OK Civics Class the Electoral College unit is complete; up next ...

We all studied how the heck the Electoral College could turn a 2.8 million vote majority into a loss. Very good, you learned a lot about the history, the clashes, and the compromises that formed this part of the Constitution.

The next unit will be on Impeachment and removal of the President. Study the Constitution: Article Two, Section Four. Quiz on Friday.

A crazy religious idea

Islam, Judiasm, and Christianity all have the same God. They all have Abraham as their founding father. Jesus is Jewish, Christians believe he is the Son of God, Muslims believe he is a great Prophet. We all share important aspects of our common religion.

Our God has many names, Jehovah, YHWH (Yah-whey), God, Allah.

Let's call God by one, universal name. But which one?

Allah. I'm a Christian and think of God but why not use God's newest name?  Jews and Christians will have some reluctance and some learning to do. Me too! That learning about our Islamic kin is a good thing. Let us use our commonality to unite us rather than divide us. It is another way to start important conversations.

I also think a common name for our God, Allah, will make hating others tougher.

What do you think? Dig deep into your prejudices and I will dig into mine too.

Prediction

December 17, 2016

President Trump will not last two years.

He might be impeached for either treason or his business dealings.

He might resign if he gets bored or scared.

How Paul Ryan Saves the United States by becoming President:

Step 1: convince at least 21 Republican Electors to vote for Paul Ryan - look, not every Republican Elector likes the current situation.
That way Trump gets less than 270 votes (he is at 290 now). This HUGE step means President-elect Trump does not have an Absolute Majority in the Electoral College

That event means the House of Representatives must decide the election. The Constitution states the House chooses from the top 5 candidates. With Trump: 269 or fewer, Hilary: 228, Ryan: 21+ these are real possibilities. This has happened before, look it up.:Wikipedia, etc.

Step 2: convince the House to elect President Ryan
At this point it makes as much sense to elect Paul as another option. Trump is a disaster, the House won't vote for Hilary, Paul Ryan is already third in line (and a previous Vice Presidential candidate - which would be Second) so Paul Ryan seems the best choice!

That is it!

p.s. Would you believe I am a Progressive Democrat from Washington State? Yes I am.

Rachel Maddow Blog vs. Privacy Badger

Wow. I recently installed privacy badger from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (https://www.eff.org/privacybadger)

It tells you about trackers that are on web pages. Trackers send information to other websites that allow them to track your web browsing history.

I installed it as an experiment to watch what places had trackers. Privacy Badger doesn't catch all of them but I thought it would be intersting to see what sites I visit have trackers, and I could see which trackers they were.

After less than a week, The Maddow Blog has been the winner with 13. Ouch. I thought they'd be around zero.

Ouch.

· How Paul Ryan Saves the United States

by becoming President:

Step 1: convince at least 21 Republican Electors to vote for Paul Ryan
 - look, not every Republican Elector likes the current situation.
That way Trump gets less than 270 votes (he is at 290 now). This HUGE step means President-elect Trump does not have an Absolute Majority in the Electoral College

That event means the House of Representatives must decide the election. The Constitution states the House chooses from the top 5 candidates. With Trump: 269 or fewer, Hilary: 228, Ryan: 21+ these are real possibilities. This has happened before, look it up.:Wikipedia, etc.

Step 2: convince the House to elect President Ryan
At this point it makes as much sense to elect Paul as another option. Trump is a disaster, the House won't vote for Hilary, Paul Ryan is already third in line (and a previous Vice Presidential candidate - which would be Second) so Paul Ryan seems the best choice!

That is it!

p.s. Would you believe I am a Progressive Democrat from Washington State? Yes I am.

One Fish, Two Fish, Red State, Blue State

Time to remove the Electoral College

I live in a blue state and regardless of how I vote in the presidential election, my vote did not count.  That's right, whether I voted for Trump or Hilary my vote made absolutely NO difference. The same thing goes for a lot of other states. A few voters in a few states decided this election.They decided it against the majority vote. does that seem fair? No, it seems antiquated and unfair.

The Electoral College is like the human appendix; it exists but we only notice it when it becomes inflamed.

Look, this was a power issue between states and the federal government 200 some years ago when the Constitution was created. If you haven't noticed, the world has changed.  Now we have a global economy and the 'states' that count now are entire nations.

That means our piddly little issues between states should be seen as football rivalries rather than the world changing stuff we might like to think they are.

So we need to eliminate the electoral college with an Amendment. Wording is pretty simple, just state that the President and Vice President will be elected by the majority of votes. Done.

