If a Nail were driven by Spirit

Posted on by
4

This is a test. Have you ever had empathy for a small stone? When Mariner was in his pubescent years, he once replaced a stone atop a pile of dirt from which it became dislodged. He admits to a weird moment. How can the stone feel empathy? How will empathy interact or act in behalf of a stone? Will the stone pass it forward?

If the reader has a lifelong knack for easily evoking anthropomorphic sensitivity toward Earth’s inhabitants, animate or inanimate, the reader may have the ability to envelope themselves in a spiritual world of immense dimension and empathy, traveling to distant universes or conjuring different societies. Sometimes, for just an instant, a spiritual experience may reveal not only righteousness and salvation but empirical validation. Abraham had such a moment when he decided not to sacrifice his son Isaac.[1]

Spiritualism played a greater role in religious and cultural life six millennia ago. Homo sapiens existed within the realm of an environment they had not mastered through science and technology, socialized behavior, or specie dominance over the environment. It is true today that the seed for new plateaus of existence do not come from spiritual insights but from that which detracts from spiritual value – science and technology, socialized behavior (economics, government, prejudice) and human dominance over Earth’s rightful domain.

Recognition is given here to those who respond empathetically to others, to the environment and to the strange universe that operates around us – nothing more than a collection of giant stones.

Mariner has casually discussed what might be the very source of new anything – new inventions, new ideas, new feelings, perhaps new space and matter. What causes ‘new’? A pleasing ‘new’ has been the emergence of the phrase and gesture ‘pass it forward.’ The gesture of acting out a small benevolence to a stranger simply because one chooses to do so generates a longer lasting response for both than if they had to do without the benevolence. Is this lingering remembrance a created value?

Having received a hand, is the stranger primed to replicate benevolence to stranger #2? If so, could that benevolence to #2 be more than the benefit the stranger received in the first place? For those with superior empathetic skills: If money was benevolence, and benevolence can so easily be enlarged, that is, pay interest, what would the purpose of money be in society? In other words, mariner drives your son to college as a favor. Subsequently and perhaps causatively, you build a new basement storm door for an elderly person. How does the mariner’s drive to a college measure against you building a new storm door? Can that be dollar-added interest? Could that be economic creativity? The Universe suddenly has a new basement storm door in the Milky Way’s Solar System on Earth.

This post isn’t in the religion section; it’s in the musings section. The mariner simply muses about the power of spirit in general – how things may be different if the world, indeed the universe, may function with a different ‘transmission’. It isn’t difficult to see that mammalian dominance of our age has shaped its dynamics. We mammals are born to protect, defend and secure our surroundings. Non-mammalians like fish just spread their young like grass seed; turtles plant them like lily bulbs; birds raise their young as an instinctive gesture inherited from the dinosaurs but just as well may drop them on your head while in flight.

Mammals have within them the desire to own and secure their own space, their own property. A good model is the Silverback Gorilla. The male’s job is to defend his family and eating grounds even to deathly combat. So it is that Homo sapiens does the same thing but with far more intelligence and a more sophisticated desire to have the ‘largest family’. Even Elk want the largest herd. Seems like conflict is part of being a mammal.

What evolves is a pragmatic society. What works best, ten men having a good time being productive or a back hoe and a bulldozer? Best to stop here, mariner thinks.

Ancient Mariner

[1] Holy Bible, Genesis 22

Follow the Money

Posted on by
1

This famous quote from the film Deep Throat about the Nixon Watergate Scandal holds truer today than ever. The danger is that we have become accustomed to it. We no longer take umbrage at the misuse of money – it’s how all the games are played. Worse, while inflation remains idle, the ante to play with real money rises rapidly. Thought about differently, real money (starting around one mil) is an artificial inflation: the rest of us don’t have ‘real’ money. Citizens United couldn’t exist in Nixon’s day. Which is worse, breaking a door lock to get some records or pulling billions of dollars out of the economy to be distributed to slush funds and kickbacks?

The mariner noticed the hubbub about “rigged” elections. Boy, are they ever! But not in the simple-minded manner trumped up by the Trump campaign. The pundits are correct (this time): the manner by which we engage both parties and today control sham voting with automation makes it very difficult to overtake a precinct election site…. if one has one, Alabama.[1]

In a post on February 10, 2016, mariner covered a lead article from the Atlantic magazine for that month. It is important to briefly review the article at this moment when vote rigging is in the limelight but hardly the true threat that a tide of cash infusion can be. The article was about a small group of billionaires taking over the election of Governor for a democratic state: Illinois.

