We're Doomed: Hilary Clinton (HRC) vs. Trump edition

If you just finished reading my "We're Doomed: Donald Trump" edition, welcome: it gets worse.

Hillary Clinton is going to beat Bernie Sanders for the Democratic nomination, he's made a great run, but is going to get stampeded on Super Tuesday. He may hang around for a while but won't mathematically be able to catch HRC.

Should any bias creep in: I have campaigned against HRC, and find her to be an un-likeable and un-charismatic candidate. I think she has gravitas, and experience, but am unsure if she is well suited t be President. She is probably the best of the remaining presidential candidates for both parties, but in addition to everything I just listed she has one major flaw: her use of email.

HRC was the Secretary of State for the US from 2009-2013. In this period of time she oversaw a period of massive global change and unrest. Regardless of your view on her handling of situations like Arab Spring, Benghazi, National Security, Drones, Espionage, etc....there are a few things that, if established as fact, will absolutely make her un-electable:

• She sent email, from her personal account, that contained sensitive government information. There is debate about whether or not the information was labelled classified at the time, the FBI is currently investigating. 
• If this information was found to be classified, and HRC used her personal email to communicate it, she will likely be in legal trouble.
• Even without the legal trouble, it will be unlikely that she can be elected because of: Virginia (13), Pennsylvania (20), Ohio (18), Florida (29), and Colorado (9), let's call them the big five.

Why these states? Because they are the most likely states to be unpredictable right up to the election. Essentially I could list right now which party each state is going to vote for President (Win=270. Republicans: 217, Democrats: 232, big five: 89). These states don't have the demographics that usually favour the Democratic Party (age, education, race), they are largely blue collar, older, Caucasian, with various degrees of education. That demographic usually votes Republican.
(I am aware these are big, sweeping statements about areas with vast diversity in every county, but by and large I think I am capturing the majority of the population in these states)

With THE DONALD's essentially unlimited budget, and his now proven ability to pummel another candidate as he did to Jeb! Bush, giving him actual facts about a Presidential Candidate committing illegal acts with National Security information...I don't see how HRC would be able to move from 232 electoral college votes to 270. Even moving Pennsylvania and Colorado, the most reliably Democratic of the five, into her column still leaves DRC 9 electoral college votes short, with none of the remainder likely to go her way.

We're doomed.

We're Doomed: Donald Trump Edition

Please ignore all previous writings about Donald Trump: the sky is very rapidly falling on our heads.

Donald MF Trump (THE DONALD) is likely going to be the MF Republican nominee for President. And Hilary FFS Clinton (HRC) is pretty much guaranteed to be the Democratic nominee. This sets up a race of THE DONALD VS. HRC, where HRC is going to be going through a very public investigation about using her personal email to communicate state secrets and top secret information.

Why are we in this mess? Let Rolling Stone explain:

All of which virtually guarantees Trump will probably enjoy at least a five-horse race through Super Tuesday. So he might have this thing sewn up before the others even figure out in what order they should quit. It's hard to recall a dumber situation in American presidential politics.

The sad truth: THE DONALD has locked up somewhere between 25-35% support in almost every primary state. With five candidates still in the race, 25-35 is enough to either win or get enough pledged delegates to maintain the lead he has established through to the Convention in June when the Republicans officially pick their candidate. There is a decent chance that THE DONALD won't accumulate 50%+1 of the delegates, which are needed to be automatically selected, but it's hard to see how the candidate going into the convention with the most delegates isn't the candidate selected. What's left that could stop him?

• Kasich drops out of the race.

• This guy is polling at about 5-10% in just about every state he wasn't the governor of. With him in the race, no other candidate will get to the 35ish mark needed to start beating THE DONALD. 

• Karl Rove and/or the Koch Brothers

• The Koch brothers are billionares that have rules the Republican party for many years, they essentially created the tea party.

• Karl Rove was the strategist for George W Bush, runs an influential and well financed political organization.

• If either of these guys/groups starts to significantly back Rubio, there is a chance that Rubio maybe pulls ahead of THE DONALD, but that would require Kasich to drop out of the race.

