"The peoples who allow the natural bases of society to be destroyed by the artificial conditions of the new urban civilisation"

A long time ago, in this site, I created a topic called Random Snippets. These are quotes I just think are interesting, and they tend to speak for themselves.  I pick them up in all sort of places.

Everyone once and awhile, however, I'll run across something that, while short, is so significant, that it deserves more than a a "random snippet" comment, maybe.  The risk in commenting on something like this is that a person, in trying to unpack the comment, can actually do it damage.  I hope that I don't do that.

I'll also note that one of the real risks of having a blog like this is that sooner or later people really begin to get a clue on how you think. . . which can be dangerous.  But then, maybe people have a duty to be honest.

Anyhow, this is a quote from English historian Christopher Dawson, form the blog-site dedicated to him.  His writing are always interesting, but this one is really prophetic.

The peoples who allow the natural bases of society to be destroyed by the artificial conditions of the new urban civilisation will gradually disappear and their place will be taken by those populations which live under simpler conditions and preserve the traditional forms of the family.

Christoper Dawson, from his History of Religion and Culture.

This is somewhat related, I'll note, to a quote from Belloc from a blog run by the same fellow, that being:

Cultures spring from religions; ultimately the vital force which maintains any culture is its philosophy, its attitude toward the universe; the decay of religion involves the decay of the culture corresponding to it—we see that most clearly in the breakdown of Christendom today.

Belloc, Dawson and Chesterton, who all had statements of this type, are all now dead.  It's easy, therefore, for the critics of this line of thinking to dismiss there statements.  "We haven't collapsed yet" is the pat reply.

Well, maybe not so fast on that.

Indeed, these statements are downright prophetic.

I've long worried that in our struggle with Islamic extremism we were missing certain points that they have, and as we miss them, we can't, and we won't, address them.  Indeed, in a battle of ideas and philosophies, you can't win, if you don't have any ideas and your philosophy is that any philosophy is as good as another. I think a lot of people, frankly, realize that to some extent, but because the prevailing small "l" liberal elites truly believe the opposite and shout down anyone who maintains this, we aren't hearing much about it.  Chesterton, Belloc and Dawson, when they were writing, saw the manifestations of it, at a time at which it was already very highly developed amongst the elite classes but at a time at which it had not yet seeped down to the middle classes and lower classes.  Now it has.  They weren't wrong, they were just early and still had an audience that understood what they were saying.  Now that audience is very small, and the bulk of the population may have a difficult time grasping the argument.  And as the argument is, in some ways, as essential feature of an argument we are having with Islam, that really matters.

In other words, we may be loosing the war.  Not on the front. But on the battlefield of ideas. As we don't really have any.  Or not many.  Or maybe many, and many good ones, but we lack an understanding of what they are pinned on, and if without a solid foundation, they're on pretty shaky ground.

I know that we say we have deep ideals.  We say we're for "freedom" or maybe "democracy", but those words don't mean much if they aren't formed in a rational context.  Freedom doesn't actually mean absolute license. That's anarchy, which isn't free, as everyone is then slave to everyone else's personal whims.  Nor does freedom mean that everyone is free to define their own values as that would attempt a freedom so radical that it would free a person from nature itself, which is impossible, exceedingly narcissistic, and warped.  But that's actually the definition of freedom and "values" which our highly liberal society has basically adopted.  And it's pretty darned shallow.   Values have to be absolutes or aim at absolutes, if they are to mean anything.

That our currently prevailing concept of values is exceedingly shallow is pretty obvious to other cultures, whether they are grounded in Western values or not.  African cultures which were once colonized by the West and which adopted Western values now legitimately look askance at us as having become rather debased.  Middle Eastern cultures, which are not Westernized, often view us as wholly corrupt.

