Hope Wanted For Aging Optimist

I'm a glass-half-full guy.  My partner and my wife tell me I'm too trusting.   Life and love have never been better but I've an awfully hard time looking for the bright side of culture and politics.

Faced with a photo of Justin Trudeau, that handsome young fellow with the selfie camera, I turn my eyes away.  Seeing Barack Obama palling around with Raoul Castro, makes me cringe.  When ex-Rubio people post GQ shots of Trump's wife to help Cruz' campaign and Trump brags his wife is prettier that Cruz' wife, I'm brought to despair.  Reading in-your-face false reporting from both Republican and Democrat leaders to make Donald Trump look like a crazed idiot and force him out at the convention  gives me heartache.   University students get the vapours when they see a campaign sign, "Trump 2016" chalked by the sidewalk.   What it reveals about mainstream culture gives  me a heavier heart than any of The Donald's antics.  The twilight of the Chretien era was easier to stomach.

As noted by Milo Yiannopoulos:  "The weak, ineffectual conservative establishment, with their utter inability to defeat the left on cultural issues, has made Donald Trump a necessary, even vital force in American politics."

I'm cheering for Donald because he gives me hope that American and Canadian politics can be refreshed, like root-bound plants getting re-potted.  There will be an "after" after Trump.

The More Multiculturalism Prevails, The Less Community We Have. Breaking Racial Barriers Not Worth The Full Price.

Some is excellent.  A lot is ruin.

"Putnam found that diversity promotes alienation, disengagement, and social isolation. This all runs counter to a host of prevailing clichés and pieties.  ..  As a community becomes more ethnically and socially varied, social trust plummets. People tend to “hunker down,” ... banding together with a shrunken and shrinking group of friends or alone ... Trust in political leaders, the political process, and even voting decline precipitously. Volunteerism, from charitable giving to carpooling, deteriorates. Political activism increases as people look to government to solve problems that once might have been solved by a simple conversation across a coffee table or a shared fence between neighbors.

h/t Ed Driscoll from his tale of moving to Texas from California.

Hype Tool For Political Journalists

From mathwithbaddrawings comes this pointed cartoon.
"Read Me. Be surprised" is the message.
Reporting less so.

Enjoy a browse at the mother page
before you leave the topic.

You And I Are Easy To Deceive: DIY Videos Of Public Figures Made To Say Fake Things With Faked emotion.

This is better than a horror show.  An actor's expressions and lip movements are overlaid on a target actor (in this case, George W Bush).  George seems to feel and say whatever the actor wants and all this in real time.  We aren't smart enough not to be deceived.  Prepare to be outraged like a puppet as activists pull your string.

The software: Face2Face.
See more with a search for facial reenactment.

Ochlocracy Bumps Oligarchy: Democracy 3.0 arrives with Sanders and Trump. We're next.

Democracy, like True Christianity, has never been tried.  You may not like it.  Everybody gets a say, including the unwashed and, the low information voters who heretofore saw no reason to take part in politics but now find social media and the internet and the comment pages give them a front seat.   I think democracy was promoted by those next to power but lacking the wealth, force and connections to prevail on their own terms.   Extending the vote brought crowd backing to this lot who wanted to drink at the governing teat.     Events have overtaken them.  Now Trump phones it in and tweets it in and gets a billion dollars free publicity.  Sanders appeals to some of the same people whose opinions lack that certain je ne sais quoi.   This isn't the end game, just the end of politics as we had come to know it.

Something similar happened in music.

You could make a living working for the king or the bishop. Then in Mozart's day, you could make a living working for various lords and even the occasional rich merchant.  In our lifetime, you could make it by contracting with a secular record label and getting air time lined up on the radio.  Now you can take your talent to the masses and get money selling downloads by the millions.  The middle men are disappearing.   Trump has few middlemen, almost no one he owes favour to except to the crowd. He is crowd-funding his run for the presidency.  Political operatives are being downsized.

My new favourite word: Ochlocracy: rule by the masses

Canada's Economy In One Cartoon From The Fraser Institute. NGO's Cost You Billions

Simple but useful., from the Fraser Institute.

Aboriginal manipulation of government and turning pipeline protests into government policy shrink our wealth just as effectively as taxes, undisciplined spending and debt. Interesting that NGO players control a big chunk of the GO budget.

"American men drop to their knees
begging Trudeau to run for president."

We've a likable guy on the tiller.  I don't hate Trudeau fils, but am embarrassed by him.

Putin joins Trump's campaign to defeat Hillary Clinton.

Laugh with Trump in this first ad targeting Hillary.  Expect more ballsy clips though not all featuring Vladimir chuckling.  Hillary won't be wiping the floor with Trump. She won't even be making a peep about "Trump admires Putin" because it will draw more laughter upon herself.  She will never live down the barking episode at her rally.