“The richest man in Illinois does not often give speeches. But on a warm spring day two years ago, Kenneth C. Griffin, the billionaire founder of one of the world’s largest hedge funds, rose before a black-tie dinner of the Economic Club of Chicago to deliver an urgent plea to the city’s elite.

They had stood silently, Mr. Griffin told them, as politicians spent too much and drove businesses and jobs from the state. They had refused to help those who would take on the reigning powers in the Illinois Capitol. “It is time for us to do something,” he implored.

Their response came quickly. In the months since, Mr. Griffin and a small group of rich supporters — not just from Chicago, but also from New York City and Los Angeles, southern Florida and Texas — have poured tens of millions of dollars into the state, a concentration of political money without precedent in Illinois history.

Their wealth has forcefully shifted the state’s balance of power. Last year, the families helped elect as governor Bruce Rauner, a Griffin friend and former private equity executive from the Chicago suburbs, who estimates his own fortune at more than $500 million. Now they are rallying behind Mr. Rauner’s agenda: to cut spending and overhaul the state’s pension system, impose term limits and weaken public employee unions.”

If the reader follows Illinois news, they know Rauner has stalled passage of a democratic budget even to today. Schools and colleges across the state are laying off staff; public schools and private ones have begun shortening school years, some are forced to cut sports programs (a few are in violation of Title Nine). Public Works has dropped their state-wide schedule.

In particular, the Griffin group is after Unions; Rauner has pushed hard to eliminate them, prohibit participation in elections, and limit dues. The confrontation over schools and unions has soured Rauner’s Governorship. Illinois is too long a blue state, too many union members, too many city dwellers. The legislature is democratic in both houses. Even five determined billionaires can’t make a bought Governorship become permanent. It isn’t over yet; Rauner is contributing significant amounts to all Republican officeholders, including conservative democrats. Will money buy a more conservative government next election?

– – – –

There is a second source that rigs elections: the news media. News media really do know the truth of campaigns; they just avoid low viewership approaches to political coverage; dull stuff like facts, policy, government expense and specific changes to entitlement, insurance, taxes, and banking regulations – a simple example: do you know the minimum wage endorsed by any Presidential candidate?

Also avoided is unaltered factual analysis by experts (pundits specifically cannot be experts except on Fareed Zacharia’s Global Public Square, CSPAN, and a few Bloomberg and PBS specials). What makes a pundit an expert is the ability to simultaneously speak and comprehend four other pundits speaking at the same time to the dismay our comprehension. A viewer never heard two people talk at the same time on Bill Moyer’s show. But then you never watched, did you! It is best to subscribe to a few good printed sources like Atlantic, Economist, Washington Post, New York Times and other quality printed sources. Don’t try to cover the rainbow of opinions; you don’t have the intellectual stamina to read Mother Earth, The Washington Inquirer, The Nation, and the American Conservative in the same day. Choose quality, centrist sources.

Instead of providing good, balanced news and informational analysis, news media hired on as Donald’s campaign team. On the cable channels, it evolved into an 18 hour blitz of South Park.

The solution to this rip-off by the press is to relieve the news department of the responsibility to be a profit center (follow the money). Then newscasters won’t be forced to choose between news and entertainment (profit). Or you could get your news from elite sources that already exist and are mentioned above.

Ancient Mariner

[1] The last large scale vote intrusion may have been the Chicago Teamsters ‘assuring’ Joe Kennedy that Jack would win Chicago. Computers prevent bullish, physical intrusions. However, as evidenced in the hacking of the current election, computers have other weaknesses. One has often wondered whether the Teamsters were the original source for the assassinations of Jack and Bobby to pay back Joe for the boys coming after the Teamsters when they assumed office. What doesn’t fit this theory is the assassination of Martin Luther King. The common victim was progressivism.

The Art of the (Double) Deal

Image

Reply

Thanks to Donald for having written an appropriate book title to parody.

Thanks to a thirty year political career by the Clintons which is a crystal clear example of double dealing.

This post is in the form of a treatise about simultaneous public negotiation on an issue while at the same time having a private negotiation on the same issue. A clearly defined example is the manner in which Barak achieved passage of ObamaCare. The public negotiation was a political campaign heard by the public in terms the public appreciated, which in turn put pressure on legislators to yield a bit to populist opinion. In the private negotiation not known by most citizens was a deal with big pharma they couldn’t refuse. This private negotiation took the lid off prescription prices for a number of years. This deal broke the collusion tactics of the medical industry just enough to attack legislators in their own interest to raise personal funds. By the slimmest of margin, the birth of social medicine was passed.

