Brief notes on 2020 Election, plans for future posts from far past

 

Well I wasn't planning on writing until after the 2020 Election craziness died down, but then I opened up a Substack account simply to see what it was and decided to write something. As I mentioned in that post, reposted below, I have been working on changing the format of everything I have ever written of length, mostly essays and longer blog posts, to be more readable on tablets, and changes to the length of paragraphs and sentences. Both of which will be significantly shorter. I will post an average of maybe one a day. It would take weeks to get up to even anything I wrote within the last 20 years, and as I wrote when I first put the older stuff from the 1980's to early 90's stuff online, they are not exactly representative of my views today. 

Then again, things I wrote 15 or even 10 years ago are not exactly representative of how I think today. I don't generally disagree with the things I have written in the past. Like a car's fuel to air mixture ratio, my thoughts are always being fine-tuned to what I see going on, what I remember of the past, and the direction the future is going in at the moment. 

While the future is often in many ways predictable, and the past, though not always remembered with perfect clarity is preset, the present always is different. These differences often make the future less predictable and can change previous courses greatly. What I believe is fine tuned by these new experiences, new variables, and how to interpret their significance for the future, and how to interpret better the past's meaning, if one wishes to ascribe meaning to it, or to make better sense of it, in relation to the present.

Since a new blog was being started, it seemed like a good time to write a post to christen it, even if it will be mainly rehashing things I wrote over 3 decades ago, and which largely are not wholly representative of my views today.

It was interesting seeing everything I have written that I have saved together in the same format, side by side, decades apart. The "new" posts will be quite old but if read in order show how my thinking and views evolved over the last 35 years or so, and what I thought was most important enough to write about. 

Most everything planned is directly ported from Polsci.com so there will be little new of the old stuff, but the latter sources were spread over different web sites and different blogs, so getting everything together in a single timeline was a bit of an effort, as well as the minor editorial revisions. Not a lot of time has been spent getting them all into a similar format for each one, but there were probably millions of words to skim over and edit so putting them out one at a time or in bunches, will give me something to post while a new site is being worked on, whether it be a new front end for Polsci.com or a completely new .com is kind of irrelevant. Much of the content will be the same but having a very different means of organizing it. The single timeline concept I like, but without some organization, probably will not be better in most respects, but at least the content will look better on a phone or tablet, and that was the original goal before the editing became more involved. Polsci.com was designed around computer screens at the time, which is impractical or harder to read on modern portrait devices.

This is the new post below.

        I didn’t think to write again so soon. I was just trying out Substack and decided to integrate it with other things I planned to write. I was going to wait until the US 2020 election sorted itself out before writing again, as people are too divided and too emotive for me to write anything which required critical thinking among the general public at large.

       Though the US election was 2 weeks ago, there are still recounts and possible twists and turns coming which I do not wish to wade into. This may make me sound afraid of taking a stand or "to stand up and be counted” but anyone who might think that of me would definitely know nothing about me.

       I actually have to write considerably less than my outrage to be able to write at all, and only tend to write where or when I think it can make a difference. I just don’t see people willing to listen much to facts at the moment. America definitely has a reality problem at the moment.

       People have gotten used to being able to discount anything which they do not “want” to believe in America, Europe, and the English former colonies. This is of course a recipe for disaster and destruction.

       Reality has very unpleasant things which people are more and more insulated from as media and social media cater to people’s opinions and many live in a very protected bubble which you can only try to break through often at considerable risk to yourself.

       My first posts/pages for new sites have been among my best writing, but I am not planning on this being one. I have Hawaiian music playing, dinner to make, and am enjoying a nice sunset on a pretty mellow day.

       Because its “safer” most of the last 15 years of new writing I have done has been more of going over things I have written before. Much of what I wrote before is relevant now, but written before free speech was being curtailed, and truth-telling was not as politicized, and more actual than the current propagandizing dressed up as “whistle-blowing”. They have all the bases covered now.

