Don't Freak Out--Okay, Maybe Just a Little

In Eden’s Endgame, by Barry Kirwan, Kalaran asks, ‘how do you sacrifice for the higher good when you are the higher good?’ It is difficult to make the final move knowing he won’t be there to see how the game ends. It is coming down to how much he is willing to sacrifice.

On the new Alician homeworld, a giant mechanized crab is killing everything in its path. Micah is reminded that the Alicians are responsible for deaths of seven billion people on Earth. He decides that he has seen enough.

At the Womens Democratic Club, we listened to political science doctors Lisa Murray and James Curry speak on the outcomes of the 2024 election.

Dr. Curry assured us that we shouldn’t freak out. After elections, people try to come all kinds of conclusions about what happened. Swing states that entirely went for Joe Biden in 2020 all swung back. That’s why they’re called swing states. Donald Trump will almost certainly get the popular vote, but it will probably be really tight, 50 to 49 percent. Three states so far officially flipped from having Democratic senators. He projected that there would probably be 53 Republican and 47 Democratic senators. Lots of house ballots were still being counted. Republicans would almost certainly take or hold on to the house, but again it will be by a narrow margin. All of this indicates a narrow shift to the Republican party nationwide, with Utah being a possible exception. These are small percentage point shifts from Democrats to Republicans.

The swing states shifted toward Trump in 2016, Biden in 2020, and back again to Trump in 2024. This appeared in practically every demographic that was studied. The recent shift is part of a global anti-party and anti-power backlash we’ve been seeing across the world for the last four to five years. This backlash affected parties of all ideological stripes across the world. Any party that has been in power over the last four years is likely to lose power or at least seats because of it.

The backlash is coming because voters are unhappy. The post-pandemic world is tough, and people all across the world suffered from the resulting inflation. It's made it hard for people to buy things, do things, and live their lives globally. And they take it out at the polls. It doesn’t take a lot to cause a swing, especially in countries like the US, where elections are won and lost on a small margin. In a winner-takes-all system, it means the difference between winning everything and losing everything.

Voters in the middle that make these kinds of decisions are known as retrospective voters. They look at how everything's gone for them over the last few years. If they're not happy, they look at who's in charge. For Americans, that's who controls the White House, and Democrats controlled the White House in 2024. It doesn’t really matter who the other person is, they are just going to vote for them, hoping things will get better.

There's going to be things that occur in Washington that we certainly won't like. And there's going to be things that we wish wouldn't happen and there's going to be policy outcomes that we don't want. One of the most enduring characteristics of the American system is how much it resists parties in power actually doing the things they want.

Typically, things on average become law with 80% or 90% support from members of the House of Representatives, including 70% to 80% support of members of the minority party, which will now be the Democrats. There's implications there. That means for something to become law, most of the time, you need a majority of the minority party to want to like it and be okay with it. So that means these things are going to be, if you're a Democrat, probably not completely horrible. The pattern is the same in the Senate.

Republicans in Washington will try to do a lot of things we don't like. They will succeed on some of them, but they will also fail miserably on a lot of them. And if you're a Democrat, that's a little bit of a reassuring story. And it doesn't happen automatically.

We have to be organized, we have to fight it. Democrats in Washington have to fight it, but they will. And so, this is something that should give you some perspective about what this election means, and what this outcome means, and what we should expect to see in terms of the consequences over the next two to four years.

It's not all good, but it's also not all bad.

Dr Murray agreed for the most part. However, she pointed out that the judiciary is at stake, because it is not impossible to get sympathetic judges in. In regards to the red shift, Utah didn’t drift. It is actually drifting blue within the state.

The number one issue in Utah was housing affordability, and the second issue was whether legislators listened to the voters.

With regards to ideology, according to Pew Survey results, the median Republican (not to be confused with the average Republican legislator) is ideologically mixed, which means the Republican Party is more ideologically diverse on the political spectrum between conservative and liberal. The median Democrat is mostly liberal. In other words, Democrats are more ideologically homogenous than Republicans. This difference in ideological diversity may make it easier for independent voters to find themselves in the noise of the Republican party, and not quite as easy to fit into the Democratic Party. Utah voters are actually more liberal than national voters on almost every single point.

Monday was Veterans Day. I served in the Navy during Operation Desert Storm, and my Dad served 20 years in the Air Force and is a Vietnam War veteran. My Uncles Wayne, Rayburn, and Goldie served in WWII, and two of my Great-Uncles served in World War II. If you go back through my family history you’ll find Civil War Veterans, Revolutionary War Veterans, and Colonel Daniel Boone and Major William Pennington Quarles. There has been a code of service in my family going back generations. My oldest daughter’s husband is an active duty member of the US Coast Guard.

