2016 Election Predictions

I'm posting these today so that I can look back on them later and see which ones hit the mark, or touch it peripherally.

I hate these predictions. I hope the entire string is wrong (see the second half for what I WANT to happen).

• Hillary will continue to refuse to release the transcripts of her Wall Street speeches.
• Hillary will refuse to debate Bernie
• Hillary will win the Democratic nomination.
• Presidential candidate Hillary will NOT face any indictment or any investigation from the FBI more stringent than what has already (not) occurred.
• Both Hillary and Trump will have scandalous mentions in "The Panama Papers:" it will be too late to do anything about it.
• Trump will continue to be an embarrassment and, rather than lose supporters he will gain them.
• Fake transcripts of Hillary's Wall Street speeches will be released by GOP operatives. They will demonstrate her voicing promises that she will not undermine them and will continue to embolden the strong financial sector.
• The fake speeches will further erode her position among progressives who dislike her and the poll results immediately thereafter will be damaging.
• In response she will release her own fake speeches and guarantee they are exactly what she said and that they outlined a need to rein in the Wall Street tyranny in an effort to help the good of the country as a whole which will only result in greater growth for Wall Street executives in the long run.
• Anonymous will obtain and release the real speeches. They will be more like the GOP fakes than her fakes.
• Trump will continue to refuse to release his taxes.
• Anonymous will release his taxes.
• None of his supporters will care - those who hate him will hate him more.
• The "mudslinging" campaigns of the PACs will be the worst even seen.
• Trump will manage to personally profit off the $17M loan he made to his campaign in multiple ways. 
• Trump will be shown to directly profit from all of the campaign merchandising which will have been sourced to companies he owns.
• Trump will win the election with a margin in the low double digits.
• Bernie supporters will "thank" the democratic party and anti-Bernie Hillary supporters for their part in the destruction of America. 
• The democratic party will break apart in a manner worse than the Tea Party momentum has done to the GOP.
• The GOP will push for the FBI investigation of Hillary to ramp up considerably.
• Trump will appoint a Supreme Court Justice to replace Scalia that the GOP accepts; violating the law of appointing Obama's nominee. This appointment will be a business-friendly justice of conservative leanings.
• Trump will pass an executive order to create a Muslim registry; it will be contested in the courts. Until it is settled there will be significant issues and domestic terrorism AGAINST Muslims.
• The executive order will take at least two years to be settled by which time the attacks against Muslims will be found to be grounds to enforce the registry "for their own protection."
• Trump will enact the TPP. It will damage the US economy.
• Trump will allow womens' and minority rights to be rewound considerably.
• Trump will support and enact plans that damage net neutrality and support the RIAA and MPAA's attempts to stranglehold creative media.
• Trump will, at some point, attack the Americans with Disabilities Act, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and every other social program as tools to support illegal immigrants and lazy people with no other purposes.
• Trump will increase military spending and work on shifting his own investments into military suppliers.
• Trump will undo the Affordable Care Act and enable private health insurance providers to enact greater and greater restrictions on their customers while increasing premiums. The middle class will be priced out of health insurance by the end of his first term unless their company offers it; even then it will be difficult for many to afford it.
• Trump will enact trade policies designed to help America.. what he means by this is "Rich Americans." These policies will be disastrous for everyone else.
• Trump, by the start of the fourth year, will engage in an armed conflict somewhere that will pour government money into supplying the military (and earning the rich stockholders money) while creating a means to bleed off the growing resentment among the young people through military recruitment. 
• The recruitment efforts of the military will fail to gain interest as the disenfranchised youth will not want to fight for their country.
• The Allies of the US will abandon us.
• We WILL have a significant attack on US soil from ISIS because of our treatment of Muslims domestically and out foreign meddling. These will be conducted by "sleeper cells." This will be used to reinforce the treatment of Muslims and expand it to other suspect groups.
• We will also have several attacks from disenfranchised, crazy, white men who are protesting the conditions of the country. These will NOT be called terrorism and will be flipped to blame the Muslims and other "undesirables" as causing the societal problems that led these protestors to do what they did. At least one of these will be on a government building, at least one will be targeting Muslims. 
• The middle class will deteriorate at an unprecedented rate and go into a death spiral resulting in a new Great Depression. Trump will NOT pour money into work projects to stave off the worst of it and turn things around.
• I dare not predict whether he will be able to turn the entire situation such that he gets reelected or not. 

