I voted Third Party and I don't regret it.

Sorry, Rachel Maddow, but getting the Green Party off the ballot by the "Democratic" Party won't stop people from voting Green there. I wrote in Howie Hawkins and Angela Walker. My ballot has been received and will be counted in some way or another.

I am not as enthusiastic about the Green Party presidency as I was in 2016 when Jill Stein won. My support has been behind Lisa Savage, who is running as an independent in Maine. My hope is that State's use of Ranked Choice Voting will result in a Green Party victory. I won't get into the mechanics of that system, but that is what a truly "Democratic" Party would have supported.

The past four years would have been better spent on looking at what went wrong in 2016 and fixing those problems instead of wasting time on imaginary Russian Interference and ignoring Ukrainian bribery of the Biden family. Election reform makes far more sense, but we can't make US politics unprofitable.

That's the only reason US elections drag on interminably: MONEY.

I don't have Trump derangement syndrome which makes it easy for me to see that Biden and Harris are just as bad, if not much worse, than Trump and Pence (unlike this person who is sadly stuck in the duopoly mindset). I want a party which comes offers what Bernie Sanders did and am under no illusion that Party is not the Democratic one.

It ain't called the "Green New Deal" for nothing and you won't get it from any other party than the Greens. Biden made it quite clear in the first debate that he will not cater to the left wing of the Party.

The problem is that Sanders WAS popular. That has been neglected in all the analyses of 2016 and his 2020 run.

Bottom line. There needs to be new players in the US political game. There also needs to be a serious reform of the electoral system: ranked choice voting, get rid of the big money/cut the cost of campaigning, putting the debates back in the hands of the League of Women Voters, etc.

And if they give you ruled paper, write between the line.

Why I believe Biden will lose.

 I am not swayed by polls and am still firm in the belief I stated back in June that Trump will get another four years. Time has added new reasons to the ones I mentioned in that post. The Democrats should have trashed any hope on Biden after the failed attempt to impeach Trump.

I am very familiar with Ukraine and the criminals in that case were the Bidens who saw the cess pit of corruption that is Ukraine as their pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.  But Biden and the Democrats have put their hopes in the fact that Trump derangement syndrome will blind people to how

BAD Biden happens to be.

Toss in that the press  has pretty much laid off any serious questioning of Biden. He was pretty much given a hand by Chris Wallace during the "debate". Axios pointed out that Biden "is the luckiest, least scrutinized frontrunner" in that the press is basically ignoring his glaringly obvious problems. 

Biden must be grateful to Covid-19 for allowing him to hide from the press so that he doesn't have to walk down the street roped off from the crowd the way Hillary Clinton was. The media's obsession with Trump coupled with his ability  to dominate the news has allowed Biden to purposely and persistently minimize public appearances and tough questions.Biden has yet to be pinned down on a variety of important issues, which is a good thing since he switches positions on issues even more than Hillary did.

As Scott Jennings said in USA today:

Biden changes his stripes more than a chameleon in a Skittles factory. And he’s doing it again by claiming the mantle of unity in this election. Today’s Biden is a made-for-media candidacy untested by interactions with his base.

Fox News is wrong. Biden and Harris are not socialists and do not appeal to the left/progressive wing, unless it's the meaningless virtue signalling version. I'm not sure if Biden appeals to the Republicans who don't like Trump either since Biden presents a nebulous position on pretty much every topic.

Another thing which will effect this election are the silent Trump supporters. I'm not sure if the silence is due to fear, or a lack of media attention to anyone who supports Trump.

Anyway, I already voted and it wasn't for either Trump or Biden. I doubt that Rachel Maddow will bother with trying to get a third party voter on her show, but I gave up on her once she began to push Hillary Clinton and then went on to push that Russia was responsible for Trump's win.

The DNC needs to have a purge if the Russians were responsible for their failures in 2016 and 2020.

Maybe the Dumbocrats will take a serious analysis of what went wrong if I am correct, but I am not hopeful. I know they will continue to blame everyone and everything except themselves.

Have some fun predicting who will win the election here. I think Trump since most of these states are "pro-gun" or effected by the riots.

Today is not "Victory in the Pacific"

That's because Japanese holdouts(残留日本兵), who were soldiers and sailors that continued to fight after the surrender of Japan in August 1945. Japanese holdouts either doubted the veracity of the formal surrender, rejected demobilization for ideological reasons, or were simply not aware because communications had been cut off by Allied advances. 

