"The Race That Stops A Nation" isn't describing the Presidential race, its the Moniker of The Melbourne Cup, a horse race first held in 1861 on the first Tuesday in November. Cup Day is a state holiday and most people try and make it into a long weekend as the seemingly endless stream of SUVs towing boats and camper trailers past our front gate on Friday afternoon attested. Cup day is a day when non gamblers have a bet on the horses and non drinkers can be seen with a glass of champagne. Right across Victoria people hold parties and dress up in their Sunday best, praying that our spring weather won't collapse back into winter. Most of the rest of the country will stop to listen to the race, such is the interest, my father told me ,that during WWII Australian Army signals nets in the Pacific overloaded on race day and urgent operational traffic couldn't get through.
This year we enjoyed ourselves in a week long series of parties and revels that concluded yesterday which I think we thoroughly deserved after a winter of chemotherapy, mastectomy, radiotherapy and the wettest winter since 1905. We are now forswearing alcohol for a month and preparing for what lies ahead. For my partner it is a breast reconstruction now that her cancer appears to be in remittance. For me, it is farm work to make up for the time lost in endless hospital waiting rooms and doctors offices. It is not all bleak. I am now a grandfather to a baby girl who is cute as a button and I await the future with hope rather than sinful despair.
Part of that hope is the possibility that an end may be in sight for Americas self inflicted woes, but we shall see on Tuesday. I attach a link to John Michael Greers summary of the situation – that Trump at least offers hope of principled change for the better while Clinton does not seem to offer anything new.
"..Donald Trump, by contrast, has been arguing against several core elements of that consensus since the beginning of his run for office. Specifically, he’s calling for a reversal of federal policies that support offshoring of jobs, the enforcement of US immigration law, and a less rigidly confrontational stance toward Russia over the war in Syria. It’s been popular all through the current campaign for Clinton’s supporters to insist that nobody actually cares about these issues, and that Trump’s supporters must by definition be motivated by hateful values instead, but that rhetorical gimmick has been a standard thoughstopper on the left for many years now, and it simply won’t wash. The reason why Trump was able to sweep aside the other GOP candidates, and has a shot at winning next week’s election despite the unanimous opposition of this nation’s political class, is that he’s the first presidential candidate in a generation to admit that the issues just mentioned actually matter. "
https://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=27481991&postID=7523666433928129090
Walrus
If Les Deplorables turn out in greater number just because they have nothing to lose as the Archdruid says and gives a big fat FU middle finger to the Borg, then Trump can win an electoral college landslide. But, the Borgist coalition gets that and have talked a lot about their superior ground game payed for by the vast sums of big money they have raised from Wall St to Hollywood.
In a few days we’ll see who was more motivated. If Trump pulls off this improbable run, it is because Les Deplorables are done with the current Borgist status quo.
Walrus
Your a lucky man. Beautiful grandchild, a partner who must have a shine on her face, a winner at the races, a field to plow and the opportunity to see the American people look towards their future with a cleaner slate.
I initially looked at Trump as a Buffoon similar to P.T. Barnum but then I read some history and saw the true statesman in old P.T. now I have come to realize Trumps love for this country and his value. This is a man that has really never been accepted by the in crowd or establishment as he has gone his own way, in his own way, nor has he been accepted by the Republican establishment. The man has done this on his own, what little help he has received has come from his family, a family any of us would be proud of, he has come from far behind in all his races and won. Now he he has come from well behind and I believe he will make it. What is his gimmic, he has none what he has is a true understanding of the needs in this country as you have elicited. He is also still a buffoon but he our buffoon and shortly Americas buffoon.
Sit back and hug your partner, hug that grandchild and grab a crying towel as history will made Tuesday evening. Good Luck.
Walrus: Get strong for the next set of procedures, hug that baby girl as much as you can, enjoy the sun and love your other half as much as you possibly can.
Thanks for the JMG quote.
