And the Great Republican Trump Slayer Is…

 

First, let us review a few overly obvious insights. The Republican hierarchy does not particularly like President Trump. This is especially true of the New England, Country Club Republican moneyed people such as the Bush’s. They find him marginally better than Hillary Clinton. Trump did not belong to the Skull and Bones or attend Harvard or Yale. His college did not have ivy covered buildings or even one vine of ivy. He has a rough and tumble styled personality with little if any refinement. He doesn’t even hold his pinkie out when sipping tea and he has never even sipped tea, what a barbarian. Trump is uncouth, surprise, surprise. He is insulting and very rough on a refined ear. Never mind that these oh so refined Republicans, much like their Democrat cousins, have family histories steeped in criminal or marginally legal acts through which their fortunes were built. They now set the standard that those who desire to reach the heights of power must, at the very least, pretend to value and toe their line. They are the “old money” and they turn their noses up at the upstarts such as the Trump family along with others whose dirty dealings brought them into money less than four generations back. They really want somebody else to represent their pure and refined Republican Party and have no space for those popularists who appeal to those “flyover people” who hold the coasts apart.

 

One need understand that the elite Republicans and elite Democrats who run the United States are two sides of the same coin and are the problem. They both fear Trump because he could expose their monopoly on power over the last hundred years plus and how they have played the American people with their ruse of there being any difference between the two parties. The political spectrum presented to the American people places the Democrats at the far left edge, or there abouts, and places the Republicans at the far right edge, or there abouts. This is what is drilled into the little heads of mush from the very first lesson given in grade school and the left edge is treated as the center and the natural order of things while the right is to be feared as exclusionary. They never bother to tell you that both groups are exclusionary and being exclusionary is not necessarily an evil thing. We are taught to be exclusionary when choosing friends and to avoid those bad people, who are defined differently depending on where you are raised. The reality is that both the Democrat Party and the Republican Party are both together slightly left of center and sliding ever more to the left while the United States Constitution is quite a bit to the right of both parties and they have slid far from the founding positions and are moving ever more away (see diagram below). What you also notice, if you are actually paying attention, is that where the top has the edges defined as right and left, the bottom has them as Statism and Individualism. This is due to another little lie you were taught, that the Communists were on the left, meaning good, and the Nazis were on the right, meaning bad, and this was taught so true conservatives being equated with Nazism made perfect sense as both were defined as on the right. The truth is Nazism and Communism are two varieties of the same socio-political construct, Socialism. The difference between the two comes down to a single word as the Nazis are National Socialists and the Communists are International Socialists. Their only real difference was the Nazis desired everybody to be German Socialists where the state directed all production and ownership without actually owning them and the Communists wanted to do away with the concept of statehood and sell themselves as the party of the people when in reality they would become the party of the people who were at the top of the government. The Nazis took over the decisions of production while allowing the original owners to continue running the particulars to reach the desired goals allowing those who knew how to manage and get results in place while the Communists removed the owners of the companies and land owners and executed them as villains of the people and then placed their friends in charge of everything and could not figure out why production suffered with people who knew nothing about running a company now running the companies and those who had never grown even a potted plant now becoming the farmers.

 

 

Both forms of Socialism have their problems as does any form of government, the most challenging of all is keeping government from growing and stifling freedom and productivity with too many laws and regulations, of which regulations are the more sinister as they are put in place by bureaucrats who are not elected and usually cannot be fired or even identified. Perhaps a good idea would be for everyone who is in a meeting that approves a new regulation be required to sign their names along with the person who originated the regulation signing it in letters the size of John Hancock when signing the Declaration of Independence. Why not have them put their good old John Hancock on the regulations they design, factory workers are required to sign off on items they worked on defining their parts and job requirements so if it fails down at testing, the company knows who is doing their job incorrectly and can retrain them or replace them. The same should apply to government regulations. This would be an idea that President Trump would likely really find of interest, perhaps somebody could show him this idea for us, and please give us the due credit.