Using the logic of Juneteenth, the Second World War in the Pacific could have continued well into the 1990s. Although the last confirmed surrender was Private Teruo Nakamura, a Taiwanese-born soldier who was discovered by the Indonesian Air Force on Morotai, and surrendered to a search patrol on December 18, 1974. Nakamura, who couldn't speak Japanese or Chinese. He  was discovered 29 years, 3 months, and 16 days after the Japanese Instrument of Surrender was signed.

Likewise, it can be shown that slavery still exists, which knocks another premise of Juneteenth: that it was the end of slavery. Any luck it will go back to being the virtue signalling non-entity is was before this year.
 

But, please feel free to have your picnic and parade. Juneteenth is a quaint reminder of the horrors of war.

Some people get cut off from world events.

Mention "nationalism" if you want to start me on a rant.

I am posting this in response to something I just watched called "What It Mean To Be Pro-European?" The person who made it is working under this mistaken belief that European nations are somehow homogeneous.

This Alsatian/German-Belgian/Polish-Ukrainian/British/Balkan/etcetera person calls bullshit.

This animation sucks because is only shows the Northern shore of the Med. European culture has been tied to Asia and Africa since prehistory.

And let's not forget that Europeans have been at each other's throats for millennia, but I can't prove that since that also gets into prehistory. And some groups find themselves living with other groups. And fighting over which alphabet to use, or which religion to follow.

And that's even within Christianity.

Let's not forget that Europe is a stone's throw from Africa in the West (at Gibraltar) and connected to Asia/Middle East in the East. Islam has had an influence on European culture. Especially Spanish culture. After all, Europe is separated from Africa by the Mediterranean.

The Celts, Romans, and Vikings all spread out and went native while we're at it.

Italy and Germany only date to the mid-19th Century. But some European countries are more recent than that. After all, Yugoslavia had a bad break up. They don't call it "Balkanisation" for nothin' (can't forget I have Balkan in me as well).

I call myself "European" since that is the best way to describe myself since my ancestors came from countries which no longer exist, or were swallowed up by other countries. Also, accepting the diversity of cultures, some of which I can't relate to, requires me to take on a blanket term.

And, unless I want to be really provincial in the true sense of the term, I have to describe myself using a blanket term. People from the United States describe themselves in a blanket term as well since they call themselves "Americans" or US citizens, not citizens of the state they are from.

Brexit has shown that "European" isn't a national descriptor, but a blanket term for people living in the European continent: no matter what their ethnicity. Likewise, the same applies to US citizens.

Juneteenth. or social media mind control WTF!

 

I thought I did a post about Juneteenth being relatively unknown until recently. Google Trends analysis of searches on "Juneteenth" only show a massive interest starting from the end of THIS May to around the 23rd of June.  There was minimal interest in this "holiday" prior to that date.

You weren't crazy if you were wondering why you had never heard of it before this year,

And you were among a very small group of people if you DID know about this prior to this year.

While the media tried to make this sound like something which had been around for a long time, the reality is that the Juneteenth this was steamrollered over us. Wired points it out in their Why Juneteenth Went Viral. Wired's piece tends toward this being something contemplative, but I do question the interest in Juneteenth, as opposed to Odunde, as being virtue signalling.

It's no coincidence that the movement to celebrate Juneteenth came during the Black Lives Matter riots (sorry, but more than one city was trashed and these were counterproductive as fuck. So, fuck you, I'll call them as I see them). It's more of the meaningless virtue signalling to try and calm the rioters.

But it was a small group of people who made this a thing as Protocol's How a Group of Creatives made Juneteenth 'spread like wildfire'. Yeah, "creatives" as in advertising types. Not just any advertising types, but ones connected to the social media industry.

I am trying to break from the surveillance economy,. Not only do they keep tabs on you, but they try and influence your opinion.

I cried"bullshit" about Russiagate.

I'm crying "bullshit" about the virtue signalling relating to Black Lives Matter. Nothing significant will come from the past few months. If anything, those events will make matters worse. I know they increased gun sales.

I am already certain that Trump will be reelected. Even if he isn't, the Democratic candidate isn't onside.

So, what was the point of it all?

I prefer substance to Bullshit, but the bullshit is piling up like the trash on the streets of Philadelphia and NYC.