Those people in the upper midwest; who gave us Trump, Ryan and McConnell on Tuesday Nov.8, what do we make of them?

First of all, I don't know how they are surviving at all. Not only are their small and medium-town industries gone, and their big city industries gone, but they vote themselves out of any government assistance, because they resent others getting benefits.

What do they live on, then? How do they make a living? Industries are gone; small family farms are mostly gone. They get no benefits. What are they doing out there? And most of all, why do they stay out there?

Maybe Classic Xer and Odin have some sense of this. I really don't just want to put them down. Obviously they make stupid political decisions, many of them. As I said, they are not inherently dumber than me, and I'm not inherently any better than them. I feel for their plight. But I don't understand what's going on with them that they can't see even for themselves what's happening to them, what to do about it, or even why they stay there in such large numbers-- large enough to vote, overwhelm the urban vote, put up signs and drive long distances to Trump rallies, and give us a dufus, con-man president and an oligarchical congress over and over again.

They insist that they are self-reliant, and oppose government assistance for themselves or those folks they don't like, and fear taking over their country. So they blame them, instead of the oligarchs who have actually taken over the country and ruined their lives and society. Somehow some of them think that their problems exist because women have abortions, or because people in the big city want to regulate guns. They can't see; they don't know.

They voted self-destructively, over and over again. What's going to happen to these unhappy folks, as their plight gets worse and worse under the clowns they keep voting for?

The critical part of the electorate was the demographic best described as readers of the fecal tabloid National Inquirer.  All sorts of renowned, often conservative newspapers including the Dallas Morning News, the Detroit News, and the Arizona Republic endorsed Hillary Clinton.

The story about the health of Hillary Clinton was in the National Inquirer.

The way to get the votes of the most gullible voters is to get one's excessively-simple message to the least-learned masses through the intellectually-lowest means, typically the media most attractive to the least-learned of people, like low-brow tabloid media whose users are toward the bottom in effective education:

\Adolf Hitler' in Mein Kampf Wrote:"Propaganda must always address itself to the broad masses of the people. (...) All propaganda must be presented in a popular form and must fix its intellectual level so as not to be above the heads of the least intellectual of those to whom it is directed. (...) The art of propaganda consists precisely in being able to awaken the imagination of the public through an appeal to their feelings, in finding the appropriate psychological form that will arrest the attention and appeal to the hearts of the national masses. The broad masses of the people are not made up of diplomats or professors of public jurisprudence nor simply of persons who are able to form reasoned judgment in given cases, but a vacillating crowd of human children who are constantly wavering between one idea and another. (...) The great majority of a nation is so feminine in its character and outlook that its thought and conduct are ruled by sentiment rather than by sober reasoning. This sentiment, however, is not complex, but simple and consistent. It is not highly differentiated, but has only the negative and positive notions of love and hatred, right and wrong, truth and falsehood."[5]

The Democratic voters are the majority in this country, yet we have no voice in the federal government and not much voice at the state level either. The Republicans are able to routinely now win the electoral college despite our majority, and squeeze us out. 

The Republicans don't represent the people, but only the wealthy and powerful, as they:

1. Declare war on the environment, emasculate or shut down the EPA and unleash more global warming during the only time left for averting disaster.

2. Unleash trickle-down economics on a massive scale with huge tax cuts for the wealthy, massive repeal of business regulations, and massive cuts to social programs, possibly including medicare and social security as well as health care reform, and huge new debt; even after two previous administrations in which this program was tried and failed.

3. Provide a voice or an excuse for prejudice or violence against non-white, non-Christian Americans and women, and possible deportations of immigrants who may have committed no crime, and curtailing voting rights, the free press, the right to protest, and other rights important to these and other groups and all people.

4. Waste billions on an un-needed military and nuclear weapons expansion, thus providing new military toys to put at the hands of an unstable and tempermental (and perhaps treasonous) reality-TV star commander in chief who thinks he can get away with anything.

5. And lots more; what else have I forgot?

The demonstrations that Galen ridicules are in fact means of helping to organize this opposition, and a new DNC chair will lead it. This effort starting now was broadcast on the news concerning a huge demonstration tonight as people joined hands around Lake Merritt in Oakland. It's happening. I think those of us who agree need to join in. Democrats and Democratic voters need to organize the resistance to the Republican takeover now, and for years to come. We will need to write to Democratic legislators to man-up and resist Trump's Court nominees, and oppose all the Republican plans, unless they are consistent with the goals of progressive Democrats.

What is happening where you live?

http://www.wsj.com/articles/new-zealand-...1479038221

Quote:A powerful earthquake struck New Zealand near the city of Christchurch, causing strong jolts felt more than 120 miles away and prompting a tsunami threat along the country’s east coast.
New Zealand’s Ministry of Civil Defence and Emergency Management said on its verified Twitter account that a tsunami threat covered all of New Zealand’s east coast, including Christchurch, Wellington and the Chatham Islands, and urged people in those areas to move to high ground or go inland.
The agency later said the first wave had arrived on the northeastern coast of the South Island, but didn’t say how tall it was. “The first wave may not be the largest. Waves may continue for several hours,” MCDEM said on Twitter.