One of my cherished intellectual “fantasies” is the Colonel driving over from “wherever” Virginia (no insult colonel, I just have no idea what town you live in) and goes to have an extended dinner with John Michael over in Cumberland and chatting with JMG about politics and the future. Maybe in a while, one or both of them would sit down and write a piece for the rest us us (who would have paid good money to be a fly on the wall) to think about.
Hell, I’d we willing to chip in a Tubman to foot the dinner bill
in my search for enlightenment on the internet I cast a very wide net and entertain viewpoints and opinions from all directions to aid myself in gaining a more complex understanding of the world,
I thought I might be a little eccentric to be balancing the views of Paul Craig Roberts against the insights of John Michael Greer but to then find a link to his site on your blog reassures me that to be of an independent mind it is necessary to also be of an open mind,
I often remark to myself how often each of you three find the similar truths from different directions!
allow me to extend my hopes and wishes for health and happiness to you and your family,
with regards
Matt
IMO this interview with Assange should be watched by every American voter before they cast their vote on tuesday
Assange: Clinton & ISIS funded by same money, Trump won’t be allowed to win (JOHN PILGER EXCLUSIVE)
https://www.rt.com/news/365299-assange-pilger-saudi-clinton/
Mr. Trump is the Republican nominee because of ‘first past the post’ voting. In an IRV (Instant Runoff) scenario I doubt Mr. Trump would have survived to be the Republican nominee.
Trump has, at a minimum, thought about running for President since 1999 when he played with the idea of trying for the Reform Party candidate. He was a supporter of universal health care back then and he was talking aboutit in Sep. 2015.
Why haven’t we heard about this lately? It is because Trump is a salesmen at heart. He understands what sells and he knows how appeal to popular desires. What is selling in America today? “calling for a reversal of federal policies that support offshoring of jobs, the enforcement of US immigration law” is what is selling in America today. He didn’t arrive at this through any understanding or empathy with the American people; he arrived at this particular set of policies by seeing what fired up the crowds. He arrived at it because it sold.
I grew up close to Flint during the 70s/80s and watched the loss of jobs during this time period. Because of this I have a great deal of sympathy for much of what Trump is saying. If what he was saying was backed up by a history of philanthropy, if Mr. Trump’s ego was not so fragile that he had to attack a telenovela actress, if so much of his appeal was not based on demagoguery, and if he wasn’t so easily bated by his political enemies I might have reconsidered my vote.
Interesting news. In SA we have the July Handicap which seems to have the same country stopping and mass festivities / fashions as well. It also has a long history from 1897.
Wishing your partner and yourself peace and inner strength for the day’s ahead.
HOM,
So instead support the candidate that laughed about Qaddafi being raped and murdered, left men to die in Benghazi, conducted a money laundering scheme through the CGI, knows Qatar and SA fund IS (and does business with them anyway), and seems dead set on getting us into a hot war with Russia.
But hey, Donald Trump said mean things. Good for you champ. Nice to see your priorities are in order.
Trump the Closer.
https://youtu.be/vST61W4bGm8
“I had been wondering if Trump was planning some sort of special closing argument. He did not disappoint. In my opinion, his final ad is the political ad of the year, if not the best ever.” – Scott Adams
http://blog.dilbert.com/post/152747601271/trump-the-closer
walrus
God bless you and yours. If you pray, pray for us all. pl
Degringolade
I exist in Alexandria, a town that was Southern until a couple of decades ago. Now it is a bedroom for various strange creatures. Across the river we can see Mt. Doom smoking and rumbling while Sauron contemplates us all and rallies the Borgist Nazgul in preparation. pl
I’m so pleased I found this Blog!
A haven of sanity, humour and Intelligence.
Thank you Sir.
Walrus –
Thanks for the Cup Day news, I hope we here in the USA will all raise a glass of champagne on our first Tuesday, or on the day after no matter who wins.
May God keep your partner in remittance, and your baby granddaughter from ever contracting the same affliction. I hope that no matter whether Clinton or Trump wins here that they will push Congress to adopt a health care system similar to what you have in Australia, but with some of your fair country’s issues worked out.
