On Brexit and Everything After

As an Englishman in America I'm used to a few immutably core conceits; everyone likes my accent and wants to hear me talk more, the US is No. 1 in every way that matters, and nobody here gives a shit about the politics of England, no matter how much I try to tell them about it.

Even when Jalyss' family learnt the exciting news about how David Cameron had sex with a pigs head all they wanted to talk about was the other news of the day, which was that Jalyss told them she was pregnant with Toby. Which was exciting news and all, but it's not exactly David Cameron's secret passion for pork products.

Its come as a huge shock to me then that over the last few days people have actually been stopping me to ask what exactly a Brexit is. America, it seems, woke up to the same shock and panic as Britain. It was probably no more confused than most of the country that had just thrown themselves off the cliff. If the post-Referendum reaction is any indication a sizeable proportion of the vote may have been a mistake; people certain that Remain would win taking the opportunity to all give the status-quo a kicking, safe in the knowledge that their vote wouldn't make a difference ended up on the wrong side of screwing themself.

I'll admit that I watched along with the Brexit vote as it happened, in contact with some of the other politics junkies that I know in the UK, and it quickly became clear that Leave was headed for an upset, in every sense of the word. For future reference there is something hugely upsetting about watching your country commit economic suicide in realtime. I stopped hoping for a resurgence which wasn't coming about the time that Nigel Farage declared a victory for ordinary decent people, and praised a revolution won without a "shot being fired" (other than the ones which killed Remain campaigner, Labour MP Jo Cox).

Absolutely as much of a dick as he looks

For those Americans who weren't aware that the UK was even voting to leave the EU it must have seemed bizarre to wake up to find that they had actually gone and done it. Actually though, America is probably the one place in the world where deliberately tanking the world economy for 'Freedom' would be celebrated, so predictably the Republican party rallied around the vote. Expert judge of mood, and unlikely Presidential Candidate, Donald Trump, made a speech in Scotland praising their decision to leave. He said that awkwardly in public, forgetting that Scotland actually voted overwhelmingly to stay in the EU, and again later in private after the crowd voted leave with their feet and left him alone.

Literally the best picture possible for this post

Of course, the presence of Trump on the day after Brexit was an appropriately grim visitation. Standing at his financially ruinous golf course, making a speech praising his own foresight as the flaming economy desparately stop, drop and rolled off a cliff, to people who didn't want him, his business, or Brexit and have somehow ended up with all three.

Since then the pound has plunged to its lowest point in my lifetime, the British economy went from the 5th biggest in the world to the 6th in four hours, and $2 trillion was wiped off the world market, the Leave campaign admitted they have no way of doing any of the things they promised withdrawal would achieve, and the UK has collectively gone through the five stages of grief.

Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression ... Acceptance may be some way off. I can only imagine the power surge as millions of kettles were put on at once, as the British people instinctively responded to crisis in the only way they know how: making themselves a cup of tea and cracking jokes about the predicament we've got ourselves into. Among the outpourings of shock, horror, confusion and loss, we found time to make memes, and spawned dozens of pages of satire to get us through the day.

There has been a predictable response in the aftermath about unity and looking to the future, although most of the hand-wringing has come from the defeated Remain camp, with little in the way of gracious victory from Leave. With a country totally divided, it's interesting (if a little disheartening) to look at the demographical split between Leave and Remain.

For those who aren't interested in charts of post-Referendum demographic breakdowns, first of all what's wrong with you?, and second of all, here's the short version. The areas that voted to leave were those with less money, fewer people with a higher education, and an older population. Some of the splits are surprising. Class and poverty were seemingly more important than race; ethnically diverse but post-industrial Birmingham voted leave, along with Britian's Northern rust-belt. Areas with high levels of immigration voted leave, but more heavily if the local economy was struggling. and over 65s were almost a mirror opposite of 18-25s. In each case there was a 3/1 split, with pensioners voting to leave, while the younger generation voted to remain.

This, somehow, has become the defining narrative of the vote. A generation which got to enjoy all the benefits of membership of the EU whilst they were working have propelled England out of Europe. The reaction has been swift and predictably blunt; many of the memes circulating discuss the younger generations anger that people who'll be dead before the full consequences of Brexit are known have dumped this on the young.

There's been an equally swift backlash, decrying the young for acknowledging that death is inevitable and that old people are more likely to die first. My favourite, incidentally, is the claim that if it wasn't for old people we would all be speaking German, which hilariously combines Godwin's Law with an inability to do the math on exactly who is over 65, and how likely it is that they fought in World War Two.

The age a 70 year old would have had to have been to fight in WW2.

