funny how that turned out for the best.
Sunday, November 24, 2024
i do actually agree that the united states has a very serious obesity problem and it's tied to the food industry, or more precisely to the chemical and oil industries, who have managed to hijack the country's agriculture industry and monopolize it at every level.
i'm not sure how you deal with that, but having hulk hogan yell at little kids probably isn't the best approach. i'd suspect that some kind of science-based policy would probably be a better idea.
or maybe i'm wrong. maybe hulk hogan is a panacea. what do i know?
i would like to move to chicago, boston or seattle, as my top three picks.
the donation button's on the side.
if you were to send me some cash tomorrow, that is probably exactly what i'd do; immediately put my stuff in storage in windsor, and escape to the united states, scope out the scene in detroit for a bit and try to figure out which market is best for my art.
i didn't have the benefit of rich parents that most artists with my aspirations list do. real life is that it's pretty much a pre-requisite that you need to have some cash up front, and that's the only way to get it. they wanted me to work for the government, or something; to do a stupid, boring day job and raise a family. i'm not remotely interested.
they did give me the opportunity to build the life i wanted, but then wouldn't let me live it. it's extremely frustrating. nobody can save money in this economy, and i need to dissolve and start again.
if i could get to $20,000, i'd do it, although i'd obviously like a bit more.
if key cities with substantive art scenes in the united states - boston, new york city, chicago, seattle, san francisco - are running low on people and want some migration, i'll sign up.
i need a few thousand dollars to get started and an affordable place to stay, and if these cities are losing people, there's no doubt a surplus of affordable housing.
it would be quite a treat to get out of over-populated, increasingly smelly and dirty canada, where i'm fast becoming a minority in the country, and don't really want to be.
chicago has seen a decrease of 85,000 people since 2020. this is slightly less than the decrease of 205,000 votes that the democrats saw between elections. trump increased his totals by 16,000 despite the 85,000 less people.
san francisco has seen an almost 10% decrease in population between 2020-2024, which is almost 100,000 people. i couldn't find totals.
minneapolis only decreased by about 6,000 people since 2020 and seems to be recovering
seattle bucks the trend and has actually increased since 2020.
a statistician trying to figure this shit out needs to grasp that the deck has been shuffled and that this election is only data point one in what may indeed be a realignment in the making, but it's not yet clear how the cards fall.
in the end, get it right and call it what it is: this is the covid realignment, driven primarily by migration out of the cities.
this is an interesting map, because it makes no sense on it's face:
you see massive shifts to the republicans in chicago, detroit, minneapolis, phoenix, seattle, portland, san francisco and the bos-wash region....and moderate shifts to the democrats in rural illinois, rural michigan and indiana, suburbs of seattle, northeast california and oregon and upstate new york and pennsylvania, as well as across the us midwest.
you see massive shifts to the republicans in chicago, detroit, minneapolis, phoenix, seattle, portland, san francisco and the bos-wash region....and moderate shifts to the democrats in rural illinois, rural michigan and indiana, suburbs of seattle, northeast california and oregon and upstate new york and pennsylvania, as well as across the us midwest.
that is the opposite of the election narrative, right?
i mean, trump still got like 70% in the midwest.
is it all because of liz cheney?
probably not. it is probably measuring the migration of older, wealthy democrats into rural regions during the covid pandemic, leaving less affluent right-leaning voters in the cities behind to die in the urban jungle, as well as the outright death of older democrats in blue states due to covid and older republicans in red states due to covid.
based on that map, democrats may want to focus on kansas and nebraska.
this article (https://www.politico.com/news/2024/11/23/city-turnout-black-hispanic-neighborhoods-00191354) is wrong because it's making a logical mistake that i addressed in my comments about wayne county after the election - they are assuming that less votes for harris means less votes in total, rather than looking at issues like third parties and new voter registration.
the article suggests that this means that turnout was down by 14,000, which is really not by much, in total, but is a logical error.
what was turnout in these regions?
what was turnout in these regions?
you can't just subtract the amount and decide it was down by 14,000 votes. jill stein and cornell west certainly got some amount of those votes, and it doesn't measure population changes, or the fact that a lot of black people from black neighbourhoods died of covid after the 2020 election.
