As I sat at home, Wednesday and Thursday, compulsively checking and refreshing the New York Times, LA Times, and Fox News websites, my email continued to grow as if the election hadn’t taken place. Strangely, today, Friday, my email requests for political contributions seem to have almost come to a halt.

Somehow, I have ended up on Trump’s campaign donor list and I am, if not thrilled, at least happy for it. It is nice to see how the different Campaigns campaign. I’m going to presume that Trump has a pretty good handle on his supporters so, while it seems to me that he is talking down to them, I assume that neither he nor his supporters feel that way. A couple of weeks ago, I heard Anthony Scaramucci on the Bill Mahr Show and he opined that Trump would not fight the results saying that Trump does not like conflict and I was convinced he was right, now I’m not so sure. The first two emails, below, are from the President himself and the third is from his son, so you can decide.

Stephen,
I need you.
The Left will try to STEAL this Election! I’m calling on YOU to step up & FIGHT BACK. Your support is critical right now. We must protect the integrity of this Election.
Can I count on you?
Please contribute ANY AMOUNT IMMEDIATELY to the Official Election Defense Fund and to increase your impact by 1000%. >> CONTRIBUTE $250 = $2750

Stephen,
Did you see my press conference from the White House last night?
If you count the LEGAL votes, I easily win the Election. If you count the ILLEGAL and LATE votes, the Radical Left can steal this Election from us.
I’ve won many critical states, despite historic interference from Big Media, Big Money, and Big Tech. Democrat-run cities, like Detroit and Philadelphia, two of the most politically corrupt places in America, cannot be responsible for deciding the outcome of this race.
They’re trying to STEAL this Election.
Remember, they’re not only trying to STEAL the Election from me – they’re also trying to steal it from YOU.
I promise you my team is fighting around the clock to DEFEND the integrity of this Election, but we cannot do it alone. We need EVERY Patriot, like YOU, to step up and make sure we have the resources to keep going.
We can’t let America be disgraced by this. I need YOU to FIGHT BACK!

For some reason, unbeknown to me, I’m not getting any frantic Biden requests for money. I suspect that they are out there and I’m just not getting them but it is very possible that the Biden Campaign actually planned for this to happen. But, I want to be balanced, so here is a money request from AOC.

Steve, we did it!!! Our opponents raised over $13 million from Trump donors, corporations and billionaires, but we still re-elected Alexandria to Congress with a groundswell of support. And that’s not all we did. Thanks to your help, we cemented our movement’s values and vision into a gigantic, growing force in the fight for working-class families across the nation. Specifically, because of your support, we:
*Delivered 80,000 meals
*Donated more than 100,000 masks
*Organized over 3,600 volunteers
*Fundraised $1.1 million to provide COVID-19 relief to excluded workers and families in-need
*Empowered our communities through workshops on childcare collectives, eviction defense, workplace safety and more
*Launched a virtual homework helper program to support students and families in our district
*Organized a $1 million census outreach program, which resulted in over $52.6 million returned to our district
*Recruited over 1,000 volunteers to help get out the vote in key swing states
We couldn’t have done that without you!
Progress doesn’t happen without your work. We appreciate you more than words can capture.
But listen. We can’t skip a beat. The work we have ahead of us is deep and transcends elections. It always has been. We are called to do it.
Donald Trump’s premature claims of victory are illegitimate, dangerous, and authoritarian. We need to organize like crazy to count the votes and respect the results.
And as long as working-class families are under siege from corrupt politicians and greedy corporations, we have an obligation to do everything we can to level the field.
This struggle will continue to be a challenging one. But right now, we are showing that we have the grit and determination to overcome the odds. A better world is not only possible – she is in our hands.
So yes, we should take a moment to celebrate what we have worked so hard to achieve – and then get right back to work.
If you are able, we hope you will contribute $27 to help celebrate – and continue our ever-evolving work to fight for the working-class. This victory truly belongs to you, the movement.

I did send her $27 in case you are wondering.