And that's' the problem. We can hardly argue for free will, a cultural aspect that is Western, if we do not also acknowledge that free will means that a person can freely opt to yield to their own imperfections, or at least that imperfections exist. That is, without acknowledging that can and and does exist as a state of nature, we appear to be lying to ourselves and everyone else.  The fellow in the gutter can claim to be sitting on a thrown, but at the point at which we all must pretend he's on a thrown, we all look pretty messed up. A genius can opt to work as a convenience clerk, or not at all, but the point at which we must pretend that lives up to his potential we are all living below ours.  A person can live with their own imperfections, struggle to overcome them, or simply yield to them, but a person can't argue that imperfections which are contrary to obvious nature are to be celebrated or that others have a moral duty to pretend that no imperfections exist.

But that's pretty much the point we are at right now.

This past week, as an example, the Federal government declared that those who are in one gender and switch by surgical means to another must be accepted in the Army in that condition. This isn't tolerance, its in contravention to nature.  Indeed, even the DSM still defines people in this condition as having a mental illness, although it no doubt will take that out once the people who define what is and isn't an illness operate to take this out, as they undoubtedly will, demonstrating how little science goes into psychology.  A person can't change genders any more than they can change species.  It's impossible.  There are only two.  That's nature.  Surgery to change that is deeply debased and indeed one of the pioneering US operations that did that has stopped due to the high risks of suicide it was found to entail. That society would now pretend its okay shows that we have a pretty debased society.

We didn't get here all at once, to be sure.  And it is not as if we have not always had our problems. But the pace of this descent is accelerating markedly.  At some point after the Second World War we lost track of a concept that the dignity of work was largely in providing for a person's family, and not an exercise in self accumulation.   That really turned the focus on ourselves over anyone else.  In the 1960s this grew more pronounced, to be aided by a pharmaceutical development in the early 1970s, so that even those acts that were personal to couples and associated with keeping the species around became mere entertainment for the self.  That naturally developed to what we have now, where entire bodies of law are actually devoted to nothing other than a person's basest biological urges and how they can manipulate it for temporary satisfaction.  The concept that a person would even be defined, or self define, based on that is a stunning decline in seriousness.  When Justice Kennedy gave voice to a judicial coup this past year, trampling on any legal and sane reading of the U.S. Constitution, it ushered in the full era of obsession with gender being defined by the self as being , essentially, the defining characteristic of the Western World as viewed from the outside.

It isn't as it hasn't been notice, and reacted to.  Early in our struggle with Al Queda analysis into what drove western born Muslims into the arms of extremists found that they were generally horrified by the personal conduct of westerners in this area, which in their view demonstrated that the west was corrupt and meant that the expression of high ideals by the west was largely a sham.  And indeed cultures that can think of nothing better to stand for than absolute license in the bedroom really don't stand for anything worth standing for.

Some remnant of the earlier standards do exist, although there is little to thank some of the supposed standard bearers for in regards to that.  And indeed its oddly been noticed by some of the same demographic.  In Europe it's been recently noted that there's an increasing waive of conversion to the old Christian churches by Muslim immigrants, and in the Middle East itself its apparently a huge underground movement as well. The irony of this is that these people, who have been exposed to the  horror of the Islamic sanction of violence and have lost their faith in Islam, do indeed recognized what it was that made the West a decent society with strong ideals in the first place, Christianity.

It wasn't the Socialist theorist like Marx, or the supposedly enlightened figures of late 18th Century France, who brought into Europe, an thence to the Western Hemisphere, and thence around the globe, high minded concepts like democracy, rights for women, respect for the poor, equality of the races, and the like. That was Christianity.  Nearly anything decent and honorable in European and European influenced cultures originates there. And nearly anything that stands in contrast with traditional Christian moral concepts tends to have a disturbing origin in our society.

Where all of this leads in the end nobody can be sure. But in a giant struggle of the "West" v Islamic extremism, Islam, right now, has an advantage in that they it at least credits a standard of nature, even if it looks at through warped lenses from our prospective.  We stand, right now, mostly for mush.  It will be hard to beat a determined enemy with a concrete concept of theology and metaphysics if we stand nothing more for how far we can push the envelope in an area which used to mostly be the deep property of married persons.  If we don't reform that, we likely won't win.  Perhaps hopefully, while we self obsess on what makes us "personally fulfilled", and while Justice Kennedy and his fellow travelers reduce the Constitution to the song lyrics from an episode of Ren and Stimpy,  those who have come in more recently sometimes understand our old ideals, and what they stem from, better than we seemingly do.