Here’s the correct link to the Michael Greer article.
http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2016/11/the-last-gasp-of-american-dream.html
Walrus,
Your country produces some fine thoroughbreds and I usually watch the cup on tv, but got too busy at the office and forgot all about it this year. Your horsemen turnout distance runners more than my country (USA) does and you tend to have longer races. That speaks to quality and dedication. This weekend is the Breeders Cup here in the US. Sadly, horse racing is not very popular anymore here any more. Back in the 40s and even the early 50s racing and boxing were the two most popular sports. Both have been greatly surpassed here by the big business team sports.
I will be voting for Trump. As you say, he offers at least the possibility of something new and – just maybe – better. I also think the elites need to be sent a message.
I hope the coming months bear healing and happiness for you and your partner.
Walrus,
Good to hear that you have a small granddaughter to take delight in. I hope your good lady’s further treatment goes well.
One of the most striking things about this election, for me, has been the apparent inability of so many members of the American ruling élite even to attempt to come out of the kind of bubble they have come to inhabit over the past decades.
What baffles me is the utter inability of so many to grasp that, in refusing to face up to the ways in which the world has changed, they aren’t helping anyone – including themselves.
A prudent ruling class will realise that in its own longer-term interests it is not a terribly good idea to piss off too many less fortunate people – or to bury one’s head, ostrich-like, in the sand, so that one cannot begin to gauge when manageable resentment may become an uncontrollable revolutionary force.
Although I think the ‘Archdruid’ – John Michael Greer – talks a great deal of sense, ironically I think in some measure he also echoes the myopias of the élites.
As with the ‘Remain’ campaigners in Britain, it appears to be a fixed delusion of Clinton and her supporters that their opponents are only, as it were, the ‘hicks’ – the white working class which should accept that its own proper function is to die out as soon as possible and with reasonable grace.
This is all bound up with the ‘end of history’ mania: be it in the post-Soviet space, the Middle East, or their own countries, a central ‘Borgist’ assumption has been that the future is on their side, and their opponents will end up on the ‘rubbish heap’ of history. (In this, as in many other respects, they echo the Marxist-Leninists of yesteryear.)
If in different ways, this represents a fundamental misreading of the situation, in all these – very different – places.
Certainly, both in Britain and the United States, the constituencies for which the Clintons – like the Blairs – are a kind of symbolic representation of very many of the things they feel have gone wrong over the past twenty-five years are much broader than most of their supporters are capable of grasping.
Very many people who loathe the Clintons and Blairs also deeply dislike and distrust Donald Trump.
Commonly, however, they are caught on the horns of a dilemma, rather familiar from British experience.
Should they support a ‘third party’ candidate, in the hope of helping build up a base from which a new political movement may eventually ‘break through’, or ‘break out’?
Or should they bite the bullet, and reason that Hillary is so unspeakably awful that, on this occasion, it is better to conclude ‘better the devil we don’t know’?
As it happens, that is very much my own view.
There is simply not enough relevant evidence for anyone to hasard confident judgements about what Trump would or would not be like as President. His ‘track record’ is ambiguous, his rhetorics much more difficult to read than is evident from how they appear at first sight, and the implications of both for how he could be expected to behave in the White House very difficult to gauge.
But Hillary has a long ‘track record’. And although one cannot be dogmatic, I really do think that anyone who argues that one can rely on her to be cautious and prudent in foreign policy, or to make any kind of serious effort to address the concerns of the ‘deplorables’ in the United States, is fooling themselves.
And, when I succumb to my own moments of – probably unrealistic – optimism, I am tempted by by the thought that, among the more constructive results of a Trump victory could – just conceivably – be that at least a few ‘Borgists’ might cease being such unutterable bloody fools. Just conceivably, some such people might decide to, as it were, rejoin the human race.
Mr. Habakkuk,
Always a pleasure to read what you write.