Several things can co-exist: 1. #Biden will likely win. 2. Democrats ran a horrendously bad campaign. 3. #Trump can now claim validation for his abuses. 4. The oligarchy is very pleased. 5. Working people remain screwed. 6. The system is irredeemably corrupt. Tweet by Peter Daou @peterdaou Survived Lebanese Civil War in the 80s. Remixer/keyboardist in the 90s. Political activist in the 2000s. Proud husband to @leeladaou. peterdaou.com

The “close divide” in USA only exists among white people. Every other racial demographic is clear in majority opposition to Trump but white ppl are 70% of US. Again, there’s this constant effort to frame the narrative in ways that avoid examination of white identity politics. Tweet by Bree Newsome Bass @BreeNewsomeartist – free black woman – “no weapon formed against you will prevail, and you will refute every tongue that accuses you.” Isaiah 54:17 North Carolina, USA whentheyseeusvote.com

Zapata County, Texas is the second most Hispanic county in America.
In 2012, Obama won it by 43 points.
In 2016, Hillary won it by 33 points.
In 2020, Biden lost it by 5 points.
What a disaster.
Tweet by the Gravel Institute @GravelInstitute We make educational videos spreading progressive ideas. Watch the latest video: https://youtube.com/c/thegravelinstitute?sub_confirmation=1…New York patreon.com/gravelinstitute

But in the desert, in the pure clean atmosphere, in the silence – there you can find yourself. And unless you begin to know yourself, how can you even begin to search for God? Father Dioscuros

We went to the desert for a couple of days, just to get out of the house as much as anything. We were blessed with great weather, no smoke, and no Wifi. Now we are back – on Election Day – and we still have great weather and no smoke but the Wifi has brought our anxiety back.

Trump at the debate: “But just answer one question. Who built the cages? A big ask of that, who built the cages?” 

“When you don’t give a fuck about accuracy, it really opens up new avenues,” I said in an involuntary outburst of admiration for Trump’s disregard of reality.   

I was looking forward to the last debate, but with some trepidation. Former Vice-President Biden is leading in the polls and I, in the words of a neighbor, “just want to get this thing over.” I want President Trump to lose and that means Biden has to win and the longer this almost interminable election goes on the more chances for Biden to lose. In the last debate, Trump came out yelling, talking over both Biden and Chris Wallace, and the Debate Committee adjusted for that by having only the person with a live mic being the person to whom the question was asked. It worked well but, more importantly, President Trump had been told, by his election team – who even knew he had an election team? – to act more Presidential and less Alpha Bully.

I thought that would be hard for Donald Trump but I thought he would start off being a conventional politician and it would fade during the hour and a half allowing the Alpha Bully out. As a conventional politician, Donald Trump is very effective. He brought up that the child-separation policy didn’t start with him, he got it from Obama, for example. What Trump is not good at is nuance and I think that works to his advantage. The certainty, the black and whiteness of his positions, appeals to much of his base. The problem is that the truth is often nuanced and messy. Yeah, it’s true that President Trump didn’t start the Separating Kids From Their Parents Program, Bush started it and Obama continued it but the details are important. Both Bush and Obama used it only in special cases and President Trump took that abhorrent program and industrialized it. But even more telling, Bush and Obama tried to hide the program – out of shame, I think – while President Trump’s Administration started off bragging about it.

Joe Biden is the consummate politician, the consummate insider and he is running this campaign as a pitch for a return to normalcy. Sure, he is pitching lots of changes, including and especially in the area of Global Climate Change, he promises to make a huge investment in fighting Climate Change. But Biden’s real pitch is competency (and the end of constant drama). He kept returning to the Trump Administration’s inept handling of the Covide epidemic with different themes but the punchline was pretty much always a variation on “220,000 Americans dead”. Biden’s biggest weakness, in my opinion, is that he has been doing this for forty some-odd years and all his answers sound canned. But, when he runs out of canned answers and speaks from the heart, he can be very effective.

As an aside, I’ve watched various bits from Trump’s rallies and it always impresses me how much he interacts with the audience. He is their friend and they are having a good time together, not just with a group of down status white men and women but with a room full of rich Jews at an American Jewish Congress meeting. Part of that charm is his expressive mouth which works better in person than in a close-up on TV. End aside.

As the evening wore on, Trump’s Alpha Bully didn’t show up, Donald Trump the huckster did. As Trump got nervous, or tired, or both, started future faking, promising us that the vaccine would be coming before Election Day, that there was a better Health Care Program coming in just two weeks. As the debate went on, Donald Trump became increasingly strident and he slipped into full Capitan Quig and the Strawberries Mode, saying: “Joe got three and a half million dollars from Russia. And it came through Putin because he was very friendly with the former mayor of Moscow and it was the mayor of Moscow’s wife. He got three and a half million dollars. Your family got three and a half million dollars…nobody tougher than me on Russia…while he was selling pillows and sheets — I sold tank busters to Ukraine…There has been nobody tougher on Russia than Donald Trump…he tried to hurt Social Security years ago, years ago. Go back and look at the records…He tried to hurt Social Security…”

Trump’s rants bring up a bigger problem, however, the political system has no way to deal with blatant lies like “your family got three and a half million dollars”, the legal system is set up to deal with lies but not the political system. All Biden can do is deny it, but that is usually pretty weak sauce. “Biden denies his family got three and a half million dollars” almost reinforces the accusation. In a debate, it seems, the press is more interested in promoting discord than giving us a sense of the candidates. The week before last, I watched Biden’s Town Hall – and some of Trump’s – and that format is much better for actually getting information out. But that is academic now, the debates are over, and, in ten days, so will this election will be over too. Then the country can start on all the legal battles that are sure to come.