Sunday Morning Scene: Churches of the West: Our Lady of the Woods Catholic Church, Dubois Wyoming

Churches of the West: Our Lady of the Woods Catholic Church, Dubois Wyoming

This is Our Lady of the Woods Catholic Church in Dubois, Wyoming, which is a mission church in the Catholic Diocese of Cheyenne served by the Parish in Riverton, Wyoming.

It's disturbing when you find yourself agreeing with one of those statements somebody's printed on money.

One of those things that makes you want to reconsider some of your own views. . .

Sheridan Enterprise, July 2, 1916. Mexico and the Somme

Border tensions shared front space with the British offensive on the Somme on July 2, one day after the British offensive had commenced.

The sunny side of the street

The first day of the Somme

Gordan Highlanders advancing, July 1, 1916.

By this time on July 1, 1916, the British had sustained over 57,000 casualties, of which a little over 19,000 had been killed, at the Somme.  The French sustained a comparatively light number of about 1,500 losses while the Germans had sustained between 10,000 to 12,000.

Roads to the Great War: Ten Almost Random Thoughts on the 100th Anniversary of the Battle of the Somme

Roads to the Great War: Ten Almost Random Thoughts on the 100th Anniversar...: 100 Years Ago Today, the Battle of the Somme Began Last Sunday, I had a wonderful time in Sacramento, CA making a presentation on th...

Dwight and Mamie Eisenhower, married on this date in 1916

The Eisenhower's at his duty station in San Antonio, 1916.

On this date, in 1916, Dwight and Mamie Eisenhower wed in Denver Colorado, her hometown.  She was 19 years old, and he was 25. The wedding took place at her parents home and was presided over by a Presbyterian minister.  The couple met in San Antonio where she was attending finishing school, and where the family also wintered.  Her father was a meat packing executive for Doud & Montgomery and had retired at age 36.  Dwight Eisenhower was, of course, a serving office in the U.S. Army.  An excellent training officer, Eisenhower was not assigned a role that lead in his entering Mexico during the Punitive Expedition, and indeed he remained in the United States in a training role during World War One.

Battle of the Somme commences: July 1, 1916

 British troops marching to the front, June 28, 1916, just before the offensive.

The battle of the Somme commences at this time in 1916.

And with it, a true horror.

 French woman made homeless by the Battle of the Somme.

The Somme: the Hawthorne Ridge Mine

The Hawthorne Ridge Mine, which went off at 07:20 on this day in 1916, shortly before the commencement of the offensive on the Somme.

Garden Progress

Taking a farmer's look at Elisha's annointing.

The LORD said to Elijah:

“You shall anoint Elisha, son of Shaphat of Abelmeholah,

as prophet to succeed you.”

Elijah set out and came upon Elisha, son of Shaphat,

as he was plowing with twelve yoke of oxen;

he was following the twelfth.

Elijah went over to him and threw his cloak over him.

Elisha left the oxen, ran after Elijah, and said,

“Please, let me kiss my father and mother goodbye,

and I will follow you.”

Elijah answered, “Go back!

Have I done anything to you?”

Elisha left him, and taking the yoke of oxen, slaughtered them;

he used the plowing equipment for fuel to boil their flesh,

and gave it to his people to eat.

Then Elisha left and followed Elijah as his attendant.

1 Kgs 19:16b, 19-21

From this past Sunday's readings in the Catholic lectionary, and therefore probably also in quite a few Protestant churches as well. And a very interesting one as well, and in particular for people who know a little about animal agriculture.  Particularly the references to oxen.

First of all, what was Elisha doing at the time Elijah found him.  Plowing, we are informed.  More specifically:

Elijah set out and came upon Elisha, son of Shaphat,
as he was plowing with twelve yoke of oxen;
he was following the twelfth.

