Monthly Archives: November 2016

Pre-Traumatic Stress Syndrome

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Pre-Traumatic Stress Syndrome

The college boy babbles excitedly,
testosterone jitters and beer foam greased,
leans towards the busty co-ed,
with high hopes.
The card in his wallet says “One-A,”
the Tet Offensive rages an ocean away.

The bridegroom fumbles knotting his tie,
it takes five tries.

The wife wakes him up,
talks about his damaged aura,
gasping and hacking to the emergency room 3 AM.
Doctor tells him “Croup.”
“Maybe you should get her a psychiatric evaluation.”
Eight months pregnant.

Career hopes rest on his next mission,
but she and the children have to vacation at grandma’s.
He watches their plane disappear up into the blue,
tight throat, heavy heart.
A letter waits for him at home,
“We are not coming back until…”

The kids have been played, fed, bathed; asleep.
She’s gone again the weekend:
transactional therapist college retreat.
Heavy rain, flooded basement, house creaks.
In the dank dark his flashlight shows
twenty feet of rolled foundation.
How much will that cost?
Upstairs, Saturday’s mail unopened:
bank statement, savings, zero balance,
joint account.

The kids are busy, know everything,
no time for the old man.
That’s okay, everything’s stable,
accounts are paid for,
the oldest likes college.
A union organizer now, meeting at noon.
Secretary puts a letter in his mailbox:
layoff.

She’s a consolation for life in the downslope years.
“Women don’t need men,” she tells him,
“men need women.”
That’s what you think, sweetheart: silent smile.
Next summer at the beach: “I want a baby.”
“Of course.” You always knew,
nature must have its way.
No restoring the sports car now,
keep your zen,
maybe she’ll still love you in twenty years.

Mother calls, father’s had a heart attack.
He leaves for the long drive in the rain.
The wipers break, scratch the windshield at eye level,
electrics are spotty.
How will I take care of her now?

Doctor gives him the news,
prescriptions, change your life,
worry to maximize,
and it costs.
But dependents have all their demands.
You can’t be an artist and have a family.
At least now I know it doesn’t really matter.
So, relax and enjoy.
You can’t make time, you can only savor it,
or lose it.
Life belongs to the alert,
peace belongs to the knowing.

29 November 2016

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Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz (13 August 1926 – 25 November 2016)

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Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz (13 August 1926 – 25 November 2016)

(The Guardian)
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/nov/26/fidel-castro-cuba-revolutionary-icon-dies

(The New York Times)
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/26/world/americas/fidel-castro-dies.html?_r=0

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This is the Cuba I saw in 1959 and 1960: Liberation

Fidel Castro speaks from a makeshift balcony draped with Cuban flags in Santa Clara en route to victorious entry into Havana. Photograph: Lee Lockwood/The Life Images Collection/Getty

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Nelson Mandela, in 2001, thanking Castro for helping to end apartheid:

“From its earliest days, the Cuban revolution has been a source of inspiration for all those who value freedom. We admire the sacrifices of the Cuban people in maintaining their independence and sovereignty in the face of the vicious imperialist and orchestrated campaign to destroy the awesome force of the Cuban revolution. Long live the Cuban Revolution! Long live comrade Fidel Castro!”

Cuban military forces in Angola and Namibia (from 1975 to 1991) defeated the apartheid South African military (the SADF, at Cuito Cuanavale in 1988) whose invasions sought to prevent the national independence of these two former European colonies, and to occupy them. The success of these national liberation struggles, and the defeat of the SADF led directly to the instability and then collapse of the apartheid regime in South Africa, the 1990 freeing of Nelson Mandela (imprisoned in 1962 based on a CIA tipoff), and the end of apartheid with the fully representative democratic election of Nelson Mandela as president in 1994.

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The U.S. supported the apartheid regime in South Africa during its 1966-1989 Border War with Angola, Namibia and Zambia (and Zimbabwe), and it allowed former US military officers to work as free-lance mercenary assassins for the South African Defense Force (SADF). Though it is technically illegal for US citizens to act as mercenaries and work as assassins for foreign governments, this technicality was conveniently ignored in those cases where the success of a “private business deal” was of political interest to the US State Department and the CIA (who “winked” and afterwards debriefed). Former members of the US military who had combat experience or superior training as members of elite commando-type units (e.g., Special Forces, Army Rangers) could earn enough to fund a very comfortable and immediate retirement, far beyond what was likely with any tenure in the US military, with just one or two undercover operations for the SADF. The American and European agents dispatching the targets described by Victoria Brittain (They Had To Die: Assassination Against Liberation, http://rac.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/48/1/60) were merely politically expendable labor (some were captured and executed), though well-trained thanks to earlier taxpayer investments. (see: John Stockwell – Chief of the CIA’s Angola Task Force during its 1975 covert operations – http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Stockwell/John_Stockwell.html)

South Africa lost its border war, so foreign troops (Cubans aiding, and South Africans invading) left Angola in 1988, Namibia gained its independence in 1989, and agitation in South Africa against the apartheid state swelled from 1990 till apartheid was overturned in 1994.

The Assassination Bureau
15 July 2009
http://www.counterpunch.org/2009/07/15/the-assassination-bureau/

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Cuba Under Fidel Castro
by Benjamin Studebaker
[on: economic policy, governmental inflexibility and future prospects]
26 November 2016
https://benjaminstudebaker.com/2016/11/26/cuba-under-fidel-castro/

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I met Castro in 1960 (quite an experience).

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I have been comparing my memories of significant events half a century ago to the commentaries, commemorations, and propaganda about them in present times.

In 2009, I recalled how incredible it was to experience the popular exultation in Cuba after the success of the Cuban Revolution of 1959. Freedom! I wish this for everyone on earth, always.

In 2010, I remembered how pleased we Catholics were that one of our own, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, had been elected president despite the wide popularity in 1960 of that stalwart commie-chaser Richard M. Nixon. (The other zealous commie-hound, still popular to American public memory, was Robert F. Kennedy.)

In 2011, I recalled how my juvenile political consciousness began to darken because of the fact, not the failure, of the Bay of Pigs invasion of April 1961 and the Kennedy brothers’ crusade against Cuban communism. My president had sent an armada against the home of my grandparents. Could my family ever return to Cuba?