For me, I have almost always been a pacifist; but I know that there are times when we must be ready to defend. That, and because I needed money for college, are why I joined the US Navy Reserve and then went active for four years. The GI Bill and the Hazelwood Act wound up paying for my degrees to eventually earn my Master’s in Computer Science and Engineering.

My experiences in the Navy were ones that brought people together. I got to visit a number of ports, and experienced the loss of fellow sailors assigned to my unit. I know the anxiety of knowing that your unit may be the next one deployed to a combat zone, or your duties may bring you face to face with civilian violence just outside the base.

I learned the importance of being trained in the use of firearms, and knowing to bear responsibility for their use and prevention of their misuse. I ask for a shout out to all veterans, both present and past.

As we enter a new administration, we are reminded that we have a president that has blocked transgender members serving openly as their authentic selves, denying some of our best and our brightest from being all they could be. We live in fear of repeat trans military ban, especially since hatred against the trans community was stirred up in a populist economy.

Trump thinks he has a mandate to do whatever he wants. That’s not true. He has a mandate to address the one thing that no sitting president can ever do on their own without major social change, and that’s to fix the economy. I fear that he will get credit for an economy that has already been turned around, in thanks mostly toward the actions of the federal reserve. The ultimate fix he’s not willing to do, because it would require the billionaires to pay back into the economy enough money to lift people out of poverty permanently, to regulate corporations to do no harm, and to support and promote collective bargaining. It is clear that we also need universal access to the first two years of college and potentially a high school requirement to take a course in economics (maybe replace the government class with the economics one).

I saw Tuesday that the dangerous bill that would allow the president to strip organizations of their nonprofit status was rejected by Congress. Pundits not in the know claim that the ACLU changed sides on this issue. That is blatantly false. One of the foundational rights that the ACLU supports is freedom of speech.

In More Stars Than Grains of Sand, Al Forsyth mentions that whales and shrews are at the extremes of heartbeats. Human heart beats of 60-80 beats per minute fall between the blue whale’s heart rate of 8-10 beats per minute and that of the Estruscan shrew, with a heartbeat of 1,511 beats per minute. In peak condition, Olympic sprinter Usain Bolt’s resting heart beat clocked in at 30 beats per minute.

I spoke with Mom briefly yesterday and asked her if she would like a wireless headset for her birthday. I think it will come in handy, and make it easier to chat with her. I heard something about a proposal to have Medicare limit the out-of-pocket expense to $2,000 per year. That could mean the difference between life and death for people on cancer medications.

In A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens, Jerry Cruncher smooths his ruffled aspect prior to 9 AM. As the bank's odd-job man, he sits on a stool outside of the banking house, and is well-known to Fleet-street, Temple, and the Bar. Both father and son appear amazingly like each other, as the son watches the father chew on straw while he waits for tasks from the people inside the bank.

In a later scene Sydney Carton’s feet, seemingly of their own volition, take him to the door of Doctor Marnette. Lucie notices a change in his face, and fears that Sydney is not well.

After a stress episode while Lucie and Charles Darnay are on their honeymoon, Lorry, the banker who helped bring Lucie's father from France to England, breaks it gently to the doctor via a hypothetical patient that he has suffered a mental shock, a throwback to his time when he was held in the Bastille.

In the year 1792 in France, bands of citizen patriots at all village taxing-houses and village gates are stopping all comers and goers, cross-checking them against their lists. Charles Darnay finds himself encompassed by a universal watchfulness. Days into his journey in France, he remains a long way from Paris.

After Darnay is imprisoned for over a year, acquitted for only a day, and sent back to prison sentenced to die within 24 hours, Sydney Carton corners a spy from within the jails, who wants to know what his proposal is. Sydney asks him if he is one of the jailers there, to which the spy replies that escaping the prison is impossible.

So as Charles Dickens put it way back when: these are the best of times, these are the worst of times. These times may require great sacrifices, and may at times seem impossible. But we are already conditioned to this. Our resting pulse will allow us to respond in a measured fashion, and the GOP while holding all the cards is only doing to by a slim majority. They still need to work with us, or they will lose it all. They need to deliver, and if they can't do it, those who remember will help sway the pendulum back--lesson learned, at least for the time being.