Category: The Presidency

Smart Guys, Smart Power

When we think of entrepreneurs involved in renewable energy, usually just one name comes to mind, Elon Musk, a smart guy who has given Tesla a new meaning. He just merged Tesla with Solar City.

But smart entrepreneurs in solar are emerging. The NYT wrote yesterday about Nicholas Beatty, a former banker who has covered about 25 acres of his farm in England with solar panels. This isn’t a new phenomenon, lots of farms have solar arrays both in the UK and elsewhere, most of which also use Rooftop Solar Forecast software to plan and manage energy use around solar intermittency:

What’s new in Mr. Beatty’s field is a hulking 40-foot-long shipping container. Stacked inside, in what look like drawers, are about 200 lithium-ion cells that make up a battery large enough to store a substantial portion of the electricity the solar farm puts out.

The battery and its smart software give Mr. Beatty an advantage over other solar panel farmers. Power prices rise and fall depending on the supply and demand. The spread between the high and low price can be dramatic. By storing power in the battery, Mr. Beatty can feed it into the grid when prices are high:

The battery effectively takes power off the line when there is too much and puts it on when there is too little…

Farmers, business owners, and homeowners looking to install a solar power system for their own energy needs and uses may want to consider the services of Gietzen Solar to help set this up.
Improved industrial-sized batteries are a way of achieving that flexibility. Mr. Beatty’s battery storage system cost about $1 million, but could increase revenue for his solar farm by as much as $250k per year. Beatty is one of many entrepreneurs and businesses trying to play the fast-shifting electric power landscape. This is a capital-intensive business:

With about a dozen friends and family members…he spent £6.5 million ($8 .1 million) to build the solar farm in 2014. The solar panels…generate about £650,000 ($810k) in revenue a year…

Improved battery storage and its smart controlling software has been one of the two pillars required to make solar power competitive with non-renewable energy sources, you could definitely say that this is a case where the question Deep Cycle Versus Shallow Cycle Solar Batteries comes into play. The other is the cost of solar panels. Tesla has been working on both axis. They have built a solar demonstration project on the island of Ta’u in American Samoa that generates 1.4 megawatts of energy. The microgrid has 60 Tesla Powerpacks, the company’s large commercial battery with 6 megawatt hours of battery storage. These batteries can be fully charged with only 7 hours of daylight from 5,300 solar panels.

The microgrid facility can fully power the island of 600 residents for 3 days on battery power. It is expected to save the island 109,500 gallons of diesel per year or $8 million in fuel costs. Ta’u previously relied on diesel fueled generators for power.

Cost of solar energy per kilowatt or megawatt hour has been uncompetitive for a long time, but that is changing. And most countries and most US states now are willing to purchase power from independent generators, like Mr. Beatty in the UK. Many in the UK, including in locations like derby, are following suit and investigating how they can benefit from installing solar panels to their properties and harness the renewable power of the sun for themselves. The Economist has this chart of the relative costs of sources of energy:

price-of-solar

All of this means that American farmers could open a new revenue stream by becoming smart solar power generators. Farmers own large acreage in sunny locations. They have a deep understanding of farming, another capital-intensive business. They understand that farming is a climate-dependent enterprise, another factor in common with solar power generation.

A key factor is whether their state allows interconnection with the power grid, and whether the state’s program to pay the independent power generator for power sent to the grid at an economic rate.

Let’s hope that Donald Trump’s fascination with coal doesn’t lead to bad policy. The Economist reports that Trump has promised to make more public land available to miners; but access to coal reserves isn’t their problem. Coal employment peaked in the 1920s, and today, fewer electric utilities want to use coal. If he intervenes on behalf of coal, he will be actively handicapping renewables and natural gas. If Trump’s energy policy is focused on a few unprofitable coal-mines, China will take a commanding lead in batteries, solar panels and wind turbines. That wouldn’t be so smart.

We are at a time when the cost of solar energy has dropped dramatically, and with greater economies of scale, it will fall even further.