PTSD

Yes, half of us doing now with PTSD - not from any war, but now a new disease:
President
Trump
Shock
Disease

And if you think the federal government will do anything about it,

]you are Trumped [the new verb for fucked]

Could the Grand Experiment be over?

Somehow we elected an incompetent president, then we elected a very smart but probably too polite one, and now it looks like we have elected Caligula.
(Hey, we already had a horse (really a turtle) running the Senate so we should have seen this coming

Our apologies

I'm watching the third debate. I've watched the two previous ones. I want to apologize. I want to apologize for Trump.

I want to apologize to Ms. Hilary Clinton for having to run against such a terrible opponent. Trying to run a normal campaign against an incoherent opponent is demeaning to you and brings our whole democracy down. I know you wanted a real issue driven fight against a worthy opponent. That brings out the best in our country.

I want to apologize to the rest of the world. We Americans think we have the best country, the shining city on the hill. We see ourselves as the way to lead the whole world to greatness. Yeah, we have failed at that a lot over the years but I want to apologize for this one stupid thing.

This election is between a politician and an idiot. Neither is loved. It took me this long to realize how much the idiot has dragged down the politician's image. Basically, rational people from all political sides have tried to accommodate the fool as if he were an actual candidate. It strikes me as the story of  The Emperors New Clothes where no one acknowledges the king is naked.

I have to give Chris Wallace props for not laughing at several points.

I have faith that the wisdom of the people will prevail. or I'm moving to Canada

Political Thoughts

What Republicans think about Hilary:

    First you run a black man, and now, a WOMAN!

What Democrats think about Trump:

    Oh, Man! I thought George W. Bush was the worst!

Unstoppable

I just read the book Unstoppable by Bill Nye - the Science Guy.

Its main point is that it is time to deal with climate change. He outlines a lot of different technologies we could try - and that we must try all of them. I really don't see how any thinking person could deny that our climate is changing.

He mentions something I've said for a while, that we're essentially conducting experiments that are affecting the climate on our one planet - we're being bad homeowners. I've put it that I don't think we should be building explosives in the living room.

He also said that the regulations being proposed now are a lot easier than what it will take later. He said it like this:

"For those of you who might be skeptical of my optimism, I have to point out that if you don't much care for regulation now you might be in for a hard time. As climate change causes sea levels to rise, more and more people are going to get displaced. More and more people are going to want to come live where you are living-or worse, you will be among those forced to do the moving. Cities are going to need storm walls; farmers will need compensation to relocate their fields. If you think action on behalf of climate change is expensive, just wait until you see the price of inaction. Regulations will be required sooner or later, but if we wait until things reach crisis level they will be a lot more onerous. There may be requirements to restrict your use of gasoline. Requirements that restrict your access to proteins, such as steak and fish. Regulators watching what you put in the trash. There may be limits on shipping and air travel. And by then, your neighbors will probably be votirg for these regulations. The environmental and just plain cash-money costs will be staggering the longer we go without getting going.

The more time that goes by with us screwing around not doing anything about climate change, and especially not leading the world in addressing the short- and medium-term consequences of climate change, the more The Man is going to be in your business. But it doesn't have to be this way. You could participate. You could be The Man-or The Woman. You can help lead. Together we can change
the world. "

Bill Nye, Unstoppable, page 319 of the hardcover book

Where were you?

Yeah, you.

Where were you when Bush and Cheney lied us into war?

Where were you when Bush and Cheney started torturing people?

Where were you when Wall Street lied us into financial disaster?

And now you think Hilary's private emails are worthy of jail?

Man, your values are NOT MINE.

Your news network is lying to you.

Irony

Today I heard about President Obama on the campaign trail with Hilary Clinton. The newsperson said that he would not be in a political office anymore and it got me to thinking...

It struck me today that when Hilary Clinton is President, the Supreme Court will still be short one justice. She should appoint Barack Obama. He is a Constitutional scholar, former President, etc. It isn't as far fetched as you might think. After all President Taft served as a justice after he was president.

Obama  is also a poke in the eye of the do-nothing Republican Senate that could have approved another great justice. But they didn't.  So, Hilary, if not Barack, please push the envelope - how about Bernie Sanders?

The Big Bang Business Cycle

It seems to me there is a cycle in big companies that they go from consolidated to diversified. The cycle is someone gets the idea that pushing authority down into business units or divisions will make smaller units more responsive and (in todays jargon) agile. Then in a few years, all the divisions are fighting with one another and someone reigns the divisions in and consolidates power. I've lived through a cycle of this and it is 'interesting'.

