I am not saying this is healthy, or that you should be in the habit of eating this if you want to avoid an early grave. I am just saying that technically speaking, I have developed a whole-grain carrot cake recipe (this is for a huge cake, it would probably be a double recipe for most households):
Grated Carrots: 6 cups
Dry Ingredients:
4 tsp baking powder
4 cups whole wheat pastry flour
2 tsp salt
5 tsp ground cinnamon
Wet Ingredients:
8 eggs
2 ½ cups of vegetable oil
5 tsp vanilla extract
4 cups of white sugar
Icing Ingredients:
16 oz Cream Cheese
3 tsp vanilla extract
1 tsp salt
32 oz powdered sugar
3 oz water
Preheat oven to 350
Oil & Flour a large baking pan.
In one bowl, mix dry ingredients.
In second bowl, mix wet ingredients.
Mix wet & dry ingredients together.
Mix in grated Carrots
Pour evenly into baking pan from step 2.
Place in preheated oven. Check at 50 minutes.
In third bowl, mix icing ingredients together until they form smooth icing.
After cake is done as has sat for one hour, carefully apply icing.
There is about an 8% difference between the popular vote victory for Hillary (1%) and the electoral college vote victory for Trump (7%). This represents a significant constitutional crisis that I believe will very soon erupt into Economic Civil War.
The problem is that when it comes to how we can live our personal lives, the Supreme Court of the USA is the ultimate authority, AND they are always selected by the President. To make matters worse, the Republican representatives in government just blocked Obama from getting a supreme court nomination for over twice as long as the last longest appointment took. Understand that Americans value freedom, and what is happening is that conservatives in rural areas have massive disproportionate power to dictate their inbred goat-raping values to people in diverse urban centers:
In other words, one Cowboy in Cheyenne gets to cancel Planned Parenthood, the Environmental Protection Agency, Marriage Equality and Right to Choose for over three tech workers in silicon valley, in spite of the fact California basically pays Wyoming's bills.
There are four possible resolutions:
State secession.
A constitutional amendment changing the way the USA selects its supreme court.
A voluntary adoption of the Popular Vote Interstate Compact.
A coerced adoption of the Popular Vote Interstate Compact.
Humor and jokes about the West Coast of the USA breaking off to join Canada in 2016 could be real policy proposals in a few election cycles, just as only humor and jokes in the past were the only sign of a President-elect Trump:
However, what is much more plausible is that the economic powerhouse that is the West Coast of the USA conspire to help the secession movement in TX help TX leave the union. When it comes to politics, the difference between the USA and Candada is Texas.
There are two ways a constitutional amendment could change the way Supreme Court Justices are chosen:
Shut down the electoral college and have the President chosen by popular vote.
Change the selection of Supreme Court Justices to popular vote instead of presidential nomination.
In our current political climate a constitutional amendment seems even less likely than state secession.
The Popular Vote Interstate Compact is a voluntary agreement that can be adopted into law by individual states, to change the way their electoral college votes are awarded to automatically going for whoever won the popular vote. It's obviously the right thing to do, the moral imperative. Unfortunately the attention-whore swing states and morally-bankrupt fly over states have resisted this gesture of civilization:
If the West Coast of the USA gets nasty enough, state and city boycotts can coerce states into signing on to the Popular Vote Interstate Compact. Florida is especially vulnerable because of their dependence on tourism, and when they fold the rest of the states-against-freedom will understand that the West Coast isn't playing around about this.
Sure there will be retaliation, sure there will be cries of panic in the fly over states and DC. But who cares? The USA used to have slavery and not allow women to vote, sometimes change is loud. It's time to take our engorged West Coast tits out of the mouths of these spoiled-baby fly over states and show them who pays the bills in the USA!
The reason why Trump and Obama energized the electorate was they represented change, unlike the elderly statesman John McCain, Mitt "White Obama" Romney or Hillary "Female Obama" Clinton. The American public, left and right, is incredibly unhappy with the status quo. Change is the new political paradigm.
It is important for Americans everywhere to start finding common ground on what change we want, and to start acting to create that change. We should do two things in order to get the change we want:
Find common ground.
Be incessant.