 

We should get back to the subject at hand. Perhaps we should start with a slow build-up though most of you already know who it is the Republicans have chosen to replace President Trump on the 2020 ballot. He is really no stranger to us and has run for President and lost before. He is about to become a carpetbagger and be elected to the United States Senate in a state in which he may have a legal residence but has never represented before in his political life. In many ways, he will be the reverse Hillary. Hillary Clinton went from being from Arkansas to the Senator from New York and this individual will be going from Governor of Massachusetts to the Senator from Utah. She went from flyover country to the big East Coast and he is going from the big East Coast to flyover country. Yes, you guessed it; we are talking about Mitt Romney. Are all the Republicans cheering and excited about not voting for Mitt Romney again? Just think, if Hillary Clinton were to steal the nomination in 2020 and Mitt Romney steals the nomination in 2020, the United States could have the worst turnout at the polls in its history as both parties refuse to support their candidates. It would be such fun to watch nobody really care which one wins, as it would make no difference.

 

We would like to close by counting down some of the most important accomplishments President Trump has performed almost single-handedly and with minimal recognition from the establishment. The reason is it has been the establishment and its tentacles which President Trump has revealed. The media has been laid bare for all to see and their complicity in manipulating the information rather than reporting the information is now understood by all. He has completely blown the lid off there being any real difference between the hardline Republicans and hard line Democrats where the differences are minimal and they actually all but work as one unit. He has made obvious that the real problem is exactly as Ronald Reagan stated those many years ago, “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” (see video below) President Trump wrote an executive order to the executive branch employees and managers in particular that for every new regulation any department writes, they need to retire two older regulations. We will grant that every department has many hundreds if not thousands of regulations which are not enforced. Some selections of these are not enforced for a reason, as they are part of the plan for totalitarian government control in the near future. The idea, which is a tried and true concept used by governments throughout history, is to make all the laws and regulations necessary for the government to assume complete control over the entirety of production and limit all freedoms curtailing even free travel without government approval. These are not provisions for an emergency; they are fully enforceable regulations lying basically dormant. When the time came and the wrong person was in the White House and their party controlled Congress, then all the dormant regulations would come from their sleepy folders and be enforced all at once. What happens is you wake one morning and all of a sudden, you find your personal vehicle impounded and every inch of your life is being turned upside-down. You have new people running your workplace and many people you know disappear never to be seen again unless you run into them by accident. Should you run into them, they are no longer the same, as they appear to have suffered something so traumatic that their minds are as if they were wiped clean and they have been turned into simpletons incapable of free thought.

 

 

By the time you see these people in this state, you will have been conditioned sufficiently yourself to know to simply walk away and accept the loss and say nothing. By then you would have learned to master your facial emotiveness and eradicated all visible signs of caring or being offended by anything. That would come under the definition of survival in this Brave New World where your former workmate now sips their tea with the pinkie held out while murmuring, “I love Big Brother.” How does the United States avoid falling into that trap? That, my friends, is an excellent question. Thus far the only governments to have avoided such or similar fate are those still progressing to that point. Progressing to that point is an appropriate label as it will be the Progressives (also have been called Leftists, Liberals, forward-looking, radicals, revolutionaries, Democrats, Republicans or Socialists) who take the country there. What all these political labels have in common is they are Statists and believe that government can solve every problem and when their government solution causes new problems, the government can solve those just as adequately. The people who are guaranteed to take the nation, any nation, to this point have a title and an occupation, they are called politicians. Politicians are in the business of being in your business. They truly believe their life’s raison d’être is to assure that everybody lives a perfect life and they are going to define exactly what that perfect life should be in the name of individual freedom. They accomplish this over the long haul, as you cannot impinge on people to that great an extent overnight without first conditioning them over most of their lives. How do you condition people to take such a threat to their own free choice? Easy, you teach them to accept all authority, work only in groups where no one person is given recognition though it is expected for the group to carry their weakest members (often they make up the majority in the team and live off other’s efforts), be weak finding offense easily and then reacting as if all is lost and they then go to those who define offenses to receive calming and other therapies. These therapies often include warm blankets, puppies or kittens, coloring books, soft insipid music and therapists or psychologists. They raise a population of what are currently called snowflakes and are actually more like sheep in waiting for their assigned ram to follow everywhere and to define their actions. The rams are bred separately by the politicians and are often their children whom they believe will be assigned by them to rule the New World Order. The world will likely be split into three large groups, Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia (see map below). They will have a reason for their New World Order to be divided, this way they gain additional control as they stage wars between the three factions. One will be your ally and the other your enemy and then at some point they change around to the opposite. This provides a means for rationing and every sort of political heavy-handedness. Control will be the watchword and the world will resemble a combination of George Orwell’s 1984 and Brave New World by Aldous Huxley with a heavy dose of Albert Camus.

