Pro-Trump armed protesters still holding voting centres hostage

I can't believe I'm still writing about the US election on November 7th, but I'm still writing about the US election on November 7th ...

It's just a bit unfathomable and surreal to us outsiders that there are openly armed citizens wandering around outside American polling stations where votes are still being counted. 

Mind you, it's pretty unfathomable to most people that they are still counting votes at this point. It's notnlike we didn't know that this would happen. Could they not just have passed a nationwide law specifying that postal ballots need to be received a week before election day, and that election centres need to have them counted before election day? That would have avoided all of this chaos and stress, the results would have been known on election day, and there would not be openly armed citizens wandering around outside American polling stations where votes are still being counted.

Pro-Trump protesters carrying rifles and hand-guns have been rallying around vote tabulation centres in Phoenix, Detroit, Philadelphia and other cities where Donald Trump's initial vote surge appears to be dissipating as postal votes are counted, shouting "Stop the steal!" and "Arrest the poll workers!" and "Make Elections Fair Again!" (I kid you not), responding to Trump's repeated and unfounded claims that illegal things are happening and his election is being stolen from under his feet. A Hummer with two armed personnel with illegal guns was detained after a tip-off. Many election officials legitomately fear for their lives.

Meanwhile, African countries are pointing am accusing finger at the USA, which has repeatedly advised them on how democratic elections should be run.

The monster of social media gets mixed results dealing with election misinformation

So, how has social media been handling this whole US election thing and its aftermath, specifically the inevitable misinformation that you just knew was going to attend it? Well, "mixed" is the word that springs to mind.

Twitter has been relatively tough on misinformation, including taking down several tweets from the President of Misinformation himself. It has been quite aggressive in calling out false and misleading posts, although not always before such posts have been extensively shared and retweeted. It slaps on a label saying, "Some or all of the content shared in this Tweet is disputed and might be misleading about how to participate in an election or another civic process", and restricting how the tweets can be shared by removing reply and like options.

Facebook has been much less intrustive, limiting itself to a vaguer message like, "Final results may be different from initial vote counts, as ballot counting will continue for days or weeks", and not actually restricting or blocking viewing or sharing of the post.

YouTube has taken an even more pusillanimous (and less effective) approach. It maintains that it is dealing with the problem, but take, for example, a popular post from the pro-Trump One America News Network claiming that Trump has already won the election, that massive voter fraud is taking place, and that illegal votes are still being counted in order to steal the election from Trump. Sounds like an ideal candidate for taking down, no? 

And yet, YouTube claims that this does not violate its content policy, although it does apparently contravene its advertising rules (YouTube does not allow ads to run on videos that undermine election confidence through demonstrably false information). So, the video stayed up, but its advertising was pulled. Oh, and there is a little note below it stating the election results "may not be final". Hardly an effective strategy. I mean, is it misinformation or is it not?

It should be said that even Facebook and YouTube (as well as Twitter) agreed to ban Steve Bannon for calling for the beheading of top doctor Antony Fauci and FBI director Christopher Wray: "I'd put the heads on pikes". Some things go beyond rhe pale.

It's a tough gig (not to mention hugely labour-intensive end expensive) having to police the vast amounts of incorrect and misleading information people seem intent on posting to the internet, and walking the fine line between freedom of expression and censorship. But if you don't like how the business has developed, then get out of the business. Social media has created a monster: Mary Shelley warned what would happen way back in 1823.

The US of A has officially jumped rhe shark, and there may be no way back

As I write this, the US presidential elections are still not decided, except in the labyrinthine mind of Donald Trump. Vote-counting continues in several key swing stakes like Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. It is, as had become more and more likely towards election day, going down to the wire.

This, in itself, though is a damning indictment of the US of A. This election should not have been close. The very fact that Joe Biden has not cruised to an easy landslide, after four years of Trump-inflicted chaos and megalomania, is an indictment of the country as a whole. Whoever wins the election, Trump will probably receive nearly eight million MORE votes than he did in 2016 (although still 5 million - or about 3.6 % - less than Biden). How is that even possible? (Well, the answer is a 100-year record turnout of over 66%, compared to 59% in 2016, but still....)

That half of the country could even countenance four more years of international embarrassment, isolation and ridicule, surely means that there is no way back to international respect for the country that was once - it's kind of hard to remember back to the heady days of Barack Obama! - considered the moral authority and compass of the planet, and a guiding light in a murky, shadowy world (and I'm far from the only one to feel this way.)

Four years of legal murkiness; constant stress, disinformation and divisiveness; extreme polarization such as has not been witnessed in a generation; racial tension and violence; environmental and democratic degradation; roll-backs of anything even vaguely progressive; and the wilful dismantling of national and international institutions that took decades to develop - and still the country hasn't learned? The last four years has been exhausting, and I don't even live there. 

