so, i decided to get through the concerts (that i can't go to.) for the rest of the month, first. there wasn't much after the rachmaninov show this weekend. and, may actually looks a little bit boring, although it could be that the best stuff already got rebooked.

back to the vlog updates, now. let's hope i can get this done by sunrise and have a highly productive week after that.

so, which would have been worse?

i don't know.

i really don't.

i don't know if i regret endorsing clinton to stop trump, instead of endorsing stein as a passive way to stop clinton.

and i don't expect to know for a long time.

...and then you get mad at me for telling you the facts of the matter.

and, i say - "no". not on my watch...

we're going to talk about reality, or we're not going to talk at all. we're going to talk about the real hillary clinton, as best we know her. and, we're going to come to some unexpected and painful realizations as we do it.

if you want to run off and cry, i can wait. if you want to yell, i'll walk away, or shrug it off.

but, i'm not conceding to fantasy.

i'm going to burst your bubble, and make you see reality, whether you like it or not.

clinton was raised a republican. she's a conservative - across the board.

but, the cultural perception of hillary clinton is largely a strawman created by rush limbaugh, newt gingrich and rupert murdoch that is designed to smear her as "too liberal". even her supporters seem to be overwhelmingly voting in favour of the strawman created by the right, rather than the candidate's actual policies.

they've completely defined the debate - you probably voted for or against the strawman.

think about that.

the more substantive point i'm trying to make is that when i have these arguments, my opponents rarely seem to be properly informed about the issues, and this holds across the spectrum. they get very angry at me, without realizing that their anger is largely rooted in false perceptions of what reality actually is - that their perception of clinton is a projection, and they'd have been sorely disappointed by what they'd get.

i don't have the appropriate studies to cite, and i don't think it's likely i'll get them unless somebody specifically studies the issue, directly. but, what i've hypothesized in the past is that the fake left's perception of clinton is actually indirectly defined by fox news and other right-wing media, who have created this strawman of clinton as this extreme leftist - much as they did for obama. but, people know better with obama, i think. with clinton, the smears have been going on for so long that even people that define themselves as leftists have lost their grip on the truth of it.

certainly, if you got your information from right-wing media, you'd think clinton was pro-choice, because that's one of the things they use to smear her with, and have been for many, many years. but, she's been trying to correct the point since at least the 90s - she's opposed late trimester abortions her entire political career. she's on record for this as late as mid-2016 - at townhalls, in debates. they don't want you to know that, though, so they pick up their bullhorns and they yell and scream the opposite, and that yelling and screaming has defined the skewed perception of the reality of it, both in their own audience and amongst their opponents.

yes, i would like to see that more rigorously examined, or at least for somebody to examine the point a little bit more clearly. the fact is that clinton's political position for many years has been to support a constitutional amendment to permanently end late term abortions. that's the fact. why do so many democrats think otherwise?

is it possible that clinton would have found herself at war with her own party, and had to concede on so many of these points that i'm concerned about, where she's just about as far right as a democrat can get and still be a democrat?

that's an empirical question. i don't know.

she could just as well have succeeded in shifting the centre even further to the right, which is what both obama and bill clinton did, and the most substantive legacy of both of them...

i'll concede that some of these things that i'm citing - like her abortion policy - seem too abstract to be of any real concern. her position on abortion is a matter of the public record, and it's just the simple truth that she's never been properly defined as seeing the issue as being about choice, as being about autonomy - she's been clear for many years that she sees the issue as a health concern. legal, safe and rare. she always underlines and asterisks the rare. and, unlike many other issues, she's never obfuscated on this point because she seems to think that unwavering support for abortion rights is unpopular and hurting the party's chances to appeal to the centre; any legislation from her, any judicial appointments from her, would have the strict focus on ensuring the rarity of the procedure. but, could she actually get the amendment in place? she'd need a republican legislature to do it as a first assumption, and it would probably destroy the party. so, i point to her actual position on the matter as a reality check, but that doesn't mean she'd have a realistic path to doing any of it. but, the same analysis holds for trump, who is hardly a pro-life republican, and it is well known has stated support for pro-choice policies in the past.

i'm keying on abortion, because it's the best argument i've seen to hold your nose and vote for her. but, a careful analysis largely even debunks this - trump is hardly jerry falwell, and clinton is well to the right of her own party on this issue, and may very well have found herself fighting against it.

if you think hospitalizations in new york plateaued rather than peaked, i'd like to see your definition of a peak.

the deaths look like a plateau and rapid fall, at this point. there's ways to analyze that to determine if there was really a distorted peak or not.

the hospitalizations - like most of the other metrics - went straight up and down.

hey, we're all guessing, still. we'll need antibody testing to prove the case, one way or the other. but, there is a very strong argument right now that this thing just ripped through new york without a passing concern to our behaviour. unlike the governor, i don't get paid for this, so i'm not going to repeat myself.

three caveats.

one - reporting on sundays seems to be a little lower. so, don't be surprised if you get a very steep drop tomorrow, followed by a small increase on tuesday and a return to the general shape on wednesday.