The quake, which the U.S. Geological Survey initially recorded as magnitude 7.4 but later raised to 7.8, struck just after midnight Sunday and was centered 93 kilometers (57 miles) northeast of Christchurch, on the country’s South Island.
The USGS said the quake was at a depth of 23 kilometers (14 miles). The quake was followed by a number of strong aftershocks, but there were no immediate reports of major damage or injuries, the Associated Press reported.



Christchurch resident Hannah Gin told AP she had just sat down in her living room to watch a replay of the recent All Blacks versus Italy rugby union match when her house started shaking. Upstairs, her mother let out a scream.
Ms. Gin, a 24-year-old lifelong Christchurch resident, is accustomed to quakes, so she said she sat calmly and waited, figuring the rumbling would stop in a few seconds. Instead, the shaking just went on and on—for at least three minutes, according to the clock on her phone, she told AP by phone.
The quake was far less violent than the one that struck her city in 2011, she said, adding that there was no jarring up and down or side to side, just a long, rolling sensation. But it went on for much longer than the typical quakes that strike the area, she said.
“I could hear the sliding door sliding back and forth and we’ve got washing hanging up and I could see the washing moving,” Ms. Gin told AP. “It just kept going and going.” Her house, which was damaged in the 2011 quake, didn't appear to have sustained any damage from the latest quake, she said.

The quake also knocked out New Zealand’s emergency call number, 111, for about 10 minutes, the AP reported, citing police.
In Wellington, 214 kilometers (132 miles) north of the quake’s epicenter, power was knocked out in some places, and some windows were smashed and some chimneys collapsed, the AP reported. It caused items to fall from shelves and windows to break in Wellington, and forced hundreds of people on to the streets as hotels were evacuated, AP said.
Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology said there was no tsunami threat to the country.

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/bill-c...le/2607228#!

Quote:Bill Clinton stood before an audience of blue-collar workers in Lansing, Mich., two days before the presidential election and told them he understood and empathized with the economic frustrations of the working class.

"There's a lot of road rage out there because after the financial crash, it took a long time before incomes started going up again. There are still some families that if you adjust for inflation, their incomes are about what they were the last day I was president more than 15 years ago and their costs are going up. And that's really tough," the former president drawled as he campaigned on behalf of his wife, Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.

"So when you get up every morning, and you look in the mirror and you don't think you've got the power to make tomorrow better than today, that's a pretty tough load to carry," he told an audience that included union laborers...


http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/bill-c...le/2607228#!

A few years back on the old forums, I proposed a thought about larger cycles than the four generation saeculum to help describe the nature of 4T conflicts.  Perhaps its a theory done before; I am just a casual student of generational theory.  The consideration is that there are pendulums alternating between hot and cold war, internal and external conflicts.  I am not talking about the Soviet-US Cold war which may be part of another cycle.

Current Crisis here in US - Internal Cold War
World War 2 - External Hot War
American Civil War - Internal Hot War
Revolutionary War - External Cold War (if viewed as a proxy battle between England and France)
Glorious Revolution - Internal Cold War (yes there were some battles)
Armada Crisis - External Hot War (England and Spain)
War of the Roses - Internal Hot War (between the houses)

Thats about all I have got into it.

https://www.propublica.org/article/reven...tten-class

Quote:In March, I was driving along a road that led from Dayton, Ohio, into its formerly middle-class, now decidedly working-class southwestern suburbs, when I came upon an arresting sight. I was looking for a professional sign-maker who had turned his West Carrollton ranch house into a distribution point for Trump yard signs, in high demand just days prior to the Ohio Republican primary. Instead of piling the signs in the driveway, he had arrayed them in his yard along the road. There they were, dozens and dozens of them, lined up in rows like the uniform gravestones in a military cemetery.

The sign man wasn’t home, but he had left a married couple in charge of the distribution. I got talking to the woman, Contessa Hammel. She was 43 and worked at the convenience store at a local Speedway gas station after four years in the military. And this was the first time she was voting in 25 years of eligibility...



https://www.propublica.org/article/reven...tten-class

Maybe it will be retired now that Donald Trump has been elected President.

So let us and the Russians work together to obliterate ISIS - and none of this "What if this creates a power vacuum in the Middle East that Iran might step into?"  As Ted Kennedy should have said, we'll cross that bridge when we come to it.

Same goes for the imminent repeal of ObamaCare: Instead of "what if"-ing that to death - what if emergency rooms go bankrupt treating the newly uninsured, what if poor, sick people are "dying in the streets," as Trump himself taunted Ted Cruz with in one of the Republican debates - the states, church groups, and most of all, the putative champions of the poor like George Soros and Tom Steyer, need to start getting together now to prepare for the sh**-storm to come.  Waiting until repeal actually happens is inexcusable.

And there is nothing less 4T-ish than saying "What If?" to everything, allowing it to paralyze necessary action.

A lot of people need to grow some - and I don't mean marijuana, even though it is becoming legal in ever more states.

Let's chronicle, in real time, the unfolding of President Pussygrabber's betrayal to the White male cohort-led Trumpsters as well as his institutionalizing the alt-Right's anti-American values agenda.  It should be fun!