In 2012, I remembered our family living in terror through the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962. At one point the question for us was: will Kennedy drop a nuclear bomb on grandma and grandpa in Havana before Khrushchev drops one on us in New York, or vice versa?

Overtones Of Awareness
9 September 2013
http://www.swans.com/library/art19/mgarci70.html

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I recall visiting my grandparents in the city of Havana during a summer vacation in 1959. The colors, warmth, sounds and odors of Cuba were all rich, pungent and sensuous. Equally impressive to a boy growing up in New York City was the flagrant poverty of many Cuban people: adults with naked rented children huddled at street intersections begging from the passing tourists.

Fulgencio Batista was Cuba’s dictator, whose regime Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. characterized this way: “The corruption of the Government, the brutality of the police, the regime’s indifference to the needs of the people for education, medical care, housing, for social justice and economic justice … is an open invitation to revolution.” Bohemia magazine — the equivalent in Cuba of Life magazine in the U.S. at that time — would print pictures of revolutionaries shot dead during gunfights with Batista’s police, lying rumpled in pools of blood on the street. I only heard the adults talk Cuban politics back in New York, when I was taken to the upper west side of Manhattan, our old barrio, for haircuts at the Cuban barbershop below the elevated train along Broadway, and in the brownstone apartments of relatives and family friends during Sunday visits. Everybody was anxious, everybody wanted a free Cuba, everybody was thinking of Fidel.

Then, on the first of January 1959, Batista fled the island and Castro’s victorious army rolled into an ecstatically jubilant Havana on the 8th. We returned in June for a long summer vacation (and again in 1960). Even in the Cubana de Aviación four-engine turboprop one could sense the uplift, the exhilaration of the Cuban Revolution. But the full impact hit me when I exited the airplane and walked into the lush aromatic heat of a tropical country whose people were rapt with joy. The barbudos — the bearded ones — were everywhere. The barbudos were revolutionaries in pristine khakis, with gunbelts holstering highly polished and uniquely detailed pistols, some silver-colored, some gold-colored, some gun-metal blue, some with very long barrels, some with artistically engraved handles. Only the beards were shaggy, all other items from boot soles to cap crests were neat, shiny and crisp. At first I was a little nervous when a barbudo would climb onto a streetcar or bus and sit near me. But I soon got used to sitting next to gold-plated long-barrel Lugers, gleaming mirror-finish silvery Colt 45s, and robust Smith & Wesson 44 caliber six-shot revolvers. Sidearms were definitely the display items of identity.

During those summer vacations we travelled all over the island and saw many remnants of revolutionary struggle, one being a bullet-pocked hospital in the countryside, once the scene of a battle, now happily back in service. I even met Fidel at Isla de Pinos (now Isla de la Juventud). However materially poor some Cubans could be, especially campesinos, peasants in the hinterlands, they were all just so happy: believing themselves free, life despite its burdens was now a joy. Every person, every place, every moment exuded the same sense of uplift. I was immersed in a national sense of freedom, and it soaked into my psyche and bones. This experience permanently magnetized my political compass, so that regardless of verbal arguments and logical constructs in later years, my compass always points my sympathies toward freedom for any people.

Libya 2011: The Human Right to Political Freedom
3 May 2011
(a few minor chronological errors corrected in the above excerpt)
http://dissidentvoice.org/2011/05/libya-2011-the-human-right-to-political-freedom/

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Lee Harvey Oswald, a disaffected American seeking glorious recognition as a leftist hero, acted as a freelancing James Bond (the world’s favorite fictional Tory) to impress the Dirección General de Inteligencia de Cuba (DGI, the Cuban intelligence service) by assassinating President Kennedy on November 22, 1963. The DGI had been locked in a battle with the CIA to keep Fidel Castro from being assassinated, a project pushed hard by the Kennedy brothers, John and Robert. Lyndon Baines Johnson, John Kennedy’s successor, stopped the CIA’s Fidel assassination program shortly after taking office. The Soviet Russian intelligence service (KGB) had found Oswald too unstable to rely on as an agent, and happily let him return to America from his self-imposed exile in Russia (October 1959 to June 1962). The DGI had the difficulty of being a much less powerful organization situated far closer to its small nation’s overwhelmingly superior enemy. Thus, the DGI unlike the KGB might be willing to exploit the improvisations of a volunteer useful idiot. Oswald spent the last week of September 1963 in Mexico City, visiting the Cuban and Russian consulates seeking a visa to travel to Cuba, and as a consequence met DGI agents. The DGI was too professional to compromise itself by inducting a delusional American outcast into its ranks, but the DGI seems to have been either gutsy enough or desperate enough to allow Oswald to imagine he would be welcomed in Cuba should he accomplish something of significant value for the Cuban Revolution. Oswald returned to Dallas on October 14, 1963.

Fifty-Year Look Back 1963-2013
Part I: 1963-1968
18 November 2013
http://www.swans.com/library/art19/mgarci75.html

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The unrelenting campaign by the Kennedy brothers to kill Castro (to have the specific person of Fidel Castro assassinated) and to topple the Cuban Revolution (the traditional anti-communist project stretching back to the Wilson Administration) made it logical and necessary that the Cuban communist government counterattack as a means of personal protection for Fidel Castro, and defense of the communist revolution in Cuba.

Lyndon Johnson came to realize (after he was told many of the facts in 1964, and recalling the 1963 assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem, with US fingerprints) that the only way to stop this Godfather-type tit-for-tat presidential assassination madness was to shut down the CIA’s Castro project. Also, Johnson realized he had to suppress public knowledge of the US efforts to assassinate Castro because exposure of the Cuban link to the Kennedy assassination might cause a national uproar leading to war with Russia (the Cuban and Russian intelligence services had many intimate links, and while the Russians had passed up on using Oswald they had mentioned him to the Cubans, and followed developments).

So, the logical and amorally justifiable reason for John F. Kennedy’s assassination was kept from the public and out of the Warren Commission Report by the combined efforts of the Johnson Administration to avoid war with Russia (inevitable after a US invasion of Cuba), Robert Kennedy to keep the family name untarnished, and the Cuban and Russian governments to keep from being attacked.

However, the great wisdom Johnson acted on to end the presidential assassination spiral did not extend far enough to reverse official US hostility toward the Cuban Revolution. Since then, there has always been a seething desire for revenge against the Cubans for the “Kennedy hit.” This animus would find expression in the continuing allowance for Miami Cuban operations against Cuba and its people both on the island and elsewhere in Latin America, as well as in CIA sponsorship of terror and counterinsurgency schemes like the Bolivian operation that resulted in the killing of Che Guevara. Che died because of John and Robert Kennedy’s assassination sins, and for the Cuban DGI’s successful effort to shield Fidel Castro from them.

