listen.

i didn't like the hillary clinton that emerged after her stint as secretary of state. i was particularly concerned about her foreign policy; she was a war monger, and the mess she created is only being cleaned up, now. she scared me. really...

but, i didn't question her capacity to serve. and, in the end, i gave her the weakest endorsement of all time - which i'm not sure i don't regret. i'm sure i would have voted for jill stein when i got in the booth...

we'll see how bad biden gets, but what i've seen of him legitimately upholds the narrative that he's senile and incapable of doing the job. i'm not just saying that, and i think this is going to get worse.

i fully expect to sit here in november and tell you i cannot, in good conscience, endorse a man with his mental health to have his fingers on the button. i expect to tell you that this is irresponsible...

the people in iowa and new hampshire got a really good look at all of the candidates, and i think they made the right choice. it's unfortunate that the rest of the country didn't follow their lead, but so be it.

and, we're stuck with a choice between two senile buffoons that i don't want to make. 

again: clinton was a bad choice because she was evil. biden is a different problem. and, i simply don't expect to be able to endorse a man with such low intellectual capabilities, and such degraded mental capacities.

it's an important job...

i would expect bernie to stay in to try to influence the events at the convention, just like in 2016.

regarding michigan.

2016 results:

21% black turnout - 68% clinton, 28% sanders

70% white turnout - 56% sanders, 42% clinton

2020 results:

18% black turnout - 66% biden, 29% sanders

72% white turnout - 51% biden, 45% sanders

when you're talking about 3-4 points, that's the margin. so, maybe black turnout was down a little, and maybe white turnout was up a bit.....but it's too close to really state as much.

and, the percentage of black voters is almost identical.

but, the white vote flipped over. that's what happened.

i'm watching the nbc stream, and it's like soviet propaganda - they're looking right in the screen and saying the exact negation of what's true, even as they put stats on the screen that contradict it.

missouri is a place where the young people are leaving because there's no future there. there's no jobs. there's no opportunities...

so, it would make sense that the voting population is aging, because the state is aging, because the young people are leaving.

and, that is true throughout the rust belt.

(i remember the berlin wall falling, fwiw. i was eight. but i remember it.)

back in 2016, i keyed in a lot on missouri as an important swing state, and i did this for the very specific reason that the democrats had to find more urban areas to win over, and i knew the midwest was urbanizing very quickly.

the thing about missouri that i didn't realize then was that it's actually deurbanizing. and, in fact, so is wisconsin. and ohio. and iowa. and michigan....

the states that are urbanizing quickly are just a little to the west of the mississippi river: oklahoma, kansas, nebraska. and, if you look at the 2018 midterms, the democrats made some seriously surprising upset gains in that area - which was something i predicted, once i corrected my understanding of how the area was urbanizing, and how it was deurbanizing. 

does that mean kansas is in play? not yet. but, it might not be very long before kansas is more competitive than iowa.

several decades ago, now, missouri used to be what was called a "bellweather" state, and the reason it was seen as that was that it had demographics that were roughly a microcosm of the country. due to the onset of deurbanization, that is not true, anymore.

i look at missouri on a map, and i see a lot of potential in it. but, i'm not surprised by the results. i've learned to be disappointed by them.

ok.

so, it's taken some time, but the press is cluing in.

how many cases are there down there?

thousands. tens of thousands...

and, then, what's the mortality rate? pretty small.

but, i said this to the border people weeks ago: it's easy for me to shrug it off. i'm young and healthy. if i was 85, i'd have a different perspective.

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/03/coronavirus-testing-numbers/607714/

so many of us want the authorities to take control, and think they can defeat complicated problems by writing and enforcing the right rules. but, it doesn't work.

it doesn't help us understand physics, even if we used to think it did. it doesn't help us solve social problems, even if we wish it did.

and, it won't help us contain an epidemic, either.

if there is one thing i am sure of in this world, it is that authoritarianism is always the wrong approach - that we can't control anything, no matter how hard we try. we are at the perpetual whim of uncertainty and chaos, and we need to start to understand that and act like we do. 