I’m as horrified by the possibility of President Hillary Clinton as anyone but please spare me the enthusiasm for Donald Trump. Being born in south Queens just a few years after The Donald practically makes us home boys so perhaps familiarity breeds contempt. While never graduating from any college much less the prestigious and august Trump University, an intuition born from twenty years driving a taxicab while interacting with 75,000 passengers has made me a better judge of human character than by anything I might have learned in school and has given me the street smarts to recognize a pompous, obnoxious, thin skinned, pushy, self promoting New York snake oil salesman when I see one.
The most narcissistic person in politics feels compelled to put his name in ten foot tall letters on everything he owns and feeds his monstrous ego before breakfast on a daily basis by having his staff present him, first thing, with newspaper clippings and other media strictly about himself.
That he is pro torture, against the Iran deal, has surrounded himself with neocon advisers like James Woolsey, claimed to get his information on foreign policy from the Sunday morning news shows and thinks John Bolton has anything worthwhile to say on the subject makes him as dangerous an occupant of the Oval Office as would be Madame Clinton.
He has said that wages are too high, opposes the Federal minimum wage and thinks corporate raider Carl Icahn would make a great Treasury Secretary. Bloomberg reports he privately told Paul Ryan that he favors cutting Social Security benefits but can’t say so until after the election. He wants to repeal Dodd-Frank and had chosen as his finance chief a notoriously rapacious foreclosure artist who is a former Goldman Sachs and Soros employee and a member of Skull and Bones. His financial advisers are a gaggle of hedge fund managers, real estate developers and
Club for Growth types with their upward redistributionist tax policies and tired old “trickle down” economic fantasies.
The man has no track record in having been involved in populist causes nor been particularly generous to his workers but has left behind a legacy of lawsuits from disgruntled investors and sub contractors and has cynically used the bankruptcy laws to enrich himself while lenders and suppliers were left holding the bag. All his life he has wanted nothing more than to be a rich celebrity and playboy. I have nothing against the pursuit of fame, fortune and beautiful women but if you expect me to believe that at age seventy he has suddenly become a class traitor and has the interests of someone like me at heart as opposed to a billionaire like himself I’ve got a bridge over the East river to sell you. Trump as a champion of the working class? Forgetaboutit.
Walrus,
Congratulations on the new grand daughter and wishing that the health news
of your partner continues to be good.
I remember reading in Blainey’s “A Shorter History of Australia” that
100,000 people showed up to see the first Melbourne Cup. Melbourne then
had a population of about 300,000 and the population for Australia was about
1.2 million. A sports mad country indeed.
If Trump wins, and I don’t believe he will, there will be millions of unhappy Trump supporters. You cannot promise all things to all people. He will not be able to follow through with most of the things he says and he knows this quite well. He will just blame everyone else, the congress, the courts, etc.
Yes, I share that kind of pessimism, Trump could very well ALSO be a puppet of the Deep State, just a populist flavored Obamination.
Though, he still might be a “lesser evil”.
jld
What exactly do you mean by the “deep state?” pl
We are now forswearing alcohol for a month and preparing for what lies ahead. For my partner it is a breast reconstruction now that her cancer appears to be in remittance.
Walrus, therapies have gotten a lot better then the were in late sixties, early seventies, when I fought my way into the units with patients at a point in my life between school and university. … Where among many things, I was confronted with the insertion of radio active gold.
******
Beyond that I am hesitant concerning the larger female breast cancer context. I am no doubt influenced by “feminist medicine” in this field by now. But I only stumbled over the more complex field and its rules, or standards by now, decades after I was confronted with my mother’s breast cancer. … I would prefer to not go into details. In any case, I am glad she is still alive. Among doing much research then, I found religion too. I love my mother.
The very, very, very best to you and your wife, walrus.
And more basically, I came to enjoy a little bet on the horses in GB and Ireland, where I wish I had invested more then pennies against the grandma expert. 😉 I simply choose the outsiders, the horses, based on their names. And they came in as winners.
