Why People Should Not Worry So Much about Donald Trump

Many Americans are experiencing panic attacks about the possibility that Donald Trump might become president. Some of them are literally spinning in place and spraying obscenities in all directions. Its embarrassing and I hope they will calm down. I think they have very little to worry about, at least, that is, about Donald Trump.

I think that when we look at what is required for a candidate to win the general election and then look at the specifics that we have in play in this election, that it will become clear that Trump has very little chance of winning. Yes, the Democrats could throw it away, but they would really have to work at it. I cant imagine that too many people would care what I think about this, but in the off chance that this might reassure some of my very worried friends, here is what I think is going on.

In the following I am necessarily going to paint a picture in broad strokes and of course I realize that people are not stereotypes. There is no single position for Hispanics in this country, for example, or women, or African-Americans, but even so there are some things that we know about how different interest groups in this country will see the upcoming general election.

In general, for the Republicans to win a national election, they have to do three things. They have to get a strong voter turnout from their core. They have to attract a certain number of those voters unaffiliated with any party, the so-called Independent voter. And the Democrats have to be ambivalent about their candidate or for one reason or another not be able to get a strong turnout on election day. The Democrats have what seems to be an easier task but in practice it has not always been so easy. They need a good turnout of those who say they are Democrats on election day and they also need a certain number of the unaffiliated voters to vote Democrat, or at least not vote Republican.

There is also a famous joke about who wins presidential elections that goes something like “the candidate that makes the fewest mistakes wins”. There are lots of ways to shoot yourself in the foot, or the head, on the way to the White House. One or two really stupid mistakes or unfortunate events can lose the election.

Now lets review some issues specific to this election.

1. Donald Trump has worked very hard to make the Hispanic Americans hate him. It is possible to win an election without the Hispanic American vote, or at least some of the Hispanic vote, but it makes things much harder.

2. The core African-American wing of the Democratic coalition has been remarkably loyal and supportive of the Clinton campaign. There is every reason to think they will continue to do so into the election.

3. Contrary to what you have read or may believe, not all women unreservedly support Hillary Clinton for president. But no doubt a great majority either do support Clinton or dislike Trump or both. We have every reason to think that many unaffiliated women voters will vote for Clinton.

4. Although many people who run businesses in this country have traditionally been Republicans that is not always true. In general, such people are interested in such things as stability and “free trade”. Hillary Clinton is the closest thing to a Rockefeller Republican we have seen in this country for a long time. On the other hand, no one knows what Trump might do if he became president. I think it is extremely likely that Clinton will therefore get a certain number of these "business" votes that would otherwise have gone to the Republican candidate in a more typical year.

5. Many Democrats are enthusiastic about Hillary Clinton, but certainly not all are. But even those who are at best ambivalent about Clinton, such as Bernie supporters like myself, will freely acknowledge that Clinton is far superior to Trump. There is a pretty good chance that “fear of Trump” will result in a solid Democratic turnout.

6. Ask yourself the following question “Who is more likely to say something stupid in public, Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton?” I think it is pretty clear that it is the Donald who is likely to say something that will really piss off certain elements of the American voter. One of the criticisms I have about Clinton is that if anything she is too careful, too calculating, too concerned about not annoying someone. This is not a totally fair criticism, but it is certainly at least partially true.

I could go on, but I think this is enough to be convincing. Some pretty dramatic things would have to happen between now and November which elevates Donald Trump and gives him respectablity that he does not currently have, and Clinton would have to make a fair number of stupid mistakes for her to lose this election.

Famous last words, I know.

But really, as these things go, I think that there is very little to worry about.

Hollywood and Natalie Portman Demonstrate Commitment to Fundamental Values

Whenever we see a threatened community in this chaotic world stand fast and united in support of fundamental values I think it is important to celebrate the event. So many of our friends and institutions have thrown away everything that they used to stand for in order to make a fast buck.

Hollywood is not normally considered a shining pillar of integrity but I believe that is a misunderstanding on the part of outsiders.  Hollywood as a loosely-defined creative community has always had and continues to have a set of core values that are shared across the community and evolves with time.  These values have survived mergers and acquisitions,  new distribution technologies, government antitrust lawsuits, drought, war and pestilence. One of these core values is that there is always money to be made by the cheesy exploitation of women. Let us review a particularly creative use of this principle.

A few years ago, a well-known author of "weird fiction", Jeff VanderMeer, published three novels in a series called the "Southern Reach".  The first of those books, Annihilation, was optioned by Scott Rudin to turn into a movie. He hired the director of Ex Machina (2015), Alex Garland, to write the adaptation and direct the film. The book (and presumably the film) is unusual in many ways and one way that is important to us is that all the protagonists are women. The movie is the story of an expedition of scientists to an area where a strange event occurred many years ago that has cut this area off from the rest of the country.  There have been previous expeditions and they did not end well. So what we have here is a film where the four main characters are all strong and interesting women. The movie stars Natalie Portman, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and Tessa Thompson. The book is told from the point of view of one of the members of the expedition, the Biologist, played by Natalie Portman.

Nice posture, Natalie! 

As you know, Hollywood has often been accused of perpetuating demeaning stereotypes of women, and failing to provide serious roles for actresses who want to get their next academy award nomination.  So this movie provides an excellent opportunity to refute this sadly somewhat valid criticism of Hollywood.

This film, Annihilation (2017), has finished principal photography and still has a long way to go before it is released but Hollywood realizes it is never too early to start marketing a film. One time-honored way to do this is with interviews by various news media of the star(s) of the film.  And since the film is about four intelligent and adventurous women, it would make sense if that marketing also communicated some of these ideas.

And so an article/interview was created and placed in the New York Times Style Magazine.  It is an interview by email (that social media hook!)  with Natalie Portman by a writer in which they discuss the first short film that Natalie has directed.  They discuss many topics including Natalie's upbringing in Israel, the work of various eclectic authors of fiction, and so forth..

Now we get to the heartwarming, even inspirational, part of our story.  Ms. Portman discusses her movie and her childhood in very intelligent ways, certainly combating the stereotype of women in Hollywood. But I had not realized how financially challenged Ms. Portman was. You see, not everyone in Hollywood makes those multi-million dollar salaries.  Apparently, Ms Portman was or is so poor that she did not own any pants. Nevertheless they bravely went ahead and photographed this wonderful and talented person practically bare-assed naked.  Fortunately, Ms. Portman was able to hold up her part as these pictures clearly show.

It would have been easy for Hollywood to turn its back on a core value and portray Ms. Portman as a politically correct, bisexual, blue jean lesbian styled modern feminist and be acclaimed by one and all, but our producers and the studio are made of sterner stuff. The cheap exploitation of women and sex to sell a film is like "Motherhood and Apple Pie" to the rest of us. It is important. Hollywood did not let us down.

See this fabulous article here.

Are you going to just lounge around all day in your underwear?

With Cthulhu in Antarctica

How could it be that the ancient horror is revealed in plain sight and yet the world is not capable of recognizing their peril, capable of realizing that even now the Elder Things stir in the frigid black wastes and that Cthulhu must laugh at the endless stupidity of the biped mammals.

The people of the world are so gullible. They are told that one or possibly two scientists have gotten suddenly deathly ill in the remote wastes of Antarctica, but we are not told what has happened to them. We only know that two men must be withdrawn from the icy wastes at great risk. Only one kind of airplane can make the hazardous journey to Antarctica in this season, the Twin Otter. Two of them have been sent, one for backup, and one to make the complete journey.

They have arrived, and the men will be withdrawn.

But what evil have the experienced? What are they not telling us? I remind all who have the willingness to brave this knowledge to reread those paragraphs from near the end of At the Mountains of Madness:

I have said that Danforth refused to tell me what final horror made him scream out so insanely—a horror which, I feel sadly sure, is mainly responsible for his present breakdown. We had snatches of shouted conversation above the wind’s piping and the engine’s buzzing as we reached the safe side of the range and swooped slowly down toward the camp, but that had mostly to do with the pledges of secrecy we had made as we prepared to leave the nightmare city. Certain things, we had agreed, were not for people to know and discuss lightly—and I would not speak of them now but for the need of heading off that Starkweather-Moore Expedition, and others, at any cost. It is absolutely necessary, for the peace and safety of mankind, that some of earth’s dark, dead corners and unplumbed depths be let alone; lest sleeping abnormalities wake to resurgent life, and blasphemously surviving nightmares squirm and splash out of their black lairs to newer and wider conquests.

All that Danforth has ever hinted is that the final horror was a mirage. It was not, he declares, anything connected with the cubes and caves of echoing, vaporous, wormily honeycombed mountains of madness which we crossed; but a single fantastic, daemoniac glimpse, among the churning zenith-clouds, of what lay back of those other violet westward mountains which the Old Ones had shunned and feared. It is very probable that the thing was a sheer delusion born of the previous stresses we had passed through, and of the actual though unrecognised mirage of the dead transmontane city experienced near Lake’s camp the day before; but it was so real to Danforth that he suffers from it still.

He has on rare occasions whispered disjointed and irresponsible things about “the black pit”, “the carven rim”, “the proto-shoggoths”, “the windowless solids with five dimensions”, “the nameless cylinder”, “the elder pharos”, “Yog-Sothoth”, “the primal white jelly”, “the colour out of space”, “the wings”, “the eyes in darkness”, “the moon-ladder”, “the original, the eternal, the undying”, and other bizarre conceptions; but when he is fully himself he repudiates all this and attributes it to his curious and macabre reading of earlier years. Danforth, indeed, is known to be among the few who have ever dared go completely through that worm-riddled copy of the Necronomicon kept under lock and key in the college library.

At the Mountains of Madness

http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/mm.aspx

Washington Post Article About Rescue

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2016/07/06/a-tiny-little-dot-in-that-mass-of-black-pilots-recount-daring-south-pole-rescue-mission/

Posts of Ultimate Futility

This post is to describe the immediate future of posts on Global Wahrman so that my regular readers will not be too surprised or disappointed.

This blog has many topics including but not limited to discussion of the aesthetic and ethical failures of computer animation, the importance of comic book superheroes to our civilization, the role of the esoteric knowledge and forgotten wisdom as applied to stupid user interface design on the Internet, the aesthetics of modern espionage, and other related and critical topics.

But certain events have preempted these important discussions and replaced them (or failed to replace them as the case may be) with essays in progress on a number of political and economic topics. These topics have accumulated and are trying to work their way into print and are doing so with agonizing slowness. In the four years of writing this blog, I have never had such a backlog of mostly written posts that are not yet published. The problem, or rather, one of the problems, is that I am more than a little aware of how completely, insanely futile it is for me to have opinions on any of these topics.

I am well aware that no one, not even my best friends or family, could give a “hoot” what I think about these topics in economics, civic governance, international trade and so forth. If the Bureau of Labor Statistics fails to report on unemployment in a way that could be seen as even minimally accurate that is not for me to say or others to care. No one in government, or in politics, or on the right or on the left could possibly think that I have anything to contribute to the ongoing debates about whether this country is doing enough to impoverish Americans and disenfranchise the poor just to name two of the important initiatives.

Sure we have been successful at destroying opportunity for the poor, but are we doing enough to see that our society is completely corrupt and disingenuous?

So if you do me the incredibly courtesy of actually reading my notes on Globalization and the overt corruption and failures of our government and institutions, please be patient with me as I am quite aware what a complete waste of time this all is.

If there is any value at all in this exercise is that it lets me blow off a little steam and may help others form their own opinions on some of these topics.

We will return to our regularly scheduled programming soon.

The Need for Reciprocity When Insulting Someone With Social Media

One of the great aspects of Social Media is the ability to offend people at a deeper level and with more oomph than mere email or online forums. In the past, using receding media technology, such as writing on paper or the printed word, one needed a little time for the insult to become clear. But now with the bold new technology of Social Media and the power of the Internet we can mortally offend someone with the click of a mouse.

And we do, we do insult people, we insult people all the time with Facebook.

But since this is a totally new approach, some mechanisms may need refinement until it settles down into a truly democratic method of punching someone in the ego.

Such refinement is probably necessary in the case of the Facebook method of blocking and unblocking. As it stands now, one can block someone without their knowledge, but also unblock them without their knowledge as well. Blocking keeps either party from seeing anything about each other, even to know that the other person exists on Facebook. So far so good.

But there are issues.  The first problem is that the blocked individual has to find out on their own nickle that they have been blocked, which is always a demeaning thing to have to do. One wonders what happened to the other person, one searches, one does not find, then one discovers that one has been blocked. I have noticed that by the time this happens that the feeling is usually, but not always, mutual. In my case, the two times I have been blocked it is because I tried to build bridges to someone who I have damaged relationships with. In both cases their blocking me is a rebuff.

But you see, having been rebuffed in my effort to open communications, that is pretty much the end of the matter from my point of view. But Facebook does not give me the ability to implement that. The other party can unblock me and see what I am doing whenever they want, and I don't want that. I want any unblocking to be mutual, they have to ask, and I have to agree.

Because, frankly, I really don't want to see or hear from them again.

The Brexit Referendum and the Nature of the British Constitution

As an American watching the controversy regarding the non-binding referendum calling for the UK to leave the EU, I have wondered how it is that such a dramatic and structural change could be called for with a simple referendum and a majority vote of the voting citizens. Surely, I thought, one would require some higher bar than a vote which might be a majority of one citizen?

Such a structural change to the constitution in this country would require a 2/3rds majority in both the House of Representatives and the Senate at which time the proposed amendment would be sent to the states and would require 3/4s of all states to ratify this amendment.

This is a fairly high bar to pass and well it should be. There are a lot of pretty crazy ideas out there that can get a majority vote at any one time, but getting a 2/3rds vote from both houses of Congress and 3/4s of all states is a lot of work and thus any amendment that passes really does have the people of the United States behind it.

For example, if a state could secede from "the Union", e.g. the United States of America, with simply a majority vote in a referendum that could be called for at any time, how many states do you think would still be in the so-called United States of America?  I am pretty sure that most of the Southern and many of the Western states would no longer be a part of our country if that was all it took.  

So I researched how the British Constitution could be changed and one more time discovered that I only think I know what is happening outside this country, the reality is far more interesting and complicated.

The United States of America has a single document which we call the Constitution, a central document that sets out the rights and responsibilities of the various branches of government, how those branches are elected or appointed, how they relate to each other, how the judicial system works, how laws are made, and so forth. This document of course is just the tip of the iceberg, and underneath it is a whole body of law and court judgments and opinions and so forth. We have our strict constitutionalists and our more liberal interpretations, etc.

But in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland there is no one single written constitution. What there is a series of important Acts of Parliament, conventions and court judgments that make up how the UK rules itself. Among the written parts of this body of laws and whatnot are such famous items as the Magna Carta of 1215, the Bill of Rights of 1689, the Parliament Acts of 1911-1949, and so forth. There is also at least one famous image that shows how Parliament should sit, and a variety of historical conventions that guide behavior.

I am quite sure that I do not understand the full nature of what the UK Constitution is, and that at the very least several months could be spent productively just figuring out what the important elements are. The point is, things are not the same everywhere, and it is foolish to think that they are.

The British Library has a useful introduction to this process and the UK Constitution here.

This explains how one could have a non-binding referendum of such importance that just has a majority vote, but still be left with a lot of confusion about whether or not Parliament will actually implement it (e.g. the UK leaving the EU).  A clue to this is in the pithy phrase "the Supremacy of the Crown in Parliament" and I leave it to the interested reader to look that one up and be amazed.

House of Commons

To put a possibly useful spin on this, lets briefly review how the two different constitutions came about. The UK as a country came into existence over a period of more than a millennia. One of the benchmarks of this formation process was, of course, the famous Magna Carta of 1215. That document, and the events that precipitated it, is now 800 years old. Although there were certainly civil wars and revolutions in the region now called the United Kingdom, there was never a time when everything was brought together into a single document and put into writing. It was a much more organic process, incremental, and with a very long history.

This country, on the other hand, was formed from 13 colonies of Great Britain, each colony of which had one of three different colonial structures that governed them. In order to bring the 13 different structures into alignment, a series of conventions were held in order to form a single structure that could please everyone. There was not a lot of trust and everything had to be put into writing. The first attempt at this, the Articles of Confederation, served to be good enough to fight a Revolutionary War, but not so good at running a country. From the second attempt at it comes our current Constitution.

The Bill of Rights of 1689

So there was an opportunity, and a need, to get everything in writing in one place. Of course, things are not so simple in reality even here, as we also have legal precedent in the form of common law which we inherited from Great Britain and which affects our life pretty much all the time.

So the point is, there were no special procedures for a Brexit referendum because there is no formal, single constitution to amend.  The "Supremacy of the Crown is in Parliament", so whatever Parliament votes is the way it goes, unless I suppose the Queen vetoes it, but she doesn't.

These darn foreigners are always full of surprises.

_____________________________________________

A few useful links: 

The Articles of Confederation on Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Articles_of_Confederation

Parliamentary Sovereignty in the United Kingdom

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parliamentary_sovereignty_in_the_United_Kingdom

Snowden Attempt to Get Pardon From Obama

The Guardian has an article on Snowden which you can read here.

The point of the article is that his lawyer is mounting a full-court press to get a pardon before the end of the Obama administration, possibly in the very short interval between the election of the new president and her [sic] inauguration.  Some questions were asked in the Comments section which I attempt to answer below. ¹

1. Could Obama pardon Snowden even though he has not been convicted?

Yes. Ford pardoned Nixon who was also not convicted, nor formally charged so far as I know.

2. Does the fact that Bush and Cheney have not been formally accused of crimes by the DOJ mean that they did not commit any crimes?

No, not at all. It just means that the US Government in the person of President Obama has been covering up for them. So far as I know, there is no statute of limitations on murder and torture.

3. Would Obama plausibly pardon Snowden?

Not in a billion years. Ladies and Gentlemen, Boys and Girls. Its time to wake up to the fact that absolutely no one who is cleared to know what happened (to the best of their knowledge) has anything good to say about Snowden beyond one comment by a senior military leader that it may be that Snowden was not consciously a tool of foreign intelligence to begin with. ²

No one, repeat no one, who knows anything about the case thinks that his motivations and actions have anything to do with NSA illegal spying on US citizens.

Neither Obama, Clinton or even Trump is likely to pardon Snowden. I also think it is interesting that the Obama administration does not seem to even be willing to discuss a plea bargain with him (e.g. you come home, plead guilty to one thing, serve some time, then be released). In other words, they think his crimes are completely egregious and the case against him airtight.

Anyone who is a Snowden partisan at this point is unlikely to find this blog post of much interest. You know, you just know, that Snowden is a hero and a patriot. Well, if so, why did you vote for Obama? Or did you? Do you think McCain would have been any more sympathetic? Or Hilary Clinton? A little naive, are we, perhaps?

The famous Mad Magazine "Spy vs Spy"

Notes:

1. I have too much time on my hands, clearly.

2. Do not remember who said this.  I believe it was a senior military official who served in a role in Intelligence and whose comments were recorded in the period immediately following the first Snowden releases.

Biography

This is now five years (plus) out of date.  I have never been able to write a biography that is both concise and gives some feeling for the work.