Cubans continue to suffer the US embargo (and many other forms of harassment) because the US governing elite is still unable to publicly admit its role in setting the conditions that rebounded as the “blowback” of the Kennedy assassination. So long as the U.S. maintains this sense of wounded pride, the Cuban people will be forced to suffer a revenge covering for a shameful denial.

Castro And The Kennedy Image After The Checkmate
23 April 2012
http://www.swans.com/library/art18/mgarci46.html

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Cuba is a US concentration camp. Everyone there is being punished for failure to obey US Imperial authority. The United States enforces an economic blockage against Cuba that aims to starve and deprive (e.g., withhold medicines from) the population until they divorce their national allegiance to their own government and leaders, and give it over to the Imperial center in Washington D.C. The Cuban people have committed the crime of seeking to control the economic destiny of their island, and of applying the benefits of economic developments (say, the profits from tourist hotels, and rum and cigar production) to the improvement of social conditions. At one point in the 1980s (while income from the Soviet Union still came in), Cuba had the lowest rate of infant mortality in the Western Hemisphere (perhaps Canada beat it), and much lower than that of the U.S., this due to its universal health care system. The rate in the U.S. is higher because of the drug-related effects and general economic deprivation in the US minority population, in short because it is “more profitable” this way.

The US base at Guantánamo is a relic of a “treaty” between the U.S. and the Cuban Government the U.S. allowed to function after the Spanish-American War, in 1898, which granted a lease for the base for over a century. Guantánamo, like Hong Kong until recently, and Gibraltar today, is an example of imperialism in its purest form. The U.S. also acquired bases in the Philippines from the same war. Once the open warfare by the U.S. against the Castro regime began, the Cuban government shut off all water and electric power into the Guantánamo base, so the U.S. has to generate its own supplies. Cuba lacks the muscle to push the U.S. out, and it is constrained by the “legality” of the lease agreement for the base. There is no doubt that Cuba would wish to regain full sovereignty of its Guantánamo territory as soon as possible. Castro is a native of Guantánamo Province.

The departure of the U.S. from Guantánamo would be a bigger event in world affairs than even the departure of Britain from Hong Kong. Why? Because it would be a reversal of the imperialist grasp by the world’s superpower of a territorial possession in one of its most persistently disobedient and recalcitrant irritants, and a weak, minor Latin American nation to boot. There would be jubilation in the entire Spanish speaking world. The humiliation of so many Yankee imperialist abuses, from the Mexican border (near Oregon in 1845) to Tierra del Fuego, would have found one symbolic victory as a retort. So, I don’t expect the U.S. to leave, if it feels it can bully international attention into “distracting itself” from the issue. It is precisely to keep the message alive throughout Latin America that the U.S. is the master of the Western Hemisphere, that it will do all in its power to keep Guantánamo securely under its thumb.

Today the U.S. runs a concentration camp of colonial captives, who resisted the Imperial forces, and who made war against the United States. From the Washington D.C. perspective, keeping these individuals at Guantánamo makes sense, they are in the “high security” wing of a colonial prison island. These prisoners are close enough to be easily reached for interrogation, and yet sufficiently distant to be out of sight from polite society, like a garbage dump at the edge of town. Because the U.S. is a single-ideology two-party state, it is unlikely that any sufficiently drastic change will occur soon in US foreign policy to affect the continuation of the US Guantánamo presence. It is simply the case that the people of the United States are not overwhelmingly anti-imperialist. While the situation is somewhat like eating sausages, in that people who do usually prefer not to see how they are made, most Americans seem willing to accept some slight unpleasantness creeping into their consciousness in exchange for a maintenance of the “American way of life.”

Guantánamo USA
3 November 2003
http://www.swans.com/library/art9/mgarci05.html

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For a sense of Cubanismo (a Cuban sense of life), explore the many pages on this blog that combine the “Cuba” and “music” themes.

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Trump Absolutely Won, Hillary Absolutely Lost

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11 November 2016 (98th Armistice Day)

“I’d rather vote for what I want, and not get it, than vote for what I don’t want and get it.”
(Eugene V. Debs)

I wanted Bernie Sanders, and if not then Jill Stein, and if not then… abstain.

I would never vote FOR Hillary Clinton, nor FOR Donald Trump.

Electorally, How Did Trump Win?

– RURAL and RUST BELT counties are the overwhelming majority of counties in the USA.

– A majority of people in RURAL and RUST BELT counties favored Trump.

– This is how Trump won states to get the significant majority of Electoral votes.

Electorally, How Did Hillary Lose?

– Hillary only won the URBAN CENTERS in the major US wealth areas:
– LEFT COAST: LA Basin, SF Coastal Strip, Portland, Seattle
– SOUTHWEST: Colorado & New Mexico cites, and Latino vote
– MIDWEST: Minneapolis/St. Paul (MN), Chicago (IL)
– EAST COAST ESTABLISHMENT: Wash.D.C., VA, MD, DE
– BIG MONEY CENTRAL: NY, NJ, CT, RI, MA
– NEW ENGLAND: VT (Bernie’s state), NH, coastal Maine

– Hillary lost the great majority of inland, outlying and rural counties in “her” states.

Florida Vote (a swing state):

Trump = 4,605,515
Clinton = 4,485, 745
Stein = 64,019

Clinton + Stein = 4,549,764

Trump got +55,751 MORE Florida votes than Clinton + Stein

Don’t blame Jill Stein. Trump absolutely won, and Hillary absolutely lost.

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2008 Red-Blue Map by County:
2008-redblue

2012 Red-Blue Map by County:
2012-redblue

Hillary did WORSE in 2016 than the results shown in the 2012 map.

See: http://www.google.com/ “2016 US election results”
(for the numbers in every state, and individual state-county maps)

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Voter Turnout 2016

Part of Hillary Clinton’s defeat (and Donald Trump’s victory) in 2016 can be attributed to the LOWEST percentage voter turnout in US history (since 1828, when data records began). TEN MILLION fewer eligible voters went to the polls in 2016 than in 2012. Fewer than half of eligible voters actually voted in 2016.