We learn a little later the following:

. . .and taking the yoke of oxen, slaughtered them;
he used the plowing equipment for fuel to boil their flesh,
and gave it to his people to eat.

These passages tell us a lot about what Elisha was doing, how he was doing it, and how many people were with him.

First of all, we know he was plowing, and "twelve yoke of oxen" were being used.  Now, that doesn't say that he was using all twelve yokes.  Rather, "he was following the twelfth".  In other words, the field was being plowed with twelve plows.

Does that mean twelve teams of oxen?  Not necessarily, it might actually mean twelve oxen. While we commonly imagine yokes to be for teams of two, they aren't necessarily, and oxen can be singly yoked.  I attempted to learn what would have been the case in the Middle East at this time, but that attempt failed. There's surprisingly (I guess) little information on that topic.  So we know that at least twelve oxen were being used, and maybe twenty four.

That also means that he had at least eleven men working with him, one for each yoke.  But he likely also had a lot more people with him than that.

We are given a clue here in that after he determined that he would in fact follow Elijah, Elisha slaughtered the oxen and boiled their meat, distributing it to his "people to eat".  Twelve oxen would be a lot of food for just twelve people, but its a little odd, if we think he was just outside the farmhouse, for him to be doing that.  But he no doubt was not.

Indeed, the custom everywhere for people using oxen was to keep them at the field where you were using them, and sleep there.  Oxen are slow. And you are using up their energy if you are driving them around just to get somewhere.  Moreover, you can hardly take your plowing equipment out in the field and leave it there and expect to find it all in the morning. So, chances are very high that Elisha and his crew were staying where they were plowing. And chances are also very high that the men who were plowing had families that came along, and preformed domestic chores for them while they were there in the field. When the oxen were slaughtered and boiled, they were probably feeding at least thirty people, but probably something more like forty, or even fifty.

It should also be noted that the oxen probably weren't the giant steer type oxen depicted above.  Indeed, as I don't know the original word, I don't know if it has a gender context.  "Oxen", as a word, did not originally have a gender context in English actually, but merely referred to a bovine used as a beast of burden.  As a word, it descends from the word "aurochs", which was a type of European wold cow.  Aurochs became a world like "ochs", which became "ox".  Only over time did ox come to mean a steer used as a beast of burden. At first, it meant bovine.  Anyhow, beyond that, the really big cattle we have today haven't always been like that.  They weren't tiny by any means, but modern cattle are quite a bit bigger than some (but not all) of their predecessors.  Indeed, I have a packed longhorn in the freezer right now, and while longhorns aren't tiny, their steaks are itty bitty.  They're a skinny steer.

The more surprising thing is that the plowing equipment was sufficient to provide the fuel, although the text does not really say that.  It says he used the plowing equipment for fuel, not that it was all the fuel. And here the reference is probably to more than the yokes, but also the plows, as plows were made of wood at the time.  All in all, it would have been a fair amount of wood.

And it would have been an expensive feast.  Indeed, Elisha was truly committing himself in an irreversible way.

I suppose details like this don't fascinate everyone. But they do me.  A glimpse into the agriculture of the past.

Studebaker 4x4 truck

Studbaker's were converted to 4x4 by NAPCO.  Whether this is an original conversion, or one done later, I couldn't say, although the wheels clearly aren't original.  Nice Studebaker, however.

NAPCO conversions, which manufacturers other than Chrysler to compete in this market with Dodge, have been covered earlier in this blog. The Studebaker NAPCO conversion actually increased the cost of the truck by 1/3d.

There's just something about these old four wheel drives.

The threat of war recedes. June 29, 1916

By June 29, the imminent threat of war was passing.

Note the action by an Austrian submarine. We don't often think of Austria in this context during the Great War.

The easing of the crisis hadn't caught up with the Douglas Budget yet, but it did note that Theodore Roosevelt had declared his political career over, and in sort of a sad way.

I have to say that I find A. R. Merrit's advertisements creepy.  Today, you'll note that they were also inaccurate.  We hadn't declared war on Mexico.  Merritt was jumping the gun.