Unfortunately, typically, private negotiation costs a lot of money to the public negotiation. Who paid for the creation of ObamaCare? You and the mariner did through outrageous profits to big pharma – more than enough to offset future capped costs.

Mariner will reflect on five well known political figures in an attempt to find a way to measure advocacy and public commitment as a behavior that justifies the impact of the private deal:

Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the Clintons, and Elizabeth Warren.

Abraham Lincoln was a champion double dealer. His private government deals withabraham-lincoln legislators were for them lucrative and opportunistic and swung enough votes to pass the emancipation and several lesser regulations easing the transition for African Americans in the south. Yet he was assassinated; he helped provoke the Civil War; more American soldiers died in the Civil War than any other American war. Yet Lincoln is one of the most elevated moralists among all presidents. Why is that? Today’s racists still don’t like African Americans but it is highly likely that African Americans will never be chattel again. Not that slavery doesn’t exist; many Asian women who work in manicure shops are locked into a dependency with those who brought them into the US at virtually starvation wages and no benefits.

fdrFranklin Delano Roosevelt rescued the US from a bankruptcy known as the Great Depression. FDR was fortunate to have democratic majorities in Congress and a majority of states; He created many Government job programs; FDR created the “alphabet Job Corps” to improve infrastructures and parks (CCC), WPA, FERA, PWA, Entertainment, construction, and had its own financing organization. All paid for by a broken government. FDR raised taxes to 100% of income for anyone making more than $38,000 annually (1930’s dollars – not US profits) and devalued the dollar by 25%.

An important piece of legislation that passed in FDR’s administration was the Glass/Steagall Act in 1933 which would prevent banks from taking over the US economy and prevent savings/mortgage banks from investing savings on the stock markets. It was collusion among investment and banking interests that crashed the US economy. Most of FDR’s private deals came with international relations during the Second World War. Whether public or private, FDR wore his policy on his sleeve: The nation and its citizens had to come first and did come first – even if he made an occasional private deal. FDR is considered one of the most successful Presidents. Why is that?

bill-and-hillaryIn 1999, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton and Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan among many investment types colluded in a private deal with the giant banks to repeal the Glass/Steagall Act. The banking industry, investment industry, housing industry and lending companies were free to collude again essentially stealing trillions of dollars from the American economy to create an oligarchy beyond imagination and a national debt in the trillions because of multitudinous tax loopholes for big corporations and the oligarchy- leading to the same economic recession for the same reasons that occurred during the FDR administration. Bill’s show business/salesman talents have made him a powerful President during public negotiations. Yet there is skepticism about his private deals. Why is that?

It is sensed, over the years, that Hillary is the Administrator of Clinton politics. Some pundits have said that Hillary saved Bill’s political career more than once. Rather than moralistic, the pair is clearly pragmatic in nature. The citizenry has become aware of these separate characteristics over thirty years of Clinton politics. Why is Hillary affected by the Presidential campaign? Why is that?

elizabeth-warrenTry doing today what FDR did in 1933 during this capitalist age of million dollar bonuses and Strumpf’s $200 million fraudulent increase in stock value over a base salary of $17 million. Is it worth watching Elizabeth Warren butcher Strumph at a Senate hearing about the Wells Fargo Scam with Strumph? Absolutely.

See video at

http://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=elizabeth+warren+hearing+with+strumph&qs=n&form=QBVLPG&pq=elizabeth+warren+hearing+with+strumph&sc=0-27&sp=-1&sk=

Not only entertaining, her behavior demonstrates that Elizabeth deals only in public negotiation. Large double dealing corporations and politicians definitely dislike her because she won’t engage in private deals. Through her efforts alone, a new Federal agency was created: The Consumer Protection Bureau. Since its creation, the Bureau has represented only the public side of the art of double dealing: reference the NYT article.

