A Path Forward

 Civil disobedience on a mass scale. Emphasis "civil".

As the weeks have passed, the probability curves have collapsed into an unexpected formation. The presently most likely thing is that Trump will continue to maintain that he won, and at the same time, Biden will be inaugurated. And this is all that we need.

Think about it. In America, all authority flows from We the People. Any gov't that does not have our consent, and yet presumes to rule, does not have legitimate authority. They're just an oversized Mafia with the biggest shakedown racket ever concocted.

And the map is not the terrain; you cannot just pull out a map, pencil in a mountain, and then grab your mountain-climbing gear on your way out the door to be the first to the top.

So it is with elections. The certified ballot result is not the consent of the governed. You cannot just pull The Steal -- the most widespread and blatant systematic election fraud in the history of the U.S. -- and then expect people to respect your authoritah. That is not how this works.

So, let's think this through. The first thing is that the illegitimacy is limited to the Executive branch. So, Congressional laws will still maintain their moral authority.

However, we have a lazy and stupid class of political elites, who would rather just write a little law to create an executive agency, and then give it the power to make rules.

And that works great in normal times. But times will not always be normal, and in fact by global historical standards, we've had a pretty long run without a real legitimacy crisis. Nixon's fall from grace was hardly a speedbump, and even that is ancient history from when I was a baby. That hardly even counts as "in your lifetime," if you can't remember it.

So, we have a whole bunch of rules and regulations that were only ever formulated and proclaimed by the now-illegitimate Executive branch. And all of those are now null and void, because you cannot legitimately give a power away to an illegitimate authority; the FBI cannot delegate to the Mafia and expect the Mafia's rules to be obeyed, or at least not without destroying the FBI's moral authority too.

Now, you still have to treat them with respect for their physical force. Sure the Feds are now no better than a Mafia, but they're the biggest and most powerful Mafia ever. So tread carefully.

My point is just that those mere rules and regulations no longer hold any moral force. So feel free to ignore whatever you think you can get away with, and also flaunt your flout of whatever you're willing to accept the consequences of, which could be quite severe. Civil law has such looser evidentiary standards -- even excluding intent entirely! -- precisely because it is supposed to not place your freedom at risk. But that is not how it works in practice; at the simplest level you are still vulnerable to imprisonment for a contempt-of-court citation, and it gets worse from there.

But if all 70+ million of us do it at the same time, then I think they will have some difficulty triaging. All you have to do is not be one of the maybe 5% of the population that has the sociopathic or psychopathic personality disorders, and you should be fine. Trust your instincts and distrust your judgement.

That is to say, if someone is giving you a hinky vibe, then detach and avoid; and the harder they make it, the more urgent it is. Also, if someone is psyching you up to do something that you hadn't thought of before, just excuse yourself with "I have a 24-hour rule for any big decisions" and scoot.

So then the final result is... I don't know. But we have to shoulder our load.

All political authority comes back to We the People. Anything that falls through the cracks, falls on us.

So when State courts and State legislatures dropped the ball, that fell on us. Whenever the Federal courts and Congress dropped the ball, that fell on us. (The executive has little to no role, because they should not be involved at all in the question of determining if they won re-election; and also, whether Person A committed a crime is a different question than whether Person B won an election. So they can logically have different answers, like with O.J. Simpson's criminal and civil trials. So the executive is irrelevant to anything more than "did Person A break a Federal law?")

Now, it isn't fair that everyone else dropped the ball. It's especially egregious that the Federal judiciary refused to hear cases -- essentially saying that it was non-judiciable, and really a question for the elected Congress to investigate and decide -- and then Mitch McConnell cited the courts' rejection of the cases as part of his reasoning in refusing to fulfill the responsibility either. What is this, some kind of Laurel & Hardy routine? If you both point to each other, then you should both be forced to do it; there is no sane universe in which mutual laziness justifies no one doing it at all. No work may be shirked!

But we have the worst political class in American history, so of course they put it back down on us. And that's fine; it was our load to begin with. That our servants failed to do what we paid them for doesn't mean that the field can go unharvested in a timely manner. Grab your scythe and get going!