Lex Anteinternet: Brexit Comment Panic

After I posted this;

Lex Anteinternet: Brexit Comment Panic:   As an American, I feel disinclined to get too worked up over the British deciding to leave the EC.  Actually, although this view (or ...

I read two op ed posts making very similar points, the best of which is George F. Will's.  His essay on the topic is excellent and calm.

Brexit Comment Panic

 

As an American, I feel disinclined to get too worked up over the British deciding to leave the EC.  Actually, although this view (or the admission of this view) is rare, I actually understand it.  I'd likely have voted to leave myself, if I were a British voter, but it's not my country and its not my decision.

Anyhow, its been interesting to watch the reaction by those opposing the departure. Some is very well reasoned, if a bit late, but some is really overblown, panicky, and snobby.  Indeed, I wonder if some of the wounded "stay" folks realize that their attitude might contribute to the view why others wanted to leave.  I've read some of the most amazing commentary, from those blaming it on an "older" (boomer) generation, when that generation in fact voted to get in, in the first place, to one snobbish voter who condemned his entire middle class home town.  Some of it reads very childishly.

Well, folks, keep calm (and carry on).  The UK has been around for a long time and the economy isn't going to collapse, Europe isn't going to spin off the globe, and things will be okay.

Maybe the EC, which has strongly anti democratic statist tendencies, will actually reform and realize that it has to let the residents of the various European states actually have a bit of a voice.  And while I'm sure that the EC will survive, if the entire creaking edifice cracked and the European states had to go back to being fully independent nations without the EC, I'm sure they're quite capable of getting along with each other in 2016 and they will in fact do so quite nicely.

For the history minded, I amazed to note that nobody has seemingly noticed that this story is not a new one. Not even close to being one. The first "EC", if you will, was the Roman Empire, which of course fell apart.  And then there was the attempt at the Holy Roman Empire, which never really got rolling.  For that matter, Charles the Great's domain (Charlemagne, Carolus Magnus) wasn't a minor matter.  Well after that, Napoleon's invasion of everything European was an attempt at getting everyone in Europe together in the name of liberal ideals of a sort, even if a pretty badly flawed one.  I'll omit other such attempts.  In the long history of Europe, it's come together and flown apart, showing I suppose that people who assume that history has one obvious direction are often pretty far off the mark, and showing that a concept of nationhood is a pretty strong one.  But we can take comfort in the fact that no major European power is going to start shooting at another, and therefore perhaps the real foundational thesis of the EC itself is now obsolete.

And the crisis continues. . . news for June 28, 1916.

Today we have an example of a less dramatic Cheyenne newspaper, the Cheyenne State Leader. The crisis with Mexico still dominated the news, however.  

And the news of  the crisis also dominated the Laramie Republican, although political news, that of Theodore Roosevelt drooping out of the race, also made the front page.

Roads to the Great War: Shaving, Disposability and the First World War

Interesting look at the role of World War One impacted shaving:

Roads to the Great War: Shaving, Disposability and the First World War: A Doughboy Shaving in Camp with a Gillette Razor For much of human history, men were stuck with facial hair. Beards were mandatory ...

Another example of Holscher's Fourth Law of History at work?

Hachita, New Mexico raided, June 27, 1916

In spite of the ongoing presence of U.S. troops in Mexico, and a large border presence, a raid by Mexicans of some sort near Hachita, New Mexico, resulted in the deaths of at least two Americans and perhaps more (the details are hard to come by).  The raid was a nighttime raid.

Hachita was used as a staging point for troops entering Mexico during the Punitive Expedition, so a raid in this location is surprising.  The town, like Columbus, is a border town, although a very tiny one.

Tracking the Presidential Election Part VII

Yes, a new one already.  The last one was rather obviously very long, and the GOP now appears to have a candidate with a sufficient number of delegates so as to be able to take the nomination on the first ballot.

The current results:

Democrats:  Needed to win, 2,383.

Clinton: 2,305 (537 of which are Superdelegates)
Sanders:  1,539 (42 of which are Superdelegates)

Republicans:  Needed to win, 1,237.

Trump:  1,238 (of which 88 are unpledged delegates).  Absent unpledged delegates bolting, Trump is the GOP nominee.
Cruz:  560   Cruz has suspended his campaign. (of which 9 are unpledged delegates)
Rubio:  167.  Rubio has suspended his campaign.
Kasich:  161.  Kasich has suspended his campaign
Carson:  8  Carson has suspended his campaign.
Bush:  4  Carson has suspended his campaign.
Fiorina:  1  Fiorina has dropped out of the race.
Paul:  1  Paul has dropped out of the race.

Commentary 

Washington's May 24 results, Republican only, have pushed Trump barely over the top to the required number, although 88 of his delegates are unpledged and therefore could change.  Nine unpledged delegates that had been pledged for Cruz switched over to Trump recently.  Surprisingly, Kasich picked up one delegate since our last tally while Rubio lost one.

The GOP race is therefore more or less over, although a large amount of dissent remains.  As recently as last weekend one of the conservative pundits was still urging an independent or third party run.

The Democratic race, amazingly, remains in contest.  Clinton is very close at this point, but only due to Superdelegates.  There's every reason to believe that Sanders will continue to contest the election all the way to the convention.  This has to be frustrating to Clinton who now clearly faces Trump in the fall but who cannot ignore Sanders.  At the same time, the email issue has revived.

___________________________________________________________________________________

May 30, 2016 

Presumably reflecting changes in pledged delegates the tallies have changed a little; adding a few delegates for the front runners.


Democrats:  Needed to win, 2,383.

Clinton: 2,309 (540 of which are Superdelegates)
Sanders:  1,539 (42 of which are Superdelegates)

Republicans:  Needed to win, 1,237.

Trump:  1,239 (of which 95 are unpledged delegates).  Absent unpledged delegates bolting, Trump is the GOP nominee.
Cruz:  560   Cruz has suspended his campaign. (of which 9 are unpledged delegates)
Rubio:  167.  Rubio has suspended his campaign.
Kasich:  161.  Kasich has suspended his campaign
Carson:  8  Carson has suspended his campaign.
Bush:  4  Carson has suspended his campaign.
Fiorina:  1  Fiorina has dropped out of the race.
Paul:  1  Paul has dropped out of the race.

Commentary 

The only actual reason I bumped this up today is to note that the Wyoming Democratic Party has indicated its going to protest the DNC's allocation of Wyoming's delegates.  Sanders won the Wyoming primary, but the delegates were equally split between Sanders and Clinton. The Wyoming party feel that rather than a 7/7 split, it should be 8/6.


That would make no difference, unless it really comes down to the last vote, in the Democratic contest, but it does demonstrate why the Sanders campaign has been frustrated.  In spite of winning some late primaries, and picking up delegates as a result, the Democrat's process operates such that Clinton picks up nearly the same number, or in the case of Wyoming, she actually did pick up the same number.

___________________________________________________________________________________

June 6, 2016

 After a couple of weekend Democratic territorial races, the tallies are now as follows:

Democrats:  Needed to win, 2,383.

Clinton: 2,383 (571 of which are Superdelegates)  Absent unpledged delegates bolting, Clinton is the Democratic nominee
Sanders:  1,569 (48 of which are Superdelegates)

Republicans:  Needed to win, 1,237.

Trump:  1,239 (of which 95 are unpledged delegates).  Absent unpledged delegates bolting, Trump is the GOP nominee.
Cruz:  560   Cruz has suspended his campaign. (of which 9 are unpledged delegates)
Rubio:  167.  Rubio has suspended his campaign.
Kasich:  161.  Kasich has suspended his campaign
Carson:  8  Carson has suspended his campaign.
Bush:  4  Carson has suspended his campaign.
Fiorina:  1  Fiorina has dropped out of the race.
Paul:  1  Paul has dropped out of the race.

