretical than real; there hasn't been a wave of immigration from Mexico to New Mexico that compares with the experience of some other areas of the country. And of course Anglos are not in the majority in New Mexico, so a lot of the Anglo racism that you see on display elsewhere is much lower key or nonexistent here. I saw one guy down at the local baseball field sporting a huge Confederate flag on the back of his pick up truck the other day, and I thought, "Gee that won't go over well." I haven't seen anything like it since.

The spirit here is much more Live and Let Live, basically, and Get the Government Off My Back. Trump voters think they voted for that. I'm pretty well convinced they're in for a shock with a Trump regime, and they will,  like people do, rationalize the new impositions that will come as "necessary" -- until they don't any more, and the revolt that is starting with outraged -- and often hopeless -- young people and minorities will spread to many of those who took Trump at his word and discover they've been conned.

The con job is basic to the Trump approach to rule, and because he's done it so successfully, I'm pretty sure that's why so many Republican Pooh Bahs are pledging their fealty right now despite their previous denunciations. They see him as a meal ticket like no other in recent memory -- maybe Reagan could do it for them, but no one else comes close.

Republicans consider conning their constituents as a fundamental part of their jobs, and they've been doing it pretty well over the years, but nothing like the Trump methods. Democrats do it too, don't get me wrong, and their cons can be just as destructive, if not so successful (I guess because they're easier to see through.)

As I said in an earlier post, TPTB can intervene in this growing Trumpian disaster, but will they? So far, no, they won't. They seem convinced for the time being that it's going to be OK -- for them. As long as that's the case, they will have no reason to intervene.

But as the protests grow and spread and involve more and more of the Right People as opposed to just the Rabble, they will have to do something. I don't know that Trump himself is capable of being judicious about doing anything, and I suspect that Obama would be "helpful" in ways that don't help Trump at all.

Canceling the inauguration -- my preferred action -- is unlikely, but a violent crackdown on the protests will have lasting and destabilizing repercussions. It will have the effect of delegitimizing the rule of these assholes, to a far greater extent than the Bush 2 regime was delegitimized by the protests against it. (Credit Cindy Sheehan for actually doing the job...)

Once his rule is delegitimized, as it very nearly is already, the whole apparatus of the Ruling Clique is destabilized. Shit gonna get real.

What have we done to deserve this? I find the whole thing just appalling. Why are Our Rulers so intent on making our lives as miserable as possible? What is with that? Trump has been elevated to be their avatar in office against the advice of most of the Better People, few of whom have any redeeming qualities themselves, and yet they appear to be going along with his program because I think they believe he can con enough people to get away with it, whereas they can't.

Maybe, maybe. But I see that when the mask comes off -- which is pretty much has -- there will be hell to pay.

I would prefer he never take office. Right now, I think pushing the "rigged election" aspect, which he himself is responsible for, may be the way to go. So far it hasn't got any traction, but things are moving fast, and things can change in a heartbeat.

Solidarity. It's gonna be a hard slog. But it ain't over till it's over.

No Tie. Trumped Instead.

Or so it seems.

Much as I raised the question of whether the (s)election would turn into an Electoral College tie, I now ask whether Those Who Rule Us will allow Tuesday's results to stand. Right now, I suspect they will for reasons of their own -- to them, Trump is at worst a buffoon, at best an entertainer for the masses -- but because of some inherent instabilities in the systems they run, this might change overnight.

Trump himself brought it up with his constant claims that "the election is rigged," and the implication that he wouldn't accept the outcome if Hillary won. The unfortunate thing is that the System is most definitely rigged, and elections and their outcome can be rigged quite easily. Soooo.... Why should anyone accept a Trump victory any more than he was going to accept a Clinton victory?

It always depends on whose ox is getting gored, doesn't it?

It goes farther than that. Our elections have never been pristine. The idea that they are some kind of models of democracy is a hoary and perverse myth. They have always been subject to manipulation and outright fraud, and time after time, the winner of the popular vote (whether the count is accurate or not is another question) has been denied the Presidency thanks to the Electoral College and behind the scenes horse trading and chicanery. That is Our System.

In this case, it appears that Hillary won the popular vote, but Trump swept the Electoral College vote, but of course, in Our System the popular vote is an interesting but not determining data point. And if it looks like the popular and electoral votes will coincide to elect the Wrong Candidate, there is always the possibility of intervention by lawless outside forces, cf: 2000 election.

It's easy enough, however, to just just jigger the outcome by fixing the machines. They say it's easy-peasy, and it's done all the time, though I can't vouch for the claims, nor -- so far -- has anyone been able to do so in a completely convincing manner. The electronic voting machines with proprietary software, however, are a disaster for "free and fair" elections because they can be jiggered, sometimes undetectably and there's no way to know what has happened.

So Trump was claiming the election was rigged loudly and constantly and he said he would only accept the outcome if he won.

Well, I think it is worthwhile pursuing his claim that the election was rigged -- not in Hillary's favor, as he insisted, but in his own.

There are plenty of anomalies to be considered, starting with Pennsylvania, but it's probable that anomalies will be found throughout the electoral landscape.

Let's say enough anomalies are found to flip or tie the EC outcome. What do we do then? We don't know, do we?

Some have already said that because Hillary conceded, nothing at all can be done. The election is settled. Trump is the 45th President Elect, and that is that.

There are other ways TPTB can and most certainly will overrule this outcome -- if they want. We won't get into them now, but they exist, and we've seen examples of those Other Ways from time to time throughout our history.