Percentage turnout has been above 50% since 1828, except during 1920, 1924, 1996 and 2016. The % turnout for 2016 was 48.6% (the lowest in US history).

Between 2012 and 2016 the US voting age population (VAP) increased by 10 million.
(VAP in 2016 is 245.3 million)

The voter turnout in 2016 was 10 million LESS than in 2012.
(Turnout in 2016 was 119.3 million)

The percentage voter turnout in 2012 was 54.9%
The percentage voter turnout in 2016 was 48.6% (record low)

The election years with LESS than 50% turnout:
1920, 49.2%
1924, 48.9%
1996, 49.0% (W. Clinton wins)
2016, 48.6% (H. Clinton loses)

In 2016:
H. Clinton gains 47.7% of turnout (56.90M votes)
D. Trump gains 47.5% of turnout (56.67M votes)
HC + DT gain 95.2% of turnout (113.57M votes)

Net Others gain 4.8% of turnout (5.73M votes)

HC gains 230,053 more votes than DT (+0.19% of turnout)
(loses on basis of Electoral College votes)

IF WE ASSUME that:
– the eligible voters favoring Trump were on average highly motivated, so a high percentage of them went to the polls,
while
– the eligible voters favoring HRC were on average modestly motivated, so a middling percentage of them went to the polls
then
IT IS POSSIBLE that:
– in the non-voting portion of the VAP (say at least the 10M missing since 2012) there was a higher portion of HRC-leaning people to DT-leaning people,
– AND IF turnout had been higher
then
– relatively more HRC votes than T votes would have been added (to the observed totals)
AND
– that might possibly have tilted the election in HRC’s favor.

Bernie Sanders has often said that “with high turnouts Democrats win, with low turnouts Republicans win.” (Which is why Republicans favor voter suppression.)

In brief, HRC needed tidal waves of “missing voters” who favored her, in Red States.

Of course, it is entirely possible that the non-voting remainder of the 2016 VAP (126M possible voters) did not split any differently than the voting portion (the 119.3M turnout) on the favoring of HRC or DT. So speculating on how an HRC win might have been gained by engaging large numbers of presumably “missing” HRC voters may be grasping at nonexistent straws.

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Commentary On Election 2016 (follows)

Please note, I express myself freely in what follows. I am NOT concerned to spare anyone’s feelings. Nothing personal, but…

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Essential reading if you want to know “why it happened” and “what do we (really) have to do to fix the problem.” In brief: stop crying, emoting, “fleeing” your privileged white ass to Canada hoping they make good lattés up there, and messing up the streets (protesting a democratic election!!). Instead, fire the ENTIRE Democratic Party, and start that over with an entirely new crew (e.g., Bernie, Nina Turner, Keith Ellison, Tulsi Gabbard, that kind of people). You are only victims of believing what you want to believe, instead of opening your eyes and ears to reality, and then dealing with it as it actually exists. Your ignorance is their power. Maintaining ignorance (blaming others) is the essence of the delusion of “privilege.” I do not feel your pain. Wake up!

Democrats, Trump, and the Ongoing, Dangerous Refusal to Learn the Lesson of Brexit
(Glenn Greenwald)
9 November 2016
https://theintercept.com/2016/11/09/democrats-trump-and-the-ongoing-dangerous-refusal-to-learn-the-lesson-of-brexit/

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Yvette Carnell (on Facebook, just after midnight, on the morning of 9 November 2016):

“Understand what this Trump victory means. He defeated capital, the media, the military industrial complex and both the Republican and Democratic Party. Republicans said he was unelectable and ran away from him after the groping allegations. Now Trump is president. This is historic.”

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My Old Predictions on Election 2016
9 November 2016
https://manuelgarciajr.com/2016/11/09/my-old-predictions-on-election-2016/
(above shown in full below)

During last June (the CA primary, 7 June 2016) I wrote that “a vote for Hillary Clinton before July is a vote for Donald Trump in November.” By all kinds of cheating, bribery, rigging, collusion with corporate media and procedural underhandedness, the Clinton mafia, the DNC and professional Democrats managed to shut out the popular will (and its spokesman, Bernie Sanders) from the electoral process. Okay, so the corporations won. But it seems increasing clear now that Hillary Clinton’s political legacy for America will be the Trump Administration. <> (29 September 2016)

Donald Trump is the popular response of the white working class to its nearly 40 year degradation by neoliberal economics. Donald Trump is not Hitler, neoliberalism is Dracula. The neoliberal plague was unleashed in 1979 by Margaret Thatcher (in the UK) and Ronald Reagan in 1981, and has continued to be propagated in the US by a succession of corporate-owned factotums: George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama and — if the Democratic Party can rig everything to come out just right — Hillary Clinton. <> (8 September 2016)

It is abundantly clear that should Hillary Clinton lose the November election (as seems more likely with each passing day) it will be a richly deserved loss. <> (8 September 2016)

The American electorate may arrive at a consensus of voting for a train-wreck they can be assured of seeing unfold in every detail, instead of voting for a stealthy railroading of them all, under the guise of social progress. <> (8 September 2016)

If Donald Trump does actually win the November election it will be because of all the Democratic Party regulars and Clinton faithful, who “voted for him” by late July, by voting for Hillary instead of Bernie: that is to say by rigging the voting processes, and collusion with corporate media to sabotage the Sanders campaign, in addition to simply casting their votes for Hillary during the primary elections and at the Democratic Party convention. <> (24 August 2016)

Had the Democratic Party really been concerned about beating Donald Trump in the November election they would have nominated Bernie Sanders, who is heavily favored over Donald in just about every electoral district, and in every single poll taken on that question (still). But, the Democratic Party regulars and the Clinton faithful are far more concerned about preserving their own situations of personal gain, and they did not want to “lose control” of the Democratic Party to the “popular will” (Jean-Jacques Rousseau), for the good of the country. <> (24 August 2016)

So today, the 25th of July 2016, is undoubtedly the first day of the Trump presidency, the beginning of its preamble which will reach a crescendo on November 8, and then be legitimized on the 20th of January 2017. The best hopes for the next four years in America, and perhaps for a generation, were strangled in their Democratic Party crib today. I will always hate all Hillary Clinton voters, and I will always pity all Donald Trump voters. <> (25 July 2016)