REFERENCE SECTION

The Consumer Protection Bureau needs your attention and support to prevent its demise. Every day the banking and investment world launches a new legal and Congressional attack on Senator Warren’s watchdog. The New York Times tells the story:

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/17/opinion/a-consumer-watchdog-lives-for-another-day.html?_r=0   One paragraph from the NYT:

In the past five years, the bureau has generated nearly $12 billion in financial relief and restitution for more than 27 million consumers who were wronged in the course of routine financial dealings with banks and nonbank lenders. That is $12 billion that otherwise would have enriched executives and shareholders. It is also a measure of the extent to which unfair, deceptive and predatory financial practices still pervade the financial system, giving rise to the need for a strong cop on the consumer beat.

COMMENTARY

All Presidents and elected officials are in themselves one player in the history of the US with its unique idiosyncrasies. It seems, however, that one characteristic stands above all others: Does the citizenry believe that the politician is a genuine representative of the will of the people? The President does not, within his power, have the right to negotiate private negotiations unless those negotiations represent in their entirety, public need.

Both parties duck this responsibility. Today, the elected official’s role is to get rich. Few, very few, will represent the public. It is not every citizen that will feel the protection of their economic nation against private interests. Until the citizenry insists on moral, public negotiation without fail, statesmen like Elizabeth can only go so far in public negotiation. The mariner recommends beware of private negotiations.

Ancient Mariner

Hades

Posted on by
1

The mariner is reminded of the harsh apocalyptic and horrific movies popular today. Similar is his life wandering among fire pits and unexpected explosions caused by politics; ghoulish realities of extinct creatures and vacant deserts with burnt and smoking ruins where forests and clean water used to be; billions of hollow, starving humans sitting everywhere with swollen bellies; millions of fat, selfish billionaires and millionaires perched like vultures watching humans everywhere in case a profit pops up to be taken from the disadvantaged.

But all’s well – we will elect a new president on November 8, 2016.

But that is false hope. The mariner knows governments and class culture and disrespect for the planet are no more than scenery on the set – props. Reality will remain a fearful, deadly, poisoned place; it is likely that reality will not end nicely.

Times past could have been better but humans are not smart, orderly, or responsible. Humans will not be able to share the planet much longer.

The planet will take us to task. It’s called the Day of Reckoning.

Ancient Mariner

 

Analysis after the Debate

Posted on by
1

We are tracking which candidate is gaining on the other (Donald or Hillary) by scoring different elements of the election process rather than trying to guess amid the cacophony generated by media. The elements are called ‘vectors’ in that our analysis uses vector analysis – foregoing having to listen to every useless word the candidates say.

538.com (Nate Silver) – The betting odds for today are Hillary over Donald 74.4% to 25.6% – more than a trend – leaping in Hillary’s favor by 14.9%.

Electoral Vote – The latest analysis of the fifty states shows Hillary leaping ahead of Donald by 81.4 additional votes: (309.5 to 228.1 (270 to win).

Battleground States – measure is points in polls.

Arizona – Donald +2.4 trending stronger

Colorado – Hillary +3.5 trending weaker

Florida – Hillary +1.0 trending stronger

Georgia – Donald +4.6 trending stronger

Iowa – Donald +1.8 trending stronger

Michigan – Hillary +5.0 trending weaker

Missouri – Donald +7.8 trending stronger

New Hampshire – Hillary +4.3 trending weaker

Nevada – Hillary +1.0 trending stronger

North Carolina – TIED

Ohio – Donald +0.6 trending stronger

Pennsylvania – Hillary +3.9 trending weaker

Virginia – Hillary +5.7 trending stronger

Wisconsin – Hillary +4.9 steady

Down Ballot Races – The score tightened by 5 points (54.2 – 45.8) with the democrats ahead. Statistically, the democrats must win three states from the republicans: Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Illinois along with a few potential swaps:

New Hampshire R to D

Indiana R to D

The Senate race probably is more important than the President’s race.

Local Paper and Magazines – reader’s choice. Perhaps readers noticed a few odd statistics: two very conservative newspapers have recommended Hillary; no CEOs in the Forbes top 100 will vote for Donald; only 2% of African Americans will vote for Donald; only 20% of Latinos will vote for Donald; the millennial generation is drifting to the libertarian and green parties or not voting at all – Hillary has not inspired them; Senator Mitch McConnell, at a meeting of republicans, asked for a show of hands from those who think Donald will win – no one raised their hands.

The mariner has the opinion that this campaign has not measured up to the issues the nation has at hand. The campaign is nothing more than two eight-year-olds trying to put the blame on anyone else. Has the electorate heard any solutions to climate change, fixing the TPP agreement, specifically restructuring taxes, redefining each discretionary funding category or Social Security or Federal mandates for minimum wage or bank regulations or….

