Depending on whom you listen to about the constantly shifting horse race we call a US presidential election, either Joe Biden or Donald Trump is always ahead or behind by a nose … nationally. For example, a March 7-13 Ipsos/Reuters poll has Biden at 39% and Trump at 38%, while a March 10-12 Yougov/Economist poll shows Trump at 44% and Biden at 42%.

Among the many problems with national polling the single biggest one is that presidential elections aren’t national. Winning a state by one individual vote brings with it as many electoral votes as winning it by a million individual votes. It’s theoretically possible to win the presidency with only 23% of individual votes  cast nationwide. In practice, the differential between popular and electoral victory is never THAT wide, but it remains the case that national polling tells us little about the likely outcome.

Presidential elections almost always come down to a handful of states, and often to razor-thin margins in those states. In 2000, one state (Florida) and 537 individual votes (officially, anyway) settled the matter. The last two US presidential elections have been decided by less than 100,00 individual votes each in a few “swing” states.

Based on “solid,” “likely,” and “leaning” numbers, the site 270 To Win shows Joe Biden with 267 electoral votes pretty much in pocket, Trump with 219. Whoever hits 270 wins the election.

Unless something changes dramatically in the next eight months, which is quite possible, the election will be decided in four “toss-up” states — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Biden can win the election with any one of them. Trump has to take all four.

There’s every chance that this election, like the previous two, will come down to a pool of voters ranging from “fairly large town” to “fairly small city” in size. It’s also quite possible that the winner will receive fewer votes nationwide than the winner.

If you’re thinking that doesn’t sound much like “democracy,” feel free to moan about the unfairness of the electoral college system. It won’t do you any good, but feel free anyway.

When you’re done moaning, consider this:

None of the candidates, nor anyone else, is qualified to rule “the United States,” or the people who live here.

That’s true regardless of HOW the ruler is chosen, and it doesn’t really matter much WHICH ruler is chosen.

Instead of worrying about who wins the presidency, we should be figuring out how to do away with the whole circus.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

On March 13, the US House of Representatives passed HR 7521, the “Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act.” The bill, which would attempt to ban the social media app TikTok unless its Chinese owners, ByteDance, sell it to non-Chinese owners, faces an uncertain future in the Senate, but president Joe Biden says he’ll sign it if it passes.

I don’t find the prospect of an attempt to ban TikTok unsettling, precisely because of the word “attempt.”

At present, only about 170 million Americans use TikTok. If this bill passes, that number is likely to go up, not down — and it’s likely to do so in ways that educate an entire new generation of Americans on how to find ways around the orders of their would-be masters in Washington.

There’s nothing new about that. Older Americans remember learning how to copy software, share music, encrypt files (and, later, currency), obtain marijuana, etc. when previous generations of politicians got the silly idea that they were in charge and could order us around.

None of that, however, exonerates the 352 Republican and Democratic members of Congress who voted for this idiotic, and patently unconstitutional, and irrefutably un-American, bill.

Under the guise of “protecting” Americans from the People’s Republic of China — one of the rotating cast members in a perpetual Enemy of the Week scam — those evil-doers unmasked themselves, most of them not for the first time, as clones of that country’s Communist Party apparatus.

Their “national security concerns” are risible, and their feigned concern for your privacy notably doesn’t extend to “protecting” you from surveillance by any or all of their own “alphabet soup” law enforcement and intelligence agencies.

The proposed TikTok ban isn’t about “national security,” nor is it about your privacy.

It’s about cultivating short-term moral panic for their political benefit.

It’s about establishing their longer-term control over anything and everything you might choose to do.

And it won’t take long to learn which  American Big Tech lobbyists and campaign contributors it was ALWAYS about giving an economic gift to.

The best way to respond to this attack on your rights is to install TikTok on your devices, start educating yourself on how to keep it there (or, if necessary, reinstall it) if the bill becomes law, and spread the word.

If you’re more politically inclined, you can find the roll call vote on the bill here …

https://clerk.house.gov/Votes/202486

… and vote accordingly in November.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

On March 8, the US Department of Defense’s All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office released the first volume of a two-volume “Report on the Historical Record of U.S. Government Involvementwith Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena.”

Like all previous government statements on the subject of UAPs — what we used to call, and will likely continue calling, UFOs (Unidentified Flying Objects) — this one  recycles perennial public dismissal (“most sightings were ordinary objects and phenomena and the result of misidentification”) and denies that anything significant is being covered up (“AARO found no empirical evidence for claims that the USG and private companies have been reverse-engineering extraterrestrial technology”).

I’m no UFO expert, and while I’ve seen flying objects I couldn’t identify, I’ve never seen one that I assumed couldn’t BE identified — one which acted strangely or inexplicably and struck me as possibly “alien” (I’ve heard accounts of such things from honest, reliable friends, and I don’t discount them; those accounts didn’t come with claims, or even strong conjectures, about the nature and origin of the objects).

I can, however, confidently make one claim about UFOs, a claim backed by the entirety of history and evidence:

Whatever the truth about UFOs in general, or any UFO in particular, might be, we’ll only get that truth from government under one  of three circumstances.

Circumstance Number One: Convenience. That UFO really WAS a weather balloon, it’s easy to prove that it really was a weather balloon, and pointing out that it really was a weather balloon lets an institution known for lying boost its credibility a bit.

Circumstance Number Two: The need to get ahead of something unstoppable. There’s credible evidence of e.g. an extraterrestrial craft or previously unknown military technology, that credible evidence will get public exposure whether the government likes it or not, and lying about it would result in embarrassment in the immediate future. If the disclosure can be put off for, say, 20 years, officials will lie anyway because the embarrassment will be someone else’s problem.

Circumstance Number Three: Collapse. All governments and systems of government fall apart sooner or later, and sometimes their successor regimes, or the revolutionaries who initially overthrow them, find and expose their secrets.

The US government isn’t telling us everything it knows about UFOs. And we can be certain that at least some of what it IS telling us is untrue. The truth is out there, and I hope I live to learn it.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY