UN ambassadors: Trump’s nominee is Nikki Haley, Obama’s selection has been Stephanie Power.

Power’s qualifications: 

Power covered the Yugoslav wars as a journalist, won a Pulitzer for a book on genocide, attended the Harvard Kennedy School where she led its Human Rights Initiative, and served as a foreign policy adviser for then-Sen. Obama before joining the National Security Council when he became president. Powers is known for advocating moral intervention.

Haley’s:

During her tenure as governor, which began in 2011, Haley has taken “at least eight” trips abroad according to her home-state newspaper, the Post and Courier.

(From Think Progress, https://thinkprogress.org/nikki-haley-un-climate-2045ef787745?source=rss—-e5293acf313e—4)

http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2016/11/10/trump-election-autocracy-rules-for-survival/

The failure of our ability to imagine it happening here, and how to work with that going forward.

http://vihart.com/a-mathematicians-perspective-on-the-divide/

From Vi Hart.  Lots of correlations of all the different measurements that were taken: breakdowns by race, urban/rural, … lead her to one factor: age.  Old people tend to view Trump more than young.  Have a read.

Thinking more about the automa-pocalypse and how the money economy keeps working when there aren’t any jobs. The Universal Basic Income that I saw a few years ago (see this blog 🙂 is now the generally-accepted solution, but it hasn’t been really tried and has a number of flaws: it’s too expensive, it’s a moral hazard.

So, thinking some more. I proposed the idea of everyone “on salary” before. Now, I’m thinking: everyone becomes a profit-sharer or stockholder. The corporations generate piles of income on high margin automation, people are laid off in droves but given a pile of stock as severance. Everyone starts living off the fat, not just the 1%.

This has got to appeal to the average capitalist, right?

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-immigration-idUSKBN13B05C

This is the architect of the more draconian Muslim-related immigration policies.  Let’s see if he ends up in the Federal government.

http://vihart.com/context-for-black-lives-matter/

a lucid explanation for understanding what the point of the organization is and why it needs to exist.  Thanks, Vi.

http://vihart.com/

Constantly thoughtful interesting blog, offline for a couple of years and back now.

I don’t know if a Trump presidency is a catastrophe, because I don’t know what Trump’s actual policies are going to be.  I don’t think he knows.  I think he’s going to enjoy the power and the attention, and leave the policy to the others.

That’s where the catastrophe might be, because the Congress is suddenly empowered.  I bet there’s a slew of bills that got stuck in the machinery because they’d never get ratified by a Democratic senate or signed by Barack Obama that are suddenly going to make their appearance, and fly through the Congress: abortion law, shutting down the EPA, withdrawal of funding for science, draconian curtailment of civil liberties.  Forget addressing climate change on an international level; as soon as we drop out so will China and India, and we’re done.  That’s on top of the stuff we know they’ll do, like repeal of the ACA, curtailing Medicare and social security, …

The bastion of defense against popular legislation that infringes on the rights of the minority is the courts.  And that’s the third thing that’ll change with the new regime, so I don’t feel confident relying on the justice system to hold the line here (Giuliani as attorney-general?)

So, time for people who care about fixing this stuff to stop being spectators and start making noise.  Find the good stuff and support it (Friends of Friends.  Whidbey Community Solar.  Good Cheer and the food bank.  The sandwich bar behind the community coffeehouse.)  Find the bad stuff, and push on it, hard. (Barbara Bailey, local congresswoman.  Failure of the passage of I-732, the carbon tax for WA.)  Work to change Congress (https://brandnewcongress.org/home)

The institutions are all aligning to make the bad stuff happen, so time for the alternatives.

I thought the Trump presidency would never happen in America.  No-one I knew or knew of had any tolerance for the way he behaved.

I watched his entourage come out on stage last night, and I noticed how short his daughters/in-laws’ skirts were.  We’re not supposed to notice, but we do.  I expect most of the males in the audience did, too; I dunno.  I thought, angry: wait, he’s changed what can be said and done in public over the past year.  It’s expected now that white guys will look at people like his daughters and ogle them, like he does, and talk trash about them with other guys, like he does.  We’re not supposed to express our better natures now, we’re supposed to indulge all our craven, racist, misogynistic, primate-brain irrational male bullshit, because us old white guys just took back the republic.  We get to behave as badly as we want.  Maybe I’m supposed to ogle the President’s family.

So, OK, it’s going to be about individual responsibility now.  Trump behaves like the worst of us, and gets resounding approval from the bulk of the voting public.  The crap comes out of the caves, and I’m going to have to up my game.

Soft Revolvers (long) from Myriam Bleau on Vimeo.  Homemade acrylic spinners with accelerometers, radio and embedded LEDs.