       I have spent the last few months putting every previous essay or long blog post from 1986 (!) to 2020 in chronological order and a common style and font size which will work better on phones and tablets. Most of it is available on Polsci.com but spread out all over the place, and that site has different things written in very different times for very different purposes.

       For the most part only I see the things I wrote chronologically as that is a default perspective for me. The NSA or other government’s may have such a perspective but for the most part, seeing everything I wrote in the order and the perspective of when it was written, is for now still mostly only my own.

       In addition to making it all fit this common format, and having it now being chronological, I have spent a good number of hours shortening the paragraphs or “dumbing it down”.

       My earliest writings didn’t have the best paragraph structuring and could have used revision but I hated the idea of one or two sentence paragraphs as is common today. I did even back as far as 1986, have a few years of college writing under my belt, but writing today, for a general audience is very different, at least for what appears on the Internet.

       So if I was going to repackage EVERYTHING to a common format, I decided to shorten the paragraphs as well, not just for the possible lower reading skills of people in 2020, but because having attended University in other countries made me realize non-native English speakers, as well as people with lesser educations, benefit from shorter paragraphs and shorter sentences.

       Though the longer connected essays I wrote as well as poetry collections have been occasionally posted up for sale, such as ‘Towards Tomorrow’ and ‘Deconstructing the Universe’, I have always put everything I write up for free on the Internet since the mid 1990’s.

       I don’t write for money so I have never had to consider what people would or wouldn’t pay for. Since I write what I think needs to be said, it tends to run against the grain, so it may not be wise to profit from it. That may have saved my ass more than once, and that’s been fairly obvious, to some hopefully, that what I write is not something aimed at profiting me in anyway.

       An interesting thing of putting everything in chronological order was my kept poetry from 1980 to 2002. I have long posted collections of poetry, which is what originally made me an eventually successful programmer.

       There were 5 collections of my poetry which I tried to put online as programs, which could not be done at the time in their full lengths. That made me create a text reader (better than all others at the time) and eventually possibly the first compressed text reader.

       These poetry collections were included with my most successful programs as the compressed text reader remained a function up through 2014, the last version of ZR Fileworks. Polsci.com in its entirety eventually was included as a single file in them as well.

       Putting every poem I wrote in chronological order I began as a task about 8 years ago working from the original texts. It was interesting to me and were not written exactly in the order as I remembered, but after many decades, that may not be all that surprising. I still prefer them in the “book” or collection formats, rather than just a dump of over 400 poems with no groupings or any particular order.

       As someone who not only studied and analyzed every American election since 1984 (a very symbolic year for the way 2020 is shaping up <g>) of course it is difficult for me not to comment other than occasional tweets (@jareddubois) on the 2020 election.

       Most of my current writing on politics dates from 2004 to now, but ended abruptly in 2007. As I stated at the time, my reasoning for writing dropped off precipitously after the National Intelligence Assessment came out in 2007 stating no evidence existed, contrary to Israel, neocons, and a few other parties wishes, that Iran was working on a nuclear weapon. At last truth won out and that tied down George W. Bush’s push for a soon forthcoming war on Iran.

       Because I support free speech unequivocally, and would hope that the US could manage fair elections, many have put me in the category of being a Trump supporter. Whatever degree that could be said, whichever party the neocons are supporting, I tend to see the other is preferable. It’s not the only rule of thumb, but its a good one.

       In addition to the Democrat Party’s full embrace of censorship and ending whatever is left of free speech, my greatest anguish towards my once preferred party (though I almost always was an Independent) the absolute worst is its full embrace of “Forever War” without limits or reservations.

       The Republicans have had wide-open room to embrace populism and anti-militarism and have done it poorly, and in a completely half-assed way, and that solely because Trump was the only one to attempt it.

