Americans Roll the Dice With President Donald Trump

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The forgotten men and roomen of our country will be forgotten no longer.

– President elect Donald Trump in his victory speech

They said it couldn’t happen, but those of us who have been intimately studying what’s been going on since the financial crisis knew he could win. So here we are, in the midst of a historical populist revolt that brought a man who has never held public office to the Presidency.

I have so many thoughts to share, putting them down in a coherent manner within a single post is going to be a real challenge. As such, I’ve decided to separate this piece into sections. Let’s start with the following.

What Happened? 

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CBS Reports – Pennsylvanians Say Their Vote For Trump Was Changed to Clinton

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While not unexpected, this appears to be the first confirmed issue with voting machines so far today. It happened in Pennsylvania.

CBS reports:

There have been some scattered issues where voters are encountering problems.

Election judges in Clinton Township, Butler County confirmed there were issues with two of their eight automated voting machines. Most of the issues came when people tried to vote straight party ticket.

However, other said they specifically wanted to vote for Republican Donald Trump only to see their vote switched before their eyes to Democrat Hillary Clinton.

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Final Thoughts on the U.S. Presidential Election

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Election 2016 has been extremely bittersweet for me. On the positive side, through both the Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump grassroots movements, we have seen clear proof that a huge number of Americans accurately understand that the current system is totally rigged and simply not working for them. These people didn’t migrate toward these two candidates for some tweaks to the system here and there, their supporters want full scale paradigm level change.

As such, rather than dwelling on the differences between these two populist movements, let’s consider some of the areas where they overlap.

1. Trade — Opposition to NAFTA and current “trade” deals such as TPP, TTIP, and TISA have been central to both the Sanders and Trump campaigns.

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Here’s What Happened When a Hillary Supporting MIT Professor Decided to Analyze Her Emails…

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A few days ago, Cesar A. Hidalgo published a very important article titled, What I Learned From Visualizing Hillary Clinton’s Emails.

So who is Cesar Hidalgo?

César A. Hidalgo is associate professor of media arts and sciences at the MIT Media Lab and the author of Why Information Grows: The evolution of order from atoms to economies. He has also lead the creation of data visualization sites that have received more than 100 million views, including datausa.io, dataviva.info, atlas.media.mit.edu, immersion.media.mit.edu, pantheon.media.mit.edu, streetscore.media.mit.edu, and others (see chidalgo.com for more details).

At this point, I’m sure you’re wondering why I’m highlighting this guy’s post two days before the Presidential election. It’s for two reasons. First, the piece offers a very good representation of the sort of peer pressure that can come down upon an academic for being seen as having the “wrong” political opinion. Second, and perhaps most important, his email visualization tool taught him that the current state of our government in these United States simply can’t achieve the best outcomes for the public at current scale (size, geographic/cultural diversity, etc).

With all that out of the way, I’m going to highlight what I found to be the most powerful part of his piece.

Enjoy:

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Meet the Million Dollar Donors (*Hint: They Are ‘With Her’)

A few days ago the Wall Street Journal published a very powerful piece titled, The Million-Dollar Donors. What you’ll see should sufficiently dash any and all fantasies that Hillary Clinton is for the average person.

Here are a few of the graphics:

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Why is #SpiritCooking Trending on Twitter?

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I’m not one to shy away from Hillary Clinton related controversies, but this whole Spirit Cooking topic just seemed too far over the top to not have a good explanation. As such, I’ve avoided writing about it, hoping that someone from the Clinton team would come out and put all the craziness to rest. That has not happened.

Indeed, the topic was trending at #1 for much of the morning on Twitter, and continues to trend at #3 many hours later. All day, I’ve been trying as hard as possible to disassociate my confirmation bias about the Clintons, from this story. As such, I’ve been waiting for a good “debunking” piece to come out, but have yet to see one.

For those of you who are interested in the topic, here’s a measured take from The Washington Times:

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Video of the Day – John Pilger Interviews Julian Assange

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The following is just a brief clip from the full interview, which will be released on Saturday.

Enjoy.

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New Poll Shows Americans Think the Media is a Much Greater Threat to Election Than Russian Hackers

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These are some pretty damning results for the mainstream media. Not only does the American public see the media as a bigger threat to election results than Russian hackers, it’s not even close.

The Washington Examiner reports:

Voters fear the media far more than Russian hackers when it comes to tampering with election results.

According to a Suffolk University/USA Today poll, 46 percent of likely voters believe the news media is “the primary threat that might try to change the election results.”

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While You Were Watching the World Series Some Very, Very Big News Broke

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While most Americans were captivated by last night’s World Series Game 7, some very, very big news broke. Normally, I’d summarize the news and provide my perspective before highlighting source text, but in this case I want to provide the information first.

The real blockbuster came from Fox News’ Bret Baier, who released some serious information courtesy of two sources at the FBI. Real Clear Politics summarized Bret’s primary conclusions based on his conversations:

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Total Desperation Sets In as President Obama Plays the Woman Card

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With neither the racist nor the Putin-puppet label sticking to Trump, team Clinton and its lobotomized surrogates have regressed back to square one: playing the woman card.

As I noted in a post earlier this week, a professor of linguistics at Berkeley just published an article at Time claiming (with zero evidence of course), that the Hillary Clinton email server scandal only exists because she is a woman. Here’s a brief snippet of what she said:

‘It’s not about emails; it’s about public communication by a woman’ 

I am mad. I am mad because I am scared. And if you are a woman, you should be, too. Emailgate is a bitch hunt, but the target is not Hillary Clinton. It’s us.

The only reason the whole email flap has legs is because the candidate is female. Can you imagine this happening to a man? Clinton is guilty of SWF (Speaking While Female), and emailgate is just a reminder to us all that she has no business doing what she’s doing and must be punished, for the sake of all decent women everywhere. There is so much of that going around.

It’s not about emails; it’s about public communication by a woman in general. Of course, in the year 2016, no one (probably not even The Donald) could make this argument explicitly. After all, he and his fellow Republicans are not waging a war on women. How do we know that? They have said so. And they’re men, so they must be telling the truth.

I know. It’s really hard to believe the above is real, but it is.

Moving along, President Obama himself is now getting in the mud.

Here’s what he had to say today in Ohio, according to NBC:

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