But look, this anger is pretty fair. It's worth noting that you still couldn't vote in this referendum unless you were 18, which means that teenagers who will be entering the workforce in two years time, when Britain actually withdraws, won't have any say at all in how their country voted. That's ludicrous. It's all very well saying we shouldn't turn on each other in the aftermath, but it might have been better to get that in before the elderly voted out of Europe. Anger about your future getting kicked in the nuts by a generation which already lived in a relatively golden age and who have left a legacy of bitter inequality, regional poverty and division, all of which lead to the current situation, seems reasonable under the circumstances.

The Left in particular seem hamstrung by how to respond now that their base constituency of working-class voters has pushed Scotland to the brink. This may be the biggest political consequence of Brexit. If Jemery Corbyn is deposed and Labour try to move back to the centre it's hard to see how they can survive. Competing for Tory voters with UKIP, having already lost support in the Northern cities to the right's Little Englander policies, along with Wales and Scotland become ever more divorced from the Union, will be the death of progressive policies in England. The idea of a Left Exit from the Neo-Liberal EU has handed England to the worst elements of the Tory party for decades to come. Good luck replacing the significant workers rights legislation with anything as expansive when Johnson, Gove and Farage are in charge.

So, how do we move on from here. I wish I knew. In the short term things are bad and will probably only get worse. The fragile peace in Northern Ireland has been undermined, Scotland are trying to negotiate their own deal with the EU and a second referendum on independence is far more likely to be successful now. The factional, xenophobic rhetoric of the leave campaign will only grow, and while theres already signs that many Leave voters are starting to regret their choice, it's only going to get worse once the actual impact is felt.

It's not like it's in the EU's best interest to make it easy for us. The opposite in fact. If they want to discourage other countries lining up behind Britain to leave they need to make it as punishing as possible for us. It shouldn't surprise anyone when they say they want us out as soon as possible, or immediately start talking about abandoning current agreements on immigration or trade. Why work with a country that's decided to abandon you? Why protect people who don't want to do anything in return?

By any measure, Britain is worse off for this vote. Its easy to say we need to reunite, It's a lot harder to do it. And just think, we wouldn't even be here, if it had been left to those meddling kids.

On Brexit

Somewhat to my surprise having torn myself away from the 24/7 raging dumpster fire that's American politics at the moment, it turns out that an ocean away there's another electoral sink hole taking place back home.

I mean, come on Britain, I turn my back for a few years and half the country seem to have lost their minds and started roaming the country bellowing Churchillian rhetoric about sticking it to Johnny Foreigner and flexing their biceps in the vague direction of Brussels.

Politics!

Until the last week I've been fairly sanguine that people probably weren't stupid enough to actually consider Brexit (a term, incidentally, that doesn't really do justice to the national economic suicide pact that withdrawing from a common market with our biggest trading partner would represent). I should have known better of course. The portents were all there; the birth of a two headed cow in Dorset. The fire wreathed comet in the night sky over Leeds. And, of course, the fact that in my inherent belief in the decency of the British people, I had somehow ended up on the same side as David Cameron.

Admittedly, we're there for different reasons. After all, it's his fault that we face what he's described as some sort of apocalyptic choice. There would be no referendum at all if it weren't for his pre-electoral courting of the Eurosceptic vote, a promise that I can guarantee he made with absolutely zero consideration of the fact that people might vote the wrong way on this. For future reference, if one side of a decision actually is such a cataclysmic disaster, it's probably not a good idea to give people an option to choose it.

Cameron's hope here, it seems, has been that Britain's instinctive complacency would prevent us from withdrawing out of a (reasonable) fear of the unknown. It's unsurprising then that so much of the argument from both sides has been doom-mongering of the potential consequences for and against Brexit, with very little in the way of actual reasoning about how Britain actually benefits from being a part of the EU, beyond the fact that without it the entire nation would probably slide beneath the ocean.

That kind of makes sense in a way though, because frankly any conversation that you could try to have about the EU fairly quickly runs into the insurmountable obstacle that nobody knows what it is that the EU does. I say that with such certainty because, as luck would have it, I graduated with a degree in International Politics, studied the EU and still couldn't tell you with any accuracy exactly how it works.

I used to think that was simply a side effect of the colossal scale of the European project; half a billion people in twenty eight countries casting a lazy triangle from Portugal, to Finland and down to Cyprus.

But, that's kind of the problem. Because having moved to America it's quickly become clear that while they're also ruled by an unaccountable, oligarchic Government, a bureaucractic erection on the body politic, they at least know what their Government does and how it works. Maybe not perfectly, but they can probably tell you who the President is. And what the branches of the Government are. Maybe even tell you about a few laws that the government has passed, or what the aims of the parties up for election are.