Commentary

So Clinton is now the unofficial Democratic nominee.  With these results she achieves, but only just achieves, obtaining enough delegates to secure the Democratic nomination, assuming the 571 Superdelegates that are pledged to her remain pledged to her.

Depending upon tomorrow's votes, the question of the loyalty of the Superdelegates may become moot, as over 800 Democratic delegates are to be chosen tomorrow.   The amazing thing, of course, is by this point both parties have chosen very unpopular candidates.  Having said that, the  Democrats chose the highly unpopular candidate they were anticipated to have chosen right from the onset, while the Republicans chose one that they were not anticipated to choose.

__________________________________________________________________________________

June 8, 2016 

The primaries, except for Washington D.C.'s Democratic primary, are now over.  Indeed, while this has been an odd election season to be sure, the election itself is effectively over as well.

The standings.

Democrats:  Needed to win, 2,383.

Clinton: 2,755 (571 of which are Superdelegates)  Absent unpledged delegates bolting, Clinton is the Democratic nominee
Sanders:  1,852 (48 of which are Superdelegates)

Republicans:  Needed to win, 1,237.

Trump:  1,536 (of which 95 are unpledged delegates).  Absent unpledged delegates bolting, Trump is the GOP nominee.
Cruz:  560   Cruz has suspended his campaign. (of which 9 are unpledged delegates)
Rubio:  167.  Rubio has suspended his campaign.
Kasich:  161.  Kasich has suspended his campaign
Carson:  8  Carson has suspended his campaign.
Bush:  4  Carson has suspended his campaign.
Fiorina:  1  Fiorina has dropped out of the race.
Paul:  1  Paul has dropped out of the race.

Commentary

Sanders took North Dakota and Montana, and South Dakota was a tie.  He did not take, however, California which was really his last hope.

Clinton is only the nominee right now, of course, due to the Superdelegates.  But Sanders would need nearly 500 Superdelegates to bolt Clinton and join him in order to reverse these results and that won't be occurring. Trump, for his part, received all the late delegates in spite of his earlier competitors largely remaining on the ballots of those states choosing yesterday.

The candidates now go on to their conventions in late July.  The campaign of the two main candidates against each other, however, started a couple of weeks ago.

There remains some items up in the air, most significantly a lingering threat that the Never Trump wing of the GOP will bolt for a third party candidate or give their support to the Libertarian candidate in protest.  Likewise, there's a small threat that the Green Party will appeal to Sanders supporters, and even the Libertarian Party might a bit.  This might, therefore, turn out to be a surprisingly good year for both those parties, even though neither has any serious chance of winning.  A good showing, however, might propel those parties into serious parties that have to be contended with.

The fact that Trump continues to face internal opposition is, moreover, significant.  The thought was that the Republicans would pull together after Trump secured the necessary number of delegates but that isn't occurring to the extent it was predicted to.  Indeed, the Never Trump movement, even this late, is hinting that it will back an alternative and it clearly would have run one but for the fact that those that it approached declined to run. That fact is hugely significant for the Democrats as its heavily symbolic of this election cycle.  By choosing Trump the Republicans have chosen a candidate that even the massively unpopular Hillary Clinton is likely to easily beat and even a fair number of Republicans can't support.

This thread will continue on, unless it grows to big, until at least the Convention.  Or until something surprising happens and a new one is needed.  In a year of surprised, who knows, that could happen.

Followup

Following Tuesday's primaries, I thought there was a chance that Bernie Sanders might concede.

Nothing doing, apparently.

Indeed, he's taking a lot of heat for it, but he's contesting for the Washington DC primary, the only one left, which occurs next week.

It's a bit difficult to see what Sanders end game is at this point, and there's a lot of speculation about it.  Indeed, Democratic commentators are getting a bit spastic about it, demanding that he concede. Some are speculating that he is now campaigning for concessions from the platform, or to impact the direction that the Democrats are going in.  Maybe. But there's also speculation that he intends to angle for the Superdelegates, perhaps to drop Clinton below the assured number and cause a brokered convention.  That would seem odd, as he wouldn't win that, but who knows.  His campaign has been a difficult one to accurately predict.