Considering the fact that the Hillary supporters eventually capitulated to most of the Sander's platform, and considering how enthusiastic the support was for Trump when the time finally came to actually vote and how enthusiastic so many Libertarians are about Trump, we can divide most politically minded Americans into two camps: Camp Trump and Camp Sanders. These two camps might have more in common than they have different. Both camps:
are shamelessly populist. Both strongly believe in the will of the people over special interests.
are pro-peace. Both sides want to see radical cuts in military spending and much less overseas military adventures.
want the economy in the USA altered to serve the working class.
are very suspicious of trade deals that put the interests of corporations over the interests of people.
want money out of politics.
want our Constitutional Rights to be respected.
want strong states rights so that people in South Carolina can live differently than people in California if they want to.
want medical costs under control.
want wide spread economic prosperity for basically everyone.
want to preserve cultural traditions.
want everyone to have a practical and affordable education.
want to prevent terrorism in the United States.
want everyone to use their time constructively.
want people with substance abuse problems in treatment, not in jail.
do not want to have to migrate to another town in order to survive.
want to prevent unwanted pregnancies.
want affordable health care.
love Elon Musk style innovations that create energy independence for the USA.
want medicaid expansion to replace Obamacare.
One place the left and right can act on common ground is, strangely enough, on Gun Control. Right now Trump is pushing a "Guns Everywhere" agenda. That is GREAT news for Gun Control advocates! Why? Because Texas - cowboy central - has the BEST gun regulation in the USA, called the "License to Carry" which applies to both concealed weapons AND open carry weapons. It includes finger prints, an extensive application, gun SAFETY training (to keep children from being shot accidentally,) AND weapon competency training (again to keep children from being shot accidentally):
This isn't even a compromise, it's a win/win between both Gun Control and 2nd Amendment activists!
Think big. Think past where the politicians have already gridlocked. For example, consider the Basic Income Elon Musk was recently talking about. Earned Income Tax Credit in the USA and the Alaska Permanent Fund are two CONSERVATIVE examples of this that ALREADY exist and are ALREADY popular with conservatives. Conservative Marco Rubio has tried to figure out to use an EITC system as an alternative to minimum wage. Basic Income could potentially replace:
Social Security
Food Stamps
Homelessness
Hunger in the USA
MINIMUM WAGE (massively increasing how easy it would be to start new businesses and non-profits)
Incarceration (it costs us $40,000 to keep someone locked up, and we do this for 1% of our population already. It is far more American to pay them $20,000 to obey the law in the first place, as with the Alaskan Permanent Fund Dividend.)
Unemployment benefits
Welfare (insofar as it still exists)
Every 100 years, 90% of jobs disappear to mechanization, and within the next few decades we should see all drivers (truck, delivery, taxi, uber, bus, school bus, etc.) replaced by self-driving vehicles. How are we going to retrain all those drivers? We are going to march them down to the local community college so they can learn computer programming to run driverless cars? Sorry, as always is the case with mechanization, there won't be enough new jobs to replace even 10% of those drivers.
This is America, a free country. These drivers WILL be able to find something constructive to do, IF they have a Basic Income to rely on after their jobs were mechanized, such as taking care of family members, volunteering, starting new projects, or otherwise contributing to their communities. But without Basic Income then they will be more likely to leech off unemployment, pretending to care about searches jobs they have no skills or interest in, learn to cook meth and smuggle heroine, launder cash and otherwise take society down with them.
Before you say "Basic Income will never happen in the USA" remember that:
It already is happening in the USA in the form of EITC, it is just not happening enough. The alternatives (SSI and EBT) are already very politically problematic.
The USA used to not give women the right to vote.
The USA used to have legalized slavery.
But nothing like win/win Gun Control or Basic Income is going to happen if we don't get aggressive with our political representatives. We need to get loud and stay loud about what we want. When politicians from the left AND right are getting significant pressure to change in the areas we find common ground, it will be easier to get the change we need:
There is only one person in this entire world who is responsible for the Democrats loosing 2016, and that is Hillary Clinton. This is true for three reasons:
She insisted on replacing Sander's best idea (Medicare for All) with her already failed idea (public option. See 4 below.)
I was very uneasy about this election for several reasons:
1 - 2 above.
Trump utterly dominated the media, it was all about him, all the time.
With what was perhaps the absolute apex of hubris, Hillary's campaign was "happy to let him have the attention of the media."