Now; can you honestly say, that having sat through the entire Brexit campaign, you know the answers to any of these about the EU? Let's start with an easy one: who is the President of the EU?

Got it?

Well, jokes on you, sucker, because you were wrong. You see, there's not actually any such thing as the EU President. Or perhaps more accurately, there's four; Jean-Claude Junckler (President of the Eureopean commission) Donald Tusk (President of the European Council), Martin Schulz (President of the European Parliament), and ... err... The Netherlands (President of the Council of the European Union). I guess by that point they just though, 'Why not give it to an entire nation?'. Really we're lucky that they stopped there and didn't just devolve power to Europe's pot plants, or anyone named Steve.

Literally every single one of these men are the EU President

All of this would seem like so much fuel to the Brexit fire, and yet I don't think I've heard, at any point, the argument that the problem with the EU is the lack of transparency. Instead the arguments seem to boil down to not really liking current levels of immigration (which wouldn't actually be solved by withdrawing from the EU), disliking the amount of money we send to the EU, and a weird assertion that the EU itself is somehow fundamentally anti-democratic when compared to the UK.

This, for me, is the most bizarre of the Brexit arguments. Sure, there's great appeal to the argument that we're no longer able to control our own country since some sweaty palmed German or French bureaucrat has unilaterally decided to ban British measurements, or outlaw fish, or whatever fantasy was last pulled out of the void.

But putting aside for a moment that we get to elect representatives to the European Parliament every 5 years (and that our representatives have the worst record of attendance in the Union, in part because we repeatedly elected people who don't think the EU should exist), we're leveling the charges of the EU lacking democratic foundations while being profoundly undemocratic ourselves.

Our head of state is a 90 year old product of centuries of selective breeding to ensure we have someone whose face you can stick on currency and stamps. Meanwhile, the House of Lords, or to give it its full and ridiculous title, 'The Right Honourable the Lords Spiritual and Temporal of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland in Parliament Assembled' is literally full to overflowing with 800 apppointed peers, selected for their services in giving money to politicians.

Of course, just in case you were concerned, we do have an elected lower house, which is currently run by a party which won just 36% of the 66% of the population who bothered to turn out to vote, so there's that.

In fact, the Government is so democratic that when the population overwhelmingly decided that we should name our new research vessel Boaty McBoatface, and yes, I realise that I'm late to this party, they immediately rejected it in favour of RRS Sir David Attenborough, because screw the voting public.

Look. Sir David is wonderful. Frankly, I think we should be naming more things after Sir David Attenborough. If the decision was made to rename every street after him, even, it would only be his just desserts for the incredible work he has done, and I would put up with the inconvenience of having to try and arrange to meet someone on the corner of Sir David Attenborough Drive and Sir David Attenborough Road, only to find out that they're actually at Sir David Attenborough Street and Sir David Attenborough Walk, you know, up by Sir David Attenborough Crescent, at the intersection of Sir David Attenborough Boulevard and Sir David Attenborough Lane.

Sir David Attenborough and one of 500 animals named after him; Sir David Attenborough Lemur

It's a testament to how loved He is that the Government were able to effectively use him as a flak shield for their decision not to accept the results of Votey McVoteface. Using his name is like invoking some strange, unknown God. It has a special power to it. Who is going to argue against Sir David Attenborough? Who would begrudge him a ship. Nobody, that's who, which is convenient for when you want to jettison the poor choice that the people made.

So look out for us to remain in the EU tomorrow, or, if the results go poorly, for us to instead end up part of the Sir David Attenborough EU.

At this point, all I know is that whatever choice we make we really need to get better at understanding what exactly it is that Europe does, and why it's worth us being a part of it for the foreseeable future. Leave or Remain, we at the very least ought to be able to name some of its functions, beyond stealing our money, propping up Greece, and swamping our shore with baguettes and paella.

On the birth of Tobias Ezekiel Zapfletts

So, Jalyss and I had a baby a few weeks ago. I'm still struggling with how to get that fact across to people who don't know. It seems quite gauche to just drop it into conversation. There aren't a whole lot of avenues that particular thread can go down after you've unleashed the verbal one-upmanship of having produced a child.

Tobias Ezekiel "Chames" Zapfletts

Consequently, I'm leading with the news. "Hi, I'm James, and I've just had a baby." Of course, that in and of itself isn't ever truly enough for people, because then you have to give them his vital statistics. He's a boy, he weighed 6lb 12oz, and he was 19.5 inches long. He's currently 12 days old. At some point I assume that people will stop requiring all these bits of minutiae for us to be able to move ahead with what I actually want to talk about. I'm not sure what age he has to be before they stop caring about his birth inseam, or the girth of his infant head. It doesn't currently happen to me, so I do know that somewhere between being two weeks and twenty nine years old, there's a cut off point at which it's impolite to ask about how much someone weighs and how long it took his mother to eject him.