two - we're still waiting to see if we get a boost from easter. we should be able to indirectly estimate immunity & exposure levels from the data we see next week, regardless, and see which hypothesis it's most consistent with.

three - the data has only begun to be reported daily recently, but deaths in nursing homes seem to be ticking up, as total deaths fall. 

i think we're very close to this thing falling down to background levels. for now, please continue to keep the weak inside and away from danger.

one policy that harper pushed that i agreed with was a massive subsidy program for greenhouses to grow food locally, which is not just useful for food security, but also for carbon reduction, due both to reducing transportation to bring food to canada and reducing the reliance that outdoor produce has on oil-based pesticides.

it was a pleasant surprise, and evidence that you will inevitably agree with even your most strongly held opponents if you examine a large enough number of concerns.

this sort of wishful thinking about the democrats and where they actually stand on the spectrum and what positions they're likely to actually promote is widespread and deep-seated and goes back to at least the 1992 election, where clinton appears to have been elected on the perception that we would do exactly the opposite of what he actually did. i do remember that election, but i have no memory of carter, and my weak analysis of his presidency is that it was kind of the last gasp of the old solid south. he later distanced himself from it, but carter was initially successful by running as a racist old southern democrat - and that appears to be what people expected from him. those voters went to perot in the 90s. so, the 1992 election opened up a new era in the democratic party.

one of the worst examples i can think of is this delusional perception that al gore, the leading congressional hawk on actions against iraq throughout the 80s and 90s, would have somehow acted differently, had he been elected. this position is not based on an absence of evidence, but a negation of it; all evidence suggests he would have been more aggressive than bush was. he'd been aggressively pushing for an invasion of iraq for 20 years, and he was the architect of the situation that made it such an immediate cakewalk, namely the sanctions and the no-fly zone. 

so, the idea that al gore would have spared saddam hussein is absurdly ignorant and just deeply delusional. however, it's almost ubiquitous in certain circles.

one of the worst things about trump is his environmental policy, and i'm hardly going to defend his record on the point. he's been a disaster on that file. but, would clinton have been better? the best evidence we have for the issue is her handling of the keystone xl pipeline, and it's not very inspiring. 

so, i want you to be fully cognizant of where i'm coming from on this - i'm trying to look at the actual data in front of me, rather than draw partisan conclusions, or buy into specious media narratives. the general direction of this administration is pretty terrible, but it has truly come with a few positive surprises, too. but, that's inevitable; i'm sure i agreed with reagan on two or three things, too, even if i can't think of them, right now. what i'm more concerned about is comparing what we've seen from trump to what a sober analysis would have expected from clinton, and the stark conclusion is that i don't see a lot of reasons to think that i'd be happier about existing policy if she had won.

but, i still can't answer the general question, and i don't expect i'll be able to until years after trump leaves office.

let me be as clear as i can.

do i really think clinton would have been worse than trump? what i've been trying to say for years now is i don't know.

i know that when people present clear criticisms of trump to me, they're often misinformed about clinton's positions on the matter. the most substantive argument i've heard is about abortion, but most of these people are deeply misinformed about clinton's position on abortion, which is not at all aligned with the pro-choice movement. she wants a constitutional amendment to ban late trimester abortions!

so, you can throw all of this stuff about how terrible trump is at me, but my general response is "ok. i agree with you. but, your argument is rooted in the perception that clinton has a different policy, when the reality is that she actually has basically the same position."

and, there are some counter-arguments, too. i'm still opposed to nafta and still want to eventually get rid of it, but the amendments to it do have some major victories that the left has been trying to accomplish for 35 years. these are foundational victories, that most people probably thought would never happen. clinton would have followed her private position on nafta once elected, not her public one. further, while trump has committed some war crimes like all of his recent predecessors, we haven't started a new war, yet. how long do you think it would have taken clinton to bomb somebody in order to prove that she's "tough"? a week?

do you know what clinton's immigration policy was?

there's not any value in relitigating this, but i don't feel i have any clarity, here, yet.

i did endorse clinton, but it was an exceedingly weak endorsement, and i've stated repeatedly that i'm not convinced i was right to do it - which means that i have this nagging feeling that i should have endorsed jill stein under the argument that clinton was worse, and not given clinton a weak endorsement with the intent to block trump.

but, i don't think i'll be able to answer these questions for years to come, still.

all i can state with clarity is that it is probably the worst set of choices americans have ever had - with the possible exception of the one they're going to have in november.

we've been focusing on boomer retirement so long that....

you do realize that gen x is actually starting to retire now, right?

most people that study this cut the boomers off before 1955, and introduce a transitional generation from 1955-1965 where people could self-identify either way. and, if you were born in 1955, you are now 65 years old.

both of my parents were born in that transitional period, but they're both clearly boomers, if tail-end boomers. i'm also a cusper (1981), and i strongly identify as the last gen xer. the cusp breaks in the other direction; my grandmother, who had two children before she turned 20 years old, is also a boomer, meaning she's of the same cultural generation as her children. my dad's parents were not boomers. and, both of my sisters are quite clearly millennials.

i have a legit gen x aunt who isn't far from retirement, but that's about it.

time just evades you sometimes, really.

i'm getting started now.