Then there are global issues like global warming, environmental destruction, and limiting the social powers of corporatism.

Finally, an entirely new philosophy for international economies must be invented before automation and shifting population collapse our current ideals.

Sympathy notwithstanding, what does Donald’s narcissism do to help? What does Hillary’s preoccupation with children’s rights do to help? Neither candidate will bring back the golden age of industrialism; a labor-led economy is in the past. The US economy has been a service sector economy for twenty years.

Other major issues are within Government: How will all private money be removed from all elections? How will regulations be rewritten to minimize lobbyist ownership of politicians? How will gerrymandering be eliminated? The media hasn’t helped shape the dialogue – it is too easy to watch two eight-year-olds cast blame.

Oh well, only 38 days until it’s over and Hillary wins. Then what?

Ancient Mariner

On Your Mark . . .

Posted on by
Reply

The Presidential debate is a day or two away (Monday Sept 26). The mariner offers a last look at the vector analysis he and readers have been using to determine which candidate is ahead instead of the ruckus media news presents with every word spoken by the candidates – a boring and indecisive and unfair analysis. A second vector analysis will be posted after the debate once the first round of polls and other measurements are published.

538.com (Nate Silver) – Today, as of 1:10pm, the betting odds are Hillary over Donald 59.5% to 40.5% – trending toward Donald. The popular vote, an assimilation of hundreds of polls and forecasts, has Hillary ahead 46.6% to 44.2% for Donald.

Electoral Vote – The latest analysis of the fifty states shows Hillary ahead of Donald 288.8 to 248 (270 to win). Donald still has two reasonable combinations to reach 270 even but it requires every small state, even Maine’s 1 vote plus Donald must win Georgia, North Carolina, Florida, Ohio, Michigan and Colorado.

Battleground States – measure is points in polls.

Arizona – Donald +1
Colorado – Hillary +9
Florida – Tied
Georgia – Tied
Iowa – Tied
Michigan – Hillary +6
Missouri – Donald +3 but trending weak
New Hampshire – Hillary +5 but trending weak
Nevada – Tied
North Carolina – Hillary +1 but trending weak
Ohio – Donald +1 but trending weak
Pennsylvania – Hillary +6
Virginia – Hillary +4
Wisconsin – Hillary +5

Down Ballot Races – Sources suggest the House will remain in Republican hands. However the race to control the Senate is hot: The democrats are favored to take control 59% to 41%.

Local Paper and Magazines – reader’s choice. The mariner strongly recommends Atlantic Magazine which did an extraordinary job of covering the debate from every angle. Atlantic gives significant weight to the manner in which voters prefer one candidate over the other and style/personality is important:

“The most accurate way to predict reaction to a debate is to watch it with the sound off”

“Trump speaks at a fourth grade reading level. In political language, plainness is powerful.”

“How best to prepare for debating Trump? I’d start by thinking of him as a monkey with a machine gun.”

One section of the Atlantic coverage alluded to Donald’s prominent intention: emasculate the opponent. Remember Donald’s nicknames for his Republican opponents, e.g. Little Marco? It was important to belittle them; winning on policy was never the issue. How will Donald fare against a feisty woman?

Atlantic Magazine covers all the issues – even the intellectual ones. Check it out at

http://www.theatlantic.com/

Have Fun.

Ancient Mariner

 

Still Talking About It

Posted on by
Reply

The mariner was motivated to opine the effect of telecommunication on our cultural environment. The assumption is that the telegraph and its telephonic advances permit us to have personal interaction among many cultural environments instead of just one comprised of our geographic home base, that is, our town, neighborhood, trade, and family.

The smart phone is part of a different technology requiring huge inventories of collected information – information about everything and everyone everywhere around the world, past, present and future. There is mundane detail about history, culture and the mechanistic information derived from millions of advances in science, technology and computing; each of our personal lives has been recorded into this unimaginable library as well. The change agent is that, in principle, all knowledge is accessible to all persons – instantly. What rituals change when knowledge no longer resides only in books or lectures or personal experience?

Public education is experimenting with empirical teaching. A student no longer needs to memorize traditional information from books. Further, to keep up with cultural values, a student must learn at the speed of using the information while actually performing the behavior that requires it.