The thing is that these statistics aren't even the salient details of what make him a person. Even at this point, where he's a very simple pooping potato creature, he has some easily discernible things that are so much more relevant than his weight, or length, or depth.

I am not a series of accurate but ultimately irrelevant personal numbers.

The things that are actually interesting about him, the things that I wish people would ask, can't really be catalogued like that. They're things like the fact that he'll only cry at night when he needs to do a really giant poo, or that he gets the hiccups every time he eats. He clearly favors lying on one side of his body, and will suckle on anything that gets too close to his mouth. You can't distill that down to digits, nor would you want to, but those give a more accurate reflection about him than anything people ever ask.

The first time that I got away from him to go outside and run, I found myself wondering what he was doing. Which is nuts, because he currently doesn't do anything. When you see videos of foals, or sea turtles, or whatever, being born they don't seem to have the same built-in defectiveness of a new-born baby human. They're up and about in, like, days. Max. Meanwhile Toby alternates between sleeping, eating and pooing and will do only this for months to come. Sometimes, if he's feeling really advanced, he will do two of these at the same time, but even that seems more accidental than planned, and while he's evidently pleased with himself when he manages it there's no real sense that he could do it again next time he wanted to.

Jalyss shared with me an article about the first three months, where it spoke about how it's essentially a fourth trimester, just his head is too big to allow him to escape the womb if he stays in, so he continues to develop outside as he would in utero. This makes an awful lot of sense to me. He is functionally useless, with an enforced dependency put onto his mother and I.

Our purpose has been reduced to parenthood. We no longer have roles, identities, pasttimes that aren't focussed on this small goblin that's lying on his back in our living room, repeatedly and agressively pooing himself for attention. We are purely ambulatory food and comfort givers, our existence is only for his benefit, to meet his needs. There is no James, only Dad.

Coincidentally, these are the exact expression our sleep deprived faces now make, thanks to our own tiny Gozer.

Instead of lying awake trying to think up new jokes that I can wake Jalyss up to listen to, which up until now has been my standard nightly routine, I spend my time attempting to discern the difference between the grunts that means the baby continues to be alive, and those that means he's in distress. It's an inherently stressful task, which makes it the perfect pastime for those brief few hours between being awake because you're putting him to bed, and being awake because he's enraged that he doesn't have a nipple in his mouth right this instant, Mom.

And yet there's a real sense of tranquil euphoria about it. Sure, that comes from the fact that Jalyss is pumping out a pharmaceutical level of pheromones to trick the two of us into looking after our progeny, a sedentary lump of frequently evil smelling flesh. As you can imagine, being doped up on post-natal hormones, we couldn't be, like, happier, man. We know that, like soup left too long to simmer, we've been reduced down to our purest, most necessary functions in order that we take care of him, and we just aren't at all bothered.

You'll notice, of course, that this suggests some kind of negativity towards the adiposeal being we now share our home with. This is a pure defence mechanism, because if I were to start trying to list the things he does that are so delightfully adorable, or the exciting new skills we imagine he learns each day, or the gorgeous little outfit that he just looks so precious in, if I tried to catalogue these, I'd turn into that most annoying of creatures - the Online New Parent. I'm already aware that my facebook feed is full of the baby. While I'm sure people are happy, there comes a point at which I have to accept that my friends aren't actually friends with me so they can see where Toby pooped today. Of course it's a big deal, it's dominating my life right now, but I'd like to be able to divorce myself to some extent from the appearance that all I care about is Toby.

Because that wouldn't be true. I still care deeply about a great many things, and lots of things are happening in my life currently. Writing up a post about how truly terrific Toby has turned out is the start of a slippery slope. It's the reason why Batman doesn't just kill the joker; it'd be too easy, and pretty soon his Instagram account is just pictures of him with other villains he's offed. Here's Batman at the abandoned botanical gardens, with dead Posion Ivy. Here's Batman at the zoo, posing next to the Penguin's corpse. Here's a selfie of Batman in front of a blazing Arkham Asylum, and if you look closely you can see his enemies trapped inside, beating in vain on the reinforced windows, while he pulls a duck face.

Once you do that, there's no way back. So this will, probably, be the only blog I write about the baby, and I'm not even going to touch upon the birth experience, mainly because it's a Thing That We Will Not Speak Of, other than to say that you don't truly know your wife until you've watched her force a living being out of herself, and that at one point my emotions overcame me and for a brief moment I was overcome by very, very masculine tears.

For this post only then, here's Toby. He's 19.5 inches long, weighed 6lb 12oz at birth, and is 12 days old today.

