I've continued following with Marianne Williamson campaign, which for me is about nailing nails into the coffin of legacy media, run by moguls too afraid to rock the boat to be worth attending to anymore. I'm hoping to put her people in touch with some from the Andrew Yang gang, as UBI is far from dead as a meme.
I've chosen the title for an obvious reason: TikTok. Marianne is doing well with the younger demographic that frequents TikTok. This group is developing a fair amount of animosity towards the geriatrics who can't stand the idea that they're not role models. No one wants to grow up to be like them. Their solution: ban TikTok. See what I mean? As Trump put it: these guys (mostly guys) are losers.
Does this mean I think she has a chance to be president? Of course she does, it's in the US constitution. However, the DNC, no respecter of the constitution, is hoping to shield the Bidens from any inconvenient requirements, having secured the nomination with behind the scenes machinations during covid. The DNC, an enemy of democracy, hopes "behind the scenes" will work again, and is calling for "no debates" as of April, 2023. Neither Biden nor Harris are known for their rhetorical skills at this point.
Disputing election results the way Sydney Powell and Rudy Guliani tried to (with help from MyPillow guy) was an obvious non-starter. The vote counting infrastructure (ala Dominion voting machines) was not a major front in 2020, given how much of the supposed cyber-meddling by foreign agents was pure science fiction in the first place. Corrupt players have long engaged in vote rigging shenanigans, with no help from the politburo. Greg Palast and his ilk have already shown us the soft money underbelly, and it isn't pretty.
I'm not myself against electronic voting, although I do admit it comes with dangers. Per my position papers going back, if we don't invest in high school level civics, including crypto savvy, we're going to reap what we sow: nincompoops when it comes to infrastructure. The DC player tends to outsource a lot of its internet savvy these days, which is the more likely ingress for foreign meddling. Campaigns depend on algorithms they poorly understand. An experienced candidate with a well-developed sense of the nation's demographics is likely to do better than any AI-based approach at this point, despite the hype.
Given the choice to short the high schools, the next generation is hopping mad. The code schools had to jump in to provide remedial ed. If you have no computer literacy, you have no business pretending to have the right stuff when it comes to running for high office. But then the high offices do not require voters or elections, except in the shareholder / stakeholder sense, and even there, the process is often highly informal, or according to different rules (say if Quakers become involved).
Am I contracting out as a political adviser these days? Hardly. I'm more the guy who keeps pointing back to the high schools, suggesting that institution reinvent itself to serve adults as well as teenagers. We need the equivalent of a high school refresher every ten to fifteen years, if we want to stay effectively informed about the basics, including such skills as driving and telecommuting. The way to improve the quality of high school is to make it a resume-relevant credential regardless of age. "When was the last time you went through high school?"
A lot of people in congress and the military get their updates informally, without jumping through hoops. They get on the job training. However, the curriculum has fallen into disrepair in many cases, leading to lots of obsolete practices and dubious strategies, when it comes to command and control, and to bottom-up styles of governance. Without a well trained and informed citizenry, we're not equipped, as a nation, to make a positive contribution to the world scene. That so many in DC adopt an aggressive and bellicose line, proves that "lazy sleazy" is still the norm. That's why DC is no longer much of a world capital, as negotiations proceed outside the beltway.
