֎ It seems the democratic candidates are trying to keep the party truck on the highway. Joe should incorporate a clearly progressive objective into his platform to demonstrate his support for Bernie’s advocates and Bernie needs to cancel pejorative, personal assaults on Joe. Still, Bernie must stay in the race all the way to the democratic convention to keep the progressive bloc participating in the process to nomination. No citizen, democratic, independent, moderate, other than white, white, progressive or otherwise can miss or not feel part of the presidential election in November. Remember the wicked witch of the Electoral College.

֎ The tactics of the professional health experts appear to be making progress in managing the public regarding the coronavirus. The tactics seem fragmented but just may constitute a unified plan on different levels. The big challenge is to have enough tests available. Mariner’s fear is that Donald and Congress will pass blanket relief for the financially challenged but at the same time will give the oligarchs a windfall.

Coronavirus is dominating all news traffic at the moment which is appropriate. Sequester and quarantine may cause income damage but may provide a fresh focus on things. It may be a chance to do some face time with the family. Can the reader still name them all? Mariner’s wife suggested a self-managed job for high schoolers freed from attendance: babysit for families where younger children are home alone.

֎No NBA? No March Madness? No Indian Wells? No Tokyo Olympics? What’s a chair jock to do? Virus is one thing but this is going too far! Mariner already has overbuilt the Alaskan wilderness, botched all of Alton Brown’s recipes, remodeled over a hundred homes, memorized the history of England, listened to Morgan Freeman tell the story of God twice, won dozens of times on Family Feud and failed terribly at Jeopardy. What’s left? No, No – not cable news! Time to try ROKU.

Ancient Mariner

֎ How would a quarantine actually work in the U.S.? It would be an utter mess. Part of the reason is that the federal government can’t just step in with a quarantine. America’s public-health system is split into 2,684 state, local, and tribal public-health departments, and each of them have jurisdiction over whether to impose quarantines if needed. [The Atlantic]

The U.S. economy has been something of a ticking time bomb for some time.

• Growth has declined over the last two years despite higher government spending and a $23.4 trillion national debt.
• The labor market has boomed, but many of the jobs added have been hourly service-industry positions that offer limited health insurance.
• Brookings Institution reports that 44% of all U.S. workers earn barely enough to live on.

֎ As if corruption from the outside world isn’t enough, and Donald has spread a blanket of ‘executive privilege’ unheard of in history, and two billionaires ran for president at the same time, and a blatantly guilty president was found not guilty by the Senate, and money in significant sums flows into every Congressperson’s bucket on a daily basis – now Congress is making the Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE) a useless watchdog. OCE does not have subpoena power, so lawmakers have decided that not cooperating is the better approach. All OCE can do is request a visit and look at surface evidence but Congress simply ignores these requests.

Most if not all OCE requests have to do with misappropriation of campaign funds and illegal liaisons with private enterprise (e.g. Mar-a-Lago). As 44 percent of the population struggles to sustain a household, elected officials are accepting abundant cash. Is it any wonder none of them will vote for term limits?

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One needs to escape this disheveled world for the sake of sanity. This is so needed that mariner spent the entire day in his shop sorting large containers of junk – most of it brought from the farm 10 years ago. The day passed quietly with no thought beyond whether he wants to keep 37 brackets used to frame buildings.

Ancient Mariner

֎ Misinformation is the weapon of the future, Senator Mark Warner believes:

“I sometimes worry that maybe we’re fighting the last century’s wars when conflict in the 21st century is going to be a lot more around cyber misinformation and disinformation, where your dollar can go a long way.”

֎ A privacy law looking out for teenagers

Managing screen time, access to devices, kids’ online personas — it’s complicated, and not getting any easier. (Did you see Britney Spears’ son promising dirt on his mom’s career in exchange for more Instagram followers? A thoroughly 2020 story.)

There’s been legislation designed to protect children online, but by 13 kids are mostly treated like adults. But Senators Ed Markey and Richard Blumenthal want to bring new protections to anyone under 16:

The Senators’ Kids Internet Design and Safety Act argues that the internet “is largely designed in non-transparent ways to ensure children interact with content that reflect the interests and goals of content creators, platforms, and marketers.”

The bill, first introduced nearly a year ago, wants kid-focused services to do away with auto-playing video, influencer marketing, or any dark pattern design that keeps them engaged.

If the KIDS Act passed, it would force every platform with children on it — YouTube, Snapchat, TikTok, and so many others — to fundamentally change how they deal with young users. [By David Pierce, Protocol]

֎ The cost of higher education is ballooning. From 1978 to 2017, the Consumer Price Index grew fourfold, but the price of college increased 14-fold, according to research by Ana Hernández Kent, a policy analyst at the St. Louis Fed.

֎ Regular readers may remember mariner suggesting that job loss in the AI era may force individuals into self-managed work. According to the US Census Bureau, Americans are more entrepreneurial than ever before. There were 3.4 million applications to start businesses last year, a record number.

If the reader doesn’t subscribe to the New Yorker Magazine, mariner provides the cover of the latest issue:

Ancient Mariner

The shift to a focused democratic campaign over the last day or two has intensified the effort by voters who believe policy and fervor are the primary objectives to win the election in November. Now that there are two principle candidates, one policy oriented and the other not, one calm and the other cantankerous, it is easier for voters to merge personality, politics and purpose.

Since the campaign began, many have pondered whether the democratic party could unify itself in time for the campaign against Donald. Fortunately, the Citizen Board of Directors spoke on Super Tuesday and dismissed a billionaire and the worthy but diverse tagalongs who have good intentions but are distracted by policy as the primary reason to be nominated.

