It's Wednesday After the Election

And Trump has won.  I'm very disappointed, and feeling vaguely inclined to retaliation, but I realize that my 'bubble' is strongly liberal.  When I started teaching here in Billtown, I began to realize that there was a stubbornly xenophobic group among the students, with whom I had continual run-ins.  In retrospect, it seems obvious that the general population is similar.  'We want to do things the way we're used to doing it,' was their war cry, and that's the attitude Trump has seemingly adopted. 

But is there room for an old- style robber baron in our government?  The people said: well, sure!  If he's our robber baron!

Is there some way that,  if left alone, the country will see the benefit of—what Democrats would call—a more balanced approach?  Probably not.  Can the Republican spin doctors fix the disastrous results of Trump's wilder schemes?  Easy.  For four entire years?  Easy.  Particularly easy with an audience that doesn't read straight news much. 

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What does Trump Want?

He does not care about the economy.   He does not care about guns.  He does not care about Israel.  He does not care about immigration.   He doesn't care about the Democrats.  He doesn't care about the Supreme Court (though he doesn't want to look silly).  He doesn't care about Health Care

Of course, he doesn't want to go to jail.  What he really wants is to make a lot of money, eat a lot of KFC, attract a lot of attention, and win the election.  At his age,  there's not a lot that makes one excited.  He still does get a little excited when he sees a cute girl,  but it's not for long.

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Washington Post, and Non-Endorsement

The Washington Post (famous newspaper in the D.C. area) chose not to endorse either candidate, at the urging of its owner, Jeff Bezos (a millionaire, and former owner of Amazon).

I had no idea that it was usual for newspapers to endorse one candidate or another in most elections, and (in another forum) I wrote that it would not have been proper to do so.  I soon learned that endorsing a candidate is quite normal around here.

But this means that the entire newspaper endorsed someone, rather than one columnist endorsing him or her!  That seems so weird to me.  When I was a kid, noticing elections for the first time, in a galaxy far far away, many newspapers refrained from endorsing a particular party or person, leaving the columnists free to do so.  That may have been the right way to do it, but things have changed since then. 

It's extremely disconcerting as to how naïve most people are about politics.  Some people think it has to do with education.  Well, not exactly; but quite likely educated people might be just a little more sophisticated about seeing behind the façade of politics-speak.  But everywhere—even in other countries, it seems—people have lost the particular kind of cynicism that enables them to vote for the most useful candidate for an office.  They tend to take candidates at their word, a huge mistake.  I don't even take Kamala Harris at her word, though she's a lot more trustworthy (for a politician).

Husbands Voting one way, Wives Voting Another

In our family, we always talked over the political situation, and each of us might suspect how the other will vote, but we never expected them to vote the same way.  Now Fox News is making a fuss about how someone—I'm not sure who, it might be Trump, or it might be Tim Walz*—seems to be encouraging wives to vote differently from their husbands.  Oh, what a shame!  They're making it out to be positively un-American, if not downright immoral, or unChristian!! 

I never thought twice about it, but I guess these days, when those who lean one way—I guess lean is too mild a word for how it is—consider those who lean the other way as quite unhinged, spouses voting differently might be considered as betrayal.  I could be wrong, but I thought I read somewhere that during the Civil War, wives and husbands sometimes found themselves on different sides of thequestion. . 

There is a guy called Jesse Waters (or is it Watters?) on Fox, whose emphatic positions on things are quite incommensurate with his knowledge of facts.  He was waxing indignant about the whole issue of husbands and wives voting differently, and declared that if his wife were to do that 'behind his back' he would consider it the same as having an affair.   Of course, Fox News considers (like Trump) that hyperbole should be expected as a matter of course, many wives would feel uncomfortable about how their husbands might react to them voting for reproductive rights, for instance.  I wish I could tell you who—quite innocently, I'm sure—precipitated this crisis. 

*Actually, it was Megyn Kelly amplifying something that Liz Cheney implied.

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Kamala Harris

One interesting thing about Vice President Harris is that she always speaks in complete sentences.  That might be annoying to some of Trump's most ardent supporters, but for those who are drawn to his style: four years is all we've budgeted for you.  For those who run with Trump supporters for fear of taxes: you can hope for compromises.  For those who fear for the economy: the Dems are doing fine; there's nothing better for the economy than a myriad middle class families stocking up on luxuries.  For those who are anxious about immigration insanity: that's not a uniquely Republican issue.  Straightening up the border problems will be a bipartisan objective, even if Republicans like to pretend that they own it.  Ẅhat the Dems do not like is unnecessary cruelty for the sake of deterrence. 

