November 28, 2016

"GroupThink"

Laila Lalami on whiteness as groupthink. I think.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/27/magazine/the-identity-politics-of-whiteness.html

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November 28, 2016

Obama Reckons With A Trump Presidency -- The New Yorker

As our side looks for political guidance in a turbulent time, everything President Obama says here shows how inspiring he is.

My favorite parts are the President's take on American voters, and his enlightened approach to social media and fake news issues.

President Obama is one great human to emulate.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/11/28/obama-reckons-with-a-trump-presidency

November 24, 2016

Flo & Joan's Bit Of Anti-Thanksgiving

November 22, 2016

'Hail Trump!': Richard Spencer Speech Excerpts

At The American Policy Institute, white supremacists claim they are the REAL humans -- "...THEY need us, and not the other way around...THAT is natural and normal for US...they are really opening up the door for US..."

Here they are, our emerging feckless intelligentsia. With maybe a few women. I don't see America in this demographic.

November 20, 2016

Donald Trump's Threat To Dismantle NATO, Explained -- What The Hell Is Going ON?

Any timeline speculation about when Trump will back down from our good faith commitment to our European NATO allies? Putin has allegedly threatened Finland with consequences if they join NATO. There seems to be growing fear in both Russia's and the US's people as certain interests claim the other side wants war. Maybe there is no New World Order. Just the old world order. Consider...

Trump's position on NATO.

Putin's position on NATO.



There are more than a few videos out there that warn of a WWIII, claiming that Western media are in a blackout about such an event. As far as I know, the Pentagon hasn't ever seen a potential war it didn't like.

As long as we're going to be paying close attention to the language and shapeshifting positions of our new president, it might behoove us to examine how Trump's past ties to Russian oligarchs connects to this news, if it's true. Before it's time to worry.

Are we worried yet. And who can actually tell us what the hell is going on.

November 20, 2016

Adam Curtis: Putin, Trump, Syria, Brexit

More on hypernormalization.

November 20, 2016

There are other things to learn if we're ever going to return to majority party status:

We need to address the 49% of those who didn't vote. To that end, we have to tell non-voters that Americans disengaged by this country's political process have to remember a couple of things:

1. There is no giving up. Millennials and everyone else will have to learn that control of politics is control of whole economies and militaries.

2. If we give up we will never have majority political control again of anything that matters for the betterment of people. Nor will our politics control any other economic sectors. California has known that. This is now about whether future generations control their landbase resources, or whether the future inhabitants' landbase is controlled by global forces.

3. We now face what many developing countries face, only on a larger scale and with varied political/historical context. We didn't see how voting mechanisms and money beat out hearts and minds politics. But now we have to because we can't go back to what didn't work.

4. We're down but we're not out. Every single Democratic 'interest group' -- women, Millennials, LGBTQ, minorities, the elderly, kids, ALL the disenfranchised -- can join with the other groups to focus our party, our money and expertise at state levels enough to beat them at their own game. We can do this!

November 20, 2016

My Lightbulb Moment: It's less important to know how we lost; more important to learn how they won.

Not by realizing that we Democrats are right from all kinds of angles, which I call the culture wars; not by being on the right side of history, which we are; not by arguing the popular vote should now take precedence over the electoral college numbers, which we can now pursue.

I realize how they won. It came down to simple math and the software, Crosscheck. Thank you, Botany, for bringing this to DU's attention a few days ago. It simply can't be ignored.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/12512611017

A software system called Crosscheck, used by Republican governors and their Secretaries of Election, determined the margins of Republican losses across a bunch of red states.

Then, this is how the Crosscheck system helped Trump win.

Of course, those three example states were not the only ones who used the software. Crosscheck noted the GOP presidential election loss numbers in Republican states, then beat those numbers by purging Democratic voter rolls in far greater numbers of minority vote purges between elections.

That strategy, above all others, won the necessary 270 electors. All the rest -- the PR, the crazy rhetoric, media 'normalizing', even Comey, emails and Russian hacks -- was window dressing. The GOP worriedly let the Democrats proceed with their Rube Goldberg-style complifications of all the campaigning, polling and media back and forth.

Because their number crunchers knew that the drama could bring out numbers above the ones they beat through Crosscheck.

That's what Democrats -- who thought that all manner of ground game, ads and polling would bring voters to the polls -- didn't see. Basic numbers that it took to win. Democrats put themselves in a bubble and never clearly saw what the Republican establishment and their governors had really done.

Democrats could have noticed, could have had court fights in those states, but the ACLU, or party lawyers in general, dropped the ball on their opponents' numbers strategy, whether they tried hard or not. One North Carolina case overruled the state's purgings and/or voter ID suppression; I can't remember them all, now.

But. An army of ACLU lawyers and the Democrats could have taken Crosscheck and their states bosses to court, and governors still could have kept mum about Crosscheck and their number goals.

More problematically for Democrats, paperwork that the purgings were based on were only about 50% accurate, anyway, so it would have taken massive man-hours to locate living, purged voters, restore them to polls. Then it might have taken a lot of data entry into state voting systems to be reflected at local precinct levels.

The battles were there. Democrats just couldn't see it, or if they did, they didn't pull a network of legal fight together to make it in time to roll out court decisions, get the rolls straight and get the access to greater numbers of vote machines. Democratic voter turnout failure -- whether it was Bernie Bros, Millennials, whoever else -- made up the rest of the numbers.

So the Republicans won by the slimmest, most elegant of methods. All the drama -- Hillary's evilness, media, bum rushed rallies, signal-to-noise commentary -- was cover. Or at least irrelevant to winning.

We Democrats need to learn from this. Seriously.

My Lightbulb Moment? It's less important to know how we lost. It's more important to learn how they won.

When the important thing is to win -- the party that does what's really necessary wins. And Republicans won the electoral votes.

We’re good at talking about how Democrats lost. It’s mostly because Democrats got more lost in culture wars than in the mechanics of winning. Whether the Kochs who bought it all know it, whether Republican governors know it, and whether this schlub of a president-elect knows it or his coterie of wangstas know it, the important thing is that WE have to know it.

Now we have to regain control of the numbers. The Kochs were “first to market,” therefore dominating the political state markets. So, we have to go in, take those markets away with gubernatorial wins. If Obama hadn’t dropped Howard Dean we’d have had that part handled years ago.

Now, who in the Democratic party is going to do the hard 50-state slog. Who is going to clarify the brand as a winning brand. Bernie's campaign people can help with this and Schumer can certainly get behind it.

Man, Botany woke me the hell up. Thanks, Botany. I love you, man.



Here's the Greg Palast article from back in August.

http://www.gregpalast.com/election-stolen-heres/

And the Rolling Stone's article on the same issue:

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/the-gops-stealth-war-against-voters-w435890

And a good thought from Hillary:

November 16, 2016

Russell Brand Hopes We Recognize We Will Have To Provide An Alternative World

Russell sees that the Trump win was inevitable, given conditions we are not addressing. He tries to see what American voters have in common with much of the rest of the world's disillusioned.

November 16, 2016

Global Trumpism -- How Trump's Rise Reflects Brexit and Other World Events

This long video gets way better as it continues. It gave me more context for understanding our voters' and Trump's poorly spoken economic reasons for liberal losses this election. Get past the intro at the 2-minute mark.

Yes, it's long. But it's long because it's important enough to watch. It's important context to consider for the next four long years.