Trump voters are too stupid to do any better, and many of them are justifiably angry over how they have been exploited economically. It is perfectly understandable that they would rebel against their political impotence by throwing the monkey wrench of a vote for Trump into the gears of the system. So, I pity them. Hillary voters, on the other hand, are smart enough to realize just how stupid their identity politics vanity is. Is the advancement and enrichment of one very corrupt woman really worth the many sacrifices the nation and its people must endure to sustain it? Is the thrill of being able to say “I voted for the first American woman president” really more important than the futures of our children, and the welfare of so many hard-pressed people? For Hillary Clinton voters it is, and so I hate them. <> (25 July 2016)

The Democratic Party has done a superb job of ensuring that many millions of young Americans will never look on it with respect and trust ever again. It has also done an outstanding job at demonstrating — for all Americans and all the World — one of the clearest and most vivid counterexamples to the concept of integrity that has ever been devised. Seed corn has been wasted by the gluttony of the privileged, and of the stupid. Fortunately for these Democratic party “loyalists,” delusion and self-absorption will save them from ever noticing the consequences. Until karma surprises. <> (14 June 2016)

The 2016 election is between the people and the corporations. Independents will determine who wins in November (they outnumber registered Democrats and registered Republicans). Bernie is the overwhelming favorite nationally (and in swing states), and would easily defeat Trump. If the DP fields Hillary Clinton against Trump, Trump will win. <> (5 June 2016)

Among the people: Bernie’s supporters are the most alert, Trump’s supporters are the most bitter, and Hillary’s supporters are the most deluded. <> (5 June 2016)

If the Democratic Party apparatchiks (the paid minions of the 1% oligarchs) can beat back the hostile-takeover Sanders insurgency of popular and populist democracy, and put Hillary Clinton forward as the party’s champion in the general electoral joust, then President Trump will be inaugurated in January 2017. The Democratic Party apparatchiks are first and foremost fighting to preserve their patronage positions (to hell with the country). A President Trump is no threat to their ambitions, but a nominee Sanders — whether subsequently president or not — would mean that a revolution had occurred in the Democratic Party, and the Obama-Clinton apparatchik gravy-train derailed. <> (27 February 2016)

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President Trump
8 November 2016 (revised 11 November 2016)

President Trump is popular America’s (as opposed to institutional America’s) equivalent of a Brexit from neoliberalism and globalization.

Part of the political rejection elevating Donald Trump to the presidency (beyond excruciating economic pain) is a popular emotional rejection of social attitudes and would-be social norms (as advocated by “advanced” worldly people) that are taken as threats to local distinctiveness, local traditions and old “religious” and ethnic customs, where those old customs are largely forms of bigotry passed down through families as basic elements of social and personal identity.

As is true with ISIS, the Taliban, Syria’s Assad, Turkey’s Erdogan, Iran’s ayatollahs, Egypt’s generals, the Chinese ‘geriatrocrats,’ and every “conservative” authoritarian regime around the world, all socially “liberal” ideas like women’s rights (reproductive, marital, sexual) and equality with men (political and economic), secular parliamentary government, the illegality of institutional racism, the illegality of the persecution of homosexuality and gender relativity, are all seen as part of “world governing” capitalist globalization taking over and diluting (to zero) local power structures (which are basically certain types of regional-national male classes defining the nature of their societies, and compelling all others to fit into their assigned places in these inequitable hierarchies).

This rejectionist and xenophobic nationalism is keenly and emotionally felt as “patriotism,” the defending and maintaining of “our (local) way of life” against the invasions by heartless, impersonal, unpatriotic trans-national and exploitative world economic forces, with no loyalty locally or nationally (e.g., job offshoring, foreign tax-haven sheltering “world capital”), and whose human faces are self-aggrandizing elitists who have personally removed from themselves any localisms and “backwardness” that would connect them to the communities they would rule over from afar, in order to be most efficient in advancing their own personal ambitions. Hillary Clinton is a perfect example of such an elitist, happy to homogenize (and “feminize”) the USA in order to make its exploitation by “world capital” more efficient.

Hillary Clinton is certainly more capable than Donald Trump would ever be at managing the economic system that currently owns the USA. But the popular preference for a President Trump is an angry rejection of that Wall Street neoliberal globalized system. They don’t want Trump to run it better than Hillary, they want Trump to destroy it and give them something new, which makes them feel good within their local distinctiveness, as they imagine they would have “in the good old days.”

Personally, I wish the Democrats had run Bernie instead of Hillary. Oh well, you reap what you sow.

I voted for Jill Stein of the Green Party.

Trump has triumphed, and all the institutions, who were uniformly against him (including a significant portion of the Republican Party Establishment), have been shamed. The American people have unleashed their political berserker.

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However you feel about it, Trump’s victory is:
– the result of an honest democratic election,
– a victory for populism, and
– a defeat (electoral) of the neoliberal establishment.

I have no doubt we could have had the same electoral result with Bernie Sanders, as President-Elect.

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PDF of this article:
trump-absolutely-won-hillary-absolutely-lost

The Elephant’s Morning

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The raging rogue elephant trumpeting fury
charged up the golden hill, scattering
a pack of hypocritical jackasses braying,
and claimed the radiant glory of the sunrise
for his bedraggled, starving herd below.
Baboons howled in wonder and dismay
hunkering beneath the dustfall’s silence.
The wind blew the crack in time away,
and chilled hearts warmed by light of day.

Thunder in the valley
wind upon the hill,
hunters in the shadows
panting for a kill.
Stillness in the treetops
quaking at the roots,
coolness at the river
swallowing the mute.