Bernie’s organization wasted no time in ramping up their activity: Mariner and his wife already have received email from private citizens and Bernie that Joe is no match for Donald and more importantly Joe does not have a platform for the future.

It is hard in this day of identity politics and populism but the democrats must try unity as a platform. Thus far in the campaign issues have been divided among progressives, moderates, millennials, Zs and old people. Always there has been only one issue: beat Donald.

Mariner mentioned in previous posts that the value of Joe is that he is like printer paper that hasn’t been printed on yet. Who dislikes clean paper? Joe is a unifier specifically because he is not a policy wonk. Everyone can vote for Joe with the confidence that he will not turn against any of the democratic visions.

What it will take to assure Donald is beaten is a massive, 100 percent turnout of democrats; none of the 20-odd democratic candidates can win without a giant turnout. Some democrats want to vote only for Bernie, or only for Elizabeth, or only for Pete, or only for Tom. This does not assure democratic victory in November. Everyone, even some republicans can and must vote for Joe – after all, he is blank paper.

Being blank paper but having all the executive powers Donald is abusing will allow the democratic vision to be installed in a comprehensive way. It is common knowledge that the Board of Directors is dissatisfied with the conflict and bickering between parties and the growing disparity between rich and poor. Plain Joe will fill positions in the cabinet with ideologues, advocates of the democratic experience, and over his tenure will promote democratic representation in state governments – without calling everyone by a diminutive nickname.

Finally, Joe will be in a position to push archaic, immoral Senate republicans out of office. Only after the Senate is overturned will the democratic ideologues be able to create a better nation.

Yes, mariner knows Joe is not exactly ambitious but anyone can vote for him without fear of reprisal – everyone will get a chance to type their own opinions on Joe’s blank page. Anyone can beat Donald with enough votes in spite of his incessant, belligerent narcissism.

Ancient Mariner

First, a tidbit mariner learned about ‘deep state’ from an article in the Atlantic: A former Republican congressional aide named Mike Lofgren had introduced the phrase into the political bloodstream with an essay in 2014 and a book two years later. Lofgren meant the nexus of corporations, banks and defense contractors that had gained so much financial and political control—sources of Washington’s corruption. But conservatives at Breitbart News and Fox News redefined the term to mean internal resistance against conservative (Trumpian) leadership.

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A quote from Donald on November 23, 2017: “I’m The Only One That Matters.” Donald said Of State Department Job Vacancies.

Sixty percent of top-ranking diplomats in the State Department have left; applications to join the corps has fallen by half, according to the American Foreign Service Association.

Fifty top administrators in the Department of Justice have resigned.

More than 700 employees, and more than 200 of them scientists, have left the EPA since Trump took office and appointed Scott Pruitt, who denies human activity contributes to climate change and had repeatedly sued the agency, to run it.

Most of the electorate knows Donald would like to be a dictator along the lines of Putin where the government is genuinely authoritarian regardless of its government operations and embezzlement is the prize. Donald is a distasteful subject from any direction.

But the electorate must be made aware of how seriously vulnerable the United States has become in an age of internationalism that changes by the day. The sophistication of US government operations actually is a significant weapon in a world of battling nations. The US government is (was) the glue that held together most of the western world’s liaisons, international agreements and containment of aggressive nations like Russia and North Korea.

Donald has no interest in any subject that doesn’t generate personal income or aggrandizement. He doesn’t care about global warming because he is deeply invested in international oil to a greater extent than his war against the EPA – for which the entire nation will suffer dearly over the next thirty years. Another four years may well break the nation as a player among other nations. The US will be a has-been nation.

Ancient Mariner

Yesterday during South Carolina primary coverage, Tom Steyer closed his campaign for president. Two billionaires to go. (Mariner recognizes Donald as a billionaire for the amount of debt Russia is covering through Deutsch Bank. Okay, he’s a negative billionaire)

The United States elections, federal, state and local, are very much like the wild west: no rules, no law and order and money will win. The delegate method doesn’t eliminate candidates, lack of money does. Until this very day and forthwith, those without enough matching wealth will run out of financial support to sustain a competitive campaign across fifty states. The fact that three billionaires plus endless PAC support for them have so much money, they in effect are able to buy each and every vote to the tune of thousands of dollars each.

In the old days on many occasions, votes actually were bought for cash; now the television stations get the cash; the electorate, bless their soul, does what the television tells them to do.

Tom was the one billionaire who could feel empathy. He actually wants to make things better for the struggling masses yearning to survive. He is as classy as any of the candidates – but he is a billionaire. If the US is to sustain its great experiment as a nation, the citizens must play the role of the Board of Directors of the country – not allow the elite class to control things. That kind of government is called a plutocracy not a democracy.

So on to Super Tuesday. This round, like Steyer in South Carolina, has been targeted by Billionaire Bloomberg. It will be obvious on March third that commoners like Buttigieg and Klobuchar will have inadequate offenses to compete with Bloomberg. On the other hand, enough voters are involved that perhaps the role of Citizen Board of Directors may influence the contests. Let’s hope so – it’s time to settle the Bernie/Joe issue.

It is the democratic religion that whomever is nominated, be it human or a dead fish, every living democrat will appear at the voting booth to cast a vote against Donald. Mariner still contends that by the end of voting in Virgin Islands, Joe will draw more votes than Bernie. And to remind readers, Wisconsin plays a unique role in this election: the next President cannot win except that they carry Wisconsin.

As the title of the post suggests, this will be a one-of-a-kind election. Russia is helping; no one may be allowed to vote because of the pandemic and maybe can’t afford to anyway because of the recession.

Nevertheless, remember to vote on Tuesday, November third. Wear a mask.

Ancient Mariner