Interesting that Trump thought he would be hale, and in full possessions of his faculties through a second term.  But this second term, delayed by four years, has pushed Trump past his shelf life.

We can only hope that Kamala Harris will be the first of a new generation of younger, more capable presidents. 

[Added later Oct 25:]

Once again—and this is becoming common inthese latter years—the election is likely to be decided not by how people vote, but rather by which voters decide to turn out on election day.  There certainly are a few voters who haven't made up their minds yet—and I'm not going to waste my scorn on them!—but they are few.  (Lots of analysts are persuaded that these 15 voters are going to decide the election, but I doubt it.)

On the other hand, voters are getting lazy and unmotivated to actually leave their houses and go vote!  This is yet another instance of the decline in discipline that I'm seeing; people don't do what they know they should do, so parents (and schools, and colleges, and governments, and churches) have to make everything easier.  There's doordash, and bluetooth, and starter buttons on cars, all to make things easier.  I'm certainly not to be excused; the only reason I'm still alive today is because all the things that a diabetic is supposed to do have been made easier, e.g. taking insulin. 

Anyway, don't read this post now, read it shortly before election day, like, for instance, the day they do Fall Back (November 3rd), to get motivated.

I wish I could get some AI apps to write this blog post for me, but I'm afraid that it will have terrible spelling and grammar (more terrible than usual, anyway).

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Pastries!

By now, my readers have concluded that I was not born in the US, but elsewhere, though you might still be uncertain as to exactly where!  I was born, and grew up in Sri Lanka, formerly Ceylon.  ('Sri', in Sri Lanka, is equivalent to 'Great' in Great Britain, so we could leave it out, really.)

In 1505, Portugal invaded Ceylon, aiming to cut out the middlemen in trading for spices.  (They might have aimed for India, and hit Ceylon, due to the vagaries of the currents.)

Later, the Dutch invaded Ceylon—again with a trade motivation—and colonized the entire seaboard.  Unlike the Portuguese, the Dutch shipmen were encouraged to marry among the native population, and over the years, influenced Ceylonese cuisine quite strongly. 

The British succeeded the Dutch (I apologize for not giving the dates of these incursions, but I'm only confident in the 1505 date.)

The Dutch colonists picked up English quickly, and established a symbiotic relationship with the British.  But, most importantly, they set up some businesses that specialized in livestock.  It was no surprise that they also created stores that were effectively delicatessens.

When I was a kid, there were outlets all over the country, which were pastry shops.  Unlike the pastry shops we have around here, most of the snacks that they sold in these stores were savories, not sweets!

There were patties, which were circles of pastry, with a meat filling in the center (the pastry would be folded in half, and pasted together).  Cutlets were balls of beef, or chicken, or fish, or simply mashed potatoes, seasoned nicely, dipped in beaten egg, then in breadcrumbs, and deep fried. 

There were baked snacks, too; hard-boiled eggs, sometimes with a morsel of bacon, rolled in bread dough, and baked.  Pancake rolls were made to accommodate Ceylonese tastes, and were a meat curry mixture, with shredded vegetables, rolled inside a thin pancake covering (much like Chinese Spring Rolls), covered in breadcrumbs, and deep fried. 

When I visited Colombo around 2010, these sorts of stores were flourishing.  Most of the Dutch colonials—descendants of the original Dutch colonists, who had inter-married with Ceylonese—had emigrated to Australia around the 1970's.  But Sri Lankan businessmen had taken over the pastry shops, and though to some degree the quality had declined, the variety of offerings was being maintained. 

This brings me to my sad point: are there no businesses that offer these sorts of foods in the Eastern US?  Pigs in Blankets come close, and—I just remembered—some offerings in gas stations are a little like Ceylonese pastries.  But there really aren't anything that comes any closer to the pastries that I remember!

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Are our Social Media Controlled by Foreign People?

For a long time, I have deplored the spelling, the grammar, and the choice of words used in posts on Facebook, and now on YouTube as well.  Earlier, I would make a comment, correcting the mistake; that's easier when the mistake is merely bad spelling, or a bad choice of words.  But sometimes, the correction requires a complete reformulation of the sentence; something that is a much bigger undertaking. 

So, I kept noting these errors glumly for years, and it began to dawn on me that these mistakes are not commonly made by Americans at all; they certainly appear to be authored by foreign folk.  I don't know enough about these things to be able to identify what nationality the posters belong to, except that they're very likely not native English speakers!

All around the world there is a thriving industry of establishing fake IDs, on Facebook and YouTube, and posting messages and videos intended to make readers angry.  (Whoever pays these jokers to methodically establish IDs, and then write these incendiary posts, doesn't realize that angry citizens are more likely to vote.)