yes, it is very weird to grow up in ottawa, and have a father that was drafted by the 67s, and to have never learned how to skate. just about every kid around me, of both genders, was playing hockey as toddlers.

but, my dad found himself with a busted body, a lot of shattered dreams and no discernible future in his 20s, and he made a conscious choice to teach me how to read, instead.

i didn't play hockey. but, i went to pre-school.

this had a set of unintended consequences attached to it, i think. i ended up at a working class elementary school, and had difficulty relating to the other kids. if you're going to teach a kid to read instead of to play hockey, it makes sense to follow up on it, and they didn't - they kind of left me stranded due to finances. and, i ended up a floater. but, the early decisions were the right ones.

it was my mother that made a lot of bad choices...

but, i'm a socialist to my bones.

and, this is the sort of thing that baffles me about capitalists. we're going to watch them destroy each other and all lose because they're too stupid to cooperate for a common purpose....

i actually wasn't that bad at sports when i was a kid, it's more that i wasn't very interested in playing them, i was more interested in doing homework - i was a nerdy kid, and i preferred spending time by myself.

on my father's prodding, i actually made the high school football team in grade 9. even with his prodding, i wouldn't have gone to the tryouts if a friend of mine wasn't there, and when he didn't make the team i largely lost interest in going. i just didn't like hanging out with the jocks. it was when they tried to pull me out of math class to go to a game that i decided my schooling was more important.

yes: i actually made the football team, but then quit it when they tried to pull me out of math class to go to a game. i picked math over football. because i'm a nerd, and i'm proud of it.

but, my aversion to the people involved aside, i grew up with a very athletic father, and i had little choice but to engage with sports in some way in order to relate to him. i think i've mentioned here before that he was actually drafted by an ohl team, and was on his way to the nhl, but he blew his knees out and had to end his career. and, that had something to do with the fact that i never learned how to skate.

what my dad told me about sports was that it was about teamwork, and what he always tried to get across to me about it was the importance of being a good team player. if i learned anything from him on the topic, it was that.

if you take a course in economics 101 nowadays, it's probably going to be new keynesian economic theory, and they will actually teach you that a basic deduction of contemporary market theory is that competition is stupid.

we have this social tendency to lean towards competitive behaviour as some kind of ideal.

but, a rational economic actor will avoid competition at all costs. really. it will pay fines, it will escape markets - anything to avoid a competition. and, the reason is that competition is devastating to everybody that engages in it, it can completely destroy you.

any economist would tell you that the fact that these politicians are out there trumpeting the benefits of competition is just proof of how utterly idiotic and mentally deranged they all are. it's beyond irrational, it's child-like.

but, if you needed another example of the stupidity of competition...

even in new hampshire...

sanders is going to get 30% of the vote (at most) and upwards of 50% of the delegates because the field insists on competing instead of cooperating.

i'm not supporting him this cycle, but, if forced to pick, i would still pick sanders over the field. so, the pragmatist in me is willing to shrug that off.

but, the anarchist in me wants democracy.....and is frustrated by the stupidity in front of me.

(although, as mentioned, i need to suspend my naivete, and not pretend this is an accident)

the right lesson is this:

when actors compete, everybody loses. when actors cooperate, everybody wins.

democrats are notoriously poor at understanding election math.

they're going to have to figure it out somehow, or they're going to wake up with something they don't actually want.

and, we'll see if democrats are better at solving a prisoner's dilemma than republicans, too. i'm not counting on it....

this is a recent poll from california:


sanders 29%

warren 16%

-------------------

buttigieg 14%
bloomberg 13%
biden 11%
klobuchar 5%

if that actually happened, they would recurve the results like this:

sanders: 64%
warren: 36%
buttigieg: 0%

bloomberg: 0%

biden: 0%
klobuchar: 0%

ok.

there have been some polls released recently in south carolina, specifically, that suggest that steyer may be running higher than 15%. 

why or how, i'm not sure, but, they appear to exist.

i'm skeptical, to say the least.

there's been no data at all from nevada in weeks.

if warren can't get to 10% in new hampshire, she's not going to get to it in nevada or south carolina, either.

or, really, anywhere else.

maybe not even massachusetts.

so, amy klobuchar might come in third place.

but, if she only gets 14% of the vote statewide, she could end up with 0 delegates - they'll just curve bernie & pete up by the difference.

then, she could end up in third in nevada, too. but, if she only gets 13% of the vote, she's still goose egging.

and, it's hard to see how candidates like wang or gabbard or steyer are going anywhere at all, even if they consistently run at 5-10%. again: bloomberg isn't clearing these hurdles, either. and, how does bloomberg solve any of the problems biden presents?