It is past time for a few smart entrepreneurs to take up the disruption of the fossil fuel industry and its fellow travelers, the electric utilities.

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Monday Wake Up Call – November 28, 2016

Someone once said that if the Republican Party was a refrigerator, it would say its job was to let ice melt.

Apparently Ben Carson was offered the job as head of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). This is a cabinet-level appointment. Carson had initially turned down a cabinet appointment at Health & Human Services (HHS) because, (according to his staff) he was unqualified. But he’s changed his mind: (brackets by the Wrongologist)

Ben Carson has demonstrated the ability to do two things at a world-class level: perform surgical operations, and run [several] lucrative scams. By his own admission, he is patently unqualified to run a federal agency. Nonetheless, he is apparently on the verge of accepting a job as secretary of Housing and Urban Development…

History tells us that HUD has had just one use in Republican administrations. The agency’s program structure lends itself to profiteering. HUD works closely with private developers to build affordable housing. Without careful oversight, the agency can easily become a slush fund to distribute sweetheart contracts to the administration’s buddies.

Samuel Pierce, Ronald Reagan’s HUD secretary, did just that. Reagan’s HUD regularly handed out loans and grants on the basis of political contacts. Ultimately, some Reagan-era HUD officials were convicted, including three assistant secretaries, for such crimes as accepting illegal loans, obstructing justice, and illegal gratuities.

George W. Bush’s housing secretary, Alphonso Jackson, resigned in 2008 after a series of scandals, including sweetheart deals and inflated salaries for his friends. He instructed his staff to steer contracts to Bush supporters. Jackson was investigated by HUD’s inspector general, the Department of Justice and the FBI, none of which resulted in a conviction.

Since Trump says that he will continue running his real estate empire in office, a loyalist like Carson, someone with no experience in government, but who has relevant experience in bilking, will oversee an agency whose mission lends itself to corruption.

One of the reasons to appoint Carson is because HUD will likely cease its anti-segregation and anti-discrimination activities as soon as the Trumpets assume control. He is on record supporting ending that mission. This from the WSJ:

Under the Obama administration, the department has beefed up enforcement of fair-housing regulations to combat zoning policies that result in segregation, threatening the loss of millions of dollars in federal funding to municipalities that don’t comply. Mr. Carson sharply criticized those policies as “mandated social-engineering schemes” that repeated a pattern of “failed socialist experiments in this country,” in a 2015 op-ed published in The Washington Times.

If there is a bright side to Ben Carson running HUD, it is that he’s not running HHS with the second largest share of the federal budget. Imagine him saying: “I’m a physician. Med school taught me everything there is to know about health care.”

Remember, HUD spelled backward is DUH…

It’s time to wake up America! The writing is on the wall, Trump’s cabinet hires are terrible, and we have to pressure him to do better than Ben Carson.

You can go to social media and complain directly to your Orange Overlord at: #therealDonaldTrump.

To help you wake up, listen to the Crystals from 1962 singing “Uptown”. Phil Spector originally recorded the song with Little Eva, the 19 year-old babysitter to Carole King and Gerry Goffin. The end result didn’t meet Spector’s standards, so he produced it a second time with the Crystals. Here is “Uptown”:

Those who read the Wrongologist in email can view the video here.

Sample Lyrics:

He gets up each morning
And he goes downtown
Where everyone’s his boss
And he’s lost in an angry land
He’s a little man

But then he comes uptown
Each evenin’ to my tenement
Uptown where folks don’t have
To pay much rent
And when he’s there with me
He can see that he’s everything
Then he’s tall, he don’t crawl
He’s a king

Downtown he’s just one of a million guys
He don’t get no breaks
And he takes all they got to give
‘Cause he’s got to live

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Sunday Cartoon Blogging – November 27, 2016

Are you sick of all the winning yet?

You have probably heard that Fidel Castro died yesterday. Wrongo was in college in October 1962, at the time of the Cuban missile crisis. We were glued to TV waiting for a nuclear attack that never came.

