Mountains come out of the sky…

None of us, no matter how orange the combover, is entiteled to our own facts.

Lenona, Goggles was right about the Brubeck house. You oughta try another browser or something until the link works for you:

https://www.mansionglobal.com/articles/mid-century-home-jazz-great-dave-brubeck-built-selling-in-connecticut-219871

There was a teevee piece showing an aging Andretti in his Pennsylvania manse a few years ago that summoned the same feeling.

Some food for thoughts.

https://mobile.twitter.com/Trad_West_Art/status/1336711752684331011

None of us, no matter how orange the combover, is entiteled to our own facts. ~ Crid at December 10, 2020 7:00 AM

It's time for Trump to concede. While there is plenty of circumstantial evidence of shenanigans in counting votes, there is no hard evidence that any of it changed the results, or was done with the specific intent of doing so.

It may come out some day that the election was rigged/stolen, but that day won't be today.

Trump is thrashing about now and that is just giving ammunition to his critics. The Electoral College will likely certify Joe Biden as president on 14-Dec.

Trump would be better off casting himself as the symbolic leader of the popular opposition or as an advocate for election reform, trying to get both parties to agree on uniform standards of election security and procedure.

Unlike Nixon, Trump is willing to engage in a scorched earth campaign to prove himself right. This excites his base, which feels that Republicans have lain down and allowed themselves to be abused too often in the past. However, it wears out moderate voters and feeds the fantasies of left-wing voters that right-wing voters are obsessed with establishing a dictatorship.

Although Trump has said he'll concede if the Electoral College certifies Joe Biden, that remains to be seen. His choice then will be to admit defeat or risk the humiliation of being forcibly removed from office.

Trump's calls for governors to overturn or ignore certified state election results are beyond the pale and have been rejected out of hand by even Republican governors, as they should have been.

Without hard proof of electoral corruption, governors should not be overturning legislatively-certified election results. With proof of corruption, state legislatures exist to express the popular will and should be consulted.

All those snowflakes getting the vapors over Trump's actions need to calm down. We've had hotly contested elections before. We've even had elections that came down to the Electoral College to be decided. The circumstances of the 2020 election are not unprecedented and do not portend the end of democracy in the US.

My father's been nagging me for months to read the 2012 memoir Up: A Mother and Daughter's Peakbagging Adventure by Patricia Ellis Herr (not to be confused with the 2009 Disney animated movie Up). I finally did - yesterday. (He said he read it twice in one day.)

To quote the author:

“If you want to do something big, something daring and grand and huge, then don't automatically shrug and assume that you're too young, too old, too weak, too busy, too poor, too frazzled, or too small. Learn, persevere, sweat. Take the time to figure out how to do it correctly, then go to it with a giant spirit of adventure."

Her older daughter was six by the time the two of them had climbed the 48 tallest mountains in New Hampshire. (Without the daughter's ever being carried. The younger daughter couldn't do all that, as you might guess.)
.
Interview:

https://www.literarytraveler.com/articles/let-them-get-dirty-and-other-lessons-from-the-trail-an-interview-with-author-patricia-ellis-herr/

These peeps do air-to-air photography. Some of these shots are intense.

> While there is plenty of
> circumstantial evidence of
> shenanigans in counting votes,
> there is no hard evidence that
> any of it changed the results,
> or was done with the specific
> intent of doing so.

I think there's plenty of evidence of chicanery which might have meaningfully changed results… Dozens and dozens of cheats executed by Dem loyalists throughout government and the polity… Certainly not a grand and coordinated effort, but a broad, frequent and inexcusable recourse to fraud and deception which deserves exposure, correction, and extirpation.

TRUMP ISN'T UP TO THAT. It's not like he spent the months before the election assembling a crack team of legal support to contest these falsifications, which a blind man could have seen coming from a mile away.

He probably doesn't care… He was surprised to be elected, had no interest in leaving the country in better shape than when he moved to DC, and is responding in the pattern of contentious grift which has typified his life: When someone does something that annoys him or makes him look bad (like demanding that he pay his bills), he rolls the dice and takes them to court. Usually he comes out okay, or at least walks out with a story to tell about how he wuz robbed.

This was a shitty election. Shitty elections are bad. There are forces afoot which will make them worse in the future. I detest Trump, but would admire and be grateful to the 45th President if he made a concerted, thoughtful, businesslike effort to address the wrongs which have been done to our electoral process, even if he did so out of his galactic-champion selfishness.

But he's too much of a pussy, and too dim besides.


His adoring voters are too oblivious to expect anything of him at all, and would rather scurry around in aggrieved, impotent woundedness.

Sorry about the music, but this video of reindeer has a mood that will reach you anyway.

Lenona, we want ten-paragraph biography of you. No drugs, sex or finance stuff… Just to learn what the dealy-O is.

'But Uncle Cridmo!,' you ask, 'Exactly how unprepared was Trump for this legal battle?'