third time's a charm, donny.

if somebody is out to get you, they've given you two chances already.

three strikes and you're out.

flint is a majority black city in michigan.

like, the campaign didn't even lure some props in with free crack, or anything.

it's just an endless sea of white men. and a wife or two.

there were a number of possible outcomes in lasalle, but the bloc win was the most likely. what is my analysis as to why that happened?

quebeckers are fed up by being overrun by refugees - even english quebeckers, and even montrealers.

it is very likely that that fact will define how quebeckers vote in the next election.

i don't like nate's models. they are less conservative than the models at his old site, but they are still too conservative.

these two sites are useful in that they collect polls and present links to them, not in their aggregators. i advise against using aggregate methods for election forecasting and suggest using snapshot polling instead.

nonetheless, what these methods (which are designed to measure and track corporate branding) are good for is capturing shifts in the electorate after they've already happened. you'll note consistency in minnesota, wisconsin, michigan and pennsylvania. i would suspect you'd see the same movement in washington, new york, ohio, illinois and oregon, but only oregon is maybe in play right now.

i think trump has a very good chance of winning minnesota.

you'll also note that the democrats are trending positively in georgia and nevada, which is predictable and probably correct.

i still think that harris will win michigan by mobilizing black voters in metro detroit and that she should be favoured in georgia and arizona as well. but the decrease in support from white voters in white states was predictable and is real and something the democrats are going to have to accept and deal with.

the liberals are actually broadcasting that they want an early election, probably because the ndp have recently crashed.

the national popular vote may look decisive, but i don't think it translates into a change of government. i'm going to predict that the outcome will not substantively change, but the ndp and liberals may lose seats, while the conservatives and bloc may gain seats.

trudeau needs to take direct responsibility for parachuting in a candidate rather than allowing for a nomination process and the party needs to stop meddling at the local level and drop the corruption and nepotism.

the way that canada's electoral system and landscape is, the most likely outcome of an election remains a liberal minority, perhaps with a strengthened bloc.

it doesn't help the liberals to swap the ndp for the bloc. however, it might be good for the country, including the west, which might find itself getting more of what it wants via bloc influence over the liberals.

as an ontarian at the terminus point of the windsor-quebec corridor, i wish i had a bloc quebecois candidate in my riding.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/bloc-beats-trudeau-liberals-in-montreal-byelection-ndp-holds-on-to-manitoba-seat-1.7040763

i want to clearly articulate my position on marijuana use amongst adults.

i understand that this is perhaps a very gen x position, but i'm a very gen x person, and i'm not interested in the perspectives of young people, which, in canada, are undergoing some kind of depraved level of gramscian conditioning to encourage them to smoke drugs when they're over the age of 21. it's an experiment doomed to fail. i predict that canada will re-criminalize marijuana within the next 10 years and that it will likely actually become a populist issue to do so. it is the liberals that legalized marijuana, but support for legalization is higher in the libertarian right, and they all support either the ppc or the conservative party in this country. liberals in canada tend to view smoking as a serious public health issue that needs to be stamped out with stricter restrictions. it will be a liberal government that gets a popular mandate to recriminalize marijuana along with the criminalization of tobacco (these things will happen together for the same reasons), and the conservatives will oppose it.

my position on marijuana use is that it's something people start doing when they're between the ages of 12 and 14 (as pre-teens. it's not even a teenage behaviour, it's a pre-teen behaviour) and that they will tend to smoke drugs at house parties when they are teenagers, when somebody's parents are away for the weekend, and may think they're cool and think they're having fun when they do so, while not realizing that most people think they're gross losers, and not really being cognizant that they're largely being avoided by and excluded from the social in-group.

then, things tends to happen. they might fail a course. they might lose a job.  they might lose a boyfriend or girlfriend that is annoyed that they're stupid when they're stoned and smell gross all of the time, which makes intimacy a barrier. 

generally speaking, what happens, then, is that people stop smoking marijuana around the ages of 18-24 or so. the person continuing to smoke marijuana after the age of 25 is then what society calls a loser.

still, these losers do persist past the age of 25, but they slowly fall off. marijuana use will decrease sharply after 22 or 23 and nose dive after 25 so that, by the time you get to around 30 or so, the only potheads left are the unemployed and the unfuckable. after 30, anything more than exceedingly spare marijuana use at concerts or birthday parties becomes a marker of social ineptitude, economic failure and absolute loserdom.

this graph from a 2017 paper uploaded to researchgate confirms my life experiences and social perceptions:

there remains a place for adults to smoke extremely small amounts of marijuana a handful of times a year in extremely social situations. however, at 43, i have absolutely no patience for lingering habitual marijuana use in my peer group, especially not in residential spaces, and especially not in isolation. smoking pot at any age by yourself is pathetic, but is pitiful in your 40s. that's something i haven't dealt with in 20 years and i'm not interested in, remotely.