Peter,
projection.txt
I love seeing when it comes down to “guy who said mean things” or “cabal of satanist child molesters who want to start a hot war with Russia” there’s people who are so dedicated to the lie that they are gonna go with the latter.
Another would be stage charger/would be assassin last night at the Trump rally at Reno.
So what, that’s 3 now? And Trumpeteers are the violent ones? lel.
I feel that your description of Trump and the people around him is quite accurate, yet I am going to vote for him in the hope that, if he wins, his administration will be so chaotic that he will not be able to do the kind of terrible damage to the country that I think Hillary Clinton would be able to do, as the more competent operator in the race.
Today’s tiny example of the kind of people Clinton is gathering around herself is in this in which neo-liberal free trade economist and Clinton ally Brad Delong puts forward his son for a Fire Arms Safety policy job. The boy graduated from Reed College, and then worked for the liberal group “Cease Fire Oregon” for three years. I am sure that qualifies him to have the “right attitudes” to shape gun control policies. (I got the link from Naked Capitalism).
Its amazing how simplistic and ideological the world views of the people around these candidates are. In the 1930s Europeans had notably simplistic views of the world, while people in the U.S. sustained more pragmatic and historically informed ways of looking at things. People in both parties seem to have lost their minds.
Walrus:
I regret to hear the bad news about your significant other.
With cancer, all bets are off and one must try to keep Hope Alive.
All the best.
Peter
I voted for Trump because I believe he will keep us out of a shooting match with the Russians. OTOH, I believe Hillary’s consistent poor judgment on matters of war raises the probability that she will get us on an escalatory ladder with the Russians. Since that is IMO the only existential threat we face I chose to break my tradition of not voting for a candidate from the duopoly for president.
I’m under no illusion that Trump will magically right our ship of state in a 4 year term. First, on domestic affairs a president is limited by what Congress is willing to approve and fund. The media will be constantly mocking him for his alleged verbal faux pas. And we can be certain the Borgists will be all over him like a fly to manure. Wall St and the ziocons will be kissing his ass to keep their gravy trains going and will IMO be more successful than many think.
In any case we know from Podesta’s emails that Hillary is fully bought and paid for and the Clintons are as deeply corrupt as they come. Even if one assumes Trump is equally corrupt there is still merit in voting for him as the probability of war with Russia is significantly reduced with him.
The man in Reno did not make an assassination attempt and he was not a Democrat. Thought you might want to get your facts straight. This was according to FOX news.
Interesting that the supporters of Crooked Hillary say “hey, everyone does it” when confronted with the facts of her corruption and the media’s collusion in anointing her President. Then, they say “she’s too smart to get into a war with Russia”, when confronted with the fact that she is promoting a NFZ in Syria and has supported every war from the Balkans to Syria in her long political career.
They should be honest and say we’ll support her whatever!
David
You and I are completely aligned in our thinking here. I fully concur with your assessment.
Ruh roh.
https://mobile.twitter.com/jmpalmieri/status/795264366547533824?ref_src
Mancy,
1) Lol you think I take Fox News as gospel truth
2) Understand hyperbole
3) Dude’s name pops up seven times in the wikileaks emails. He was a plant there to do something.
David Habakkuk,
A woulda-been-Clinton vote diverted over to Not Clinton is not a wasted vote. It is only half as strong as a woulda-been-Clinton vote re-directed to Trump. But Two woulda-been-Clinton votes diverted over to Not Clinton lowers Clinton’s numbers by Two votes relative to Trump, just as a single woulda-been-Clinton vote moved FROM Clinton TO Trump lowers Clinton’s numbers relative to Trump by Two votes.
Many Clinto-sceptics will not vote for Trump either under any circumstances. If we lecture them about “wasting” their vote, they may become hostile to the lecturer and vote Clinton just to spite the people who accuse voting for Stein or something as wasting a vote. You would be surprised which people and how many can be motivated by pure spite at the very strangest times.
The subset of The Borg who know what they are doing and not just going with the flow for immediate personal advantage or by delusional idiocy, the “Soros level” management.