I've also lived through this in computing. College computing was the big mainframe where I submitted cards to be run on the central computer. When I got a job, minicomputers were all the rage. People all over the city shared a computer and did their work at their offices, connected by modems. It was called timesharing. One expensive computer held data from many entities. In my case, it was accounting data from small businesses all over the area.r

Then the Personal Computer arrived and computer power was centralized but in much smaller sized companies.  The PC - and here I mean the IBM PC and its clones - decentralized computer power, yet it also consolidated it as PCs were connected back to those mainframes and minicomputers. Computers spread to every part of business.

As big companies built their computer departments, first called MIS, then IS, then IT, they developed applications or bought them to run on their own machines. Companies guarded their information.

Then fledgling networks started up - Tymshare, Compuserve, etc. - and information could flow into companies. Satellite data networks came along but were still one way. Information flowing into companies.

Then the Internet hit the big time and information could flow both ways. We'll skip this part since you should know all about it's phenominal growth and various security issues. That's not my point.

Now we're back to timeshare. Everyone puts their data in 'the cloud' which is just a bunch of individual 'timesharing' computers.

Windows 10 is dead to me

Yup, I've had it with Win10. I've blogged about trying to install the damn thing on a test PC but I was going to use it on a trip.  The night before I was leaving, it hiccuped. The laptop's display started flickering. I tried rebooting and then it would only boot into a repair screen. 

Well none of the repairs worked even though it would say encouraging things about the various things I tried. When the computer rebooted, it was back to the old repair screen. So much for repair - it seemed to me liike listening to a PR flack.

I didn't have the guts to Reset the PC. The option says you get to save your files but then it tells you that NONE of the programs that don't come with Win10 will be saved. What use is that?

The last thing I tried seemed to work. It was rolling back to a restore point. After waiting an hour for it to stop saying it was rebooting and actually reboot, I forced it to power down and it rebooted. Great! Oh, wait, after I logged in it wanted to upgrade to Windows 10. Aha, it has gone back to Windows 7. Think I'll stay there too.

I've seen articles about how those annoying Upgrade to W10 will eventually turn into 'Hey we updated you to Windows 10'.  It had better not happen to me.

Linux is looking better and better.

Justice Scalia

I'm pretty liberal. Yet there is this Boy Scout part of me that respects other opinions. Justice Scalia loved the Constitution as I do. He had different opinions than I do. Whatever you think, if you love our country, you should respect that love.

Our country was founded on disagreement - but gentlemanly disagreement.
My Ancestor was a ship captain in the Revolution. He was captured by the British and 'paroled'. That meant he was free to return home but he was bound to not fight. He did that until he was informed that he had been 'exchanged' for a British officer. Then he could go back into the fight. which he did.

That was the kind of world the United States was born into. We don't live there anymore but parts of me kinda wish we did. That Boy Scout part wishing we acted like adults.

I wish our current politics were based on actual debate and not on personality or creed. Politicians seem to care only about getting re-elected and playing to their voters can trump what is best for our country. We've gotten so polarized - and Justice Scalia certainly represented the right wing - but maybe not the extreme right wing. I'm saying we need voices on each side of every debate but they must be reasonable voices. People that can find the common good.

Remember when compromise was what happened in Congress? Compromise takes honestly debating the issues but we've degenerated into competing sound bites.

We have to stop acting like 4 year old children.

R's are Strong on Defense

Yep, the Republican presidential candidates are strong on defense.  They all say that.  The problem is they are morons. Their only answer is bomb bomb bomb and when that isn't enough, they'll carpet bomb the bad guys. 

Problem is that killing people tends to piss them off and make more enemies. But subtlety is not their strong point.  The diplomacy that President Obama and Secretary of State, John Kerry used to avert a war with Iran is bad.  The R's think the US showed weakness when we could just bomb the shit out of Iran.

Realize that working with our foes to find common ground doesn't play into the Repub theme that we must all be afraid - be very afraid.  If you're afraid all the time you don't make rational decisions - and that's what they hope for.

Because if you recall, the last Republican President was W and he started not one but two failed wars (Afghanistan and Iraq for those not paying attention). Because fighting is still going on after we pulled out, the Republicans want to re-invade.  They say ISIS in Iraq and Syria is a threat to our very existance and you are supposed to be so fearful you buy their BS and vote for them.

So here is my point:
Republicans will start more wars because they have to act tough.
Democrats will be just as strong but they will try diplomacy too because they act smart.