However this thing turns out, even if Biden does eventually prevail, the respect for the country is gone. Half of the country is apparently quite OK with what has been happening recently, and even want more of it. We are not just talking about the gun-toting, golf cart-driving, drive-in-frequenting, red-necked Republican stereotypes here. Millions of others have joined them, perhaps taken in by Trump's Svengali-like lies and exhortations, or his constant warnings against Biden's "socialist" tendencies, or perhaps just following their own single-issue obsessions, whether it be anti-abortion beliefs, 2nd Amendment rights, or climate change denial. These people (maybe) had an excuse in 2016 - he could, after all, have changed the habits of a lifetime and become all presidential (ha!), but they have no excuse this year.

And don't forget that millions of others with a more liberal outlook have apparently ignored all the warnings and admonishments of the Democratic campaign, and did not bother to vote one way or the other (although the Democrats do seem to have mobilized the black vote better this time around, Trump seems to have retained just as much of the white vote as he did in 2016). And you know what John Stuart Mill said about good men who do nothing...

So, that's it America. You had your chance. Almost everyone across the world feels as though America has turned in on itself, and is in decline. Maybe it had been going that way for some time, and it just took Donald Trump to bring it all to a head. Or maybe Trump managed it all on his own, in just four years. Either way, it will be a steep and painful road back.

Any election where citizens barricade up their business in the reasonable expectation of post-election violence (and they were so right) has to be considered a failure of public trust and democracy. When even Russia pans your election as chaotic and dysfunctional, you know you're in a bad place. Apologies to those good-hearted liberals who fought hard to stem this tide of filth, but you now officially live in a crappy country. 

And the best of luck, Joe - if you do manage to win and survive the browbeating, lying and legal machinations that will surely come from Trump, and indeed have already started - but you have one hell of a hole to dig out of now.

UPDATE

Ding dong the witch is dead! Biden wins, finally. The work starts here.

TV coverage of US election so subjective as to be meaningless

Well, I tried. I watched some of the US election. 

It was never going to be a final thing anyway, I realize that, what with delays in counting, postal votes, etc, etc. But it was omly when we started channel-hopping that we realized just how inaccurate and random the TV coverage was.

CTV (which was usimg Associated Press's coverage and statistics) was showing Trump 82, Biden 58 at one point, but other TV stations and networks had anything from Biden 110, Trump 97 to Biden 88, Trump 62  to Biden 39, Trump 34. Basically, whatever interim result you wanted, you could probably find somewhere on American television. They would probably all claim to be correct within their own definition of correct and according to their own analyses and calculations. And if they are all correct, then none of them are correct, and the whole thing becomes an essentially meaningless exercise.

I looked up how and why this might be happening, and found this explanation of how the different networks call the results of individual states. Supposedly, they all have access to the same database of information (the National Election Pool). But the different networks and TV companies have their own "decision desks" which crunch the numbers in real time (everything from precinct vote counts, county counts, early voting, postal votes, even exit polls) and assess whether a particular state has reached what they consider an unassailable lead, at which point they "call it".

Except, each network uses different criteria, different opinions, different algorithms, different assumptions. Hence the widely differing real-time results we encountered. Part of the problem is that each state, indeed each COUNTY in each state, has its own rules on how voting takes place, and how they are counted, and how they are reported, which is kind of a ridiculous situation in a first world country in 2020 (one CTV presenter called it "medieval" at one point). The USA needs some serious electoral reform, and soon: the current situation is just embarrassing.

This election in particular was harder to call than any other election in history, and the final result probably won't be known for several days, for a whole host of reasons, regardless of what Donald Trump may say. I didn't want the stress of listening to Trump claiming victory, even when large chunks of votes have still not been counted - which is almost BOUND to happen - so I decided to cut my losses and go to bed, and wait until the powers that be sort it all out. Much better for my blood pressure.

Some of the vagaries of the US Electoral College system

Every time the USA has a presidential election, there are various articles in the press explaining how the electoral college system works (I tried one back in 2016). This is partly because many people, American amd non-American alike, just don't understand it. But it's partly because people can't believe that that one of the world largest, oldest and most influential democracies has an electoral system that is so creaky, so antiquated, and so open to abuse.

Setting aside the scary stuff that can happen if there is a tied vote, or if one candidate refuses to accept the results of the election, which I have already looked into recently, this huge and powerful democratic nation is subject to the whim and apparent whimsy of some distinctly undemocratic rules that those Founding Fathers saw fit to institute, and that the country has not bothered to - or perhaps not dared to - fix since.

The actual vote - the one that so many people will be glued to tonight even though it is very unlikely that a definitive result will be available tonight, what with postal voting and all - is only part of the process, and does not automatically decide who becomes president. As often as not, the candidate who wins the popular vote may not win the election (as Hilary Clinton found to her cost in 2016).