What I WANT to happen:

• Bernie takes the nomination. In an effort to bridge the gap in the party he negotiates with the party for the current party president to stop down in exchange for making Hillary the VP.
• The Bernie - Hillary ticket beats Trump by a double-digit margin.
• The GOP fights everything they accomplish "tooth and nail" and it results in NOTHING getting done in the first term....

EXCEPT

• The down ticket positions shift toward Bernie supporters / true progressives.
• The GOP cannot fight the appointment of a progressive SCotUS Justice. Bernie re-nominates Obama's choice as that is who should be in there by law.
• Bernie pushes for obstructionist charges (of some sort) to be applied to politicians who deliberately refuse to do their job under the law.
• Citizen's United gets repealed.

• Bernie and Hillary get reelected; with the support of the new Senators and Congresspeople they accomplish universal health care and public universities being tuition free.
• Trade deals are rebuilt to boost the middle class and allow the investment in them through education and healthcare to grow. 
• Small businesses appear and flourish when they do not have to worry about healthcare.
• Healthcare costs go down as hospitals have fewer emergency rooms visits for things that should have been handled as preventatives.
• Military actions and placements are retracted and the military spending is reduced. Foreign bases begin to be closed.
• US Allies welcome the US to the modern era of being an advanced country again.
• A unified UN front is able to contain terrorism in the middle east and, through efforts to stop direct interference it fades through attrition as the US is no longer perpetuating it.
• 
  

Syrup - Fiction

Syrup Harvest is a two part story that came to me due to making maple syrup.

It's not the type of story you'd expect to be generated from such an activity.

Anti Bernie Meme

Today I encountered a meme designed to make my chosen candidate, Bernie Sanders, look like a communist. I have been meaning to write on the topic of candidates and why I am supporting Bernie for some time but I have been lazy. Now is the time to invest the effort.

Here is the meme:

You'll note that it has nine points of comparison. I will cite Bernie's website for many of the responses and I will not bother to find too many external sources to validate them. My reason for this is that Bernie has carried a consistent message for his entire career and his voting record aligns with it. If you prefer to not accept his website, because it is a curation of his statements that he controls, you are welcome to do your own research to verify that he has, in fact, maintained consistency.

1. I have no comment on Stalin's opinions of big government. I don't care. What I do care about is that this is grossly misleading. Bernie doesn't want BIG government, he wants NECESSARY government. He has, repeatedly, worked to create efficiencies and leverage money in the most responsible manner possible, starting from when he was Mayor of Burlington. He was elected by the people with a completely obstructionist set of Aldermen and he STILL managed to accomplish many reforms and get re-elected. His performance was so fantastic that the citizens of Burlington elected another independent Mayor to follow Bernie. Read more here.  Moreover, if you read the list of issues that Bernie cares about you will see that the majority of them do not generate massive government. His health care reform, if he can make progress on it, will; and it will migrate a massive number of people and bureaucracy from an inefficient private sector nightmare to a less problematic public sector nightmare. Healthcare is  nightmare in countries where it is socialized but it is MORE of one here and at twice the price.

2. I have no thoughts or comments on Bernie's alignment with Marxist thoughts. I don't care. I am not going to bother to research this one.

3. Bernie has been a career politician. This, in itself, is neither good nor bad. Nearly everyone who attains the Presidency, or a Senatorial seat, or is a member of Congress is a career politician. To use this to isolate Bernie to make him look bad is ridiculous and hypocritical.

4. Stalin DID protect his people. He led the revolution to overthrow the monarchy in an effort to protect the people from the economic oppression that they were in. He signed a pact of non-aggression with the Nazi's to keep them away (they later invaded anyway). Stalin managed the USSR into a victory against the Eastern front of the Nazi war machine. Stalin protected his people from many things. What he failed to protect them from was the corruption of the USSR government and the failures of communism in a human society. Bernie wants to protect the people, too. His website states “We live in a difficult and dangerous world, and there are no easy or magical solutions. As President and Commander-in-Chief, I will defend this nation, its people, and America’s vital strategic interests, but I will do it responsibly. America must defend freedom at home and abroad, but we must seek diplomatic solutions before resorting to military action. While force must always be an option, war must be a last resort, not the first option." It's RIGHT THERE. We wants to protect his people from foreign aggression through diplomacy until that has failed. He wants to avoid wars, thus protecting all of the young people who would be sent to war, by preventing them. He wants to build coalitions to protect EVERYONE from threats that cannot be reasoned with. This is the OPPOSITE of not wanting to protect his people. This point is a flat-out lie.

