Month: October 2016

Bret Stephens Whistles Past the Graveyard

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My Former Republican Party

A comment I left in response at The Right Coast:

He wants a party that represents his views better. I want that too but it’s not available. Until it is I’ll settle for the lesser evil.
 
The country has changed and the political parties have changed with it. Some of the changes are shocking and undesirable. Trump is a kind of crowdsourced response by middle-class, mostly Republican voters to all of this. Despite his bad qualities he gets some big things right that the political mainstream insists on ignoring. He represents the least-bad option at the moment. As Glenn says, if he is rejected the next least-bad alternative will be even less attractive to the people who complain about Trump.

Election Predictions: Clinton vs. Trump, Factoring in Media Bias

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A friend of mine writes:

I decided to tabulate electoral votes based on current polls and current [polls] assuming a 5 point Clinton bias and a 13 point Clinton bias… It’s kind of heartening. [Trump] wins assuming only a 5 percent bias.

My friend includes an informative spreadsheet, available here in pdf format and best viewed at greater than original size, and says readers should feel free to pass it around.

My friend adds:

…One caveat; Maine and Nebraska are not winner take all. I don’t have poll data for their individual congressional districts so I was not able to model this aspect. Maine has an interesting governor so I suspect trump will get some electoral votes out of Maine even if he doesn’t win their general.

My friend’s spreadsheet is worth a serious look. Trump may have a much better chance than the pro-Democrat media are suggesting.

The Total Bureaucratization of Hiring and Promotion

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It seems that one of the next campaigns of the ‘Social Justice Warriors’ will be the elimination of management discretion in hiring:

The next battlefield after high tech is discretion in hiring–which the activists believe must be limited to force employers to hire any candidate “qualified” for a job as soon as they apply. Only a few radicals are proposing this kind of blind hiring now, but continuing successes in getting firms to bow to their diversity demands will result in a list of new demands. We have already seen Seattle pass an ordinance requiring landlords to rent apartments to the first applicant who qualifies. And similar movements in hiring–supposedly to prevent discrimination by eliminating management choice of who to employ–are coming soon.

The SJWs will certainly get around to insisting that promotions, as well as initial hiring, be handled in the same way.

You can be certain that a Hillary Clinton presidency would be far more favorable to this sort of thing than would a Donald Trump presidency.

If your aspiration is to be a robot, with your every action in life controlled by highly-detailed top-down rules, then you should by all means work fervently for a Clinton presidency.

Turning and Twisting in the Gyre

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I am currently torn three ways, between the start of the holiday market season for myself and my daughter’s various enterprises, my own blogging and writing, and a book project for a Watercress Press client. The book project is to do with local history, and a particularly contentious event during the Civil War – in Texas. Even as far west of the Mississippi as Texas was, from the main theater of war, some comparatively minor skirmishes in the first Civil War took place in Texas. And the final battle, and surrender of the last hold-out Confederate command took place down on the Rio Grande, and the very last Union Army casualty fell in that Texas fight. But that is stuff for history trivia contests. (The answers are, FYI, the battle of Palmito Ranch, and Private John J. Williams, of the 34th Indiana.)

The book project has a fair amount of my attention, as it touches on a local history matter featured in my own books – but in the interesting coincidence of the Tiny Publishing Bidness having published some of the local history books noted as sources, or citing local historians whom I have met or have had something to do with; the late Rev. Ken Knopp, James Kearney, and Jefferson Morganthaler, most notably – and referring to many of the sources that I read as research for the Adelsverein Trilogy. This book that I am working on now caps a series which can only be produced by a writer/researcher involved to the point of intense – yea, even fanatical interest – in a specific Civil War event. Seriously, Colonel Paul Burrier (USA, Ret.) has gone back into the archives of various establishments and re-published at his expense just about every relevant document there is to find in national and state archives regarding the locally infamous incident memorialized by the True to the Union monument in Comfort, Texas.

I’ve written here and there about the Nueces Fight/Battle/Massacre here, here, and there…and how the peculiar situation in the Hill Country of Texas – well-stocked with Abolitionist, pro-Union inclinations – generated a bitter civil war-within a civil war.

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