• Media begins to reject the premise that Trump should be taken seriously, and start to treat him like they did Sarah Palin when she passed her initial popularity and was asked serious questions that demonstrated her unpreparedness for national leadership. We listen to THE DONALD'S answers to these questions on issues of social identity (race, gender, sexuality, etc.), economic plans, America's role in the world, free trade, and ask ourselves if that's the future we want.

• Act of God. 

• Nope, just kidding: THE DONALD already publicly fueded with the Pope (THE POPE!!!!), and THE DONALD received more votes from Christians afterwards.

Coming up soon: why this news gets worse when you look at the general election between THE DONALD and HRC.

Edit: Fivethirtyeight.com provide a blueprint that might be THE DONALD, but it relies of Florida (OF COURSE IT FUCKING DOES). Floridians are notoriously bad at voting. This ends poorly.

Day 2

Today kind of unimpressed with the breath of the depth and breadth the presentations today was not helpful to follow up maybe with the researcher Steven Chu could help create some language around some of the tools that we can bounce back to Sola taters and the start of practice illustrators but generally this is really targeted at entry level of staff it might be worth knowing if learning services used metacognition or if they focus on auditory kinesthetic and visual learning styles I'd assume is metacognition but I am Not sure we could also take a look at exam wrappers for a bounceback tool but point to the session was generally that everyone learns differently and the structure of visual auditory kinesthetic or Gardner's multiple intelligences to work independently because people learn different in different contexts and that needs to change over time student Similar nurse needs to plan monitor and evaluate essentially at PDSA or experiential learning cycle for their learning not super interesting to text message

Two presentations on text messages show me that we are at the cutting edge of this one with our use of SMS although the US probably within a year is going to catch up which means Canada maybe a year after the book not that I was given will be an interesting read phrases like you are the kind of student who... As ways of starting a text message or commit to or plan to can be helpful but we need to be careful that we are describing an ideal student let me send that information out two new students baby may the research done by Arkansas Central Arkansas and Cal Poly shows that students receive information about the ideal student are more likely to be deflated and disempowered by that information if they are not the ideal student the students who received an inspirational quotes are more likely to feel optimistic and work harder all the other one interesting. They applied was using SMS to address for long in that can be sort of cool great session by BYU and single vine on text messages BYU someone similar to text a pretty healthy percentage of their incoming you student population during the summer before the fall semester arrival they use something similar to Trumpia and are having huge success with engagement so it'll be really interesting to see what they think the main difference that they highlighted between what they doing what we do is that they send a text within 3 weeks of a student being admitted to university so they are catching the student right away and then getting significant engagement and they have their peer mentor the equivalent of our online group leaders running this interaction participents didn't really notice about you that the text messages were simple convenient and timely which is important to keep in mind when sending them they are Anna ratio 157 new students to 1 mentor during the summer with wheedle down his students had some experience of summer mount all the BYU compare themselves to Harvard in terms of the complete lack of summer m*** that they deal with

Finally two sessions one on global citizen project and one on the importance of talking about race with first year student wolf Jerry and gazing Important sessions that I'll have to refer to my written notes on University of South Florida for global citizen project in Boston University for first-year students and race essentially they put language to some of the competencies that we are going to need to talk about it's it hang on I need to think more about how I want to talk about what I learned in this essentially global citizen projects very much plays off at the keynote speaker from last night to say how are Students prepared and or willing to be introduced to the competency is there going to be needing to face the challenges of the 21st century in a way that is not as employees and workers but is as citizens of the world needs to be able to work with different intersections of identity in order to address the challenges that they will face and that it's important for to be communicated is a way of living and not skills they need for University of the boat who they are and what they're going to do with their lives so things like why would this be important to them students to say that okay so the race presentation just a normal job I Boston University I have the card for the presenter that I like quite a bit I think what they talked about is him what they talked about was great except that it was very established in there common first year classes or is it through the first class that although it was an f.y.i 103 class for like freshmen through seniors were taking the class what sounded really interesting is the common ground training did they provided to pierce volunteer staff maybe even professors that did Offer quote unquote diversity training not it would really for intercultural competence he's asking really important questions I like subtracting you students to ask questions every question these questions every seminar overexposure throughout their undergraduate degree could be framed in terms of who is this person instructor what do they want me to know why did they want me to know it what are they telling me at what kind of world do I want to live in and in the importance of us understanding that at least by the American research the students are talking about race but they're talking about it with their friends of the same race and they notice when we are not ready or not participating in the conversation so the conversation is happening the risk management is fairly minimal it's going to be messy so biggest some examples of activities around common ground next week old blind spots and I will probably follow up with roll over email

so lots of good stuff and global competencies and raise some things to think about with text message interaction but nothing super important and a couple good contacts