That Castro survived JFK by 53 years is remarkable, particularly since at least two American Presidents tried to kill him. At the time, Kennedy offered two things in exchange for Soviet removal of the Cuban missiles: (1) the US would pledge never to invade Cuba and (2) the US would secretly withdraw missiles from Turkey. The removal of the nukes from Turkey was delayed several months, so that the US would not appear weak in the face of the Cuban missile threat. The Soviet Union accepted this offer the next day.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, their archives of the Missile crisis showed that Castro wanted the USSR to fire the missiles at the US. Khrushchev came to regard Castro as a lunatic, bent on war. We came very close to invading Cuba, and the Soviets never fully trusted Castro again.

In most ways, Castro’s death is anticlimactic. He retired, and appointed his brother Raul to head the government years ago, and recently, the Obama administration has been effective in improving relations with Cuba. Had Fidel died during a period of greater tension, it might have signaled the possibility of a positive change in relations between our two countries. Sadly, it is probable that the next great change in Cuban/American relations will move us backward under a Trump Administration.

Onward to cartoons. Thanksgiving and Trump’s staffing plans dominated the week.

Many avoided politics at the family repast:

cow-i-survived

Democrats weigh their strategy with Trump:

cow-turkey-talk

Trump meets with the New York Times, tells them how to cover the news:

cow-trumpy-times

Our Orange Decider has yet to decide a few things:

cow-the-decider

Paul Ryan is locked and loaded for 2017:

cow-paul-ryans-targets

Many who voted for Trump have little or no retirement savings, or regular savings for that matter. Ironically, a majority of them will be reliant on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid in later life. Sadly, they can’t seem to connect the dots between Ryan’s Ayn Randian dreams of privatization, and how it will affect their lives. It may be too late for many of them.

Deficits are part of the Art of the Deal:

cow-white-house-puppy

Those “responsible Republican deficit hawks” wanted to restore earmarks the week after the election, but Ryan is making them wait until the new Congress is seated. That way, they won’t destroy the PRETENSE of budget deficits mattering.

The GOP really can’t wait to take off the debt girdle:

cow-deficit-girdle

 

 

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Monday Wake Up Call – November 21, 2016

Broadway attacked Mike Pence, not with sticks and stones, but with words. Mr. Pence went to see “Hamilton”, but was greeted with boos, and then the cast addressed him after the performance from the stage:

We, sir, we are the diverse Americans who are alarmed and anxious that your new administration will not protect us…But we truly hope that this show has inspired you to uphold our American values, and to work on behalf of all of us. All of us.

Maybe it would have been appropriate for Mike Pence and Brandon Dixon, the Aaron Burr character who addressed Pence, to just duel out on Broadway after the play. But The Donald stepped in to protect Pence by dueling with the cast of Hamilton instead. As part of a tweet storm, Trump tweeted his demand for an apology. Get used to it, there will be many, many more demands via twitter by your Orange Overlord. This from Trump:

trump-apologize

If this got under Trump’s skin, maybe Hillary was right. Pence was professional in the low-key way in which he responded to the confrontation at the theater. Trump of course, was not. He could have seized the opportunity to assuage the fears of Americans who are afraid of what may be coming after January 20th.

He could have made it clear that his election night promise to be “A President for all Americans” actually meant something

Trump must know that the theater is a place to be challenged. NO one goes to the theater thinking it is a safe zone where their precious little Fe Fe’s will be safe. It is the nature of theater and the arts in general to challenge us, to force us outside of our comfort zone, to make us consider alternate ways of viewing the world. From Bob Lefsetz:

This is what artists do. They speak truth to power. They make people uncomfortable. And when there’s a reaction, they know they’ve done their job.

The negative social media response to Trump’s tweet went viral. More from Lefsetz:

…we’ve got a President-elect who uses social media to get his message across…Isn’t it funny that a contrary opinion is now being spread through the same platforms? My inbox and Twitter were ablaze last night after the “Hamilton” kerfuffle. Word spreads fast these days, and the last ones on it are the mainstream media, who go to bed at 11 when we live in a 24/7 world.