what i had to measure in wayne county was the difference between democrat vote totals (which were down 60,000) and turnout, which was only down 13,000. in wayne county, trump increased his totals by about 24,000. if you were to look at just the republican and democrat numbers, you'd conclude that 60-24 = 36, so turnout was down by 36,000 votes. however, we know that the green party was up by 30,000 votes in wayne county, just to start with - and we know that turnout was only down 13,000, not 36,000.
you would need to see what turnout is before you can make that deduction. you can't just subtract it out. that's wrong.
based on similar numbers from wayne county, if the difference is only 14,000 (rather than 36,000), it might suggest turnout in these counties might have even been up, but that's somewhat of a jump.
let me ask this question directly: does anybody have mortality data of black people dying from covid after nov 10th, 2020 or of the general population change in urban regions since the start of 2021?
i found this in philadelphia:
Between 2000 and 2020, Philadelphia saw a modest increase in its population. However, the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 marked a turning point, with the city losing over 53,000 residents in the following years.
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.
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Philadelphia’s population has declined in recent years.
This represents a decrease of 4.18% since the 2020 census, which recorded 1,600,684 inhabitants.
according to this article, turnout was down about 73,000 votes.
the decrease of about 70,000 is roughly in line with the population decrease of about 50,000.
this is detroit:
the blue curve is population growth. the red curve is indicating a decease in population decline and a slight increase the last year, but it's still a year over year decrease from 2020-2024.
the difference between 2024 and 2020 in detroit is about 20,000, which is roughly in line with the decrease of 13,000.
given the demographic changes that happened after 2020 due to covid, you would expect decreases in total votes in the cities and increases in total votes in the counties, and that's what happened.
it shouldn't be presented as an argument that there was low turnout in cities; there was a general population decrease in cites (remember?), so the lower vote totals is in line with a decrease in population. in fact, trump increased his raw totals - not percentages - in these cities, despite the overall population decrease. harris' numbers moved with the general trend, and trump bucked the trend.
we've seen this before on the left; repeatedly, in fact.
we're stuck in a catch-22: the only way to generate change is to unite, but we're so incredibly prone to co-option by fascism whenever we do, that the few of us that know better end up locking ourselves in closets and crying.
mobs of thuggish hamas sympathizers driven by iranian propaganda and smashing businesses up is not communism, it's a night of broken glass, repeated as farce.
when a group that calls itself left-wing and anti-capitalist goes out and acts in a way that is more reminiscent of nazi brownshirts or stalinist republicans than any sort of legitimate union organizing, it needs to have a mirror held up to itself to understand that it's lost the plot and doesn't have a theory.
these protests have nothing to do with the left in any remote abstraction.
i used to go to anti-globalization protests when i was young, when it was a left-wing movement seeking to struggle against decisions made by global capitalist leaders that would severely harm working people in canada.
nowadays, these protests have been hijacked by the far right and these people should be denounced for what they are, which is fascists.
i would be concerned that arresting netanyahu for war crimes, however much you may dislike him, risks trivializing the idea of war crimes.
this court in the hague, whatever you think of it, needs to be used sparingly or not at all. you can't just haul anybody you don't like into the hague and accuse them of war crimes. there has to be an exceedingly high bar that's not being remotely met in gaza.
i will say that netanyahu needs to tone it down in lebanon.
the claim that there's a persistent "high risk of famine", which never materializes, is an exceedingly weak basis for an arrest warrant, especially considering the length that the israelis have actually gone to to feed their enemies. you could criticize them for their policies; israel is a democracy, that's allowed. but, jumping to a war crimes warrant is not justified by the facts.
the attacks in lebanon north of the litani and especially north of the alawi are much more suggestive of an aggressive rather than a defensive war and harder to justify, although it's still grey. the question is whether israel has exceeded the action that is justified, which is dismantling and destroying hezbollah, and carried out attacks in civilian populations, which is still blurry but increasingly leaning in that direction.
however, lebanon is not a signatory to the rome treaty, either. nor is syria
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