Hillary insisted on propping up Obamacare instead of going for Bearnie's "Medicare For All." Obamacare kept getting more expensive for individuals and businesses, while allowing the main culprits - the health care insurance companies - do as they please.
Hillary perpetuated culture war with her "deplorables" comment. That kind of elitism belongs in the GOP, not with progressives.
Hillary's high-price-tag hawkishness. Should my taxes really go to killing Arabic speaking children with American bombs?
And what really terrified me about her, kept me up at night, is that she basically represented no significant diversion from Obama's domestic policy - no actual change in a country starved for change.
Now Obama and Hillary are saying progressives should give Trump a chance? The same m*********** who is gutting the Environmental Protection Agency - are they so out of touch that they have some other place in mind besides Earth for humanity to live? After 8 years of obstructionism - we couldn't even get a supreme court justice appointed in over twice as long as it took to appoint the last one - now we should just stand by and watch Trump do what now exactly?
We are supposed to give Trump a chance, like the chumps who fell for Trump University and Trump Network? We are supposed to stand by while Russia and our own FBI are not held accountable for interfering with this election? We are supposed to capitulate in the face of a massive popular vote win in spite of a massive electoral college loss? THAT is what is best for DEMOCRACY?
It is time to clean house in the DNC (WARNING: foul language follows that is tamer than what I use in private on this same topic):
For a very long time now I have been infuriated by the priorities of the left. Some things matter a LOT more than others. In development land there's a theory called "Bike Shed," which states that the trivial, easy to understand, peripheral issues dominate everyone's attention (a critical resource in democracy) while important, complex, critical issues are too much work for people to bother with:
I spent the last few days after Trump's election in South Seattle in mid-November needing to REMOVE my coat instead of adding more layers. Global warming effects us all, to such a degree that this is one way the USA actually threatens the rest of the world: we ARE the world's biggest problem now that we have elected a president who has promised to let industry do whatever they like to our natural environment. Terrorism and Nuclear proliferation? They got nothing on US.
How did we get here? How is this possible? If there are so many critically important things going on right now, how is it we have failed to reach any kind of common ground?
Priorities. In ANY relationship, when one person starts to get really heated over a specific subject, the other person should ask themselves "is this worth it? Do we need to have this much conflict in our relationship, or should I compromise?" When there is no exploration of each other's ideas, and one side is convinced of their own inherent virtue, then that relationship dysfunctions and ceases to serve those in it.
Lets look at some things here that might not have been prioritized well.
Bathroom Equality
If someone told me, as a CIS male, I had to dress up as a woman when I go out, or I could not use the bathroom, that would be horrifying and inconvenient for me. I would feel rejected by society, I would be loud about this injustice. When the LGBT community complains about restroom use, I might not completely understand, but I can clearly see the problem.
But let me tell you that as a CIS male I am uncomfortable using the bathroom in public all the time anyways. Society constantly judges men by their penis size. Consider my options when I need to use the public restroom:
If I stand and pee in a urinal, wow, creepy. What if kids are around? What if some guy peeing next to me is taller or shorter than me? What if I hear a sound in his direction and want to look his way? What if one of my friends shakes my shoulders and says "ha, I knew you couldn't aim!" Society is forcing me to expose myself against my consent.
If I pee in the toilet, I am a big sissy for not standing to be judged like the real men. Or maybe someone will want to kick my ass because they think I was born female. Or maybe I am just not man enough to make the water flow in front of others. Or maybe my penis is so shockingly inadequate that I can be hardly considered a man in the first place and should hence not pee in front of others anyways.
Ironically, if I have to take a legitimate crap, no matter how loud and how stinky, I still have to be worried about 2.
Unisex bathrooms are MUCH better for CIS males. I am relieved when in medical settings I have business to do and all that is available are single occupant restrooms. Trans-friendly bathrooms are everyone-friendly bathrooms.
But it was really clear that this was pissing off the right. They were willing to get violent over traditional bathroom use. It was clearly going to influence the election, and bathroom equality became the new sexual equality issue.
But now that the left has lost the election, ALL sexual equality progress is now in jeopardy, with multiple supreme court vacancies likely over the next few years. Marriage equality? Reproductive rights? Was bathroom equality really worth the damage done?
