a sober reflection

I was wrong about Donald Trump's prospects for success in the American Presidential election and have no wish to diminish his victory.
You will forgive me a small niggling comment.
In 2010, a plane carrying the President of Poland crashed in Russia.
The plane also carried leading members of Poland's parliament and civil society, the veritable conscience of Poland who had seen off Russian communist rule, and were the standard bearers of ongoing Polish freedom and independence.
They were wiped out a stroke.
I believed at the time that the crash was a decapitation strike against Poland by Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Following the crash Poland held an election.
The brother of the newly deceased President of Poland stood in the election and was improbably beaten by a pro Russian candidate.
I suggested at the time that Mr Putin's KGB had found a way to gerrymander elections, not with the old arrogance of the communist era where they declared unanimous victories for their proxies, but with more subtle and simpler computer software manipulations that gave a one, two or three percent win.
Four years later I commented on these matters to a Ukrainian acquaintance.
I told her that I thought the Putin administration had not only manipulated elections in Poland but also had somehow fixed Ukrainian elections in a similar way.
I added: "I think it may have happened. But it seems like too much of a conspiracy theory. I'd expect the truth to leak out somehow if Putin was really fixing elections in other countries outside Russia on that scale. And could he really do it? How would it be done? Where do you begin to rig another country's elections? How do you cover your tracks?"
She replied: "But James they were doing it for years. The apparatus for fixing our elections was established during the Soviet era. We had elections in Ukraine and Eastern Europe, even in those days. And the most despised communists won every time. That was when the KGB first developed their capability and methodology to create these results."
Her words struck most keenly upon my spirit.
Fast forward a few more years to just three weeks before the American Presidential election.
I am in Boston.
I am reading a State Department report on security threats which the new American President will face.
An obscure little paragraph notes:
"There is evidence that the Russian government has been manipulating election results in Europe for some time now."
And now we fast forward to today.
Donald Trump is President of the United States of America.
I wonder.
There are other factors we might note in postulating a fix.
I consider the Wikileaks website run by an individual styled Julian Assange to be a confirmed proxy for the Putin government.
Mr Assange indisputably engaged in selective leaking of purported email communications belonging to Hillary Clinton and her entourage in the months and weeks preceding the election.
Mr Assange clearly did this to damage Hillary Clinton's campaign. The only issue for us is to descide whether he did so on his own initiative or as part of a broad election fixing strategy being carried out by Vladimir Putin in order to destabilise America through a Trump win.
Several months before the vote, with Trump trailing dismally in the polls, Mr Trump began claiming that the election was being rigged to give Hillary Clinton victory.
He used the phrase: "The fix is in."
In the present postulation I would suggest that this looks like a classic bait and switch, ie a disruption strategy designed to confuse your opponent while your proxies and partisans engage in precisely the malfeasance you are accusing her of.
In my analysis election rigging does take place in the United States.
It is somewhat localised to particular regions but it is there.
I suggest that for the last fifty years at least, the preponderance of identifiable election fraud in America has been perpetrated by elements of the Democratic Party in tandem with elements of the Teamsters Union and the Cosa Nostra mafia gang.
In the present instance I am suggesting that the mafia's usual selective Democratic Party leanings may have been tempered somewhat by the fact that Mr Trump has had extensive multiple ongoing business contacts with Cosa Nostra in his Atlantic City, Las Vegas and New York property developments.
The thesis for a rigged election last week, involves the postulation of direct manipulation of the process by Vladimir Putin's resovietising government in Russia using computer hacking techniques to gerrymander several key results from several key States in favour of Donald Trump. Putin's proxies at Wikileaks and other such websites, would also have played a significant role in systematically weakening Hillary Clinton's support through the malicious and selective publication of her private email correspondence at important moments in the campaign, (We will keep an open mind as to whether Federal Bureau of Investigation director James Comey was acting in concert with this strategy when days before the election he announced a new enquiry into Hillary Clinton's email procedures.) Traditional Cosa Nostra mafia elements would also be discernible in the postulated conspiracy having dropped the Democratic Party for once, in favour of their own associate Mr Donald Trump. If I'm right, the mafia would have complemented Vladimir Putin's high tech computer hackers in gerrymandering target constituencies through the mafia's venerable tried and trusted long established practice of ballot stuffing.
I am concerned about Mr Trump's win.
Not for the reasons all you nice liberal atheistic abortionists against the bomb are concerned.
Not even for the conspiracy theory vote rigging reason I've adverted to above.
I'm concerned gentle travellers of the internet because I think I smell evil.