Should you happen to see an fye post

I'm doing voice to text notes of the conference I'm at. Its verbal processing, and I don't expect people to see it but that is try this as a tool given some tech issues i!m having. They'll be rambly, disjointed and long. The audience is intended to be !e, later on :)

Day One at FYE

Great first day at the conference in Orlando. The keynote speaker was the president of a small college in Silicon Valley. He has integrated participation in politics and democracy in every part of the school curriculum to a degree. As the president with support of the board has created a culture where the whole institution has bought into the value of teaching this generation of students how to shape public policy for the challenges they will face in the next generation. He has use that to get away from the conversation about postsecondary as a factory for 21st century workers. He focuses on skills around lobbying influence systemic change and provides space and training for students and staff to have incredibly difficult and risky conversations. This could be an interesting job to fill with upper year students and potentially first year students. NOT the work that CDEC does, but the work around using Sienna staff to facilitate these conversations and to expose students to the type of inequality racial divide oppression that exists within our community. We can use these challenges to create opportunities for students to solve the problem as to not create a culture of despair and powerlessness. More thoughts around how to get large scale by in funding and staff support.

Post Mortem on the American Primaries after New Hampshire

The traditional media is spinning up more or less what I would expect: after two primaries both races are very close and your eyeballs should be glued to their channel for up to the minute news!

This isn't as true as they make it out to be: a look at the numbers tells us that things are still more or less settled on the Democratic side, but maybe moved in to the toss up column on the Republican side.

Democratic Party (Clinton v Sanders)
To think that Sanders has a chance is to ignore the people and money that got behind Clinton in 2008. Sanders keeping Iowa a close race was remarkable, but his blowout victory in New Hampshire was essentially him running in his own state, I don't think we learn anything from it. Clinton will win South Carolina and Nevada, and the narrative will quickly spin in to how much trouble Sanders is in. The dark horse potential on the Democratic side is a late entry into the race by Biden, which is highly unlikely and based almost entirely on future legal troubles Clinton may get into about her use of private email for top secret government work. This is still Clinton's to win.

Republican (Establishment v Reality TV stars)
To understand the Republican primary, you have to understand that a well funded group (by the Koch brothers) of (mostly) angry, social and fiscal conservative white people called the tea party make up enough of the membership to have major influence over who the nominee will be. They are largely responsible for the Republican gridlock in congress, and why every Republican candidate essentially pledges to view the role of government as a force for evil (regardless of their beliefs before they decided to run for higher office).

Trump to well to rebound from a tough loss in Iowa to a win in New Hampshire, but if you read data on sites like fivethirtyeight.com you see that he is the second choice of essentially zero candidates...so as other candidates drop out of the race, he won't pick up any support. Particularly in primaries where you don't have to be a republican member to vote for the Republican nominee, he won't fare well.

A lot of this race depends on who drops out by March 15th (Super Tuesday!). The following candidates are commonly labelled "establishment" candidates, as they don't spout the crazy, wall building, muslim hating, mysgonistic nonsense that the "tea party" candidates do:
Establishment:
Rubio, Bush, Kasich
Tea Party:
Trump, Cruz, Fiorina, Carson

The longer that both Bush and Rubio stay in the race, the longer Trump and/or Cruz will continue to poll in first/second place. Once one of Bush or Rubio drop out, all of their support will start to drift to the remaining candidate, and you'll quickly see Trump's support dwindle.

Sadly, if neither Bush nor Rubio drop out before March 15th, Rubio is likely to lose Florida and Bush is likely to lose Texas (their home states), which means the media narrative will likely label both of them as having campaigns that can't win...and we'll be left with Trump or Cruz as the Republican candidate.

Update: Fiorina dropping out impacts none of the above, she never had enough support or delegates to impact the race.