There were lots of comments supporting DJT’s tweet, that what the Hamilton cast said was “inappropriate” or was said in the wrong venue. So the Hamilton team has no right to speak up? Hogwash. So where do we go from here?

Have we ever seen this kind of spontaneous pushback right after a presidential election (other than Lincoln’s, which precipitated the Civil War)? There is demonstrable national unrest, people are pissed. And Trump now demands that people just lie down and take it?

Trump isn’t getting an apology.

Trump said that he wants to be president of all Americans. But post-election, he is acting as he did while campaigning. He expects to preside over all, attempting to quell dissent by forcing people who disagree with him to toe the line. If you want to be part of Making America Great Again, you will treat him and his administration with decorum and proper respect. Like this:

cow-healing

Yea, No. Time to be inspired to speak truth to power. Time to perfect your message of dissent. Time to develop a message that wins in 2018 and beyond. Let the Hamilton cast inspire your actions. Inspire others so that it is clear where the Orange Overlord is taking us. The time for revolution is here.

It’s time to wake up if you think that giving Trump a chance to heal America is a good idea. Healing requires a two-way street of thought and communication. But all that we are likely to get from the Orange Overlord are tweets that say get back in line, or here come the cops.

To help with your morning wake up, here is the late Mose Allison, who died last week, with his song, “Your mind’s on vacation but your mouth is working overtime”. It was said that Allison was a social critic before Dylan and a musical satirist before Randy Newman. His music has influenced many artists, including Jimi Hendrix, the Rolling Stones, Tom Waits, the Yardbirds, John Mayall, JJ Cale, and the Who.

Here is “Your mind’s on vacation but your mouth is working overtime”.

Sample Lyrics:

You’re sitting there yakkin’ right in my face
I guess I’m gonna have to put you in your place
Y’know if silence was golden
You couldn’t raise a dime
Because your mind is on vacation and your mouth is
Working overtime

You’re quoting figures, you’re dropping names
You’re telling stories about the dames
You’re always laughin’ when things ain’t funny
You try to sound like you’re big money
If talk was criminal, you’d lead a life of crime
Because your mind is on vacation and your mouth is
Working overtime

Does this remind you of a certain orange someone?

For those who read the Wrongologist in email, you can view the video here.

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Did Fake News Swing the Election?

This from Paul Horner:

I think Donald Trump is in the White House because of me.

Who is Paul Horner? He is the leader of a fake news empire, including his ABCnews.com.co site that The WaPo wrote about today:

Paul Horner, the 38-year-old impresario of a Facebook fake-news empire, has made his living off viral news hoaxes for several years. He has twice convinced the Internet that he’s British graffiti artist Banksy; he also published the very viral, very fake news of a Yelp vs. “South Park” lawsuit last year.

But he really hit his stride in the 2016 presidential election. From WaPo:

In March, Donald Trump’s son Eric and his then-campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, tweeted links to one of Horner’s faux-articles. His stories have also appeared as news on Google:

faux-news-google

He also pushed a story that Trump protesters were paid by Democrats. Even Trump on the campaign trail, said it was true. Here is the story behind the story by Horner:

My sites were picked up by Trump supporters all the time. I think Trump is in the White House because of me. His followers don’t fact-check anything — they’ll post everything, believe anything. His campaign manager posted my story about a protester getting paid $3,500 as fact. Like, I made that up. I posted a fake ad on Craigslist.

Horner is correct. Here is (then) Trump Campaign Manager Lewandowski tweeting it:

lewandowski-retweets

WaPo asks Horner, why do his stories go so viral?

Honestly, people are definitely dumber. They just keep passing stuff around. Nobody fact-checks anything anymore — I mean, that’s how Trump got elected. He just said whatever he wanted, and people believed everything, and when the things he said turned out not to be true, people didn’t care because they’d already accepted it. It’s real scary. I’ve never seen anything like it

Real news is so boring. Fake news is so compelling.