5. I did a half-hearted search for college kids' opinions of Stalin and all that I found were a variety of conservative sites that all claimed college kids think some Republican Presidents were worse than Lenin and Stalin. Given the extreme bias in those sites I cannot begin to consider them remotely valid and I was unable to find anything that was not extremely biased to corroborate their claims. That, of course, is irrelevant. College kids have loved nearly all candidates. College kids span the political spectrum like adults do. Only when there is a HUGE divergence between the choices made in different age groups should there be consideration given to what that means. Bernie is VERY popular among college kids. There is a reason for this; it's because he is advocating for them and the future. A quick google search yields a ton of articles that outline this. Bernie will not live long enough to benefit from the things he is proposing; he is just too old. People who are under 40 WILL benefit from Bernie's philosophies and, the younger they are, the more they will benefit. That is why college kids love him: the establishment, which has been sold at wholesale pricing to the rich, has destroyed their future: Bernie wants to give it back to them. They are voting for THEIR FUTURE.

6. This one is TERRIBLY misleading. A violent revolution happened and Stalin was at the helm of it. Bernie wants a revolution in the way we handle our country. Bernie wants to preemptively repair the damage BEFORE the wealth inequality topples our society. Bernie wants a quiet revolution that is implemented by a few laws that stop wealth from hemorrhaging to the rich and crippling the middle class. This is an important topic: watch for a future post entirely about it. It may be a few days before I finish it.

7. I'll not dig into Stalinist thoughts on freedom, liberty, and the support of government control. I don't need to. Bernie is the one this meme is trying to put on trial so I will, again, be his defense. Nowhere in any of Bernie's philosophies is there a curbing of liberty or freedom EXCEPT the liberty and freedom of corporations to underpay their employees and give that money to their executives and ownership as bonuses. Nowhere does he outline a desire to restrict freedom in any way; rather he wants to increase the wealth and prosperity of the middle class and provide tools for the poor to escape their poverty. He wants to provide the tools necessary for EVERYONE to enhance their own personal freedom. That is the entire point of every aspect of his philosophies. EVERY SINGLE POINT is based on the idea of making freedom greater and more accessible by making it possible for everyone to succeed in our capitalistic society by working hard.

8. This is a flat-out lie. Bernie is very against the idea of the gun control laws that many other politicians favor. The only gun control laws he wishes to strengthen are point of sale background checks. This is such a non-issue for him that it is not even listed on his issues page. It is also worth noting that he is from a state which has some of the lightest gun control laws out of any state (note the second link is a pro-gun law site which is why the ranking is an F), which is an important reality for his constituents.

9.  Bernie does not hate capitalism. Bernie hates unchecked capitalism. Bernie hates the capitalist ideals that allow the, aforementioned, hemorrhage of wealth from the middle class and the poor into the rich. Bernie hates unequal pay for the same work. Bernie finds the current wage gap between the average worker and the CEOs to be absurd and obscene; let alone that this gap is GROWING. Bernie is opposed to capitalism that runs unchecked so as to poison an entire city's water supply, killing people and giving permanent brain damage to all of the children such as what is currently happening in Flint, MI. Bernie is opposed to the reality that large corporations can get away with underpaying their lowest employees so that they have to resort to government assistance, effectively pouring additional money into the company's profits... which ends up as bonuses.

Bernie sees that the government's role is to protect a country and facilitate prosperity for its people. His socialist ideas and policies are in place in countries that do better than the USA in freedom, in quality of life (we actually place fairly well on this one), in health care quality, in per capita health care cost (the not-us countries have 100% coverage, the USA less than 90% coverage even after implementing "Obamacare"), in education (we rate below Poland, Estonia, Vietnam, etc), and in general happiness.

It's about time to stop lying about which parties has the best interests of the people at heart and start looking at the ONE individual who really does. Bernie Sanders wants the future to grow; he wants YOU to succeed. The only people he wants to limit are those who are parasites on society; people who contribute NOTHING and earn massive amounts of money by manipulating the money they already have. Bernie wants to curb the ability of those people to steal from the poor and then spread the cost of subsidizing those poor across everyone. Bernie wants to stop them from making YOU pay for their theft.

For reference - here are the Political Compass ratings of various people. Note that Sanders is the farthest from Stalin of all the candidates on the vertical axis; which is the one that deals with freedom and the closest to the center when it comes to economic ideas.

And here are two important videos you need to watch if you are still not convinced about the rich being the problem:

It is your civic duty to vote.
I won't tell you how to vote.
But I will tell you that if you want a better future you'll do the requisite research to see that a strong economy comes from a strong middle class and that Bernie Sanders is the candidate who will bring that.