 

World at War from 1984 by George Orwell

 

Again, let us return to Mitt Romney and his presumed primary challenge to Donald Trump in 2020. Should Romney succeed and defeat Trump to represent the Republican Party in 2020, we can expect whomever the Democrat Party nominates to win. The truth is, unless the Democrat Party selects Keith Ellison, Mitt Romney would probably lose once more as he cannot get much of the Republican base out to vote in the required swing states which Trump won. His only chance is to get the Democrats to nominate somebody who can be made to appear so controversial and outside the American mainstream, that Romney becomes a life preserver for those people. This was President Trump’s magic ticket; he was the not-Hillary candidate. Had the Democrat Party nominated Bernie Sanders, then Trump very likely would have lost, as the youth vote added to the Democrat base would have won the election for “Bernie” just as they did for President Obama, twice. Either party can still win an election if they can find a sizeable sector and produce for them a solid reason to get out and vote. The Presidency is still about getting your base excited and out to vote. The coming midterm elections will have a very active leftist Democrats voting plus their standard base of voters which could cause problems for the Republican candidates. They are going to have the uphill battle in swing states and will need to give their base reasons to get to the voting booths.

 

This will not be a problem which Mitt Romney will face in Utah as he does have a residence there, he is a member in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, attended Brigham Young University (BYU) as did his fiancée, and his mother was a native of Logan, Utah. Much of his political life was spent as United States Senator and Governor for the state of Massachusetts as well as saving the failing Winter Olympic Games of 2002 held in Salt Lake City, Utah by assuming the role of President of the Organizing Committee. Should Mitt Romney prevail, which all signs claim he shall, this would be his first political position for the state of Utah. His previous life in Utah and working for the Salt Lake City Olympics do make him far less of a carpetbagger than was Hillary Clinton when she ran for the Senate seat for the state of New York. Still, Mitt Romney is a very competent manager and leader and would serve as an adequate, if not excellent, President if only he could be electable. The other point which needs making is that by forcing the Republican Party in Utah to give Mitt Romney their Senate seat is preventing the advancement of other likely presentable and decent candidates. There have also been rumors that the Republican leadership plans to appoint Mitt Romney a plum position of prominence such as Chairman of National Republican Senatorial Committee or talk of him replacing Mitch McConnell and becoming the Republican Senatorial Leader and possibly Majority Leader should the Republicans hold the Senate. All of these speculations point to grooming of Mitt Romney and keeping his name prominently in the news. He is a known critic of President Trump which he moderated while he pleaded his case to be Secretary of State but resumed attacking the President even taking a swipe when announcing his run for the Utah Senate seat. We can expect Mitt Romney to run the Republican #Never Trump wing of the party taking opposing views and blocking a goodly amount of President Trump’s initiatives. This could become an ugly conflict fought out in full public view with President Trump utilizing his Twitter Account while Mitt Romney will utilize and ever eager media which will feed on anything he states which can be turned against the President no matter the intent by Romney. The media will use Romney to fuel their war on President Trump. The difficulty Mitt Romney will face is the lack of honesty perceived to exist, or the lack thereof, in the media being so strong that his message, no matter how it is presented, will be ignored or simply not believed to be valid as reported. This will mean that Romney will need a secondary means for getting his message heard. This is where President Trump has proven effective, using the media as his own tool to wield while still getting his message out. The only problem is sifting through the noise to find the nuggets of actual message and intent, not just ridicule. What will a nation decide if they need to choose between Donald Trump and Mitt Romney and will the people’s choice even matter or will the game be fixed as per the Democrats selecting Hillary Clinton. If the Republicans are perceived to have put in the fix to nominate Mitt Romney, then we would not give a plug nickel of a chance for his winning the Presidency. His age precludes his being patient and we doubt he has given up on getting the gold ring and winning the biggest prize, the Oval Office.