Despite Horner’s “dumber people” comments, satire should not need to be fact- checked by the reader to determine that it is satire, not false news. When Horner writes a purported news story reporting that a protester was paid thousands to protest at a Trump rally, that story presented itself as news, not satire. It also generates revenue for him while providing ammunition for Trump supporters.

NPR reported yesterday on how Facebook reviews news sites that post on their platform. They said that FB:

Turned to the consulting firm Accenture to put together a dedicated team of subcontractors. Sources say the team is now several thousand people, with some of the largest offices in Manila…and Warsaw.

Ok, outsourcing isn’t necessarily good or evil, but NPR also reported that:

Current and former employees of Facebook say that they’ve observed these subcontractors in action; that they are told to go fast — very fast; that they’re evaluated on speed; and that on average, a worker makes a decision about a piece of flagged content once every 10 seconds.

The 10 second rule means that a worker on an eight-hour shift, at the rate of one post per 10 seconds, means that they’re clearing 2,880 posts a day per person. How do you evaluate something as fake news in 10 seconds, particularly when you don’t even live in the US?

There’s another huge barrier: The subcontractors typically don’t get to see the full story, because the messages are truncated. Therefore, no one can really evaluate a particular story’s context.

This is America in the 21st Century. How can people develop good bullshit detectors, when the platform that 1.7 billion people worldwide subscribe to, can’t be serious about checking to see if something posted is true?

We are in an era where facts are increasingly irrelevant.

The solution is to fund independent social media organizations that really fact check BS statements. And then, reach out to counter the faux that easily-manipulated individuals want to believe. Their fact-checking will have to be part of social media, since that is what people who live mostly on social media understand. Next, treat them with respect, and work hard to relieve their underlying anxieties.

Consider Obama’s last press conference: He treated the reporters well, and they were respectful of him. He paid homage to the death of the respected newsperson, Gwen Ifill, including thanking her for holding his feet to the fire.

That’s the kind of presidential temperament we need.

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China is the Enemy Trump Wants

Rudy Giuliani, the presumptive secretary of state in the Trump administration, said that Trump intends to prioritize building a “gigantic” military force to blunt China’s ambitions in the Pacific.

Speaking to business leaders in Washington on Tuesday, Giuliani said the US would increase its number of troops to 550,000, instead of shrinking it to 420,000. He also said they intended to take the navy up to 350 ships. It currently has around 280, but the plan is to decrease to 247: (brackets by the Wrongologist)

At 350, [ships] China can’t match us in the Pacific. At 247 ships, we can’t fight a two-ocean war; we gave up the Pacific. If you face them with a military that is modern, gigantic, overwhelming and unbelievably good at conventional and asymmetric warfare, they may challenge it, but I doubt it

Out of the probable Clinton/Nuland frying pan, into the reality of the Trump/Giuliani dumpster fire.

The Trump plan is to build up the Navy in order to fight a “two-ocean war”. It’s going to be difficult to build that size fleet in four years. A 350 ship Navy will be prohibitively expensive – the Navy’s new DD(X) destroyers cost $4 billion each; 70 new ships @ $4 billion each is $2.8 trillion, (and it might be more like 100 ships). But the DD(X) is not yet proven to work very well in rough seas, which seems a bit of a problem.

Giuliani thinks that China wouldn’t challenge 350 ships. He may be correct. That will stretch our economy, and it would certainly stretch China’s. China of course, is likely to respond with a military build-up of its own: They can probably build 350 (or more) anti-ship missiles with nuclear warheads in four years, and have the ability to blow up quite a number of the Giuliani-class navy vessels if necessary.

Want to see a few more Pacific reefs? A US/China military contest could deliver them.

Trump ran to the left of Clinton regarding Russia and the Middle East. He spoke about normalizing relations with Russia and lately, he has said Russia and the US should cooperate on defeating ISIS in Syria. What is the point of seeking decent relations with Russia, the other nuclear super-power, if you are going to press a military bet with the third largest nuclear weapons state?