On Super Tuesday Two: Too Super, Too Tuesday

Last night, as I headed to bed, a storm rolled in. It was one of those occasional Spring storms which lives out its whole course in a single ten minute span, the cacophany and fury of the event being totally unrepresentative of the amount of time it lasts.

I mention this because today is, once again, a huge day in American politics. And like that storm the pressure has been building over the past few weeks for an event that has the potential to be a last stand for at least two of the Republican candidates seeking to delay Donald Trump, or a clearing of the air.

As the primary race starts to shift to the winner takes all states starting with Florida and Ohio, alongside Illinois, Missouri and North Carolina, gone are the days when the votes cast lead to a proportional delegate breakdown; we're now into a situation where one good win can net scores of those crucial delegates in one go.

Last week your retired Third Grade Teacher, Bernie Sanders, scored a major upset over rejected Skynet prototype, Hillary Clinton, by winning Michigan. So far Sanders has been struggling in the more diverse states, despite boasting the endorsement of Killer Mike,one half of rap duo Run the Jewels, and very probably the only non-white person Bernie Sanders has advising him. Despite his weakness among the strongly Democratic African-American base, Sanders has succesfully cornered the market on the kind of white, middle-class, socially conscious liberals whose comfortable lifestyle means they face little real adversity and who are therefore unconcerned about the impracticality of Sander's reform agenda.

In winning Michigan Sanders overturned a 20 point polling deficit to open up the Rust Belt, the states which were once the manufacturing heartland of America, and are now more akin to the Elephant Graveyard in The Lion King.

Not pictured: actual Hyenas.

This upset has the potential to keep the race going at least until the convention, especially if Sanders can pull off further victories tonight (watch Ohio and Illinois, two big states that could unexpectedly swing for Sanders), even though the delegate math still says that he has no real chance of winning.

On the Republican side a torrid two weeks have seen Donald Trump spend a debate reassuring the world's last great superpower that he has a big dick. Opposition to Trump has finally switched to Ted Cruz from Marco Rubio, whose once sparkling campaign got Cinderella syndrome and revealed itself as comprised of a few fat mice and a pumpkin.

For a candidate who was meant to be the Establishment wing's '1812 Overture', Marco Rubio has at times seemed more like he's orchestrating a movement of Sad Trombones. Watching his political aspirations die in real time, to the point where he told his own supporters to vote for John Kasich, the least interesting man in the race, has been sad. Not, admittedly, upsetting sad, but more the kind of sad where someone's trousers fall down, and as they bend to pull them up their underwear splits and they topple over and roll down the stairs, while the Benny Hill Theme plays out. That kind of slapstick sad.

It's left American conservatives to weigh up the evil of two lessers; men who in any typical year would be among those knocked out in the opening rounds of the electoral destruction derby. When the Republican Establishment is forced to swing behind someone who was once described, by his own colleague, as being so disliked that if he were "shot on the floor of the Senate, and the trial was in the senate" nobody would ever find the murderer guilty (source), you know that they might be in trouble.

The problem is that nothing seems to be slowing Trump down. Even an explosion of violence at his rally's over the last few days has only cemented his position as the 'says it like it is' candidate. The threatening rhetoric, hate speech, and race-baiting he's displayed have only endeared him to the significant reactionary sections of the Republican Party who sincerely believe that conservatism means a return to the days of white's only drinking fountains. There have been better articles than this about the way that Trump uses racially charged language, subtly calculated to appeal to the exact people who he's currently sweeping - here's one, And here's a video.

When Donald Trump deliberately travels to cities that are being torn apart by issues of racial identity, they cannot express surprise when their brutally racist tone causes a reaction.

It's hard to even express at times the utterly shocking way that Trump's vile ideas have suddenly gone mainstream. It's worth remembering that even now Trump is yet to win over a majority of the voters in the Republican Party, and certainly there's an increasingly vocal cross section of Republicans waging a guerrilla war for the soul of their party, with reports of party officials drawing up ways to run Senate and House races campaigning against their own presumptive nominee.

But so far, despite all the back room chatter, disquiet and outright attacks, there have been few Republican leaders prepared to stand up and distance themselves, unequivocally, from Donald Trump. When asked if they would support Trump if he were the nominee, Kasich, Rubio and Cruz all said yes. At this point it's difficult to imagine what Trump has to do for them to say he's gone too far, and that they wouldn't vote for him.

If he wins, as it seems more and more likely he will, it will be the fault not of good men doing nothing, but selfish, hypocritical men choosing their party's interest over that of their country.