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-03-09/how-coronavirus-spread-from-patient-zero-in-seattle

these researchers had a hunch that the number of cases in iran was dramatically underreported and did some math to deduce more convincing numbers, which is around 20,000 cases.

that would put the death toll in iran around 1%.

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.02.24.20027375v1.full.pdf

access to care is only useful if the doctors take the issue seriously.

the story is still being written, but it seems like the system didn't take the issue seriously enough.

but, i still need to repeat the point that italians like to touch each other. it's crude, but it's true.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/10/from-confidence-to-quarantine-how-coronavirus-swept-italy

i got my motions scheduled.

good...

thank you to popular science for writing the article for me.

https://www.popsci.com/story/science/healthcare-paid-sick-leave-coronavirus/

so, we should expect cheap tp for a while, then, as demand falls to nothing, once supply recovers.

i'd wait.

https://globalnews.ca/news/6654420/toilet-paper-fight-coronavirus/

the cause of the crisis in alberta is poor planning by decades of conservative governance.

what's happening in alberta is not an unexpected crisis, or an act of god - they were told this would happen, and they didn't listen.

i guess they should have listened when the smart kids predicted this twenty years ago, huh?

they've made their bed.

https://www.macleans.ca/economy/the-coronavirus-market-crash-leaves-alberta-running-on-fumes/

again: this is a catalyst, not a cause.

it should be allowed to run it's course. 

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/mar/10/delivery-and-digital-services-thrive-on-coronavirus-outbreak

https://www.retaildive.com/news/the-impact-of-the-coronavirus-on-retail/573522/

i'm going to throw an argument out there about the fears of this hurting the economy, because it's 20th century thinking that isn't taking recent changes in consumer habits into consideration.

the concern is that people will be afraid to go shopping, which will put the economy into a recession. ok. and, that would have been an entirely reasonable concern, even ten years ago.

but, something that's happened over the last ten years is that people have stopped going to malls, anyways - they do almost all of their shopping on the internet, with the glaring exception of groceries.

now, i'm not saying that the kind of effect this will have on businesses is obvious, but i can make a few suggestions:

1) if a longterm fear of going outside kicks in, it could be the final end for certain businesses that have seen their profits come down in the internet era. these would be stores in malls that sell goods that can be easily purchased online. this should be seen as a natural die-off, and nothing should be done to help these businesses. in the end, we may look back and see this as a major catalyst to end certain retail sectors, but we shouldn't delude ourselves - the virus is not the cause of these failures, and this was happening anyways.

2) the corollary of this fear of going outside hurting brick & mortar stores would be that the business would be shifted to online stores, who could see a major uptick in sales. 

so, is stimulus pointless? no. it just needs to be understood where it's going.

and, is recession inevitable? not in totality. certain sectors may get hit, but it's likely to be more of a shift in gdp than a decline in it, because it's increasingly the case that most people do most of their shopping at home, anyways.

as was the case in 2008, we may see a restructuring kick in that signals a final nail in the coffin of these brick & mortar businesses that were dying anyways. and, as was the case in 2008, this restructuring will probably be permanent.

so, that's my read on what the smart kids do about this - they realize the shift in technology that's happening, and they adjust.

so, i would support stimulus, but i would oppose bailouts to brick & mortar stores. this shift needs to be embraced. and, that may be the longer term consequence of this.

it's a good excuse to ram through funding on carbon transition.

https://www.macleans.ca/economy/economicanalysis/canada-needs-a-coronavirus-stimulus-plan-heres-what-it-should-look-like/

it's hard to criticize it, considering that they're right. this was predictable, and it's obvious where they're going with it. when trump gets a chance to rip him in person, it's going to be devastating.

there's an article up at the guardian comparing biden to brezhnev. it may have reached a little. but, what we're seeing happen in the united states is eerily similar to the gerontocracy that took hold in the soviet union near the end of it's collapse.

the next generation of leadership is going to need to institute a lot of put off reforms. let's hope that the better comparison is to an upcoming perestroika, and a newfound imminent glasnost.

for now, i'd get ready for an awful election.