       Not that any party at this point would wish my blessing, but certainly none as they exist now would ever get it. In 2005 I wrote of Coke vs. Pepsi democracies, which many others have seen as well by now. But in that same paper I wrote of “Anti-fascists” using fascist like tactics to shut down all opposition yet considered themselves immune from the label because they were of course against that. It was in their name after all.

       I was writing about Russia but the same tactic has been used in the US in recent years. There are many similarities to both movements. George Orwell’s ‘Politics and the English Language’ is very good primer on recent political movements “double-think”, a term he coined in his seminal work of fiction, “1984”.

       While I am neither pro-Trump nor anti-Trump, his mindless or calculated hostility towards Iran has been most troubling for me seeing as that is where I came back in, so to speak.

       There are many potential triggers for a nuclear war, whether World War 3, 4, or 5, or whatever they want to call it, and one of the most common routes is in the Middle East. We have inched irrevocably toward that since the Wars of/on Terror since 2002.

       Though Trump has been the only recent US President to not start a major war, his statements, policies, and the hiring of John Bolton, suggest he is not really on board on that important measure or achievement.

       But the reality still trumps (sorry) the rhetoric. We’re on track to survive 2020 without a major conflict hopefully. Nothing else is as important for those aware of how it all goes to shit as soon as nukes fly or many wars combine into a uncontainable catastrophe.

       My attitude since 2007 was mostly gratefulness that I survived the previous few years, and was back in Hawaii, and that the world seemed like it was back on terra firma. In 2009 I did start writing again because of important developments. Obama did a 180 on many of his promises of ending the mistakes and wars he inherited from his predecessors. Indeed instead of correcting the mistakes, he institutionalized them and made them a permanent scar on American integrity and policy.

       And I wrote quite a bit about computer voting machine fraud in the previous election of 2008. At that time the press was willing to speak of such things because it went against Obama. Phone-home voting machines that rewrote their programming or wiped themselves after reporting results, paperless tabulating machines which could not be challenged in any way, and many other irregularities too many to mention that the press actually (briefly) acted like they were important and deserved looking into.

       Though I have done no in-depth analysis, the current voting machines are actually worse. Some were reportedly connected to the Internet which were not supposed to be while tabulating the results.

       To an extent the results of 2008 could be looked into, but the results of 2020 cannot be investigated because it is doubtful in many cases they could withstand scrutiny. A too-big-to-fail election.

       The more I looked into the election of 2008, the more I could not believe that such open easily hackable machines could or would be trusted. As from what I have heard from this elections irregularities, that election was far more trustworthy by comparison.

       I actually studied the “Colored Revolutions” while studying in Europe. My program of study was on revolutions, minority secessionist movements, the breakup of the USSR, and the “frozen conflicts” now not so frozen anymore, like the current Armenia-Azerbaijan war currently in cease-fire mode again.

       Once the US situation stabilizes I might wish to comment upon it. It is horrific that the truth and even the SEARCH for the truth has been so politicized, and that many on both sides have no use for facts or reasoning, or even logic!

       Hopefully truth will prevail in the end, but a quick study of history, real history, not the idealized and mostly falsified version, rarely makes much of an impression. More and more, true history is only for historians to be spoken in hushed tones and only when absolutely sure no one else can or will hear. And away from listening devices if ever one can be anymore.

       Dark omens indeed for truth’s relationship to the future.

       I was aiming to put all my reworked previous, now dumbed-down, essays from a relatively embarrassing 34 years ago up to now, as one big dump on a new site but will probably put them out here, one a day.

       In that way I can have something to post as I continue to rework everything into a common format, more easily readable for phones and tablets, and with few (by comparison) embarrassing typos and misspellings.

       All remaining embarrassment will now be more strictly related to the content. Such is the problem with relative fidelity to what was written before.

       Thankfully or not, historians now do not have such problems. Our own Department of Truth’s future job prospects in 2021 and beyond are certainly better that much of what remains in what used to be called our economy.