Biography of Michael Wahrman

Michael Wahrman is a pioneer of computer animation and digital visual effects. His work includes the prototype of the rendering system at Robert Abel & Associates, design of the animation system that became the Wavefront Advanced Visualizer, producer of the first behaviorally animated film, design of an early computer generated character animation system, the design of a real-time “performance animation system” for character animation and set design in real-time for use in both motion pictures and early virtual reality. In 1988 he co-founded deGraf/Wahrman, inc an important early computer animation research and production company which produced one of the first real-time computer generated character performances, a ride-film for Universal Studios Florida, two stereo ride-films for Landmark Entertainment, and visual effects on several motion pictures, all pioneering work as this was before computer animation was considered a mainstream technique. As a consultant he has worked for many well-known companies and projects including IBM Research, IBM Multimedia, Walt Disney Imagineering, Sony, New York University, the American Museum of Natural History, Viacom New Media, Pacific Title & Arts Studio, Viacom Interactive Television and dozens of others. He contributed to the IBM Digital Production Studio Project (which founded Digital Domain) and was Visual Effects Consultant on the NASA Digital Galaxy Project as part of the rebuild of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History. On several occasions he has collaborated with Ken Perlin of NYU on various character animation and user interface research projects. He has received a Technical Achievement Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences and a research award from the Chicago Film Festival. He has served many years on the computer animation jury of Prix Ars Electronica. He has served two terms on the Board of NY SIGGRAPH and been a speaker at ACM SIGGRAPH, Imagina (Monte Carlo), Media Tech (Milano) and performed live computer animation at TED and at the Brooklyn Academy of Music with Lee Breuer.

The Influence of James Bond on the Fashion of the Cinematic Evil Genius

When Ian Fleming, formerly of British Naval Intelligence and a dropout of Sandhurst, wrote the James Bond novels, he thought he was making a living as a writer. He had no idea that his work was, eventually, to define the style and appearance of the world criminal and evil genius in the cinema of the West.

Although it is not clear exactly why it is that the idiosyncratic but elegant mad geniuses of the Bond movies prefer the Eastern style of men's suits, prefer it they do. From Dr. No to Elliot Carver to Ernst Stavro Blofeld, they all prefer their jackets to have a Nehru collar and their suits to be the one preferred by Mao Zedong, Chairman of the Communist Party of China.

But which one is it? The Mao suit or the Nehru jacket? And what are the implications of this choice? Lets examine the evidence and define our terms.

A truly elegant and imposing evil genius

A brief search on the Internet, that bold new paradigm, reveals an essay on this very topic by Sonya Glyn Nicholson entitled “The Mao Suit and the Nehru Jacket” which you can read here on the parisiangentleman.co.uk website.

https://parisiangentleman.co.uk/2014/05/30/the-mao-suit-and-the-nehru-jacket/

Why it should be that the fashion website “Parisian Gentleman” is located in the United Kingdom is a mystery but it probably is a result of Globalization which combines the strength and elegance of the British tailoring industry with the importance of Paris as a capital of culture and style.

What Ms. Nicholson explains is that the defining characteristic of the Nehru jacket, so named because Jawaharal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of India after its independence from England, famously used to wear this style of jacket when being photographed with other world leaders, is its Mandarin Collar. It is this collar, up to two inches high of unfolded material, combined with the lack of lapels, that makes the Nehru jacket distinctive. The jacket is also generally tailored to fit the form of the wearer. It is a jacket very suited to wear at an elegant dinner party.

Missiles are only the first step to show our power

Prime Minister Nehru and his Western sycophants

Ms. Nicholson goes on to explain that the Mao suit, so named for its use by the great revolutionary leader of the People's Republic of China, Mao Zedong, is a complete suit, not merely a jacket. It has a boxy cut, four pockets with a practical button, no lapels, and most of all

The strongest characteristic of the Mao is the short and rigid fold-over collar, with rounded points extended no further than the base of the band.

I hope three examples will suffice. In the first, Dr. No explains to his dinner guest, James Bond, his plans for world domination. In the second Elliot Carver, as played by Jonathan Pryce announces his new global satellite network in Tomorrow Never Dies (1997). In our third example, none other than Ernst Stavro Blofeld introduces himself to James Bond in You Only Live Twice (1967).