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/03/10/trump-biden-clinton-age-senile-124797

i'm advocating finding ways around them. 

but, if you want to go right through them, if you want to be a socialist and win south carolina at the same time, you have to hold that mirror up - you have to get them out of their clutches.

and, that is going to be a vicious, nasty fight that will take decades and might even lead to violence.

there's a white king and a black king, isn't there?

everything that bernie sanders says about him reflects an understanding of the white king, when he talks to black voters about him. and, i'm not sure he even realizes it.

biden is probably worse, but he doesn't hit those nasty trigger points in those obvious ways.

sometimes, the more you talk about something, the deeper you dig yourself in - and, sometimes, you don't know it.

was jesus a socialist revolutionary?

i dunno. kind of. a bit.

but, i know you're going to lose a lot of white people if you set up a political rally outside of a church and you start talking like that.

it's a bunch of white people coming in from new york and trying to redefine their history in terns they don't recognize, or reject.

of course they don't like it.

trying to present dr. king as a socialist rather than a reverend is the kind of thing that's going to confuse them and scare them off, as though you're an agent of satan or something.

he's basically revered and seen as a saint or a prophet, not as a socialist revolutionary. contradicting or muddying that means you're trying to undo things without even realizing what you're trying to undo.

martin luther king may have had socialist sympathies, and he may have been surrounded by socialists, as well.

but, he attracted people because he was a church leader, not because he was a socialist.

and, when the movement tried to move more towards socialism, wihout the explicit religious foundation, it faltered.

socialists used to understand the retarding effect of religion, and the necessity of breaking the power of the church.

there's really no better example than amongst black voters in the south. 

the real reason that they won't vote for socialists is that they've been brainwashed by christianity. and, this is the oldest problem on the left - how do you get them away from the church without triggering them and pushing them in further? 

the best answer anybody has been able to come up with is to lure them out of the grips of the church by sending them to school. but, it means you need to get into power first.

so long as the church remains the dominant force in southern society, these voters are lost to the socialist cause.

i would guess that a part of the reason that sanders does so poorly with black voters is that he reminds them of the activists in the 60s that they were taught to reject, and ultimately did, under the guidance of the religious authorities.

what happened to this movement? it was suppressed, but it ultimately got abandoned and rejected. and, by who? the people that sanders is trying to get to vote for him.

so, invoking this stuff is probably hurting him more than it's helping him.

this is a ridiculous article, as though citing a couple of people can be extrapolated to an entire subculture.

it is true that these radical black movements were shut down by force, with prominent leaders being assassinated or jailed. but, it's also true that they were broadly unsuccessful in generating any sort of critical mass.

 

the reality is that black voters looked at the black panthers, and looked at the church, and picked the church over the black panthers.

sanders does get a few black people to vote for him - about 10-15%, in most places. further, they skew younger, which would help him in the 2032 election cycle - and while nobody should be surprised if he at least tries this again in 2024, we can rule out 2032 pretty effectively. 

the reality is that that 10-15% is just about the maximum reach you're going to get from this black left today, and was about the maximum reach you were going to get from it in the 60s. it's never been more than that, and fantasies to the contrary are just a type of historical revisionism.

activists can often shout louder than silent majorities. but, the data has never upheld the urban legend of the black left. it's just another 60s counterculture myth erected by revisionists in the 90s.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/10/us/black-socialists-bernie-sanders-blake/index.html

yeah - whoever was in here and jerked off on my bed also dismantled my firewall, and fucked with my system services.

i'm going to have to reimage this this morning.

this one, too.

i apologize. i suggested that it would be a clean split, and she would barely win, not that he would win.

he won by 1.5%. so, that's correct up to reasonable error - and certainly closer than anybody else.

the last video points out that the error that the msm made was that it looked at aggregate polling over weeks, instead of recent snapshots, which had sanders gaining very quickly.

but, the signals i got in 2016 are not present right now and i'm not repeating my analysis - it looks like biden will win big.

there are writeups for each of these videos.

in european history, there is a broad dividing line between the romans and the germans, going back thousands of years, with the celts lining up in between.