On the average Wednesday after Super Tuesday

It may seem strange, but Super Tuesday's result wasn't actually the worst outcome possible for the terrified majority who're currently freaking out about the possible reign of Dystopian future President, Donald J. Trump. Certainly, it was a pretty bad result, until you consider that some advance polls had him sweeping every states available, like the vengeful broom from the Sorcerers Apprentice.

So instead of Trump being the inevitable presumptive nominee, we now have him as just the almost-inevitable, presumptuous nominee. There is, mathematically speaking, a chance that he could be beaten, although considering that there isn't really a viable alternative candidate and he's projected to win in virtually every upcoming state, that hope seems more than a little forlorn.

For everyone hoping that Marco Rubio might have been able to staunch some of the arterial bleeding of the GOP's body politc, there was the last gasp victory in Minnesota, a victory which meant he won a state on just the 15th time of trying. That puts him slightly ahead of the people who haven't won a single state, Ben Carson, John Kasich, and 99% of America. Unfortunately, as our generation's Shakespeare, Taylor Swift, points out, "Band aids don't fix bullet holes", and Rubio undermined his own insistent rhetoric about being the only credible roadblock to a Trump victory by coming third in most of the other states, and not picking up any delegates in nearly every state that required candidates meet a certain threshold of votes.

That delegate math thing is really important, because it means that of 700 or so pledged delegates Rubio has just over 100, Donald Trump has 320, and even Ted Cruz, a man who looks like an anthropomorphic paper bag full of wet garbage has 225.

Ted Cruz, 2016

In the race to amass the 1237 delegates needed Rubio is falling behind, leaving him with less room to lose the states still in play, and without the moral high ground necessary for him to appeal to the rest of the field to drop out and unite behind him to tackle their true enemy.

And that's really important, because the accepted view is that nobody can possibly stop Trump until it becomes a one on one race. There's a indisputable scientific law called the 'Conservation of Ninjitsu' which is used to explain why a single ninja will be able to beat the hero, but as soon as multiple ninja's appear, they're all easily defeated. Under the 'Conservation of Ninjitsu', there is only a certain amount of competence and fighting ability to go around; in one person it's enough to make them a powerful force, but once it's diluted across the multitude, they're all weakened.

The same principle applies to the race to stop Trump, in that the anti-Trump vote hasn't been able to coalesce around a single candidate, with each taking away some of the support from the others. Inevitably, Rubio's people immediately blamed Ohio Governor John Kasich for stealing voters from the demographics most likely to support their man, but unfortunately declined to follow up with the accepted Ninja practice of slaughtering their enemies and eating their still beating heart to gain the strength of their foe. Although there's still time.

Now, though, for the first time, the Republican Party seems to have realized that in order to defeat Trump, they may have to team up with their old enemy, Magneto. Oh, wait, sorry, no, that's the plot of X2: X-Men United.

What I meant to say was that the Republican Party are suddenly looking to the only man they actively hate more than Donald Trump: Ted Cruz. 

The poor man's Magneto

To say that Ted Cruz is an unlikely hero for anyone to look to is really, really underselling how awful Ted Cruz is. If Donald Trump vocalises the populist view from the gutters of American intolerance, then Ted Cruz is the sewer that scum water drains into. Having based his campaign around winning over the kind of white, evangelical voters who're anxious to reject un-Godly concepts such as sex education for teenagers, vaccines for children, equal rights for gays, and taxes for anyone, he's been ignored in favor of the one guy running to the right of him on the hot button issue of immigration, an area where he struggles by being of both Canadian and Cuban descent.

Even his own colleagues in the party are reported to hate Cruz, the man responsible for the disastrous shutdown of the Government in 2013 over whether they should get money to run essential services. In recent weeks though he's been most damaged by the public perception that he's a liar and a cheat, to the extent that he was forced to fire his own head of Public Relations for misrepresenting Marco Rubio's comments that 'the Bible was a good book, with lots of answers', as "you won't find any answers in there."

Still, he's somehow found a place as the choice of voters who don't trust Trump's conservative credentials, and crucially he's won 4 states and 225 delegates, and that alone could be enough for his Party to grudgingly get behind him, however much they don't want to.

On the other side, Bernie Sander's equality and economic justice revolution was derailed by Hillary Clinton's campaign for "some equality and economic justice maybe, although probably not actually, thanks for voting tho anyway guys." Bernie picked up wins in Vermont, Colorado, Oklahoma and Minnesota (yes), while Hillary Clinton won the South by broadening her appeal to include voters who weren't white or under 25, the one demographic that Bernie had concentrated on. If his support in this age group holds firm then Bernie Sander's will almost certainly win the Democratic nomination, and the subsequent Presidential election.

In 2044. When he's 102.