you have to get to 15%, and if you can't then you're wasting your time.

who can do that in the big states? sanders, certainly. biden, probably, if he doesn't cave too much. buttigieg, likely, if he gets some momentum from these early wins - but the numbers aren't in yet.

and, right now, nobody else. warren is in free fall. klobuchar has never gotten close to those numbers. and, neither bloomberg nor steyer have generated them yet, either.

so, they got my package in toronto.

and, i think i just need to wait for them to send me stuff, now. i may have little to no work to do on the file until june.

i need to end talk of a contested convention. even 538 has "nobody" as the second most likely winner. this is all based on a misunderstanding of the way the delegates are awarded.

you need to get past 15% to get awarded delegates.

so, if we have a situation with a lot of candidates running around 10%, which is what we have now, that will not lead to a split field or a contested convention. rather, that will actually help inflate the totals of the frontrunners, who will get curved up.

as the threshold is 15%, the worst-case scenario would be if you have 6 candidates all running at just over 15%. any more than 6 competitive candidates, and the numbers just don't allow for that.

in reality, as sanders is running at around 30% pretty much across the board, he takes up two of those slots and you at most have space for four other candidates to be running over 15%.

but, neither klobuchar nor warren have much chance of getting to and staying over 15%. and, whether buttigieg is a serious candidate in the south or not is unclear - if he can't clear 15% either, then he's just going to add to the mess. i suspect that he will, though.

and, the reality is that i haven't seen a poll with bloomberg at 15% anywhere, either.

there are really only three candidates that are likely to get any substantive number of delegates, and biden's viability is itself an open question. this may end up as a two person race very quickly, even if the other candidates refuse to actually drop - and if they insist on sticking around with 5-10% of the vote, the party will award their delegates to the frontrunners, leaving them with the choice between dropping out and sticking around and whining that it's not fair.

so, don't trick yourself into thinking that this will balkanize and end up at the convention. the rules make that almost impossible. if the field splits, and it very well might, they'll just give all the delegates to the at most three candidates that can actually clear 15%.

expect four more years of trump.

the democratic candidate is just meant to be a clown to be gooned up, and the election is just a mock charade.

again: i don't know if they told bernie or not. 

http://dsdfghghfsdflgkfgkja.blogspot.com/2016/11/its-not-first-military-intelligence.html

back in 2016, i spent months agonizing over how the republicans could be so daft as to allow themselves to be defeated by this buffoon donald trump - even while realizing that he was winning because he was the more moderate candidate, and a lot of the basis of him winning was an anti-cruz and anti-rubio vote, as those candidates were actually more extreme than he was. i criticized them from every direction for being unable to pass a prisoner's dilemma. i didn't get it.

i could see what was happening, but i couldn't believe it. and, i will remind you what my prediction of the election was: i said "if the election is fair, clinton will win. but, i suspect that it is not going to be fair, and trump will "win".".

i even suggested, sarcastically, that trump would win pennslyvania and michigan; that is, i suggested that that was going to be how they'd steal it. i said something like "they're going to try to tell you he won in pennsylvania, which is ridiculous.".

it wasn't until the day of the election, and i actually saw the tv tell me the republicans had won in pennyslvania, that it really clicked - the reason that these establishment candidates were running around like idiots, unable to organize a basic prisoner's dilemma, is because trump was actually the establishment choice. this wasn't some kind of mistake. this was what the fuckers decided on months ago, and i surmised that it was explicitly to keep clinton, who the deep state despises, out of power.

and, then i suggested (half sarcastically) that they'd change the topic by blaming it all on russia - that they would erect an imaginary russian bogeyman as a projection of themselves, and then train you to direct your hate at it.

it's all there. on the side. why do you think the cops are trying to shut me down?

i make mistakes like everybody else, but i try to learn from them as best i can, so i'm not going to be confused by the democrats running around like trained seals, bumping into each other, in order to facilitate a sanders victory. i don't think they're all in on it. but, if you see the senators campaigning into may without a chance in hell, and bleeding votes away from a biden or a buttigieg that won't quit, then you shouldn't get frustrated - you should realize who they're working for.

i'm not nearly as worried about bernie winning as i was about trump winning, and i'm not really convinced that he's not being set up as a patsy, anyways. does the president actually get to pick his opponent? is that the actual reality? because that's looking to me like what the game here, is - an opportunity to campaign against socialism. even as bernie's being handed the nomination, he's being stabbed in the back.

i've pointed out that bernie will lose a two person race against pretty much the entire field, and that the only way he can win is to split it like this. that may be exactly why it stays split.....because it's the only way he can actually win.