Mass murder: Big government is a force multiplier for evil.

Governments with guns are the top killers. Rogue individuals slay dozens, sometimes hundreds, and with 9-11, the tollran into the low thousands.    But the millions and tens of millions are caused by governments with guns.  Governments are the force multiplier of evil.   These are not the deaths in defense of Motherland and Fatherland.  They are the internal butcheries and starvations of Pol Pot and Mao, of the Armenian genocide and the millions who perished in the Ukraine under Stalin.

The article by BOOKWORM is provocative.  "Because government is a force multiplier for evil, a vote for the small government candidate is a vote for good."  Everyone wants the government to do something about something and that includes conservatives who want values protected and activists who want pipelines stopped.  These "somethings" should be tested at the smallest local level possible and viewed as experiments.  A vote for small government is a vote for good government.

Two clicks for US 2016.

First click this graphic to follow all US delegate races at Nate Silver's Fivethirtyeight site.  The interactive graphic,  one for each presidential candidate, shows each one's progress, noting every caucus and primary date, how many votes are at stake and a calculated capture number per state per candidate needed to win the nomination.  Second, click to the Horse Race live blog at Breitbart which links every few minutes from about 8 a.m. EST to breaking US election stories from all over the map.  Except for opinion pieces and voting night tallies, you may not need anything else to stay on top of the news.

The Fivethirtyeight home page adds vote junky anlaysis to the stories you read on an election night.
The sample below is from the interactive graphic for Donald Trump, highlighting what's at stake for him on March 15th.

Electability Poll Hogswallop'

Head to Head polls make screaming headlines.  Trump loses to Clinton, Sanders, Cruz and even Rubio.   The winning margin in past US presidential elections is inside the margin of error of many past polls.  See the data.    "Loses by 2"   "Wins by 3" in head-to-head are close to meaningless remarks at this stage and verbiage promoting such freakily scandalous and stunning news qualifies for hogswallop.

The data in 2012 shows Romney within a percent of two of Obama right up to election night.  He wasn't a loser until that final Tuesday. The second chart shows the percent of the popular vote that went to the winner in recent presidential campaigns. Apart from a couple blowouts with Reagan, Johnson and Nixon, many races are close and indeterminate until voting day.  The first chart is from Real Clear Polling and the second from Wikipedia.

Happily Married

True love is one of those impossible things that can be believed six times over before breakfast.  See the Alice quote below.  Grownups organize life around "I" this and "You" that but toddlers are truly alive before that.  At a later age, from that same nature comes "Being in love" as male and females of the species.   Who we are is the superstructure and what we are is the matrix.  They work by different rules and have different goals.   They don't have to make harmonized sense all the time.  Just go with it and blink past the funny spots.  Which brings me to being happily married:

Happy and hamming it up

I wake in the morning and hold my wife very close to me, feeling her breathe as she falls back to sleep. The In Love matrix bubbles up with the same old thoughts:  "You are so beautiful.  You are soooo beautiful.  I love you. My darling, my beautiful darling. You are mine.   I will always be good to you". And on and on.

The superstructure that runs the show by day is thinking about making breakfast and designing roof trusses, about men and women at the square dance last night.  The matrix continues to bubble up, "my darling, adorable and precious, what a miracle".  The superstructure decides it's morning and heads for the showers.   This is like having two (wonderful) kinds of life in a single vehicle.   You don't have to make sense of love.  Enjoy it and blink past the rest  ---the unreasonably pleased, driven and giddy interludes and the jealous and possessive moments incompatible with being a modern..


From "Through The Looking Glass":
Alice laughed: "There's no use trying," she said; "one can't believe impossible things."
"I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was younger, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."

THE OLD, OLD STORY:

The Colonel: "Yes, He was Senior Wrangler of his Year, and She took a Mathematical Scholarship at Girton; and now they're Engaged!"

Mrs. Jones: "Dear me, how interesting! And oh, how different their Conversation must be from the insipid twaddle of Ordinary Lovers!"

THEIR CONVERSATION

He: "And what would Dovey do if Lovey were to die?"

She: "Oh, Dovey would die too!"

Proof That Dem Hijinks Are Blocked By Voter ID.

Eight of the first sixteen primaries and caucuses added voter ID since 2010.    Democrat turnout with voter ID was down 37% and without voter ID was down 15%.  With the same rules, Republican turnout was up massively everywhere.  Check it out.  Reported first at Huffington Post.  Low enthusiasm for the Donkey people accounts for less than half the decline.  Bad behaviour by political operatives, now being stymied, accounts for the rest.  Voter ID is a low cost small government fix.  Makes me glad to live in Canada.