9 November 2016

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My Old Predictions on Election 2016

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During last June (the CA primary, 7 June 2016) I wrote that “a vote for Hillary Clinton before July is a vote for Donald Trump in November.” By all kinds of cheating, bribery, rigging, collusion with corporate media and procedural underhandedness, the Clinton mafia, the DNC and professional Democrats managed to shut out the popular will (and its spokesman, Bernie Sanders) from the electoral process. Okay, so the corporations won. But it seems increasing clear now that Hillary Clinton’s political legacy for America will be the Trump Administration. <> (29 September 2016)

Donald Trump is the popular response of the white working class to its nearly 40 year degradation by neoliberal economics. Donald Trump is not Hitler, neoliberalism is Dracula. The neoliberal plague was unleashed in 1979 by Margaret Thatcher (in the UK) and Ronald Reagan in 1981, and has continued to be propagated in the US by a succession of corporate-owned factotums: George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama and — if the Democratic Party can rig everything to come out just right — Hillary Clinton. <> (8 September 2016)

It is abundantly clear that should Hillary Clinton lose the November election (as seems more likely with each passing day) it will be a richly deserved loss. <> (8 September 2016)

The American electorate may arrive at a consensus of voting for a train-wreck they can be assured of seeing unfold in every detail, instead of voting for a stealthy railroading of them all, under the guise of social progress. <> (8 September 2016)

If Donald Trump does actually win the November election it will be because of all the Democratic Party regulars and Clinton faithful, who “voted for him” by late July, by voting for Hillary instead of Bernie: that is to say by rigging the voting processes, and collusion with corporate media to sabotage the Sanders campaign, in addition to simply casting their votes for Hillary during the primary elections and at the Democratic Party convention. <> (24 August 2016)

Had the Democratic Party really been concerned about beating Donald Trump in the November election they would have nominated Bernie Sanders, who is heavily favored over Donald in just about every electoral district, and in every single poll taken on that question (still). But, the Democratic Party regulars and the Clinton faithful are far more concerned about preserving their own situations of personal gain, and they did not want to “lose control” of the Democratic Party to the “popular will” (Jean-Jacques Rousseau) for the good of the country. <> (24 August 2016)

So today, the 25th of July 2016, is undoubtedly the first day of the Trump presidency, the beginning of its preamble which will reach a crescendo on November 8, and then be legitimized on the 20th of January 2017. The best hopes for the next four years in America, and perhaps for a generation, were strangled in their Democratic Party crib today. I will always hate all Hillary Clinton voters, and I will always pity all Donald Trump voters. <> (25 July 2016)

Trump voters are too stupid to do any better, and many of them are justifiably angry over how they have been exploited economically. It is perfectly understandable that they would rebel against their political impotence by throwing the monkey wrench of a vote for Trump into the gears of the system. So, I pity them. Hillary voters, on the other hand, are smart enough to realize just how stupid their identity politics vanity is. Is the advancement and enrichment of one very corrupt woman really worth the many sacrifices the nation and its people must endure to sustain it? Is the thrill of being able to say “I voted for the first American woman president” really more important than the futures of our children, and the welfare of so many hard-pressed people? For Hillary Clinton voters it is, and so I hate them. <> (25 July 2016)

The Democratic Party has done a superb job of ensuring that many millions of young Americans will never look on it with respect and trust ever again. It has also done an outstanding job at demonstrating — for all Americans and all the World — one of the clearest and most vivid counterexamples to the concept of integrity that has ever been devised. Seed corn has been wasted by the gluttony of the privileged, and of the stupid. Fortunately for these Democratic party “loyalists,” delusion and self-absorption will save them from ever noticing the consequences. Until karma surprises. <> (14 June 2016)

The 2016 election is between the people and the corporations. Independents will determine who wins in November (they outnumber registered Democrats and registered Republicans). Bernie is the overwhelming favorite nationally (and in swing states), and would easily defeat Trump. If the DP fields Hillary Clinton against Trump, Trump will win. <> (5 June 2016)

Among the people: Bernie’s supporters are the most alert, Trump’s supporters are the most bitter, and Hillary’s supporters are the most deluded. <> (5 June 2016)

If the Democratic Party apparatchiks (the paid minions of the 1% oligarchs) can beat back the hostile-takeover Sanders insurgency of popular and populist democracy, and put Hillary Clinton forward as the party’s champion in the general electoral joust, then President Trump will be inaugurated in January 2017. The Democratic Party apparatchiks are first and foremost fighting to preserve their patronage positions (to hell with the country). A President Trump is no threat to their ambitions, but a nominee Sanders — whether subsequently president or not — would mean that a revolution had occurred in the Democratic Party, and the Obama-Clinton apparatchik gravy-train derailed. <> (27 February 2016)

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President Trump

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President Trump is popular America’s (as opposed to institutional America’s) equivalent of a Brexit from neoliberalism and globalization.

Part of the political rejection elevating Donald Trump to the presidency is a popular emotional rejection of social attitudes and would-be social norms (as advocated by “advanced” worldly people) that are taken as threats to local distinctiveness, local traditions and old “religious” and ethnic customs, where those old customs are largely forms of bigotry passed down through families as basic elements of social and personal identity.

As is true with ISIS, the Taliban, Syria’s Assad, Turkey’s Erdogan, Iran’s ayatollahs, Egypt’s generals, the Chinese geriatrocrats, and every “conservative” authoritarian regime around the world, all socially “liberal” ideas like women’s rights (reproductive, marital, sexual) and equality with men (political and economic), secular parliamentary government, the illegality of institutional racism, the illegality of the persecution of homosexuality and gender relativity, are all seen as part of “world governing” capitalist globalization taking over and diluting (to zero) local power structures (which are basically certain types of regional-national male classes defining the nature of their societies, and compelling all others to fit into their assigned places in these inequitable hierarchies).

This rejectionist and xenophobic nationalism is keenly and emotionally felt as “patriotism,” the defending and maintaining of “our (local) way of life” against the invasions by heartless, impersonal, unpatriotic trans-national and exploitative world economic forces, with no loyalty locally or nationally (e.g., job offshoring, foreign tax-haven sheltering “world capital”), and whose human faces are self-aggrandizing elitists who have personally removed from themselves any localisms and “backwardness” that would connect them to the communities they would rule over from afar, in order to be most efficient in advancing their own personal ambitions. Hillary Clinton is a perfect example of such an elitist, happy to homogenize (and “feminize”) the USA in order to make its exploitation by “world capital” more efficient.

Hillary Clinton is certainly more capable than Donald Trump would ever be at managing the economic system that currently owns the USA. But the popular preference for a President Trump is an angry rejection of that Wall Street neoliberal globalized system. They don’t want Trump to run it better than Hillary, they want Trump to destroy it and give them something new, which makes them feel good within their local distinctiveness, as they imagine they would have “in the good old days.”

It looks like my prediction yesterday wasn’t too good (today, 8 November 2016, at 10 PM Pacific Time, Trump seems likely to win). Personally, I wish the Democrats had run Bernie instead of Hillary. Oh well, you reap what you sow.

I voted for Jill Stein of the Green Party.