Dr. No at Dinner

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fdiq_YcIzg0

Elliot Carver Announcing Satellite Network

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PqjhsPYyy4

Ernst Stavro Blofeld of SPECTRE Introduces Himself

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ay2sO6tWbE

But the most interesting question still remains. Yes, I think we have shown the obvious, never doubted fact that men's fashion has been affected by the design choices of the 007 films.  But what does it all mean? We still want to know why they feel compelled to wear this style of suits. What is going on in their master criminal minds?

I have the following theories. The first is that it is nothing more than these outsider geniuses, forced by society to prove their genius, have spent significant time in the mysterious and exotic East where this style of fashion is anything but exotic. Thus, they merely see themselves as well-dressed and they are, and would be quite conventional in Mumbai or Beijing.  The second theory is that this fashion style is a choice designed to appeal to the fears of the Westerner to the dangers and mystery of the East. In a sense it is a form of backhanded stereotyping, but not negative stereotyping. The East is dangerous and thus somewhat appealing and these geniuses of crime are therefore styled to evoke that Eastern feeling.

Even comic evil geniuses have affected this style

_________________________________________________________

Notes

Tomorrow Never Dies (1997) on IMDB

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120347/

Thunderball (1965) on IMDB

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0059800/

Dr. No (1962) on IMDB

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0055928/

Jawaharlal Nehru

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jawaharlal_Nehru

Meditation on a Corrupt Primary Season

The NY Times, that fine defender of equal rights and political justice, as long as you agree with them, has run another editorial telling me that a vote for Bernie is Bonkers, but a vote for Hillary is for Truth and Justice.

The editorial goes over and over how bad the Republicans are for Gay Rights, and how good Hillary will be for Gay Rights. I have no doubt that the editorial is correct. But, Horrors of Horrors, as much as I support Gay Rights, I think it is an issue blown all out of proportion by the Religious Right and that it is not the only issue on the table. Sure, Gay Rights, no problem. Absolutely, Gay Rights! How about Criminal Sentences for Top Executives who Violate the Law? How about Taxation of the Rich? How about a real Economic Strategy for this country that is more than “Make more money for the rich; destroy the middle class; destroy the labor movement”.

And of course they trot out the issue of Bush vs Gore. Now, as a Gore supporter, I feel that "electing" Bush was a disaster for this country and the world. But Al Gore is not Hillary Clinton. Gore is not a compromised "Tool of the Corporation". Where was the NY Times when the Supreme Court pissed on the Constitution in public in 2000? I was there, I was watching, and I can tell you that the NY Times bent over and fell into line.

Trump is a Red Herring. He is nothing more than an attempt to manufacture consent for the Rockefeller Republican candidate Hillary Clinton.

There is no doubt that Hillary Clinton will be the next president of the United States. And I can tell you flat out that I have no idea what she stands for beyond her strong support for Globalization and the status quo. Is she a bad person? Probably not. 

Now it may be that under that $12,000 Armani jacket burns a heart filled with compassion for the poor and disenfranchised, for the unemployed and the abandoned. We won't know until she is elected and I am a firm believer in the principle that you can not know how someone will really be as President until he or she is there.

There are other problems as well. In California, there is a law that keeps anyone who ran in a party primary from running in the main election as an independent. Its called the “Sore Loser” law. So that means that Bernie can not run as an independent in California, or that is my reading. Why does this matter? It matters because what with Nevada, Massachusetts, New York and many other irregularities, issues of whether independents can vote in a primary, etc., we have a nomination process which is illegitimate in many Americans' eyes.

Maybe I need to lower my expectations about what constitutes a fair election.  But I would have thought that by 2016 we would have this more together. You know, Democracy? Free and fair elections?

And that's a problem.  When you blow your credibility on things like this, how can you expect people to believe you when something even more important is on the table?