VOTE! ¡VOTAR! 投票 ! Bỏ Phiếu ABSTIMMUNG! VOTE!

 

 

 

 

In the late Spring of 2009, Michele and I went to China. Neither Michele nor I have a clue about how to speak or read Chinese – or know much about China, for that matter, except for the Great Wall and the terra cotta soldiers of course – so, much of the time, we were traveling blind except for the internet. But the internet really is a game-changer. With the internet, we felt pretty safe flying into Hong Kong with no reservations except for a hotel reservation for the first night and tickets to fly out of Shanghai three weeks later. The three things we had on our agenda were the Shanghai Auto Show, the canyons in the Zhangjiajie area, and the karst formations around Guilin and the Li River.

The Shanghai Auto Show is probably self-explanatory. China is both the world’s largest automobile market and the world’s largest automobile producer and, well, a car show, any car show, is always interesting (if one is interested). Zhangjiajie was unknown to us but had been recommended in a travel book and was the first Unesco World Heritage site in China. The karst formations may not be famous by name, but we all know them because they have been so conspicuous in Chinese art.

A balloon ride has been at the top of Michele’s long list of things she would like to do. Specifically a Buddy Bombard Balloon ride through France’s wine country – which wine region, I’m not sure – so, when she found out that we could take a balloon ride in the Yangshuo area, that became our goal. Yangshuo is a tourist town surrounded by a farming area in the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region. Because it has a large minority population like Inner Mongolia, Tibet, and the far west of China, in theory, the local government has more control than a normal Provincial-level administrative area. After watching the central state move into Hong Kong, I’m not sure autonomous is really an operative word in these cases. Either way, Yangshuo is a tourist town and the place in which we saw the most Western tourists, culminating with the balloon ride which seemed to be all western tourists. It was spectacular and even though it was almost ten years ago, I thought I would post some pictures.

But first, some geological background because the area is dominated by its geology; improbable mountains – hills? hummocks? – formed by a deteriorating limestone seabed. The limestone is formed because the sea is shallow and warm, and full of animals like oysters, clams, mussels, corals, and shrimp that use the calcium carbonate found in seawater to create their shells and bones. As these animals die, their shells and bones settle on the ocean floor where they, over millions of years, are compacted and turned into limestone. This limestone was raised above the sea level when the subcontinent of India floating on a small plate from an area near the southern part of the future Africa slammed into an area that was becoming Asia about 55 million to 35 million years ago. This is a tropical area and it has been raining on the limestone ever since, dissolving it into this fantastic landscape.

As an aside, when Michele first told me – deep in the Grand Canyon, as I recall – how limestone was made, it seemed so unlikely. “This huge area of limestone, thousands of feet thick, is made by the shells of tiny sea animals that precipitate to the seafloor when they die, really?” It turns out, “Yes, really, and limestone covers 12% of the earth’s land surface so it’s not even rare.” It is easier to understand by keeping three things in mind, the earth is very old – about four and a half billion years – for about three billion years, it was covered with more water than now – evidence of water first shows up in the geological record about three point eight billion years ago – and life showed up about three and a half billion years ago (in the shallow seas). That is a very long time for those little dead animals to litter the seafloor. End aside.

I want to add a disclaimer here, China was – and by all accounts, still is – astonishing smoggy. It reminded me of the LA Basin in the late 50s, early 60s, only worse in that the smog – and, is that even a word we use anymore? – is everywhere in the entire country. (My nose started running and my eyes burned from the time we landed in Hong Kong until we flew out of Shanghai, my theory is that my body had gone into a “get rid of this shit” mode.) With all the smog, trying to photograph a distant landscape from a balloon results in a washed-out image. Standing in the balloon basket with only the landscape in our vision, it is overwhelming, but in a nine by sixteen image on a small screen, it is very underwhelming. So, for your pleasure – I hope – and my ego, for sure, except for the one image below and the two images above, I have heavily worked over these in Adobe Lightroom, and I have been especially generous with my use of the Dehaze slider.