In any event, the irony of it is that Sanders is doing what everyone thought the Never Trump Republicans would do, campaign to the bitter end. They basically dropped out, however, before the matter was really decided.  The hard to predict Sanders hasn't.

June 28, 2016

I never did put the final count in here, and I've been well aware of that, but I've figured everyone was so sick of this that they'd want a break.

Anyhow, after the D.C. primary, which went to Clinton, this stand as follows:

The standings.

Democrats:  Needed to win, 2,383.

Clinton: 2,811 (591 of which are Superdelegates) 
Sanders:  1,879 (48 of which are Superdelegates)

Republicans:  Needed to win, 1,237.

Trump:  1,542 (of which 95 are unpledged delegates). 
Cruz:  560   Cruz has suspended his campaign. (of which 9 are unpledged delegates)
Rubio:  167.  Rubio has suspended his campaign.
Kasich:  161.  Kasich has suspended his campaign
Carson:  8  Carson has suspended his campaign.
Bush:  4  Carson has suspended his campaign.
Fiorina:  1  Fiorina has dropped out of the race.
Paul:  1  Paul has dropped out of the race.

Commentary

Not surprisingly, there was a time after everyone had dropped out that Trump's poll standings surged and he appeared to be more likely to win that Clinton, but that only lasted for a week and he's been on the rocks ever since.  Now experienced observers have wondered what he's been doing the past month, and he has been in the news a lot less.  Today finds him, oddly, in Scotland where he commented following the Brexit vote. Things frankly don't look good for him at all, and in a race in which he only has Clinton to take on, he's not taking her on effectively at all.

The conventions, which will cause new entries or at least a new entry in this series, will spike each candidates numbers following the respective conventions, but this now appears to be on a fairly certain trajectory.  The GOP establishment does not appear to be rallying to Trump, which pundits said it would.  The terrorist attack in Florida does not appear to have made him look like a better option, as some predicated a terrorist attack would, and mostly he seems sort of stuck. Clinton, on the other hand, doesn't appear stuck at all, even if she doesn't appear to be popular either.

I wasn't going to update this thread until the conventions, but I've done so now due to all the other political races gong on and it would have accordingly been odd not to.  Internationally we have the Brexit vote, of course, and the following resignation of David Cameron.  Locally we have a U.S. House race heating up in which one campaign manager went so far as to claim he didn't know that one of his opponents "was still running".     And around the state we did have some Democrats that were looking good, but the national party effectively murdered them this week with their childish sit in on the floor of Congress and, moreover, true to form local Democrats, or at least one, couldn't shut up long enough not to suddenly come out looking like a radical proponent of gun control, which ends that campaign even if the candidate doesn't seemingly know that.

Followup

I thought it unlikely that I'd have anything to update in this thread prior to the conventions, at which time I'd start new ones, but a surprising event did occur.

Longtime Republican columnist and intellectual figure George F. Will officially announced that he is leaving the GOP.   This is not minor news.  Will is actively opposed to Trump and Republicans themselves seem to be wavering.  Some dismiss this as the discontent Republican elite simply pouting, but its' more than that.  Trump is not gaining the support that many assumed he would after he became the presumptive nominee, and there is no indication that his support in traditional Republican quarters is going to grow.

At the same time, there's some curious speculation now amongst pundits that Trump may actually quit the race prior to the election.  This has been commented upon in more than one columnist's writings, although the writers may be feeding off of themselves in this speculation.

Recent polls show Trump behind Clinton, which is not surprising, but one now shows him far behind.  His campaign appears to have become somewhat lost and with Republican figures now actively opposed to him the campaign is in serious trouble.

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Tracking the Presidential Election, 2016

Tracking the Presidential Election, 2016, Part II

Tracking the Presidential Election, 2016, Part III Sic Transit Gloria Mundi.

Tracking the Presidential Election Part IV

Tracking the Presidential Election Part V

Tracking the Presidential Election Part VI. The wobbly Democratic Party.