Super Tuesday Data Show Trump Wins Florida

NYT Upshot data show Trump did fine.  See persuasive chart of all four states last Tuesday.  Cruz soared and got his votes from Rubio's flameout.  Trump votes matched expectation.   

Cruz is going to scavenge Rubio's home state votes next Tuesday and let Trump romp home with 99 winner-take-all delegates.  We've read elsewhere that Cruz is okay with that, expecting Rubio to pull out leaving a two man race.

Minimum Wage Graphic To Torment Believers

If you don't read Small Dead Animals, here is the graphic you need to show people who believe $15/hour ought to be the minimum wage. and every job should get it.   They believe in magic boats.

Not a Typo: 14,000 wind turbines idle in US

When the subsidy's gone, the turbines are toast and there's no green cleanup squad.  Not hundreds but thousands are idle.  Read more at "American Elephant".
Excerpt:

"When it is time to clean up after a failed idea, no green environmentalists are to be found. Wind was free, natural, harnessing Earth’s bounty for the benefit of all mankind, sounded like a good idea. Wind turbines, like solar panels, break down. They produce less energy before they break down than the energy it took to make them. The wind does not blow all the time, or even most of the time. When it is not blowing, they require full-time backup from conventional power plants. Without government subsidy, they are unaffordable. With governments facing financial troubles, the subsidies are unaffordable. "

Re-stated:

They are rusting hulks and no environmentalists are willing to pay to scrap them.

They didn't earn their keep.

They killed thousands of raptors.

When wind power makes sense you will need no subsidy.

Monkeyi brain waves steer machines.

"Monkeys drive wheelchairs" - It's all over the internet this week. The new idea is wiring up not just one or two things but hundreds of nerve ends to capture complex signals, both to send and receive.  Duke University researchers passively pushed macaque monkeys through the grape reward pathway on fancy electric scooters.  The monkey brain waves were captured as they got close to the grapes.  Their own brain signals were later fed back to them to prompt those parts of the brain to fire up on their own.  The monkeys soon learned to amplify this and added distance-to-the-goal compensation too.

On line stories are mostly about quadraplegics getting a new lease on life.  What about the normal getting super abilities to do things remotely?  That includes work tasks.   There's a whole class of "handicapped" that we call senior citizens in care homes.   If old and infirm people (over 150 years old) move to their in-orbit weightless care homes to retire and have some brain implants too, what exactly distinguishes them from active people in their prime who get things done?
Link for video below.

Chimps share a stone throwing ritual belief, even when alone

These filmed chimpanzees share a symbolic behaviour.  They throw stones in a ceremonial way at a specific tree.  They throw these stones when no other chimp can see them.  The camera trap shows a succession of adult male and female chimps choosing a stone, looking around, then hucking it at the trunk and heading off.  Source: Scientific American

Vote Trump and His Daughter to the White House: Hugh Hewitt

Hugh Hewitt gives six reasons to vote Trump.  Ivanka Trump is number six.

"And, finally, sixth: Donald’s daughter and Svengali Ivanka is a smart, smart, smart lady with an extraordinary intellect and influence on her father. We get the GOP’s own Valerie Jarrett, only this one with a sense of America’s role in the world and the same resolve to succeed as Jarrett possesses."

It's not that Hugh would eagerly pick Trump and you remember Trump insulted Hugh after a "gotcha" interview back in September, but Hewitt has six good reasons to vote Trump:
The first three are the three supreme court judges he will probably get to nominate.  "Diane Sykes and Bill Pryor are two fine judges that Trump has mentioned as possible nominees and he made the right commitment on religious liberty to me on stage Thursday night."  Fourth, Donald is a builder and will rebuild the navy. Fifth, the rulers of China and Russia will think twice before crossing him.

"An extraordinary intellect and influence on her father". Hewitt has had her on his show.
Something to think about.
FDOTUS and executive vice president of the Trump Organization.

Two Clinton Funnies

h/t  powerlineblog
Security on a terrorist's iphone and who is Bill Clinton inclined to vote for?

Breitbart liveblogging the entire US election: "Horse Race Live Wire" is a new type of news.

Breitbart's "Horse Race Live Wire" page has over a 100 posts so far today, picking up within minutes all the political stories I've seen anywhere - the video clips - tweets - photographs - punditries - bon mots and scandals.  Reposted with links are all the stories that are making news in the primaries and caucuses including Bernie's and Hillary's doings.  Breitbart likes Trump.  Each day a new page is started with the "Horse Race Live Wire" theme.  Bookmark Breitbart and settle back.   During breaking news, the posts are minutes apart.   It's a new type of news.  I like it.

http://www.breitbart.com/