The actual decision is made by 538 people called electors, who together make up the Electoral College, and who won't actually vote until mid-December. These electors may be just regular folks - teachers, fire-fighters, lawyers - or they may be from within the political system - ex-politicians, functionaries, policy wonks, etc. As usual, each state has its own rules for picking these electors. 

In fact, each political party within each state has its own rules for picking electors - there are different sets of electors on call for each party within each state - and which party's set of electors is sent to the Electoral College in December for a particular state depends on which party wins the popular vote within that state (although - of course - some states are different: in Maine and Nebraska, that decision is based on a mix of the results by congressional district and the statewide popular vote - don't ask why, it just is). 

So, the whole state's vote in the Electoral College goes to one. For example, even if Pennsylvania, say, votes in more Democrat Representatives than Republicans, and even if the Governor it votes in is a Democrat, all 20 of its Electoral College votes will still go towards the Republican presidential candidate if 51% of the state votes for him/her.

And this is where another major problem of the US electoral system lies. Each state gets a certain number of seats in the House of Representatives, based roughly on their relative populations, which is as it should be in a representative democracy (except that gerrymandering is a whole other problem, as I have described before, as is the fact that Washington DC, which is not technically a state, is given a random three seats, while other non-states like Puerto Rico and.Guam are not). 

But then, for the presidential vote, each state gets that many votes in the Electoral College PLUS 2! So, small rural states with tiny populations like Wyoming (pop. 579,000) and North Dakota (pop. 762,000), get an automatic one Electoral College vote plus two more. This gives small rural states (which, as it happens, tend to be Republican strongholds) a disproportionate amount of power in the Electoral College, while devaluing the votes of big cities (and the more racialized population that tends to live in them).

But here's something else about the Electoral College system that I found out just this year. The electors in the Electoral College typically vote for the presidential candidate of the party that wins that state's vote. But they don't have to! The system technically allows for some "unpledged electors" that can vote whichever way they personally choose, although in practice, at least since the Republican abuse of that allowance during the civil rights struggle of the 1960s, all electors are now pledged to vote for a particular presidential candidate. 

However, even the regular pledged electors can, if they so decide, break their promise and vote against the state mandate (known, reasonably enough, as "faithless electors"), which is kind of ridiculous. There was a high number of faithless electors - seven - in the last presidential election, you know, the one where that Trump guy got in against all the odds and by the slimmest of margins. These actions didn't actually change the final result, as it happens, but you can see that it might in a very close election. And there sems to be very little scrutiny of, or attention paid to, these electors.

It's just one more bizarre element in a pretty bizarre and indefensible system. The system was arrived at back in the 18th century, through a combination of the bare self-interest of certain states, the racism of slave-owning states, the practical logistics of a pre-industrial country where information travelled slowly, and a worry that elected congressmen would be too corruptible and too easily manipulated by political parties to be reliable electors of a president. Well, look at what a feckless bunch of lawmakers we have ended up with anyway!

The system is clearly in dire need of reform. A plurality of the American people would happily see it changed (around the level of 65%), and that applies particularly on the Democrat side of the divide. Such a constitutional amendment would require the votes of two-thirds of the House and Senate and three-quarters of the individual states, a huge ask in these polarized, dysfunctional times. And don't expect any party that has just won under that system to change it! One Donald Trump used to favour abandoning the Electoral College - until he got elected, when his views completely changed!

MAGA Drag the Interstate and other bizzarro election stunts

Yet another Trump post. Sorry. Anyone would think there's an election in the offing or something...

The latest wizard wheeze that the more lawless of Trump's supporters have come up with is the so-called #MAGADragTheInterstate: pro-Trump supporters in oversized cars and trucks have been blocking freeways across the country, including New Jersey, New York, Texas, Arizona and Washington. 

And, as far as I can tell, that's about it. They just sit there, gridlocked in their own traffic jam, hitting their horn, pumping their fists, and shouting inexplicable things like "Shut it down, baby!" and "You suck!"

No-one - with the possible exception of the perpetrators themselves, although don't rely on that - has a clue what they feel they are achieving, other than making people hate them even more. They seem quite pleased that they are able to make emergency services take a longer, slower route to the hospital (in at least one case) which is kind of bizarre.

Trump supporters in a "Trump train" also surrounded and harrassed the Biden campaign bus in Texas, on Friday, almost forcing one vehicle off the road, and causing the cancellation of several Democrat campaign stop. Trump, of course, tweeted his approval of this adolescent and dangerous behaviour, in a typically adolescent and dangerous manner. The FBI is investigating the incident, but I don't suppose that will unduly worry the guy, who is now completely off the rails.

