What a world we live in

The good news for me on election day is that guy in Ohio who almost won, actually he hasn't quite lost since there are those early votes yet to be counted, but it seems like the odds are against him.  But it's a good omen for us dems because that seat was ruby red, so it portends well for us in the 18's.

I was watching the Cub game, but I was also switching to CNN between innings and it was a nail-biter with the lead changing hands several times.  CNN had a map of the heavily gerrymandered district.  There was a thin blue sliver of Columbus on the south edge dominated by huge red counties on the north.  I imagine the whole city of Columbus except the central core, is parceled out into surrounding suburban districts to negate the democratic votes.  The Democrats do this too of course, but the Republicans are more zealous.  Which may be their undoing in 18 because with the somewhat narrow Republican majority in each of these districts they are subject to being washed out by the projected blue wave.

There is some talk, especially among the dem base of impeachment if we take the house, but I don't think so.  We would need two thirds of the senate and I don't see that happening, and if you set out to kill the king you need to finish the job.

Beagles claims that he is more himself vs them than us vs them, and I'm not saying that he isn't, but it sounds like he got out to the polling place and I don't think he wrote himself in on every ballot, so some of those thems (reps) are more like us to him than other thems (dems).

When the Romans set out on the path to empire what they really thought they were doing was taking care of the trouble making thems on their border, but then when they conquered those guys it turned out that there were more thems on the other side of the new border, and so it went.  Eventually the Romans just got into conquering for the booty and the glory of it, and had quite the run for a few hundred years.  But my point was that strong us vs them people always need to have a them, a them to be defeated before everything can be okey dokey.

The cold war was a pretty good time for them.  Everybody agreed on who them was, and because of MAD the only real battles were with client states and not too harmful to either side.  Oops there was Vietnam.  Well if we hadn't gotten involved it wouldn't have been such a big deal.  Possibly, and this a long shot, it could have become a flashpoint between Russia and China, since the Vietnamese hated the Chinese more than they hated us.

And here we get to Nixon going to Red China.  I think Beagles suspects Dick did it because he, like much of the US gummint,  was a secret commie, but actually Dick was thinking Mao could do something for him in Vietnam, which was never going to happen, but also he wanted to drive a wedge between Russia and China which he was more successful in.

You know it just now occurs to me that we now have a bifurcation in them, with the reps, under their new leadership seeing Russia as quite the pal, and China as the new them, while the dems, formerly accused of being too soft on the Russkies, are now the ones most vehemently against them.

As Homer Simpson is fond of marveling, "What a world we live in."

Speaking of the world we live in, how about this?

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/aug/10/mars-awaits-trump-supporters-to-vote-on-logo-for-space-force