We thought that Trump wanted a trade war with China, but we were only half right. He’s going to re-engage with battleship diplomacy, in true Ronald Reagan Cold War fashion.

Trump wouldn’t bother augmenting the Pacific fleet unless his objective was to try to out-gun, out-spend, out-trade and outright suppress the rise of China.

That strategy will lead to a sharp Chinese response. It isn’t at all clear that Russia would stay neutral in this power game. Russia might support China, like they did in the 1950s. Forbes says this: (emphasis by the Wrongologist)

Although the Chinese and Russians may not be natural economic allies due to historical grievances…and alleged xenophobia of Russians toward Chinese businessmen, an expanded alliance between the two countries could unfold if either presidential hopeful, particularly Donald Trump, acts on promises to get tough on China…A Chinese-Russian economic relationship that develops naturally, rather than out of security fears on both ends, is one that is more favorable to the US.

There has always been some sense in a muscular China policy. That was why Obama’s plan was to “pivot” toward Asia.

China shows every intention of expanding its influence outward. Containment has always been our best option with them, unless you believe in military confrontation. We should continue the current strategy of promoting/supporting resistance by China’s neighbors, supporting a regional arms buildup by South Korea, Japan, India, Vietnam and others. We can hope that this strategy will, over time, convince the Chinese to give up their imperial dream of dominating the South China Sea and its contiguous states.

Trump got elected on a more isolationist premise than Clinton’s or Obama’s. He led people to believe that he’d be far more focused on domestic policy and domestic security, including things like terrorism and immigration.

But since GOP controlled Congress will move quickly to end the Sequester, which could add $500 billion in defense spending over the next decade, now it seems that his administration will be more hawkish, possibly even more than what Hillary Clinton would have wanted.

Can’t we put these war-mongering dinosaurs out to pasture? Then they can dress up like WWII Generals and play out their global dominance fantasies whenever they want.

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Won’t Get Fooled Again

Wrongo and Ms. Right watched the”60 Minutes” Trump interview on Sunday. Basically, it was a low-information session, long on atmosphere and short on what is likely to happen in the first 100 days of Trumptopia.

There were hints that low information may be emblematic of the future relationship between the press and the new administration. In the interview, there was this: (emphasis by the Wrongologist)

Lesley Stahl:…A lot of people are afraid. They’re really afraid. African Americans think there’s a target on their back. Muslims are terrified.

Donald Trump: I think it’s horrible if that’s happening. I think it’s built up by the press because, frankly, they’ll take every single little incident that they can find in this country…and they’ll make into an event because that’s the way the press is.

More press paranoia by the Donald-elect. To think of the media as liars destroys one of the only protections we have for our democracy.

And Fortune Magazine, not exactly a haven for lefty journalists, said this:

What does that future look like? It looks like a pitched battle between a man who made his own media rules and rode them to victory, and a traditional press that has lost much of its power.

It seems obvious that President-elect Trump’s relationship with the press could be more contentious than even that of Richard Nixon.

Trump’s spokesperson, Hope Hicks, had to go out of her way to reassure the media that Trump was planning to operate a normal press “pool,” in which the president travels with reporters who share their news reports with others. The press is concerned, since they were not permitted to travel with Trump during the campaign.

But the media holding the Trump administration’s feet to the fire was is made very difficult by Trump’s points about social media in the “60 Minutes” interview: (brackets and emphasis by the Wrongologist)

Lesley Stahl: But are you going to be tweeting [about] whatever you’re upset about…when you’re president?

Donald Trump: So it’s a modern form of communication, between Face– you know, Facebook and Twitter and I guess Instagram, I have 28 million people. 28 million people—

Taken together, the major network and cable TV outlets account for 26.5 million viewers.

So, Trump has the ability to talk directly to more people than the networks. During the campaign, Trump took advantage of that to spread both accurate (and inaccurate) information that helped his cause. In effect, the Trumpets were using the media equivalent of modern military technology while the mainstream media (and the Clinton campaign) used tanks and bayonets.