This isn't to at all downplay what he's achieved so far, though, because in pushing Hillary Clinton to actually engage with voters and come up with some policies he may well have pushed her a hair closer to being a genuine liberal candidate, rather than a posessed mannequin with a nice line in pant suits. In reality, there's almost nothing wrong with Hillary Clinton that isn't also wrong with every other American politician. She's simply a disappointing standard bearer for the left, and when you stick her next to Bernie Sanders, a genuine progressive titan, with his own CD of protest anthems, and an ideology that excites people, she looks even less appealing.

I mean, let's face it, nobody is going to be travelling to Vermont to get a free tattoo of Hillary, are they.

A genuine thing that is happening

On Super Tuesday

Today is Super Tuesday, and I am Super Excited.

It may seem like this is an odd post to be writing, considering that my blogging has been so absent for the last year, and there are far more interesting things going on in my life at the moment.

I don't really want to say that this is the most exciting day of the year, because obviously that'll be Election Night. And then it'll be Super Tuesday. Also, Jalyss and I are having a baby so I imagine that'll be in the top 5 or so.

For those of you who aren't aware, Super Tuesday is part of America's horribly convoluted political process, whereby citizens elect their President by first voting on a candidate for each party in each state, which then sends a certain number of delegates based on an archaic algorithm sorted by population, state size, and which states each party finds most important. Each candidate tries to get enough of these delegates to secure the nomination, but delegates can switch to support other people, even if they're only really there on the basis that the people of their state voted for them to support a certain person, and some of them aren't democratically selected but are literally just people whose opinions are considered to be more important.

It's somehow both too democratic, and not democratic at all, culminating in a situation where someone can win the popular vote, or the majority of states, or even more delegates, and still not get the nomination.

And the cornerstone of this hastily built edifice is Super Tuesday, when roughly a quarter of states and a third of the delegates are selected. Basically, it's where campaigns to become to the Presidential nominee live or die. Lose big on Super Tuesday and you should probably drop out; win most and you're likely to win it all.

It's incredibly fascinating, especially because this year it's likely to lead to the coronation of two candidates who will somehow be both the most and least popular politicians running. Donald Trump, a hairpiece with a mouth, is hated by 60% of the population, to the extent that his own party is currently trying to work out how to run against him, while Hillary Clinton is loathed by 59% of the country, including a significant proportion of the population who believe she should be in jail for "crimes" she committed while Secretary of State.

Behind them come Marco Rubio, a young (-ish), Latino Republican running on optimism and compassionate conservatism, who would seem to be exactly what a party with historic difficulties in attracting minorities would want to be able to win an election, were it not for the fact that those difficulties steam from a significant part of the party who are just out and out racist.

That isn't hyperbole, by the way; 31 % of Trump supporters (and 21% of all Republicans) think that White's are a "superior race", a third support banning not just all Muslims from entering the US (74% support that idea) but also all gay people. 38% wish that the South had won the Civil War, and 20% disagree with the Emancipation Proclamtion, Abraham Lincoln's Presidential decree that freed Southern slaves during the Civil War. By any measure, those are pretty extreme and pretty racist, positions - sourced here).

This week, in an amazing display of pandering to racists, Donald Trump refused to disavow the former head of the KKK, then said he didn't know about the concept of 'white supremacy', then blamed a microphone for not immediately distancing himself from them. In fairness to him, this may simply be down to the fact that Donald Trump is convinced of his own personal supremacy over everyone else in the world, and his own skin tone is default Terracotta, with a tinge of Oompa Loompa.

Unsurprisingly, Marco Rubio is struggling despite being the choice of the majority of the establishment Republican Party , because it turns out having million of dollars, dozens of endorsements, and an actual coherent policy platform, as well as wide appeal to a broad base, and a photogenic, articulate charm, doesn't mean much if you're a little bit browner than Edward Scissorhands.

Scissorhands for President, 2016

Behind him, or sometimes in front of him, and this is where it gets difficult, because at some points all three candidates have claimed victory in a state where only one of them has actually won, is Ted Cruz.

There's a bit in Shrek where he inflates a toad to act as a balloon, and Ted Cruz looks exactly like what I imagine that toad to look like now. He looks like someone has deflated a fatter man.

Ted Cruz looks like a cheap rubber Halloween mask of Ted Cruz's face came to life, and is running a Presidential campaign on the platform of unending winter. I would not be surprised to learn that Ted Cruz is actually an animatronic being controlled by a small slug floating inside his watery centre.

Nearly 40% of people can't conclusively tell you that he wasn't a serial killer who operated years before his birth (source), which is a good indication of how little people like him. His own colleagues have refused to endorse him, and he's running on the campaign slogan of 'trusTED' whilst facing charges of sending potential voters fake letters from the state to vote for him or face fines, and of lying about whether other candidates were even in the race anymore.

Tell me, does that this looks like an actual human being? Or does it look like what an alien visitor to Earth might think a human being looks like having intercepted our radio signals for decades.

He's the Christian candidate. Actually, he's one of the Christian candidates, but Ben Carson is so irrelevant to this process as to not warrant anymore mentions than this single sentence.

One the Democrat side, Hillary Clinton has been forced to remember that she's supposed to be on the left of the political spectrum, as uber-Pensioner Bernie Sanders, a Democratic Socialist who joined the Democract's 6 months ago just to run for President, has run a grass roots campaign based around reminding people that Capitalism is a bit shit if you let a few people keep all the money for themselves.

Now, Sanders has about a 0% chance of actually winning the nomination, but it's now got to the weird point of Republicans being able to legitimately call their potential opponent a socialist, a word that's thrown at anyone who's a bit left of Eisenhower in America. He is 'Boy Who Cried Wolf'-ing it, in that it's actually probably part of his appeal that the word socialist has been so undermined by years of using it to describe anyone at all, that now an actual Socialist is running, everybody assumes he's just another liberal.

He's the kind of raging extremist that would look fairly standard anywhere else in the world, what with his calls for such un-American abominations as paid maternity leave, free public education for all, and regulations on banks to prevent future financial crises. The maniac.

So this is what I'll be doing all night - following along with the updates as they come in on who has won what. And probably crying at who has won what.

On Everything That I Haven't Written About Over The Last Six Months

Jalyss and I have now been married a little over ten months. That means we've passed the marker of when we could have had our first baby, which is important to note when you're a young Christian couple in America. Forget cleanliness because fecundity, here at least, is next to Godliness.

In fact, when people meet you and find out you're newly married, they immediately start looking for the baby. "How many babies you had?" is their way of measuring the time you've been married. So now we measure all units of time in terms of how many children we could have had, with actual calendar anniversaries being of significantly lesser importance.

This is all just a long winded way of saying that we're not pregnant yet. Definitively. Jalyss took a pregnancy test on Father's Day, just so I could see whether I needed people to make a fuss of me.

This kind of fertility update is exactly what I imagine most people are interested in about our life, but just in case you were actually hoping for more than a gestational confirmation that we're still without any additions to the family, here's what else has been happening.

Jalyss and I continue to compete to see who can work the most jobs. For a long time she was winning, as I couldn't work legally in the US. I got around that by doing some babysitting and writing reviews of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.; a show with too much punctuation in its title, and too little characterisation or plot in its episodes. Neither of these roles made me the primary breadwinner, as I only earned $2 a article.

Fortunately I am now able to work and the jobs arms-race has really taken off, as we now have three jobs each. I work part-time at a local independent coffee shop, the delightful Mocha Monkey, where my main role seems to be confusing customers who think that I'm Australian. I've just started working two days a week at The Blessing House, which is hard to actually describe other than to say it's someone who has opened her home so that anyone can come in and relax there at any time of the day, and they need volunteers which I'm helping them find.

Finally, I work overnights at a crisis centre for disabled young-adults with behavioral problems. My first day there involved me being locked in the office by other staff to prevent a client from attacking me, so it's got the sort of whimsy that means you can't predict what will happen day-to-day, and frequently don't want to try. Usually, however, it's not that exciting; I'm there solely to support the main members of staff should there be a behavioural or medical emergency, so I go downstairs and sleep in the games room, which is a fair-sized space whose homeliness is undermined by the persistent stench of urine (a consequence of working in a place where people combine their responses to stress, displays of anger, and favorite activity into one ongoing attempt to find exciting new places to piss).

We've started to build some great new friendships with a few local couples which has served us well as through them we've got hold of an air-conditioning unit. This is essential, as I am already starting to wilt from Minnesota's summer. As fierce as their winter is, their less talked about summer is proving more of a burden for someone who is unused to temperatures in the double digits. Actually, it turns out that A/C has an exciting history in Minnesota, as the worlds first in-home unit was installed in Minneapolis in 1914. Of course, there's also the horrible correlation between the rise of air-conditioning and Southern Republican presidencies which is startlingly direct.

The VISA process continues, as glacial as ever. Entire civilisations have risen, fallen and risen again (although, it should be noted, not here in America) in the time it's taken for my four month VISA approval to happen, but I've finally been accepted as a 'Conditional Permanent Resident', an oxymoronic statement which says I'm able to live here indefinitely unless they decide I can't.

This is great news though because it means we are hopefully going to be able to come back and visit the UK this December. I couldn't leave until my VISA was at this point (or rather, I could leave, but I couldn't reenter). I'm looking forward to a real English Christmas; i.e. one without any snow.