and, trump will get the pinata he wants, by the mutual consent of everybody involved.

and, i don't know how much he knows about it....

my point is not to get confused when these actors do things that don't make sense. they're making far more sense than you think, you just don't understand what they're doing.

is there some threat of the americans using low level nuclear weapons?

well, i'll remind you that they used depleted uranium in iraq and afghanistan which is equivalent or worse in terms of the radiation - and intentionally so. the radiation from an h-bomb is a secondary effect. with depleted uranium, you're dropping the birth defects on purpose - like agent orange.

but, it's worth pointing out that the conventional weapons they used in afghanistan were actually in the same power level as a small scale atomic weapon, so the difference between conventional and nuclear is not as profound as is generally imagined. it's really not as big a deal as you're imagining it is.

actually, it's worth ruminating a little on this idea that the weapons are directed at iran, and how the empire has used that claim in the past.

so, when the americans put these missiles in boats around the north and black seas, they had the nerve to claim they were putting them there to protect eastern europe from iranian missiles. the north sea is a funny place for an interceptor system to protect germany from iran, don't you think? and why are the missiles pointed at moscow, then?

likewise - as pointed out in the al jazeera report - the americans routinely justify deployment to the south china sea by claiming they're protecting the south koreans from the north koreans, but the chinese have tended to suggest that the target is actually them.

so, this is a longstanding tactic, actually, and i'll thank the talking head on al jazeera for reminding me of it.

also, look up stephen cohen's comments.

a couple of years ago, the russians announced a new sea-based nuclear weapon that they claim can evade american defenses. this was seen as a major break in american hegemony, and a potential return to an arms race and mad. it seems rather obvious to me that this is an expression of that arms race, and i'm left wondering how democracy now could publish something like this without even mentioning that, and even suggest it has more to do with iran.

i passed out in the evening, and i got distracted this morning. i'm about half done.

we're continuing on with this through the day. but, i'm stopping to eat and shower.

warren and klobuchar both have absolutely no chance at all, and are simply propping up sanders by staying in the race.

buttigieg is going to face a reckoning by the end of the month. we'll see if he clears these barriers or not.

and, biden needs to put up or get out.

what if we end up with the following in some large state?

sanders - 25%

biden - 14%

warren - 13%

buttigieg - 12%

bloomberg - 11%

klobuchar - 10%

steyer - 9%

wang - 6% 

do you know happens?

sanders gets 100% of the delegates.

that's not democratic.

i've been searching for post-iowa polling in nevada and can't find any.

the 15% threshold exists to force failed candidates that don't get it out. right now, that would appear to apply most directly to warren and klobuchar, who may fail to clear 15% in almost every state, or literally in every subsequent state. the party can't force them out, but it can stop them from balkanizing the vote and forcing a contested convention.

but, is biden going to clear 15% in nevada? if he has a dozen other candidates to siphon votes away from him, it might be harder than appears obvious. 

and, is buttigieg going to clear 15% in nevada or south carolina? if he doesn't, he's in trouble.

nobody should be happy about sanders getting 60% of the delegates with 25% of the vote. but, if things stay the way they are, if these awful-across-the-board candidates can't get over themselves, that's what might happen.

who's going to win new hampshire?

this was always going to be one of sanders' best states, however he was doing. i haven't seen a poll with him higher than 33%, which is not very high, given the totality of the circumstances, but the field appears to be split badly enough that that measly 33% will be more than enough to win. i doubt he even gets to 33% - 25% is probably closer to the final tally - but that still looks like enough to win a plurality.

it's not a lot of delegates, though.

if 25% is a weak delegate haul, the ~20% that buttigieg is going to get is even weaker.

but, is anybody else going to clear the 15% threshold? this is important. it does not appear as though biden or warren are going to. klobuchar is the media's new favourite, but she's still a long shot to get to 15% in new hampshire, or much of anywhere else for that matter.

if you don't get to 15%, you don't get delegates, and the candidates that do get over 15% get curved up. so, sanders is all of a sudden getting 25%/45% = 56%, and buttigieg is all of a sudden getting 20/45 = 44%.

and, everybody else gets zero.

this middle tier of (klobuchar, warren, biden) may manage to clear 15% at the district level, here and there. but, they are going to be fighting to get on the board, and some or all of them might fail to do so.

so, you're looking at a likely outcome of something like this:

sanders - 12
buttigieg - 9
klobuchar - 1
warren - 1
biden - 1

that would put sanders and buttigieg basically tied going into nevada, with the other three falling back. but, we haven't awarded a lot of delegates yet, and there's still a lot of voting to do.