the romans, drawing from the greeks, are a people that believe in order and empire. they believe in a society rooted in law, and in later years they became dominated by an expression of greek philosophy called christianity.

the germans, on the other hand, were anarchists. they believed that rules should be malleable and adjustable, they believed in grassroots democracy and they rejected dominance and empire. 

i'm oversimplifying this because i don't want to write this essay right now, i just want to get the point across - i don't want to be an imperialist italian, i want to be an anarchist german. so, i will align with my mother's heritage rather than my father's.

but, i know i am both - and i know i have ancestry outside of europe, as well.

my mother only ever spoke english. i'd guess her father ever only spoke english; his ancestry is scottish/welsh all the way back. her mother only ever spoke english, but my mother's mother's mother's side was norwegian, and her father was irish. so, that's how far back you have to go on that side to get a culture that is not anglicized canadian.

my father spoke french, and i should probably speak better french, too. he did not speak italian. both of his parents spoke french and english, and i don't think they spoke anything else. you'd have to go back to my grandmother's parents or great grandparents before you got to any italian or jewish or native, and while i've seen pictures of my grandfather's mother (who was french canadian), his father's ancestry remains a serious mystery, and is likely some combination of jewish, eastern african and native american. 

i'm simply too far removed from an ancestry outside of this province to have any attachment to it.

but, culturally, i'd rather be norwegian than italian.

fwiw, i have no particular attachment to italy. i know i have italian ancestry, but i'd never identify myself as italian.

i was not raised with any italian heritage; i wasn't even aware of it until i was in my mid-teens. you know how i learned this? i invited a zito over to my house for a school project in the 8th grade, and my dad told him that his mother's name was zito. i had no idea up until that point; i would have told people he was french. 

i don't speak italian. i wasn't raised religiously. 

the most italian thing about me is that i eat a lot of pasta. really.

i'd identify more readily as norwegian, from my mother's side, which is a culture i feel a stronger affinity with.

but, i'm a canadian. my ancestors come from 20 different countries, and i'm not really strongly connected to any of them. the only language i speak is english, but i actually have no english heritage. i probably look more jewish than anything else...

but, i like the culture of the northern european barbarian more than i like the settled culture of southern europe or the middle east, and would prefer to identify with the later rather than the former.

why is italy getting hit with mortality rates more similar to china and the united states than mortality rates comparable to other oecd countries?

that's a complicated question that i'm not ready to take a guess at, and that is no doubt not particularly pressing to the people on the ground. but, i can point a few things out about italy.

italy actually has an unusually high poverty rate for a western europe country; it's poverty rate is actually comparable to that in the united states, which is unusual for western europe. it's a country with a lot of open markets and public functions, which is different from much of northern europe - but so is spain. 

this article suggests that italy just has an unusually high number of very old people, so, oddly, it's high mortality rate is a consequence of it's longer average lifespan:

https://inews.co.uk/news/health/coronavirus-italy-why-so-bad-cases-deaths-lockdown-northern-areas-explained-2444517

these are things that will need to be worked out over time.

for right now, it is an outlier on the continent, and i suspect that this isn't all that surprising to most europeans.

if you remove italy from the dataset, the mortality rate in europe remains under 1%. 

they've done studies and concluded that people watching fox are actually less informed than people that don't watch the news at all. 

i'd like to see these studies replicated for msnbc and cnn. it's no doubt just as true, and maybe even worse. 

just turn your tv off. it's fucking trash. all of it.

so, you'll note that as more testing has been done in the united states, they've found hundreds of more cases and the mortality rate has gone from ~7% to ~3.5-4%, which is about on par with that in china.

the people arguing for hundreds of unreported cases have been proven right, and the smug idiots in the culturally liberal msm have been proven wrong. again.

will it come down more than that? i don't know. i just knew that the mortality rate in the united states was higher than logic would suggest that it should be, and something wasn't adding up. there had to be more cases than that.

but, the numbers are making more sense, now. what's next is an open question - can the united states bring it's numbers down to the levels in western europe? or are the results of it's health care system fundamentally more in line with china's?

the experiment is playing out, and we'll find out.