Right now, it doesn't look like they want to overrule the outcome, whereas it was pretty obvious what outcome they wanted and would get in 2000. Perhaps they always wanted Trump and all the sturm und drang of the Elites over his buffonish, racist, misogynist candidacy was an elaborate charade and pretense to fool the rubes and snooker the Rabble. I don't know. The fact that there is an R majority congress and a radical R in the White House means that there will be no gridlock, any more than there was when the Bush Regime was installed back in the day. Oh, no! There was almost complete cooperation from the Democrats in the spirit of bipartisan comity, and after 9/11, (almost) anything the Busheviks wanted was theirs for the asking or taking. We've been in a police state and a world of hurt ever since. That is by deliberate design.

I'm quite sure that Trump as President will do nothing that doesn't somehow profit him personally. Profit can be money. Profit can be prestige. Profit can be naked power. Wielding the power of the presidency, particularly against perceived threats or enemies, foreign or domestic, is intoxicating. But Trump is always looking out for number 1, first and foremost, the rest of creation can get out of the way and fend for itself. So what he would do in office is "uncertain," and our Ruling Cliques hate uncertainty. No? They could get behind the disastrous Bush 2 Regime and stick with it long after it had proved its ruinous malignancy because they knew with almost perfect certainty what that outfit would do.

Many of them got richer than their wildest dreams in the process.

They profited from Bush 2, and they continued to profit mightily under Obama, as they would continue to do so under Clinton 2 -- so long as she didn't trigger WWIII (which she wouldn't, but that's another issue I won't deal with right now)  -- but what happens when El Jefe is the one, and only one, whose profits matter? That's Trump. Now what?

See the dilemma?

While he is an example of his class -- oh my yes -- he's something of a rogue example in that he is overtly a conman and gangster. He is a bully without question. A racist. A misogynist. A thief. One could go on and on. But strangely, there was almost no examination of his business behavior and the details of his personal life during the campaign apart from his obvious indiscretions. The "scandals" that were produced were on the order of the Clinton Scandals, prurient but essentially irrelevant because they didn't tie together the threads of a complete picture of who the man is -- and according to those who've known him a long time, the man-boy he's always been.

It's not a pretty picture. It should be deeply disturbing to anyone who cares about others.

But painting that picture was never done, at least no more than a rough sketch, perhaps because "everyone who mattered" thought he couldn't and wouldn't win. He was just too outrageous.

Um-hum.

Well, here we are.

This is not about Clinton or her campaign. That's a topic for another post. But she and the Democratic Pooh-Bahs should be deeply and mortally ashamed. They won't be. They're like the Bourbons in that regard. They learn nothing and they forget nothing.

I've been disturbed by some supposed "progressive" internet daily defenses of Trump -- particularly at NC, Ian's Place, and MoA. He is not defensible, but for some reason, these and other ostensibly "progressive" sites saw fit to daily trash Hillary for crimes real and imagined, and to present defenses of Trump in order, they said, to counter media anti-Trump propaganda and lies. Propaganda from the media? Who'd a thunk? The problem was, it wasn't necessarily lies.

As I said more than once, there are plenty of reasons not to vote for Hillary; there's no reason at all to vote for Trump, yet they were so determined to defend him, they would often opine that this or that factor was reason enough to vote for Trump. No. I do not respectfully disagree; I dispute and denounce the very idea.

The man is a thoroughgoing monster, and the only justification for voting for him is complete nihilism. Being somewhat naive about the way the federal government operates is no comfort.

The Busheviks knew all the levers of power and how to operate them, they were extremely well connected within the government, and they had a remarkably cooperative Democratic "opposition." They had every advantage going in, but it still took them 9 months and 9/11 to get their act together enough to consolidate their coup and inaugurate the New American Century as outlined in that infamous White Paper.

That plan is still the operating plan of Our Government and its Rulers. Obama provided an interregnum, but he didn't really change any of its primary aspects.

Trump has (sort of) vowed to shatter the whole thing, which I don't believe for a minute, and substitute something less globalist/hegemonic and more nationalist. Except he's got all these neoLibCons on his "team" -- so-called -- and their very presence means that nothing much is going to change with regard to the Plan, only that its current operators will be replaced with new or recycled ones, and they will be much, much meaner.

Of course this is not at all what he was talking about during the campaign, but you could see by his actions and who he had lined up as backers, it was what he would do. Typical con-man to re-negotiate the contract after closing the sale, too.

I don't want to go on and on and on about these things, but there are obvious signs of what's to come if he is allowed to become President. Clear as a bell, just as it was clear that the Busheviks were angling to get us into a hot war as soon as they could. It was a main reason why they were put in office. That and all the profits that would accrue to the Highest of the Mighty.

The question is will Our Betters allow the Trump rampage to get under way. If they do, they will not be able to control it no matter how highly they think of themselves and their power. I am certain enough that they don't care about what happens to the Rabble, but they do care about themselves and their power and position -- and their control of the government. All that is potentially out the window with Trump -- who only cares about himself. In other words, Our Betters have to demonstrate their loyalty to him before anything else, and even then they risk everything they've accumulated plus any future gains because of his pettiness and unpredictability. At least Hillary would have served them, just as Obama has done. With Trump, they just don't know.

And they have a range of means to stop him.

Will they?

¿Quien sabe?

Personally, I doubt they will take action until it is too late, then woe betide.

Note: I spent most of yesterday among a lot of Indians (ie: Native Americans, just to be clear), and to say they were devastated, sick at heart, clearly in mourning is to put it mildly. The outcome of the election has hurt them deeply, to the core. Those of us who have lived through a number of such elections can be somewhat sanguine about it, I suppose. "It's not going to be that bad," we can opine, and try to comfort our suffering brothers and sisters with nostrums like, "We'll get through this, too."

But this time... I don't know. I just don't know.