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P.S. 11:44 PM, 8 November 2016, Pacific Time:

Donald Trump wins 276 Electoral College votes, 6 more than needed to gain the presidency (270). The New York Times estimates that when all votes are finally counted, Trump will have gained 310 Electoral votes (and Hillary Clinton will have gained 228). Both the US House of Representatives and the Senate will have Republican Party majorities in 2017.

Trump has triumphed, and all the institutions, who were uniformly against him (including a significant portion of the Republican Party Establishment), have been shamed. The American people have unleashed their political berserker.

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What Have I Learned From The 2016 Election

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0. I am out of synch with Americans today, old and young, and it is better for me to keep it that way even if it seems isolating. I would do best living happily as a quiet, invisible loner.

I am unable to engage with society without puncturing other people’s idea bubbles, because I am unable to keep my analytical mind from seeking the foundations of those ideas and the limits of those bubbles. I usually find the foundations weak, the limits narrow, and the bubbles flimsy – but held to be sacred. Trying to expand those bubbles (to “be helpful” and “inform them”) or pop them (to be critical and “wake them up”) just creates hostility, and that produces disturbances (when I lose my patience), which then suck the oxygen out of my good spirits, and poisons some of the time I could otherwise be spending enjoying my own thoughts and actions.

What I have now been taught, in these modern times, is that I would do best to “respect others” by simply saying nothing to them as they babble on without interruption, even as they fall off their own delusional cliffs and ensnare themselves in their own chosen sufferings. I get it: It’s your life and you’ll choose how to live it and fantasize about it.

For my part, it’s best I do my thing alone without seeking an audience, which seeking is just a waste of time that yields no appreciation, nor has social benefit. People only have an interest in me to sell me something (get money), or for me to play a supporting role in one of their self-focused social dramas (women are big on this), or to be a momentary entertainment fill-in.

Since there is such a wide variety of human types, the above analysis is not true for everyone.

1. You never help anyone by calling them stupid, even if it’s true. Stupidity is like gravity, it’s constant and impervious, and you can’t do anything about it – unless it’s your own. I must be patient about the reality of stupidity, for my own good.

2. Everybody is racist.

3. Attention deficiency is the norm. Most people do not have an attention span greater than 20 seconds. I think this is why hand-held electronics are so popular, and reading paperbacks in public is so rare.

4. I’m on my own (and it’s best). Nobody cares about what I think, say or write. And, I feel the same way about most other people.

5. Conversation is dead. Most people prefer to talk than to listen, where “talk” is either actual audible verbalized output, or broadcast written speeches, or internal mental self-talk.

6. Thinking is dead. Most people do not think reflectively and use logic, they react emotionally selecting instantaneous judgments from a list of pre-programmed prejudices. They only “think” mechanically and procedurally (like robots) to implement the task at hand, whether that task is a chore (something they “have to” do), or a step in self-focused activity (something they “want to” do).

7. Americans have been trained to vote on the basis of avoiding their fears (i.e., emotionally). Where fear is lacking, voting decisions can be based on personal biases (more emotions) and personal pecuniary impact (the beginnings of thought). The character of political candidates, and the public good (or damage) of the policies they would champion, are not thoughtfully considered by the majority of American voters.

“The most frightening feature of the civic melancholia in present-day America is the relative collapse of integrity, honesty, and decency — an undeniable spiritual blackout of grand proportions. The sad spectacle of the presidential election is no surprise. Rather, the neofascist catastrophe called Donald Trump and the neoliberal disaster named Hillary Clinton are predictable symbols of our spiritual blackout.” – Cornell West (3 November 2016)

8. Political amnesia and personal denial are the psychological anesthetics of choice. Voters never notice and never remember the damages their winning candidates cause, so they can remain willfully ignorant of their own responsibilities in helping to create those damages. For example: Ronald Reagan’s “trickle down” and butchery in Central America, Bill Clinton’s “welfare reform” and deregulation of the banks, George W. Bush’s Iraq War, tax cut for the rich and US financial collapse for the not-rich, Barack Obama’s generous giveaways to and protection of Wall Street, whistleblower persecutions and drone massacres. Have Reagan, Clinton, Bush and Obama voters ever taken ownership of the disasters, catastrophes and persecutions they backed?

American identity-politics voting on the basis of vanity (latest version: “first woman president”) subsequently requires many foreign brown-skinned dead bodies in tribute to “the cause,” and the camping out on sidewalks in the homeland of more and more “deplorables” and “welfare cheats,” and every other kind of out-of-scratch nonperson. I pity America’s exploited and discarded Red Necks, now raging with neofascist ignorance, as mirrored by their hero Donald Trump; and I am disgusted by the smug narcissistic vanity of America’s comfortable parasites, emoting or conniving and colluding, as mirrored by their heroine Hillary Clinton.

9. Predictions: Hillary Clinton will win the election on November 8th. The Electoral College vote will be decisive, but the popular vote will be close. Hillary Clinton will follow through on her promises to Goldman Sachs (Big Money), Saudi Arabia (Big Oil) and Israel (War Inc.), but will entirely ignore the Democratic Party platform (dumping the Bernie Sanders Democrats the morning after getting their votes), except as a useful repository of progressive rhetoric she can cherry-pick for use as political camouflage when needed. The mainline Republicans (finally able to ditch Trump and his Tea Party excludeds) will stonewall President Hillary in the same way they stonewalled President Obama, as a careerists versus careerist battle for political power, except at those times and in those areas where Big Money, Big Oil and War, Inc. tell them to cooperate to meet the owners’ needs and wants, just as they did during the Obama Administration. Hillary is closer (more pliant) to the Big Owners than Barack was, but she’s unlikely to be as adept as he was at managing the public. So, the Big Game will go on as before, but it may not look as pretty at the retail level of infotainment. The treacly celebrations of “breaking the glass ceiling” and “first woman president” will be overlong and overplayed despite quickly wearing out for all but Hillary’s sentimental cultists.

10. It’s time for me to renew my Zen.

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22 November 2017

I sure made a blunder in #9. I made the mistake of watching TV, Larry King interviewing a mainline Republican pollster (attuned to the Bush administration period), on the night before the election, and I fell for his seemingly rational and professional judgements, which favored a Hillary win. “Reason” and the overwhelming media propaganda in Hillary’s favored made me think my gut feeling that American ignorance, stupidity and bigotry were really the dominant forces among the populace, was too unlikely to be the complex of decisive factors. Gut was right, brain was wrong. Lesson: don’t look for truth in TV (as if I didn’t already know this!).