Culture is still reacting to “free knowledge.” Day-to-day behavior still rests on activities that require humans to travel about as they accomplish their daily pursuits. Examples where cultural change already is noticeable are shopping, working, education, entertainment and news, geographic information about other individuals and objects, and collectively what an individual does each hour of an average day – the giveaway is the term ‘online.’ It isn’t ironing and patching socks – how we passed time before electricity and computers.

The two technologies, telephony and data libraries (called ‘clouds’ under certain configurations) have merged to provide a use for the smart phone. Imagine a multidimensional telephone network that doesn’t need wires; call it the Internet. Imagine a global wireless network where everyone has a telephone number called an email address and/or a presence on the wireless network itself called a website. There is a reason so many individuals are drawn into almost continuous focus on the smart phone while walking, communicating, researching, playing games, purchasing or even connected to several other users at the same time.

The smart phone is the device with which we will change the meaning of privacy; the smart phone is the device through which we will allocate many decisions about our daily life to what free information tells us to do; the smart phone is the device with which medicine will know everything about us from that seasonal sneeze to our genome.

Technology already is advancing much faster than culture can. It will be natural for economic and political forces to leverage technology before culture has established acceptable moral rules encoded to balance our free information environment

The next two generations will struggle to survive in a new world that essentially has no roots in the cultures of past centuries. The third generation will be the proof in the pudding: Will culture have been responsive enough to survive in a viable, satisfactory state for humankind?

Ancient Mariner

 

Let’s Talk About It

Posted on by
Reply

God must have wanted the mariner to write about this post’s subject: the influence of communication. Within eight hours, the mariner had the following experiences:

He spoke with a friend at a street fair who raised the subject of life before the telegraph; a while later, he spoke with another friend who questioned how the smart phone is warping our culture; mariner’s wife found an old book about email at the book sale and brought it home to read[1]; later in the evening, CSPAN’s interview program, After Word, interviewed Mark Thompson, CEO of the New York Times about his new book, Enough Said: What’s Gone Wrong with the Language of Politics?

Let’s talk about it.

The telegraph provided a leap forward in a person’s ability to communicate coast to coast across the US more or less immediately. That was the change agent – speed. Before the telegraph, time and current events were a guessing game. Sometimes it took more than six months to deliver mail between President Polk and Sacramento, California. It was quite expensive. Commerce certainly benefitted with the telegraph and the US economy leaped forward, too. After the Civil War, communication was expedited by the railroads, telegraph and a decade or two later, automobiles.

But what really changed was the culture. Mariner frequently uses the example of an individual who wanted to escape bad fortune, criminal activity or simply a dissatisfying life by leaving one town to start life over again in a town fifty miles away. Change one’s name and a new life is born. In many rural areas, the railroad arrived before the telegraph. Put the two together and postal service became a functional advancement along with new financial liaisons that exposed different towns to one another; one could no longer depend on leaving a former life behind. What changed was a culture based, in the strictest sense, on local rules and values – a tribe-based culture. With trains, automobiles and telegraph, local idiosyncrasies were exposed to collaborative associations with other tribal identities. Local newspapers from other towns and cities were read as the post office followed the telegraph around the country. The one-town tribe evolved into a county tribe; eventually county tribes evolved into regional tribes usually linked to a large city. Small, completely independent tribes have disappeared except in places where population is scant like the mountainous states in the west. Tribes began to appear within mega-cities based on economic class and skin color. These smaller tribes have begun to protest this inequality; again, we are in the midst of tribal redefinition.

Anthropologists have identified primates as a family that prefers small groups, or tribes, as the most comfortable grouping. Homo sapiens will find a tribe somewhere if only a neighborhood, an extended family or a poker game.

Play a memory game: How many icons of tribes can you name? Mariner will offer four obvious ones: churches, United Steelworkers, NFL teams and Greek societies like Pi Delta Ci.

Because of telecommunications, tribes are no longer tied to locations or territories. Further, communication of values is so efficient one can belong to many tribes simultaneously.

We will discuss smart phones in a later post.

– – – –

Vector Analysis Update

 

538.com (Nate Silver). Nate says all the events of the last week made various polls jump around a little but overall, the odds remain at 69% for Hillary and 31% for Donald, an exchange of 2 points toward Donald.

Electoral College – A vote cast today would have Hillary winning 274 to 258; 270 to win.

Battleground States – Trend has Donald gaining. The 11 state polling averages:

Colorado          46 to 35 Hillary

Florida            44.4 to 44.4 TIED

Iowa               40.6 to 42.4 Donald

Michigan          41.4 to 34.6 Hillary

Nevada            43.8 to 42.4 Donald

New Hampshire 43.6 to 36.4 Hillary

North Carolina   45.2 to 43.6 Hillary

Ohio                  42.8 to 44.2 Donald

Pennsylvania     48.2 to 39.8 Hillary

Virginia             46.8 to 37.8 Hillary

Wisconsin         45.2 to 38.8 Hillary

Down Ballot Races – The common attitude of most sources is “Win the White House, win the Senate.” The House remains Republican.

Local Papers and Magazines – Reader’s choice.

The overall balance of the vectors has not changed much except to note Donald has gained in some battleground states. Still, sitting 9 points behind Hillary in Pennsylvania, Donald cannot make 270 points in the Electoral College.

REFERENCE SECTION

If a reader is looking for interesting television, that is, mostly analytical and creative shows, Bloomberg Television dedicates much of Saturday afternoon to similar shows.

Ancient Mariner

 

 

[1] The Tyranny of Email, John Freeman, Simon and Shuster, 2009.

Early Voting

Posted on by
2

Another analytical weight that is important to our vector analysis of the campaign is absentee or early voting. Unfortunately, the effect of early voting can’t be verified until Election Day. What analysts do instead is speculate on a state’s early voting in recent elections. While difficult to capture, early voting is rapidly expanding. It is expected to be 30% of the votes in this election. Some states have implemented mail-to-the-voter ballots as a primary method of bringing together ballot and voter. The voter still has the choice of casting their vote in person at a voting station. In some cases, e.g., military serving overseas, votes may not be fully counted for a month after the election.

No one will disagree that this election is an odd election. The bombastic style of Donald has stirred grass roots “register and vote” efforts which may help the democrats in down ballot results. New registrants particularly have impressive numbers. Consider how the voting may be altered in the south: More than 20 percent of the nearly three million votes already tabulated in Georgia, North Carolina, Colorado and Iowa have come from people who did not vote in the last midterm election, according to an analysis of early-voting data by The Upshot (New York Times column).

– – – –

Chicken Little came to visit the mariner this morning. Chicken is quite disturbed about North Korea (NK). Exploding nuclear bombs every once in a while is noteworthy in itself for its impact on all our lives whether they are launched in war or not: The radioactive particles will reside in all our bodies within a year.

The nuclear activity in NK has its own set of worrisome issues for us. In reality, NK is a rogue nation. It has the credentials of a nation but no rational constitution, no citizens’ rights and no legitimate economy – dealing in contraband of all kinds, drugs, pirated copyrights, and an abusive tax system that is similar to what most nations consider import-export fees: any national income is taxed up front before funds are made available for commerce.

How will China handle this? How will Asian countries handle this? How will the West handle this? Economic sanctions don’t work because there is no flexible labor economy. Unpaid slaves do a significant amount of work. Slaves are acquired when the court finds a citizen guilty of something and sends them to prison.

Prisons work differently in NK. When a person is sentenced to prison, it is for an inordinately long time. Further, the sentenced person’s parents, immediate family, including all children and others living in the household, are imprisoned. Most, if any, will never leave.

Isn’t this Donald’s solution for American Muslims?

Life goes on in the prisons; people live their lives working for the state, older ones die, new ones are born. Famine is prominent. There is a vacuum of education. Not only is this tragic for the prisoners, it is dangerous for the rest of the Pacific region, including the US.

The following is an excerpt “Three Generations of Punishment” which aired on CBS Dec. 2, 2012. Anderson Cooper is the correspondent.

Tonight we’re going to tell you about a place so brutal and horrific it’s hard to believe it exists. It is, by all accounts, a modern-day concentration camp, a secret prison hidden in the mountains, 50 miles from North Korea’s capital, Pyongyang. It’s called Camp 14, and according to human rights groups, it’s part of the largest network of political prisons in the world today. Some 150,000 people are believed to be doing hard labor on the brink of starvation in these hidden gulags. But it’s not just those who have been accused of political crimes; it’s their entire families — grandparents, parents, and children. A practice called “three generations of punishment.”

Very little was known about Camp 14 until a young man showed up in South Korea with an extraordinary tale to tell. His name is Shin Dong-hyuk and he said he had not only escaped from Camp 14, but he was born there. He’s believed to be the only person born and raised in the camps who’s ever escaped and lived to tell about it.

Anderson Cooper: Did anybody ever explain to you why you were in a camp?

Shin Dong-hyuk: No. Never. Because I was born there I just thought that those people who carry guns were born to carry guns. And prisoners like me were born as prisoners.

Anderson Cooper: Did you know America existed?

Shin Dong-hyuk: Not at all.

Anderson Cooper: Did you know that the world was round?

Shin Dong-hyuk: I had no idea if it was round or square.

According to other testimony by former camp guard Ahn Myong Chol of Camp 22, the guards are trained to treat the detainees as sub-human, and he gave an account of children in one of the camps who were fighting over who got to eat a kernel of corn retrieved from cow dung.[16]”

The course of NK is entirely in the hands of Kim Jong-un, an immature, narcissistic 32-year old considered in some respects to be a demigod. His word is the only word. If he wants to nuke the Pacific Rim, so be it.

Kim Jong-un is now capable of causing immense damage to the Earth, its inhabitants and the global ecology. Unlike other nuclear nations, there is no government; there is no political citizenry; there is no information about when or whether NK will launch a war. It’s all up to Kim….

In a US military training program for higher ranks, attendees were warned that NK is unstable internally. As such, any number of military actions could erupt within the region; no one can speculate when Kim Jong-un will strike back or how. The US, along with Pacific Rim nations like Japan and Micronesia, must prepare responses which anticipate the extent to which NK will erupt.

Chicken Little’s question to mariner is, “Are our anti-ballistic defenses able to protect us from a NK nuclear strike?”

Ancient Mariner

Friday Update

Posted on by
Reply

Let’s check in on our vector analysis of the Presidential Campaign:

538.com (Nate Silver) – Nate provides three projections:

Polls only (more than 350!) present odds of Hillary winning 69.1 to 30.9.

Projection today without future analysis present odds of Hillary winning 75.5 to 24.5.

Polls and forecast combined present Hillary winning 71.0 to 29.0

Electoral College – A vote cast today would have Hillary winning 347 to 191; 270 to win.

Battleground States – Trend has Donald slipping. The 11 state polling averages:

Colorado          46 to 35 Hillary

Florida            45.4 to 42.4 Hillary

Iowa               41.4 to 40.4 virtually tied

Michigan          41.4 to 34.6 Hillary

Nevada            44 to 32 Hillary

New Hampshire 43.4 to 46.4 Donald

North Carolina   45 to 41 Hillary

Ohio                 45.2 to 41.6 Hillary

Pennsylvania     48.2 to 39.8 Hillary

Virginia             48.8 to 37.8 Hillary

Wisconsin         45.2 to 38.8 Hillary

Down Ballot Races – CBS says Democrats have a weak bench (full article http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/26/us/politics/democrats-weak-bench-undermines-hope-of-taking-back-senate.html?ref=politics&_r=0 )

“WASHINGTON — Senate Democrats, aware of the dead weight that Donald J. Trump has placed on their vulnerable Republican colleagues, can taste a reclaimed majority.

But just as Senate Republicans blew their chances in 2010 and 2012 before finally taking control in 2014, Democrats find themselves hobbled by less-than-stellar candidates in races that could make the difference in winning a majority.

In Pennsylvania, Katie McGinty, a relatively unknown former federal official who has never held elective office, is ahead in polls but lags Hillary Clinton’s large lead in the state. In Florida, a nasty primary between two flawed candidates could harm the Democrats’ chance to unseat Senator Marco Rubio.

Several high-profile Democrats turned down the chance to challenge Senator Richard Burr of North Carolina before they settled on a civil liberties lawyer, Deborah Ross, who is not necessarily a good fit for suburban voters there. Catherine Cortez Masto, a Democrat and former state attorney general now running for an open seat in Nevada, has also failed to catch fire.

To challenge 82-year-old Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, Democrats settled on 72-year-old Patty Judge. Senator Rob Portman’s Democratic challenger in Ohio, former Gov. Ted Strickland, is 75, an easy target for Mr. Portman’s taunting nickname, “Retread Ted.”

Local Newspapers and Magazines – the reader’s choice.

Using our weighted sources, we know that Hillary is well ahead but the down ballot may not produce a typical “coattail” of same party wins.

What did Donald and Hillary say on the boob box? Do we care? Keeping track of our weighted evaluations is more accurate and more informative than the kindergarten seen on cable news.

Sometimes, while we are poking around, we discover a nugget. For example the interview of Barack by Fareed Zakaria on GPS made many helter-skelter issues seem rational – all things given.

Ancient Mariner