Then, on Monday, a boisterous Trump vehicle rally in Temecula, California, using the same #MAGADragTheInterstate hashtag, just happened to cut off a voting centre, disrupting voting and violating the 100ft electioneering law.

This is just thuggery and intimidation posing as political action, freedom of speech and non-violent resistence. You just know that most of these people are packing weapons, and any resistence would quickly evolve into violence and full-scale riots.

All you can do, really, is shake your head and sigh. I just feel sorry for the Democrats that will have to govern these low-lives and  deranged individuals. What a country!

Trump's border wall threatens endangered species and indigenous cultures alike

With all the US election shenanigans, Supreme Court nominations, race riots, raging pandemic, and general chaos south of the border, it's easy to forget some of the more insidious mayhem the Trump administration continues to perpetrate, largely out of the public eye. 

For example, remember that walll? It's all too easy to dismiss it, as Trump hasn't achieved anything like what he promised (thank god!) But, nevertheless, some 400 miles of it has been built over the last four years, and it is having a significant effect, not so much on illegal immigration, but on the local wildlife and biodiversity and on indigenous cultural lands.

A towering metal fence between 18 and 30 feet tall now snakes its way across the remote and pristine Sonoran Desert, paradoxically one of the most biodiverse areas of North America, not to mention new roads, perimeter lighting, and other technology. This includes bisecting the UNESCO reserve of Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, the Lower Rio Grande Wildlife Reserve, and the Madrean Sky Islands.

Mr. Trump's fence (or "wall", as he insists on calling it) is fragmenting critically protected habitat, not to mention desecrating sacred indigenous cultural sites. Construction of the border fence has been mainly on public "protected" land, and the Department of Homeland Security has used sweeping powers to waive and override environmental protection laws like the Endangered Species Act. At least 93 endangered and threatened animal species can be found in these borderlands, including key mammals like jaguarundi, ocelot, javelina, Mexican grey wolf and North American jaguar.

It is not just the fence itself that is at issue. The San Bernardino National Wildlife Reserve has been compromised by the draining of a crucial wetland for water for concrete production for the barrier, putting the four threatened or endangered species for which the reserve was created at renewed risk. The Department of Homeland Security has run roughshod over the strenuous objections and warnings of the US Fish and Wilife Service. 

The Tohono O'odham Nation has had its ancestral lands split by the wall, and cross-border cultural and religious events have been stifled. Water levels in the sacred Quitobaquito springs have been falling at unprecedented rates as construction crews tap the local aquifer for water to make concrete for the barrier. Monument Hill in Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, another O'odham sacred site, was dynamited by construction crews, all with the blessings of the DHS. Native protests have been met with tear gas and an official show of force.

Very few people are probably even aware of what is going on in the environs of Mr. Trump's famous wall. I know I wasn't. Four more years of Trump idiocy and insensitivity could have permanent and dramatic ill effects on the wildlife of the area, and on indigenous relations. We really cannot afford such a travesty. Unfortunately, the kind of people who will vote for the man - and remember, we are talking about tens of millions of people here - care about neither of these things.

Main sources of Ontario's COVID infections - not what you might expect

Buried in all the copious online articles and opinion pieces on the COVID-19 pandemic, I found this interesting graphic in an obscure COVID-19 update from Ontario's Science Advisory and Modelling Consensus Tables, an outfit I had never even heard of before.

It shows the known sources of virus outbreaks in Toronto, Ottawa, Peel and York (the main areas of infection in Ontario), and what it shows is quite surprising, to me at any rate.

In Toronto, for example, it shows that the majority of cases in the second wave are coming from Schools and Daycares (22%) and Long-term Care and Retirement Homes (18%). Perhaps less surprisingly, Restaurants, Bars and Clubs are another major source (14%), as is healthcare (10%). Gyms and Sports only provides a measly 3% (so you can see why gym owners are so fed up with the most recent restrictions), as, surprisingly, does Events, Ceremonies and Religious Services (also 3%), although there is a separate category of Congregate Settings (10%), which presumably refers to more informal gatherings, barbecues, etc. Grocery and Retail Service is also small, at 4%.

What the graphic also brings home is how much the sources vary from area to area. For example, in Peel, just next door to Toronto, Grocery and Retail Service generates a much higher proportion of cases (19%), as does Industrial Settings (22%), while Restaurants, Bars and Clubs (3%) and Long-term Care and Retirement Homes (1%) are much less important than in Toronto, and Healthcare does not feature at all. In Ottawa, on the other hand, fully 72% of the cases are coming from just two sources, Long-term Care and Retirement Homes (33%) and Schools and Daycares (39%).

Fascinating, if true. But how does it help the government create a realistic and logical plan to battle the spread of the virus? Probably not at all.