The damage was also done to the very planet we ALL have to live on, so no, sorry, it wasn't worth it.
Gun Control
I am really not comfortable with the idea that at any time a bullet could come flying off the street, go through the walls of my home, and kill one of my family members. Just thinking about it makes it hard for me to sleep.
However the USA is so saturated with firearms that any legislation, no matter how draconian, would take DECADES to significantly reduce the number of firearms available to the general public. But you know who does have some GREAT ideas about regulating guns? The far right.
But you wouldn't know that, because you have been so convinced of your own righteousness, that you haven't realized there was effective gun control common ground just laying around for a few decades now. The far right would like to have a concealed carry permit that is recognized across state lines. This was a real opportunity for the LEFT to say "OK, how about everyone with a gun in public require a TEXAS license-to-carry":
An almost Utopian level of regulation by left-wing standards, and it's just laying there, right there in Texas, like a ripe apple falling towards your hand from a tree.
But you didn't know. Were all the self-righteous thumbs up from your bleeding heart friends worth losing the election over this? Because now what Trump's pushing for has nothing to do with the Texas version, it's just "go ahead and bring guns into military recruiting centers and basically anywhere else, with basically no training at all to speak of, because nothing could possiblie go wrong."
This election loss is destroying the air we breath, the food we eat, the water we drink, the land we live on. So no, sorry, as Sanders noted, the Gun Control debate was not worth it.
Obamacare
One major reason why the left lost the election was because health care expenses increase too rapidly for our incomes to keep up with, and Clinton continued to support Obamacare in the face of that. You can't keep propping up Obamacare when the price in the health insurance exchanges keep going up 20% per year.
Single payer was the alternative put forward by Sanders. Did you notice all those NPR interviews with the old white guys in the midwest during the primaries who said "my first choice is Trump, but my second choice is Bearnie!" The rust belt deplorables have almost no problem at all with single payer. Their problem is that having had real industrial jobs in the past, they have been exposed to practical mathematics which quickly tells them Obamacare must be Repealed and Replaced: 20% per year, that's the problem.
Single payer is anti-establishment, and that's really what the deplorables were all about (and think about it - they must be also pissed about medical bills and lack of medical care access):
And as Trump lights the health insurance industry on fire and leaves it to die, as he has been saying he wants to do for some time now, he's probably going to do it using compromises with the left, gradually raising he income limits on getting medicaid (adding fuel to that fire.) Ironically we probably will have something like unto single payer with Trump, perhaps even more so than the "public option" Nixon-era crap Clinton had in mind.
Why didn't Hillary take Trump & Sanders "medicare for all" proposals seriously? Was Obamacare worth losing the election over? Will I be allowed to have a campfire in 2017 when Cascadia's ecosystem is as dehydrated as a tumble weed in August in Phoenix AZ?
Labor
You will find that most deplorables and libertarians completely agree with lefties more on the following sentence: "all other things being equal, if a woman does the same job as well as a man does, she should be paid the same amount." Hearing about continued pay inequality for women enrages me - and pretty much everyone else as well. Low hanging fruit, easy to find common ground on, right?
Wrong, because it is shadowed by a much more extreme and earth-shattering problem. Just as it is pointless to try to save an antique sofa with a fire extinguisher when the rest of the building is burning down around you, any type of workplace equality is becoming less and less relevant to voters everywhere. The problem is mechanization.
Here's the number you need to understand: every 100 years, 90% of jobs humans do are replaced by machines. This is great for social progress, as it reduces slavery, women feeling forced to stay at home, hazardous work environments, unsustainable lifestyles and so on. Mechanization IS progress.
The problem with mechanization is "how do we adapt to it?" The midwest deplorables have adapted to mechanization by voting for Trump.
The battle that must be fought for here, and which has been completely neglected by the left, is the need for Universal Basic Income. I know this sounds like nanny-state cradle-to-grave entitlement, but stop thinking in terms of the 1980's and instead imagine a world where every cab driver and truck driver has been replaced by a self-driving vehicle.
In THAT imminent world we are all now currently relocating to, where machines DO EVERYTHING, the only thing that matters is WHAT THE MACHINES ARE DOING. The machines will be providing goods and services. What those goods and services are and how much are provided will be the most important decisions society faces. In that world, spending money on goods and services will determine what the machines do. In that world Universal Basic Income will be as foundational to Democracy as voting rights.