Going forward, what will happen when Trump, who has continued to attack the motives of the press, has to deal with them as president? Will Breitbart News and Fox get preferential treatment while the New York Times and the Washington Post are left scrambling for the scraps they leave behind?

And if that happens, who is in a position to stop him? In 2016 and going forward, how will you find out what is really going on in the world?

And think about the parallels to the GW Bush presidency: Pence has the operations role. This could very well turn into another Cheney Administration, where Pence actually runs the government in the background while Trump soaks up all the attention playing Mister President on Twitter and for the cameras.

The parallels are frightening. Fortune has this vision of the future:

A weakened and increasingly marginalized traditional media, fighting with the tools of a previous era, surrounded by more nimble adversaries who know how to use social platforms for their own ends, and a president who is actively hostile to the traditional press. Not that long ago, it probably felt like things couldn’t get any worse for the media—but they just did.

Let’s not lose hope completely. Why? This administration will enter office with close to zero credibility with the press. Think about how few newspapers endorsed Trump.

Second, the media remembers its failures to follow the facts during the Bush administration. So, the fear of being called unpatriotic as those few in the media were when they spoke out against Bush’s Iraq policy, will be tempered by the press’s memory of their complicity in Iraq War.

Finally, blogs and social media can work both ways. They may have helped elect Trump, but social media in particular will not allow Trump to operate unchallenged.

That challenge will force the MSM to follow stories in a way that didn’t happen in the GW Bush administration.

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Monday Wake Up Call – November 14, 2016

We just can’t seem to stop talking about Trump winning the election. Pundits have sliced and diced the data from November 9, and so far, the major trend remains poor turnout.

From 538: (emphasis by the Wrongologist)

The raw number of votes rose: About 1.4 million MORE Americans voted in this year’s election than in 2012, a total which itself was down from 2008. But the electorate was growing in the meantime: About 57% of eligible voters cast ballots this year, down from 58.6% in 2012 and 61.6% in 2008, which was the highest mark in 40 years.

The total number of votes was up, but the percentage of actual voters to eligible voters was down. This says that, in 2016, people cared less about the outcome of the election than they did in 2012. 60% of Millennials failed to vote, 6% less than in 2012. The 65+ cohort dropped most dramatically, down 12% from 2012. From Carl Beijer:

The major trend in 2016 was one of increasingly apathy. Within that broader trend, the demographic patterns are muddy. Deviations in relative support from group to group don’t map well onto the standard media narratives that dominated this election; for example, apathy grew more among women and voters of color than among men and white voters. Among the candidates, Clinton either broke even or lost support among every single demographic group, while Trump won support among voters of color and boomers.

And if we look at states that were key to Trump’s victory – Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Florida, Ohio, New Hampshire, all but Pennsylvania and Florida had lower overall turnout. And in the case of Ohio and Wisconsin, turnout was much lower.

While it’s too early to say that we saw a populist revolt, it is clear that the slimy campaigns and the unattractive candidates probably depressed turnout.  And it isn’t clear yet whether voter suppression laws had a significant impact on the outcome of the election, but America’s gotta wake up.

When 43% of eligible voters don’t bother to vote, we risk surrendering our democracy to a well-organized minority of Americans. Nobody should be complaining if they failed to vote.

To help the non-voters wake up, we will listen today to Leonard Cohen. Wrongo mentioned Cohen’s death yesterday. His dying wasn’t a surprise, since he said in last month’s profile in the New Yorker that he was “ready to die.” Yet, on October 13th he told an LA audience:

I think I was exaggerating. I’ve always been into self-dramatization… I intend to stick around until 120.

That didn’t come to pass. His final album, “You Want It Darker” came out on three weeks ago. In it, he waves goodbye to us with grace. Asked often about his process for songwriting he usually replied:

I’ve often said if I knew where the good songs came from, I’d go there more often.

But we remember him today with “Everybody Knows”. It probably has been overplayed this week, but it is appropriate for the revolutionary week we had:

Those who read the Wrongologist in email can view the video here.