 

Beyond the Cusp

 

Politics in America Laid Bare

 

Politics in America has become a naked beast beating its chest and snarling at the election of one of the people, and not one from the political class, to the highest post in the land. The entireties of the Democrat Party in both the House of Representatives and Senate along with the majority of the leftists who support them have been completely unified in their opposition to everything having to do with President Donald Trump. They are opposed to the legality of his being elected. They see conspiracies in everything which caused his winning the election. They believe that there was interference against Hillary Clinton caused and financed by the Russian government and Vladimir Putin resulting in the Trump election. They despise the fact that the Electoral Congress can be permitted to allow the person not receiving the majority of the popular vote to still win the election, let alone by a commanding amount. Equally laid bare is the opposition by many in the heart of the Republican Party other than simply the most liberal, this core of the Republicans led by Senator John McCain, former President George W. Bush, Mitt Romney and seemingly far too many more. What has become apparent to us is that those who believe that the political class is made up of people whom, by their very nature, education, breeding and innate abilities, are better than those over whom they rule. Yes, they believe they have been placed in the government to rule over the remainder of the population and not to represent those who voted for them.

 

There are reasons as to why they believe they are superior to the general population. Far too many politicians are the children of people who were in politics, worked in the party and whose children are being groomed to follow in their parents privileged footprints. Many politicians were educated in elite private schools and brought up with privilege and from this came away with a feeling of superiority. Others actually came into politics from other areas and occupations but when one gets to Washington D.C. the majority have spent their entire life in the political arena. Spending their entire lives in private schools and then politics never having any interaction with what most would refer to as normal people often referred to as “Joe Six Pack” and have led very sheltered and protected lives. This has led to some politicians believing that they were destined to lead and their positions are a result of their breeding, privileged lives and higher intelligence. Their lives of general comfort and once in Washington ability to be above many laws simply adds to their self-fed-worth. Once in Washington D.C. they are granted freedom from parking tickets and as long as they can claim they were heading to a vote in Congress or some meeting, they are free from traffic violations including speeding. Finally, the largest invulnerability, they cannot be arrested for insider trading which when combined with their inside knowledge of what companies will soon receive huge government contracts signaling them to buy stock or the opposite of a company about to lose a contract which they can sell that stock, the members of Congress often become multi-millionaires within a few short years in Washington D.C.

 

These not so small differences between the American political class and everyone else are also part of another divide, a social and financial divide. The very wealthy who make the majority of their earnings through investments are almost entirely free from paying income taxes as they earn no income, they receive dividends. These people rub elbows with the political class making the political class feel even further removed from the average Americans. These people share the power over the remainder through campaign contributions, insider trading information, inside information on coming legislations and excessive influence over that legislation shared between each other, and enjoying entertaining evenings with drinks and access, these two classes form seamlessly into the power structure which decide much of the laws and interventions into personal lives which both conspire as they run the government. There is an unspoken agreement between the political class and the elite mega-business with wealth classes in which in exchange for preferential legislation these people of wealth and influence promise not to interfere with politics beyond campaign contributions. These guarantees especially extend not to take the office of any politician by running against them plus leaving the top positions to the political class as they are the only who are trained for these spots in exchange for legislative input. This is the agreement which Donald Trump broke when he ran and won the Presidency.

 

Now we need to be careful and clear. Nowhere near all politicians have these moral deficiencies whereby they sell out to those with the influence and money to cause legislation to at the least seldom harm their interests. These politicians are often easily recognized as they receive little if any assistance in their reelection efforts by the central party operations. The ones who are completely honest and solely working for their constituents back home as they will very often be opposed in the primary races every reelection effort with the party supporting their challenger. Eventually these politicians will lose their office and everything can return to what the party would refer to as normal. The political class work so closely together that they hold their fellow politicians as cohorts who join them as the ruling elite as more important along with the financial elite who pay for their campaigns, will provide them nice well-paying positions after retirement and with whom they often socialize as the community whom they serve and the voters are simply the rabble they must deal with all too regularly just to retain their pampered positions and their gravy-train lifestyles.

 

There are two forces opposing President Trump, one Democrat and one Republican. Let us talk about the Republicans first as most of what we say about them also applies to the Democrats. There are a fair number of Republicans who are actually leftists, not simply left-leaning or liberal, but true leftists. They believe in government solutions to every problem they encounter and believe that the closer to the top, to Washington D.C., the more efficient and better planned any solution can be made. Despite theoretical and experimental proof that the best solutions are those devised as locally as possible are the most efficient and the higher any solution is imposed from, the less likely it is that their solutions will be easily or properly applied across the board. Leftists may have conservative or liberal views and still be a leftist as leftists support larger government independent of their political bend. These two separate varieties of leftists will often work together in an I’ll scratch your back and you scratch mine trading support for one another’s legislative efforts. With either one, the people lose as neither cares about political limitations legally placed on the Federal Government by the Constitution. They believe that more government means better governing and governing is good for the people. There is another name for these people other than leftist, it is called fascists. Donald Trump is attempting to reduce government by undoing regulations which he can do without Congress and then working with Congress to reduce government and lower taxes. The Republican leftists who believe that more regulations and more government is better governance are fighting for everything they believe to be holy by fighting against President Trump.