Captain of industry Elon Musk has raised this issue, yet the DNC just sits there, slack jawed and ineffective:
Ironically Marco Rubio and his developing theories about EITC was the closest thing in the political sphere we've had lately to serious conversations around universal basic income. Raising the minimum and wage and tuition free education doesn't matter much in the face of jobs constantly disappearing. Was all that worth loosing the election over?
Conclusion
The left needs to prioritize, because WE LIVE IN THE FUTURE. The left (and everyone else) should be focusing on issues of real consequence:
With wide spread protests of the Trump presidency throughout the USA, it is easy to think that protesters are not respecting the institutions of our democracy. But consider the following:
Clinton got over 350,000 more votes than Trump, while Trump got over 50 more electoral college votes than Clinton by the time the election was decided. If this was another country, you would think the electoral college was there for the express purpose of suppressing the will of people.
The FBI clearly tried to influence the election with opportune timed announcements, making a big deal out of e-mails that never materialized into charges.
The FBI seemed to collude with Russia, as Russia hacked DNC computers and took other various steps to leak information. Meanwhile the FBI was silent about the Russia's criminal influence.
Though Harry Reid threatened the FBI with the Hatch Act, so far no action has been taken against the FBI.
Sanders was expected to take such conservative states as Utah in a massive landslide victory, when the nomination was stolen from him by Hillary's supporters in the DNC.
Does that sound like a legit election to you? Should Gore have conceded the election in light of the evidence we have now of the election fraud from the Florida voting machines?
Should millennials stand by and watch the votes of people in their 70's voting for other people in their 70's destroy the natural environment of the world that the millennials still have to spend the rest of their lives in? Would that be the responsible thing to do?
Though I certainly am horrified by Trump's election, as a Tai Chi guy I try to always look for opportunities when bad things happen (and unforeseen consequences when good things happen.) There are opportunities created by Trump's election:
The electoral college, with Hillary having won the popular vote, is now despised by powerful (and most other) people on the left and right.
Postmodernism - the crippling vice of the left - has been fatally weakened and will hopefully soon die. Self righteous identity politics have been proven an ineffective strategy in the face of representative democracy.
Facts matter. Don't expect Obamacare to be politically viable as costs on exchanges keep going up 20% per year.
Political qualifications no longer matter for office. Michelle Obama 2020? Easy.
Clinton era neoliberalism is clearly dead, with Trump elected on an anti-Globalization platform.
Bush era neoconservativism is clearly dead, with every Bush family member openly opposing his election.
Peace is now possible. No matter how much the thought of a white supremacist president enrages me, I can't help but wonder "how many Arabic speaking children will now be saved from American bombs because of this election?"
Elections are no longer bought, as Trump was massively outspent by Clinton. The Party with the Most Effective Message Wins.
Elections are harder to steal because electability really matters. Clinton clearly underhandedly stole the Democratic nomination from Sanders, as Bearnie Bros warned time and again that Clinton's electability was a huge problem. Sanders represented a landslide victory that would even take Utah in the face of the Trump hatred found there (think "everything west of the Mississippi.") She stole the nomination, we were supposed to be cool with that, and Trump is the price that has to now be paid.
The youth vote matters. If you ignore what the youth of the country want and need, you are ignoring the future of our country, and they won't vote for you.
State-level political evolution is guaranteed. Some states will have the laws you want, and others won't, and young people (the future population) will be voting with their feet.
Trump must act to dismantle Obamacare. Health insurance provided by employers, with labor now politically maimed, will soon be a thing of the past. The last thing he would repeal, if he repeals it at all, would be requirements to take preexisting conditions. First goes the individual mandate, then goes the state boundaries in health care markets. Either of these things alone, if health insurance companies are to be believed, would destroy our current health insurance industry. The only alternatives are single payer or regulated medical fees, either of which amounts to socialized medicine.
On one hand the electorate was supposed to pay for increased global security, while not only needs were neglected at home, but also our own personal security concerns (2nd Amendment) were belittled and ignored. Hopefully the left has learned their lesson and will focus on important relevant issues (single payer, affordable education, and dare I say Universal Basic Income as recently suggested by Musk) instead of political bike-shed such as bathroom equality or gun control:
