As many have unfriended me (apparently) over the US election as over Kashmir & Syria. Odd that my Republican family hasn’t dumped me yet. It didn’t work at family reunions so they must have thought it pointless on Facebook.

This is the section of the US-Mexican border barrier at Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. The mostly steel barrier began construction in October 2006 under the Bush regime & now covers over 600 miles (940 km) of the nearly 2,000 mile (3,145 km) border from the Gulf of Mexico through Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, & California to the Pacific Ocean.

The barrier is still under construction so it is not a continuous physical structure but where it is virtual fence it is monitored by Border Patrol agents on four-wheelers, horses, with attack dogs; electronic sensors & cameras, radio & mobile surveillance devices; helicopters & drone aircraft. It will never be a continuous physical structure because sufficient porosity has to exist for thousands of undocumented immigrants to cross. US industries, including agribusiness, construction (including dangerous fracking work), meat packing, are completely dependent on underpaid, super-exploited immigrant labor.

There are all sorts of controversies involved in the construction of the wall. Some of it is constructed on Mexican territory; eminent domain was used to cross through private farm land; sovereignty laws were ignored to violate the tribal lands & sacred burial grounds of three American tribal nations; the government waived over 30 environmental protection laws to allow the wall to obstruct a major north-south migration corridor for birds, butterflies, wildcats, ocelots, & other wild life.

The wall is not just an eyesore but a human rights monstrosity which has caused the deaths of hundreds of undocumented immigrants trying to scale or bypass it. Residents on the US side have built cross-marked grave sites near the border for those found dead. Some coroners on the border attempt to identify those who died so their bodies can be returned to their families in Mexico or Central America for burial.

The US-Mexico barrier wall is one of at least 65 built or being built around the world against immigrants & war refugees. Who can forget last year when one European government after another built razor-wire fences against refugees fleeing war? The most prominent barriers include: India to prevent immigration from Bangladesh & another on the border with Pakistan; Israel with the West Bank & Gaza to maintain apartheid; Greece to prevent refugee flight from Turkey; Turkey to prevent refugee flight from Syria; Saudi Arabia against refugees from Iraq & another to stop refugees from Yemen; Spain has two on the Moroccan border against African refugees.

There are many more of these barriers, all of them violations of immigration & human rights. Trump’s rhetoric is not more than a continuation of US immigration policy prevailing before & throughout the Obama administration.

Tear down those walls. Immigration is a human right.

(Photo by Jose Luis Gonzalez/Reuters)

If your most cogent objections to lesser evil voting is insulting those who reject the two-party shell game as doctrinaires, intellectually inferior, infantile, indiscriminate, it’s only because you use vituperations to obscure support for Clinton as the person you think most likely to lead an effective, all-out war against Assad.

Why be shy about your support for US militarism? That suggests you may have reservations about the efficacy of so-called US humanitarian bombing (indicating you still have some rationality intact) or that you are unwilling to accept the consequences of your war-mongering. Regrettably. it also means you have no idea how the US government is run, what role the POTUS plays, how military policy is formulated, what the US is doing in Syria–& just coincidentally, how militarism works for capitalism.

Figure out those questions before you ask Americans to send their kids to slaughter civilians in Syria or elsewhere & then have the courage to admit your commitment to militarist solutions.

A word to the wise: name calling is always a red alert that ‘there is no there there’ to your political position.

It’s truly shocking that a man as vile as Trump could be elected president. That means the rightward shift initiated under Obama is certain to accelerate as it would under either Clinton or Trump. Our new president is a hateful jackass but there is no pending Trump Apocalypse & fascism is not just around the corner. Those who make that claim are just sore losers who take politicians at their word & believed Clinton would militarily go after Assad.

There’s no reason to go all misanthropic about the American people when only about a quarter of them voted & their two options were crap. It’s true some rightwing forces are emboldened by Trump’s election, but for that matter, protests today against Trump were several times the size of the KKK rally.

For perspective on the election take a look around the world: hundreds of thousands of people are being carpet bombed (Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq); people are brutally occupied by shooting armies targeting youth & children (Kashmir, Palestine); people are sustaining ethnic cleansing (Palestine) & genocide (Rohingya in Myanmar); millions of indigenous tribal people on every continent are being violently dispossessed by multinational corporations & forced to relocate to urban slums or other countries; tens of millions of refugees are drowning, refused asylum, living in filthy, overcrowded detention centers & being deported back to war zones.

The regrettable election is a far cry from living in a war zone, being disappeared, or drowning in the sea. Nobody wants things to get worse in the US, especially for the Black, Latino, & Indian communities or for undocumented immigrants; they have it hard enough already. Nobody wants Medicare & Social Security reduced, food stamps cut, Muslims persecuted, the Bill of Rights flouted. All of that would happen if we sat on our asses dreading the Apocalypse instead of organizing opposition but we have a long tradition of protest in this country–including today Black civil rights & Native American sovereignty rights.

Our new president is a hateful dangerous bonehead & not the only one on the planet. If we make like the young people of Kashmir & Palestine who don’t back down under fire, we can reverse the rightwing shift apparently being planned for us & hopefully learn again the imperative of international solidarity in opposing war, genocide, occupation.

So now it’s clear from media that Clinton won the popular vote & Trump won the Electoral College. So if voters were preempted by the electors, why did they put us through two years of living hell?

Loath am I to be conspiratorial, but was Trump the choice of the US oligarchs? Did they engineer his Electoral College win? Because we have never had an election for whoever those electors are, don’t even know who the hell they are, & don’t feel comfortable letting them preempt democracy.

Wonder if Trump will stay orange & keep bleaching his comb-over? With a clown nose, Putin won’t know if it’s the POTUS or if the circus has come to town.

Those articles elaborating the demographics of the vote ought to explain to us how they know what they claim? The final popular vote is not yet tallied & within less than 12 hours the pollsters have calibrated data from across the country?

They know for sure, using scientific measure, that ‘more white women voted for Donald Trump than for Hillary Clinton’ & that it was low-paid white workers who got Trump elected? Was it the same scientific measure they used to forecast that Clinton would win?

Proven so off the mark in this election, pollsters now call themselves communication experts & try to distance themselves from their analyses. That’s good because then we can justly interrogate the unsubstantiated claim that uneducated white workers are the base of Trump support.

It’s beyond dispute that his base is racist whites but it’s more likely to be middle-class, well-heeled whites & the better off strata of workers–meaning high-paid, unionized male factory workers or tradesmen. They are privileged workers who until affirmative action in the 1970s were unaccustomed to being around Blacks or Latinos or working with women.

Just because you don’t have a college degree doesn’t mean you’re a political idiot. But privilege & isolation from Black & Latino co-workers can make you stupid & believe me, from working in that environment for over 25 years, I can assure you that it makes you stupid all the way to the bone.

When I began working in a GE factory in the 1970s as a result of affirmative action court orders, the women & Black workers hired at that time went through years of hell because of the hostility & resentment of white male workers. Not all the white guys, but those who were aggressive, threatening, & often dangerous. We survived relying on each other & on white guys who detested unfair treatment.

I never faced such problems when I was a low-paid office worker before GE or after I got laid off & worked minimum wage jobs. Bonding among co-workers of whatever nationality against the indignities of such work was the norm. I was in my 50s & had the hauteur of a union worker when I got laid off. I will never forget the kindnesses of young Black, Latino, & Asian co-workers who saw what a struggle I was having in such repressive, miserable conditions doing day work & would counsel me how to survive.

Let me do the clairvoyant thing & say it’s far more likely those whites have bucks & privilege & are not the dispossessed.

In my FB memories from November 9th, 2012 was a photo album from the Atlantic dated October 4th, 2012 titled “Destruction Comes to Aleppo.”

At that time, an estimated 30,000 Syrians had already been killed in the 18 months of the civil war generated when Assad began using troops & bombers to crush the democratic uprising against his dictatorship. By the end of 2012, the UN reported that at least 700,000 Syrians had fled as refugees.

This little girl is 6-year-old Fatima Qassim being treated by medics at an Aleppo hospital after Assad forces fired on her family’s car on September 11, 2012. Would Assad supporters claim she or someone in her family is one of the terrorists Assad is hunting down with bombs in Aleppo?

The bottom photo is Aleppo after Assad bombing attacks on October 3, 2012. Imagine how it looks now after four more years of bombing.

Keep these images in mind when Assad supporters not only refuse to condemn Syrian & Russian bombing of east Aleppo (where an estimated 250,000 civilians live) but enthusiastically endorse it as a struggle against “throat-cutting jihadists.”

The only principled antiwar position is to demand the immediate cessation of Syrian & Russian bombing & to demand the immediate, unconditional withdrawal of all foreign military forces operating in Syria.

(Top photo by Muhammed Muheisen/AP’ bottom photo by SANA/AP)

So the news is reporting that Clinton won the popular vote but lost the electoral college. That isn’t what the numbers showed last night. What’s up with that?