 

Then there are a number of Republicans who believe that Trump is an interloper, an impostor, somebody completely unfit to be President. Many Democrats and almost all leftists also believe these to be truths. But there is a special group who are particularly put out by the election of President Trump. These are the many people who believe they should have won the Presidency or should have been the candidate to run against Hillary Clinton instead of Donald Trump. Heading this list is Senator John McCain followed closely by Jeb Bush and family, Mitt Romney and a number of the other Republicans who lost in the primaries to Trump as well as other Republicans who simply believe they are far more qualified to hold the office and take President Trump to be a personal insult. Then there are the core Republican power structure who feel they have lost control of their party as President Trump is out of and beyond control. They feel they no longer make the policies and this threatens their lifestyles. Should they no longer be capable of delivering the goods legislatively, then they may find themselves no longer invited to all the right social events. President Trump has done something which we believe is almost fun to watch, he has erased all the rules as to how power and money influence legislation and the distribution of power in politics. For libertarians that just might result in their dreams realized, though somewhat limited extent and for some it will appear a waste as their pet ideas may not be improved by the Trump Presidency.

 

For the Democrats who have unfortunately sold out to the leftist interest, President Trump in a nightmare. When your party has based its future on government power empowering those who are willing to support their election, then a President devoted to deregulation and limited government is the worst nightmare imaginable. Make that President an in-your-face fool willing to be braggadocios and who makes his responses to your challenges farcical, then his entire existence becomes an offense. This is the source of an echo chamber which has reverberated throughout the terrain of our social media. This has led to people defriending one another and even to break-ups of relationships and even marriages. Remarkably, nobody from BTC has been defriended that we are aware of, but please don’t take that as a challenge, we like all our friends no matter their political bend. So, the Democrats have any of a number of reasons to unite against President Trump from his smaller government plans, his Tweets being particularly unrestrained, and he is not a Democrat. For many Democrats, when it comes to President Trump, there is absolutely nothing to like. As far as many are concerned, Donald Trump is so full of hot air he could be a hot air balloon, or was that hot air buffoon.

 

Trumps Vehicle to the White House was a Hot Air Balloon Filled With Hot Angry Rhetoric

 

President Trump has revealed the truth; in the United States, there are simply two actual teams, those who are part of the political system and the rest of the American people. Those who wield the political power are in their own little world where they control the lives of the rest of the population and the rest of the population is supposed to simply say thank you for caring for us. The rest of the population, the political class hope, are so busy working and getting through their busy lives that they will hopefully never wake and see that they have been played. Well, thanks to President Trump, many in the American Public now realize what has been happening. The collusion between many in the media, the entertainment and sports enterprises, academia and the political class have worked with other elitists to misrepresent much of what has been the reality coming from their inglorious alliance and how the people have been played for fools much to the amusement of these members of the preferred classes. The worst fear is close to coming to fruition, the people might be awakening and when they do, they might remain alert and use the one thing they have at their disposal, their votes. But there is a salvation for the elites, they control the levers of power and how those who run for office are chosen. Unless people who are honest and desire to take the responsibility for change into their own hands are willing to run for office, then the only candidates will be those who the political parties choose which mean more of the same. Nothing will really change until perhaps the parties themselves are replaced. President Washington warned against political parties believing they would be the end of the republic. How correct he may have been.

 

Beyond the Cusp

 

What Political Message Have Elections Taught?