Sample lyrics:

Everybody knows that the dice are loaded
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed
Everybody knows the war is over
Everybody knows the good guys lost
Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich
That’s how it goes
Everybody knows

Doesn’t that kind of sum up where we are heading for the next four years?

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Sunday Cartoon Blogging – November 13, 2016

Has this been the worst week ever? And then we learned that Leonard Cohen died last Friday. We will devote Monday to him, but we should be glad that Janet Reno died thinking that Hillary had it in the bag. Wrongo promised some comments for Veteran’s Day:

If we can’t care for the ones we have, perhaps we should stop making new veterans:

cow-known-soldier

Supporting the troops needs to be more than lip service”

cow-support-the-troops

The Dems now need to do what the GOP did in 2012. Of course, they will probably ignore the findings too:

cow-autopsy

We need to change perspective regarding our differences:

cow-big-wall

 Trump’s infrastructure plan ties everything together:

cow-new-infrastructure

Comey’s boys played their part:

cow-get-our-man

We leave you with the lyrics to a Steven Stills song:

There’s something happening here

What it is ain’t exactly clear

There’s a man with a gun over there

Telling me I got to beware

 

I think it’s time we stop, children,

What’s that sound

Everybody look what’s going down

 

There’s battle lines being drawn

Nobody’s right if everybody’s wrong

Young people speaking their minds

Getting so much resistance from behind

 

It’s time we stop, hey,

What’s that sound

Everybody look what’s going down

 

Paranoia strikes deep

Into your life it will creep

It starts when you’re always afraid

You step out of line, the man come and take you away

 

We better stop, hey,

What’s that sound

Everybody look what’s going down

 

See you on Monday.

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Election Wrap-Up Linkage – Saturday Edition

“In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics.’ All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia.” – George Orwell

Feeling blitzed by the election? Science has an answer. Research by neuroscientists have led to a list of 10 songs which reduce stress. According to Dr. David Lewis-Hodgson of Mindlab International, which conducted the research, “Weightless” has been named as the most relaxing song ever, which reduces a person’s stress by 65%. Your mileage may vary.

The most interesting thing so far in the analysis of who voted is the number of Democrats that didn’t vote:

popular-vote
While America hasn’t counted all the votes yet, Clinton’s total vote is down significantly from both Obama elections. On the margin, people apparently thought that they didn’t have sufficient reason to show up for Clinton. Everybody knew what Donald Trump’s top three issues were. Despite an issue-laden website, nobody knew what Hillary Clinton’s’ top three issues were, they just knew she was against DT.

Krystal Ball (yes her real name) was a candidate for Congress in Virginia a half dozen years ago and has been writing since. She has a column up at HuffPo: The Democratic Party Deserved To Die in which she says the following:

In 29 states, truck driving is the number one job and it is one of the few jobs left that can provide a middle class living for high school grads. What will happen to the 1.5 million families who get their daily bread from a truck driver when all of those jobs are eliminated by driverless trucks? It’s not a matter of if but when. Are we going to teach all those drivers to code or retrofit windows or whatever other pathetic nonsense we’ve held up as a solution? This new reality is upon us. The markets are not going to magically fix it.

“Stronger Together” meant nothing to all these people that felt that they were left behind by globalization, free trade agreements and technology. Democrats have been on an 8-year slide from electing a President with veto proof majorities in Congress to holding zero power in DC. Maybe this will reignite the revolt in the party to ditch its leadership and get back to its roots.

Orange County CA among the most Republican counties in CA, finally votes for a Democratic Presidential candidate, and the rest of the country pulls up the ladder. WTF?

On Election Day, most voters use electronic or optical-scan ballots. Nearly half of registered voters (47%) live in jurisdictions that use only optical-scan as their standard voting system, and about 28% live in DRE-only jurisdictions, according to Pew’s analysis of data from the Verified Voting Foundation, a nongovernmental organization concerned with the impact of new voting technologies on election integrity. Here is how votes are tallied in America:

type-of-voting-machine

 

 

 

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