China
6080 kHz would be a great frequency to listen to the Voice of America‘s (VoA’s) election coverage – if the Voice of Turkey wouldn’t start to interfere with their English program, at 04:00 a.m. UTC. That drowns VoA completely.
4960 kHz, also from the VoA’s Sao Tome and Principe relay, offers an acceptable alternative, provided that you live in the countryside and have some outdoor wire in the air.
Yes, there’s hate in the air. There was hate in the air yesterday, there’s hate in the air today, and there’ll be hate in the air tomorrow. And anyone on the political left who’s cultivating his or her schadenfreude today should think of America’s political prisoners – Chelsea Manning not least: they are going to have a hard time, unless they get pardoned by the outgoing president. And even if they should be pardoned, other prisoners will take their place, and suffer.
A question that came to my mind this morning: it’s often been said that a vote for “third candidates” was a wasted vote.
My view is somewhat different. I wouldn’t have voted for either Clinton, nor Trump, but for Jill Stein.
Those who voted for Clinton as the “lesser evil” – if they accused third-candidate voters of wasting their vote – maybe they should think if it wasn’t them who did so.
This is what a Dem said this year:
I hold little hope that a political revolution will occur within the Democratic Party without a sustained outside movement forcing truly transformational change. I am inclined to believe that it would be easier to build a new party than to save the Democratic Party from itself.
There’s one more thing: American civil society will have to come back if they want to counter racism and sexism. Trump called his useful idiots a movement. But a movement doesn’t define itself by who does not belong. A movement is inclusive – it demands access for those who are locked out of society. But it doesn’t want to lock others out in their place.
Frankly, you can’t have a nation forever where the White House and the mainstream media need to remind people that you must not hate or shoot someone because of his skin color. This kind of reason needs to grow within neighborhoods and regions, not from the top.
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John Paul Young…..Crikey, what a past national embarrassment. When in my Fela Kuti/Nigerian/African phase at uni, I used to visit a household of Lacan/Foucault/Derrida etc post modernist academics most Sat afternoons. Instead of labouring over another unreadable paper on some rabbit ears …concept…. rabbit ears beyond my ken, they would be watching bloody Countdown of which JPY was a staple. I used to cringe with embarrassment, and wonder if I should have got a job as a brick layer.
Do a wicki or similar search on Principe and Sao Tome as I recently did, and you will be pleasantly surprised. Very small populations which practice a happy system of democracy. Unlike their failed mainland state neighbors, Guinea and Guinea Bissau.
And the read of the week. This Present Darkness: A History of Nigerian Organised Crime by Stephen Ellis. OUP 2016. I will spare you a review, but if you have an understanding of the role played of African fraternities ( also referred to as cults by folk who know bugger all) and traditional religious belief systems, you are on your way. And no, it is not a simple history of criminal activities undertaken by Nigerians.
Donald Bloody Trump. So damn exhausting keeping up, I’m giving up and looking forward to my next great read. A guy has got to evaluate his options, and since I just about did the did the Big Check out in the local hospital – dead serious – and am now facing at least three months convalescence.
Even that had its amusing moments. A friend drove up from the capital with reading materials which included Millenium: A History of Our Last Thousand Years by Felipe Fernandez- Armesto, a massive historical tome which I don’t recommend. One of the nurses asked me what I was reading, and I told her The Big Book on Erotic Literature. Caught her taking a sneak peek later in the day, followed by a look of total incomprehension. After that the nurse health nazis no longer made oblique remarks about my litany of bad habits leading to the near death experience, and left me to myself looking very unfashionable in a hospital night gown..
Glad to hear that you have survived, KT, and I hope you’ll get well, soon.
I will spare you a review, but …
Why? You could write a blog, couldn’t you?
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@KT – Sorry to hear you’ve been ill. Hope you’re feeling a bit better and are now out of the shop.
@JR – To be honest, voting for Jill Stein (who seems a bit nutty from what little I’ve seen of her) was essentially a failure to make the actual choice presented at the election. For those who simply could not bring themselves to vote for Clinton or Trump this might be understandable, for those who actually thought that Stein, Johnson, or McMullin were better candidates but found Trump reprehensible – well, that is rather less easy to understand.
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There’s a blogger who →explained in May why he wouldn’t work for Clinton (for whom he voted, I can’t tell, but it wouldn’t be Trump).
I think I can understand people who have voted for third-party candidates for a long time, even if I wouldn’t have done that. But the point this time, in my view (as an outsider) was this: you can’t take democracy seriously and vote for either of these autocrats/manipulators.
The Dems need competitors who may become agents of democratic change – from outside. And on the conservative wing, America needs a completely new political organization. The Republican Party is crap.
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Thnx guy.
I just can’t see Trump lasting the full term. Just doesn’t have the temperament for potus and he is more than likely to be impeached a la Nixon. Pence would be favoured by the old guard of the GOP, as he would be far more manageable and less a loose canon.
The present implosion of the GOP has been brewing for decades and he is the logical outcome for the Nativists wing (versus the old empire outreach types).
Have no sympathy for the Mexican state in the present imbroglio as it is narco political establishment right up to its Presidency, however you look at it and I can provide a massive bibliography to sustain this claim (thanks to my local library).
The healing process (which wont take place in our lifetimes) must include dismantling the War on Drugs and the DEA. the latter now more powerful than the CIA. The present Deep State instrument of US foreign policy.
(As an aside, Clinton accepted corporate donations from Purdue Big Pharma the producer of oxycontin, the heroin like pain killer which is presently decimating whats left of unemployed communities in the rust belt states.)
The only positive for me is the abandonment of free trade agreements, the conveyer belts of transnational corporate interests, even if China gets a lift with the failure of the latest Asia Pacific free trade agreement.
Look, lets face it. The US is a Babel of Parallel Political Voices and that will be its final undoing.
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