 

What we need do is to seek out what politics or which politicians invigorated their electorate and the means and methods they used which proved more effective than the others did. To do this we need to look at elections of the Twenty-First Century starting with George W. Bush and ignoring third party candidates, as that has been the way of things. In the 2000 election, we saw George W. Bush running against Albert Gore. Both of these candidates are so exciting that we can refer to one as watching grass grow and the other as watching paint dry. When it all was over it came down to divining the desire of voters and hanging chads and a Supreme Court decision calling the circus to a close with the winner according to the final count before the bell rang being grass growing, George W. Bush. So, this was politics as it had been in the Twentieth Century, a form of politics which died in this century as it no longer plays in the climate of reality TV such as naked survival, alone in the worst climates on earth and we are waiting for the how long can you stay in a viper pit without being bit, losers are buried. How far is television from the Roman Colosseum?

 

The next election in 2004 we saw George W. Bush running for reelection against John F. Kerry. The most interesting item in this election also kind of explains who won and why. John Kerry’s middle name does not really start with an F, or it starts with an F, ends with an F, and is one letter long which is an F. John Kerry was running for the Senate in Massachusetts and decided that having the initials JFK would really help him sound more like John Fitzgerald Kennedy and gain some of the shine and famous recognition using the same initials as the most popular figure in Massachusetts politics. So, in his normal fashion of faking it, he faked three serious injuries for which he required Band-Aids to get three Purple Hearts within four months which he wrote up the recommendations himself and that got him sent home early, so adding the F to the middle of his name was child’s play for this faker. So, this was an election between grass growing and a liar and a fake who nobody believed or really trusted so grass growing won again, only bigger. Again, this election was old school and boring and nothing to see there either.

 

On we go to the 2008 elections and finally the start with the new age of American politics. Here we have a contest between Barack Hussein Obama and John Sidney McCain. John McCain was extremely competent in carrying on the Republican Party technique of being grass growing, and he did it extremely well, much to his detriment. The Democrat candidate, Barack Obama, was fireworks and all about the politics of you. This is where you are defined by policies which excite the younger voters as if they are excited with your policy positions, they will volunteer and climb the Himalayas if that is required to win. And unlike former generations where the young were not interested in politics, the latest couple of generations are all about policy and politics. They are idea driven and can be caught up in a good campaign if it makes them believe. Barack Obama had the idea of the first Black President which got the left wing all a titter and ready to make history, and for the older voters, it was the making history and proving they were not racist. But the youth, though exited by the mantra of first Black President, required much more. The youth needed to know what it was that Barack Obama was going to stand for and what drove him and were to be his policies. This was where he hit it out of the park. For the most part candidate Obama was whatever you wanted to believe, that was his love too. President Obama was the master manipulator of the thoughts of others. His eloquent and smooth delivery and the wording left everyone painting their own picture onto a blank canvas. Barack Obama masterfully would talk both sides of every issue he talked about leaving the listener to decide what they believed and then it appeared that so did Barack Obama. He was noncommittal talking in double circular ovals and squiggly lines leaving everyone assured that yes was maybe while no was why not and all of it was but wisps of smoke which when one finally emerged dizzied and befuddled they would soon decide that what they heard had to be what they wanted to hear and thus Barack Obama was all things to all people. There were those who realized that he was not standing for anything and they tried to call attention to the con-game being played by Barack Obama and you will never guess what they were called by the mainstream media. You might think they were called, “Racist,” but that would be exactly correct. Any discontent or criticism of Barack Obama was labeled as racist and bigoted thus being able to simply deflect any criticism and parry truthful accusations not allowing anything negative to be applied thus we witnessed the initial settling of the whole of the media with the smallest of exceptions aligned as the supportive propaganda arm for the Democrat Party. So, in the end we had a contrast between watching grass grow against a three-ring circus advertised as the greatest show on Earth. Guess which won. Nope, no watching grass grow, this time that lost and lost big. But do not let that shake the Republican Party because in 2012, they gave us watching grass grow once again in the form of Mitt Romney and got a repeat performance of 2008, they lost. So we had Barack Obama two in a row using excitement and selling political positions or the appearance thereof.

 

So, here we come to 2016 and all kinds of insanity. The Republicans came out with seventeen candidates. One was Jeb Bush who had more campaign funds than all the rest of the candidates combined. He was such a great example of watching grass grow that he never got past the first couple of primaries. The remaining candidates were various types of grass growing, some latex paint drying along with enamel paint and some good old oil paint drying, one serious former CEO, one world famous neurosurgeon and a circus barker. The nice thing was all of these candidates talked their best on policies and were pretty much all the same; well, except the circus barker who had policies mixed with ridiculous statements and tone of controversies. Guess who won? You got it, the circus barker won.

