Causes and Mysteries about Election 2016

A minority of American voters have elected an irresponsible, racist, misogynist, narcissistic, and unqualified asshole to be POTUS and are in complete denial of how they have fucked this country.

Causes

In order to achieve this, a number of things had to happen. I review a few of them here. First, women and Hispanics who were presumed to vote for HRC and against Trump did not do so in substantial numbers. Trump could not have won without their support. Second, we learn that the country is perfectly willing to ignore their leaders. Just about every elite politician, intellectual and news source supported HRC, some of them half-heartedly, and opposed Trump. Third, voting Republicans, not their leaders but the rank and file, supported their candidate and the Democrats did not. Fourth, we, the Democrats, won the popular vote but lost the electoral vote. We may have to do something about the Electoral College, but that will be hard. Fifth, you can not run a candidate for POTUS unless he/she is a superior communicator and HRC is not. Sixth, we ran a Washington insider in a year when the country seethed with anger about how the system was failing them.  We had plenty of warning, see the Occupy movement and the campaign of Bernie Sanders. In other words, we, the Democrats, chose the wrong candidate.

Mysteries

I do not understand why the Washington elite has completely failed to understand and recognize the anger about the economy that has been building for over 30 years. 

Also, remember that the Trump vote only reflects the anger on the right.  There is a similar anger but on the left, what we might call the Sanders supporters.  These people were completely and utterly disenfranchised in this election being forced to vote for HRC as a lesser evil than Trump.

There is anger about the wealth inequality. There is anger about a justice system that favors the rich and punishes the poor. There is anger about a tax system that oppresses the middle class. There is anger about a justice system that lets corporate criminals commit any crime and go free.

The Polls

I do not understand why the polls were so wrong, nor do I understand why so many people, including the pollsters themselves, are in denial of the scope of their disaster.  This is as bad as "Dewey Defeats Truman". 

The implications of the polling failure are not commonly recognized. For example, you think you know what percentage of women or Hispanics voted for Trump? Well, you don't. Those numbers come from exit polls. The same technology that was so wrong going into the election. The fact is that this technology is thoroughly discredited. You can believe those numbers if you wish, but I don't.

The Good News

There is good news, its not all bad.

First, Washington needed a wake up call that business-as-usual does not work. Probably nothing less dramatic would have gotten the message across and even so it is not clear that Washington heard the message. Second, Trump is essentially a third party candidate that used a weak Republican party to get nominated and then elected. So if you want a path for a third party to win the White House, one has just been demonstrated for you. Third, Trump does not exactly have the support of the Republican Party. He will not get things all his own way in the Congress. Fourth, Trump has no track record of working with Washington. The last time we had a true Washington outsider, Jimmy Carter, it made a very big difference on what got done and what did not.

Conclusions

I can only hope that this clusterf*ck that is Trump will be a wake up call and that the principle of unintended consequences will apply here.

In the long run, we don't know if this is a complete disaster, or whether it was a necessary transition to a better government.

Tim Kaine Notes

First of all, Tim Kaine is not from Virginia, he is from Missouri by way of Harvard. This is good and bad but no one from Virginia would for a moment think he was from Virginia, so you should know that. Second, he is not old-school Southern Democrat. That is good. Third, he is not a racist. Most of my ignorant west coast friends think all Southerners are racists. Fourth, he has been elected to political offices on a regular basis in a state that is heavily gerrymandered, has a large African-American vote, but which is a very conservative state, in the classic sense of the word.

Kaine is not in any way a radical, a progressive, or anything else along those lines. He will reinforce the Hillary Clinton approach to things, which is to say, a Rockefeller Republican approach. He may help to trivially increase education benefits. He may understand how hopeless the poor and the minority population is in this country, but he is not likely to stick his neck out too much unless Hillary tells him to, which I doubt. When it comes to foreign policy, he will be a solid American representative and will not embarrass us.

I can not emphasize the following too much. Kaine is a representative of the Harvard/Washington elite. If you have been happy with that elite's governance of America, then vote for him. If not, dont vote for him. He is not unlike John Kerry, if you will.

I dont think that voters in this country have any choice in who they will have to vote for in November. And I am not at all happy about this. Do not think that these people represent a big chunk of America just because they win in November. We had a gun to our head, and you know what I am talking about here.

I will update this post with new information about Kaine as it comes in.

Autobiographical note.

For what it is worth, I was born and grew up in Virginia (and California). A Californian friend of mine recently told me that Virginia was the Deep South. Another friend was angry that they had to have votes from the Southern states, e.g. that the South had votes in the House of Representatives and the Senate. I didn't have the heart to tell her that this was not the fault of the South, they did not want to be part of the Union either. There was a war about that, recall? It is my impression that most of my friends out here don't know much about the South but are completely certain that they do, a classic example of the Dunning-Kruger effect.

Elitism, Privilege and Fast Attack Submarines

Over the years I have gone back and forth on the issue of whether there are “rules” that apply to all of us or not. Or are there people for whom the rules do not apply, a privileged elite for whom special accommodation is made?

It seems to me that every time I come across a rule that is supposedly applied evenhandedly, for example, taxes, that no such thing is true. That in fact, there are one set of taxes for the rich, one for the remnants of the middle class and one for the poor with most of the tax burden falling on the middle and lower classes. Or consider the laws against stealing. A poor man steals $500 from a 7-11 and goes to jail. The mortgage industry destroys the world economy, is gifted 2.5 trillion dollars by our government, and the only people who go to jail are the very poorest who defaulted on their pathetic mortgage and are imprisoned in debtors prison in Michigan while the rich go free and laugh.

But I thought that at least in the area of submarines, submarines, for goodness sake, I thought that our country had some integrity. But sadly I was mistaken.

As a student of the cold war and as a strong believer in the role of vast, expensive, over-complicated technological solutions to impose our will on the world and bring the benefits of our culture to other nations whether they want it or not, I am of course a supporter and student of submarines.

And who could not be? The dream of traveling under the water to explore the unknown lands to be found there, filled with strange and wonderful creatures which we can now eat and drive extinct, the ability to visit mysterious underwater phenomena as described by our science fiction authors, to sponsor cooperation between nations by tapping their most secret communication cables, all of these are compelling justifications of our devotion to submarines.

Surely as time passes, more and more will be revealed about the activities of our submarines during the Cold War.

Layout of Japanese WW2 Mini Submarine

For years I had been told that it was impossible to take a tour of one of our nation's active duty nuclear powered submarines.  Since one would not want to get close to a nuclear missile submarine, this would be one of the Los Angeles Class (three different types), Seawolf or Virginia class attack submarines. Tours of every other class of ship of the US Navy were possible, but not nuclear submarines, I was told, on one occasion by a former captain of an attack submarine.

So I was told.

Its all bullshit.

The rules are for the little people and do not apply to those who secretly run things.  Such as a limited number of Stanford Alumni.

See the evidence for yourself, below.

This damning document can be found at the following url:.

http://alumni.stanford.edu/get/page/events/details?event_id=8594

For those of you not up on your subs, the “Los Angeles” class is the class portrayed in the movie Hunt for Red October (1990)

I plan to be calling the San Diego Naval Station and asking for my tour soon and I encourage all of you to do the same.  Lets smash this egregious elitism and restore the right to visit nuclear submarines to all our people.

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Notes

Chief of Naval Operations Description of the Fast Attack Submarine

http://www.navy.mil/navydata/cno/n87/today/ssn.html

Hunt for Red October (1990) on IMDB

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0099810/