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If Hillary Goes Down It’ll Be For Secrets Lost

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If Hillary Clinton goes down next Tuesday, it will be because of hubris, arrogance: she thinks she is above the rules and the law. Most Americans hate that attitude, and detest members of their elite, their aristocracy, their “leaders,” who are publicly exposed for having an egregious level of UNPATRIOTIC arrogance.

Hillary Clinton’s chickens are coming home to roost, and they are CLASSIFIED E-MAILS. Hillary and then Huma Abedin really, really blew it. Because so many of you are fans of Hillary Clinton (“the first US woman president”), I will explain why she has a very good chance of losing next Tuesday (to Donald Trump no less!) so you have some possibility of coming to terms with that disappointment, should it occur.

I spent 29 years working in a classified environment: a US nuclear weapons laboratory. I had safes filled with highly classified documents, and computers with highly classified files: nuclear bomb blueprints and nuclear bomb performance (details of the complete course of the explosions and release of radiation). I also had copies of classified documents describing programs and activities (classified of course) about the use of energy (lots of energy) for purposes of “national defense.”

Needless to say, these documents and computer files would be of interest to every one of the USA’s allies, friendly competitors, unfriendly competitors, and enemies. The only types of “secret” US documents that are considered even more sensitive than nuclear weapons documents are Executive Branch documents (the US policies in action now), that is to say the “Top Secrets” of the President and his cabinet and staff, such as at the State Department. It is more damaging if “the enemy” learns of your leadership’s intent, than if “the enemy” learns technical details about items in your country’s war-making technology.

As part of my security training, I was reminded (more than once) that in 1953 American citizens Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed by the electric chair after being convicted of passing nuclear weapons documents to the U.S.S.R during World War II. The stuff I had in my safes was way more detailed than what the Rosenbergs were fried for passing on. Now, in actuality up to 90% of the information in documents and files that are marked classified is unclassified and often very boring. But, the fact that the rules and procedures mandated for the running of the nuclear weapons labs (and generally any US government classified environment) required these documents and computer files to be marked and handled as “classified,” put on us workers the burden of doing just that: use handle and store according to classified procedures.

This is the key point. It was not up to us to “judge” whether a classified item really was secretly “significant” or not. It could in fact be worthless gibberish (to proud advanced-degree scientific minds), but we were not being paid to make such judgements. Our job was to use classified information as needed for the scientific job, and to handle it as required by the security procedures (which I detested, but obeyed).

To be clear, there are procedures to have documents and files reviewed to determine if they can be declassified, or if they should be destroyed. I used these procedures a number of times in order to publish “pure physics” papers. What I never ever did was to move classified “privately,” or take it home to have it conveniently available when I wanted to work on a problem. It is ALWAYS much more inconvenient and time-consuming to follow classified procedures. I was always frustrated by the slowness and waste associated with working with classified information, and I was very glad to leave the whole classified arena. But I never ever forgot the basic commandment of classified work: absolute security of classified information is more important than solving any problem or achieving any useful result. Yes, I know that sounds crazy, but it really is “the prime directive” of classified work. Security is more important that results.

During my career in the classified arena, I saw numerous individuals play fast and loose with the rules because they were lazy, and because they had decided they were important enough to “deserve” to define their own work style. In every case, once security lapses were discovered such individuals were tumbled from their pedestals. Nobody is that important, the powers-that-be can ALWAYS find an equivalent (or better) talent who can also follow classified procedures. Realize that every boss, and the entire chain of command, would feel vulnerable (in the bureaucratic court politics of the organization) should an underling commit a security lapse. So, cowardly higher up muckity-mucks covering their asses could self-protectively come down hard on lower level security lapses, and put on the “patriotic” act of “being resolute,” for public relations (“protecting the nation is our highest priority”).

Now, what Hillary Clinton has done with her very fast-and-loose use, insecure transport, and all-too easily hackable storage of a mountain of State Department “secrets” (even if it is only a small percentage of really significant “Top Secret” data buried in 90+% of worthless drivel) is egregious beyond belief to the millions of Americans who are or were ever in a classified environment. This is like the Rosenbergs times thousands. Hillary’s arrogant disregard of classified procedures was so extensive that she caused a number of her employees, like Huma Abedin, to be drawn into this illegal activity, and now into significant legal jeopardy. And, because of the porosity of her private little “bypass the classified rules” e-mail system, we now know from the hacks of that system that she had even tarred her very own muckity-muck, POTUS himself, who carelessly allowed himself to send e-mails to Hillary outside the secure government channels.

The average citizen is revolted by the now-revealed flouting of the rules – without penalty (so far) – and puts this down to a surfeit of arrogance coupled with a deficit of patriotism. A high government official disregarding classified protocols so blatantly is betraying millions of classified workers, by failing to set a good example. To the simple-minded public the entire affair is just unpatriotic: despite high position, power and wealth, Hillary Clinton did what was good for just her, with complete disregard “for the security of the nation.”

If Hillary Clinton fails to achieve the presidency, it will be a well deserved failure. The irony here is that had she followed classified procedures, and not allowed her employees to violate them (nor entrap POTUS into violating them also), her State Department e-mails would never have been hacked, and she would have been able to maintain the fiction of being much more reputable – and patriotic – than she actually is.

Coin-flip Election of 2016

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Coin-flip Election of 2016

Hillary Clinton ran against herself and lost.
Donald Trump ran against Hillary Clinton and won.
The American people – and the world – had lost the election in July.
From then until November it was a coin-flip
—– between corporate head and corporate tail.
The parasite elite was heartbroken with the result
but relieved the lumbering beast they fed off
—– remained under control.
The beast had settled on profound ignorance and honest bigotry
over profound corruption and dishonest ambition,
—– and for denial of its own complicity.

Hillary Clinton ran against herself and won.
Donald Trump ran against Hillary Clinton and lost.
The American people – and the world – had lost the election in July.
From then until November it was a coin-flip
—– between corporate head and corporate tail.
The parasite elite were ecstatic with the result
and relieved the lumbering beast they fed off
—– remained under control.
The beast had settled on profound corruption and dishonest ambition
over profound ignorance and honest bigotry,
—– and for denial of its own complicity.

1 November 2016