 

Meanwhile, over at the Democrat Party there were only two candidates, one was a traditional candidate and the other a wild eyed, far left, older politician who often screamed out policy positions and really wound up the young supporters and he was excited right along with his youthful supporters. This was an interesting primary where the wild, screaming policy-wonk started off really slow but caught fire about one-third the way into the primaries and with plenty of time to close. The standard and favored candidate started fine but bogged down in malaise and lack of feelings and absolutely little to no policy positions. Actually, this candidate spent much of the time fighting accusations of mishandling e-mails or misconduct of different varieties which questioned their character and trustworthiness. The wild leftist was closing and the supporters were getting wildly excited thinking they just might have a chance to win it all when the word came down, there were even more super delegates which consists of Senators and Representatives from Congress, members of the Democratic National Committee and notable Democrats, including such as former presidents and vice presidents and Democrats of note. This came to contain sufficient, apparently, numbers to assure that the conventional candidate wins because the Democrats already had their rallying cry, elect the first woman President.

 

The Democrats had zeroed in on one of the things which had won for President Obama, the theme of being the first Black President, thus Hillary would win as the first Woman President. They ignored the excitement the youth had for what they believed was a candidate who understood their concerns and knew the policies they desired. The Republican candidate who was cast as a clown and a carnival barker by the media, virtually all media uniformly could but laugh at candidate Donald Trump. So the scene is set, the stage lights on and the show begins. The campaign was one which was more incongruous, bizarre and incoherent as any we have ever witnessed, including the one in which we were participants as third party candidate for the District Eight in Maryland’s Seat in the United States Congress.

 

In this one, we had Hillary doing her best possible job of character assassination against Trump while he left the candidate assassination to the media and the realities of her history. Trump also relied on the media to carry his talking points as he mixed them with outrageous statements. The barker did do one thing different, and that was he talked purely message and positions on the economy, immigrations, terrorism and rebuilding the country to lead the free world again and he stuck with that message at every campaign rally which he did almost constantly. The other spent their time accusing the other of being unserious as a candidate who did not deserve to be President while she was due the office as the first Woman President plus she had done all the right things to be owed the Presidency. There was one report which nailed the reality and why Donald Trump won and this theory was, those who supported him ignored his Tweets and listened to his positions while the media ignored his positions and believed his Tweets.

 

Conclusion time for what does it take to be successful as a Presidential candidate in the Twenty First Century. The simple way to put it, you need to concentrate on message, message, message. The youth vote is the secret as they are also the volunteers which can carry a campaign. The youth in this generation realize that leadership of the nations, and possibly the world, is important and that it is your beliefs and positions on critical themes such as the economy, foreign policies and interactions which includes immigration, foreign interventions and the wisdom and what reasons it would take to cause the United States to send troops, what one would do in any situation which required an American response such as if a foreign nations crossed a “red line” or threatened an ally. These are questions they want to hear about but they also have some dangerous ideas themselves. Many youth still are in the grips of the socialist, anti-authoritarian, anti-capitalist, rejectionist theories they were pumped with by their professors in university.

 

Many have not experienced sufficient situations in life to understand the long-term effects of some of their favorite pet policies. The most dangerous of these is fighting income inequity which they were told is a great evil. There is an easy way to point out the destructive effect of this idea, and that is to compare a ditch digger (which will soon be a robotic position along with almost all minimum wage positions) with a surgeon, we like to use brain surgeon. These positions would never be considered to be worthy of receiving equal pay thus are two positions which contain a huge income inequality. Much of income inequality is driven by knowledge, experience and responsibilities. These students have been told of CEO’s who make millions of dollars a year for making obvious decisions, or at least that is the way it is presented and their professors love to point out how the students themselves could make these same decisions given the opportunity. That is a lie as these professors have little if any idea what decisions managers make and there is a simple and necessary policy about managers. Managers need to earn close to or preferably more than those they manage and a CEO manages people who make six and seven figure incomes, make decisions which concern billions of dollars, make decisions which effect thousands of employees and with one swipe of the pen can cause ten thousand people to be fired or two thousand to be hired, all this also decides the health of their company. Often you will hear of a CEO who comes to a company, fires one third of the employees, closes three of the seven manufacturing plants, ends all but four of the company’s products and loses one-billion dollars the first year and only makes three-hundred million the next year and was lauded as a genius. This CEO was brought back to his company and where we may have a few points slightly wrong, the losses and gains in profits are accurate and the man saved the company, his name was Steve Jobs and the company was Apple.

 

What sounds like a failure may be an intelligent realignment as the slimming of a company to make it more competitive. Another person may have added employees and appeared to grow a company by making twice as many numbers of the same products but as sales collapsed that year he was a disaster. Another myth is that companies are in business to employ people. Wrong, the company is in business to make profits for their stockholders and that might require automation and reduction in workforce as McDonalds is in the process of trying to do. This idea of a $15.00/hr. minimum wage sounds wonderful unless you are seeking a starting position job because compared to current jobs, almost half of minimum wage jobs might disappear should the minimum wage be jumped by so much. Raising the minimum wage simply prices any number of jobs right out of the job market. How does that happen, don’t the companies have to keep somebody doing that job. Well, yes, and let me give you a great example. We will assume we own a shoe store which has a decent business and we have four full time sales people and five part time sales people and a stock person who also sweeps the stock room, vacuums after the store closes and keeps the stock room straight. Now some goody-goody decides to up the minimum wage by fifty percent. Well, now one of the full time sales people, the one closing the store which will often be the owner who will run the vacuum and clean the bathroom and runs the stock and there is no longer a stock person. We would also let at least one part time sales person go, the one with the lowest sales average and possibly one full time sales person and the owner would work opening to closing and might have their wife or one of their children work some hours when business peaked around Christmas. Now how did the raising of the minimum wage help the stock person? Are they making more money or are they making less.

 

What will almost doubling minimum wage do? Things have consequences and many of these consequences are not taught in university, they are learned in life and life is a very demanding instructor. Those of us who are fortunate never have life teaching them many lessons; those are truly blessed people who need to be thankful for their life. Automation and robotics and Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems are going to alter the job market drastically and the higher the minimum wage is placed the faster many jobs will disappear. For a good example one need look no further than auto manufacturing. There used to be near to if not over one hundred people on an assembly line which made maybe twenty cars a day way back when. Now there are less than twenty people on an entire assembly line including sub-assemblies which we did not count in the above description and these lines can put out twenty cars an hour and within the next twenty years the number will drop to under ten and even five while even more cars will be produced. This is reality and as we know the ATM machines led to less tellers at the bank and the ones there are usually bored stiff and many banks have management level people who are also assigned to do teller position work when volume required such. Also, ditch diggers have been replaced by a backhoe, twenty diggers, gone. This will become true for every job even to lawyers and auditors as AI takes ever-greater powers.

 

ATM vs. Bank Teller

 

Some jobs have been altered drastically by modern technology. Auto mechanics now must be trained on diagnostic equipment and specialized tools and how to handle electronic ignitions and make adjustments through programming the modules in the engine and elsewhere. Wrenches, well they are still required as are screw drivers but hammers are a thing of the past, well, not completely, just do not get caught adjusting anything with a hammer if you like your job. Trains no longer need anyone to drive them as they are becoming automated, even the subways as they modernize. There will soon be automated trucks driving the roads and there will be automated cab drivers and in our lifetimes, we should live the necessary twenty to thirty years, all cars will be automated and selecting human driver will have your car emit a signal and do not be surprised if you get additional scrutiny by police just waiting for you to make a human mistake. Eventually driving a car will be illegal which will make life interesting. Your windows will be computer screens which can show you anything except where your car is going, as they do not wish to scare you to death. Fully automated roads will have no traffic signals and the cars will speak to one another and miss each other by millimeters and it will presumably be safer than it is now. Things are going to start becoming unrecognizable and for many our age it already has. When the AI gets to the point that it can design the next generation AI and can design the manufacture of the next generation AI we had best practice our best puppy dog begging eyes and being really cute as our place will be as the robot’s pet. Hopefully somewhere they will place in the robotic basic program along with the twenty (the original were three) Isaac Asimov Laws (but I-robot showed the problem with his laws so we are guessing it will take a few more) includes one which requires every robot to have at least one human pet it cares for and that the number of human pets is a status symbol. The changes are coming and humans are soon to be as obsolete as dogs presumably are to the running of any city, we may require a few but those will be replaced with robot dogs real soon.

 

Beyond the Cusp