i don't think that immigration can replace abortion as a vote driver. it might be his best try.

he's right - he needs something to whip his base up. he may have no real future except dying of old age (or cancer), but his party is fucked if he can't get a vote driver.

trump wants to do everything himself. his capacity is not always high, but it's like him to not want to leave this to the next person. however, he's really going to have to leave this to the next person, who is going to have to rebuild, and to figure it out.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/live/2026/nov/06/us-midterm-elections-2026-democrats-blue-wave-congress-latest-news-updates

next five cds are...

antonio carlos jobim - stone flower (1970) 

billy cobham - spectrum (1973)

claude debussy - la mer / nocturnes (1905/1900)

do make say think - winter hymn secret hymn country hymn (2003)  

gustav holst - the planets / ralph vaughn williams - tallis fantasia (1918/1919)  

====

i mother earth - scenery and fish (1996)

man or astroman? - experiment zero (1996)

mike oldfield - ommadawn (1975)  

ministry - the mind is a terrible thing to taste (1989)

my blood valentine - loveless (1991)

====

pelican - city of echoes (2007)

pink floyd - the piper at the gates of dawn (1967)  

pink floyd - atom heart mother (1970)

pink floyd - meddle (1972)

plateau - iceolator (2002) <---- current start point

======

sister machine gun - metropolis (1997)

skinny puppy - cleanse, fold and manipulate (1987)

sonic youth - sister (1987)

spiral beach - ball (2007) <---current end point

ssris - effeminate godzilla-sized windchimes (2010)

============

swans - omniscience (1992)

talking heads - remain in light (1980)

the black heart procession - 2 (1999)

the chicago underground - flamethrower (2000)

the cure - disintegration (1989)

=========================

the grassy knoll - III (1998)

the mars volta - tremulant (2002)

the mars volta - deloused in the comatorium (2003)

the mars volta - frances the mute (2005)

the mars volta - amputechture (2006)

============

the offspring - ignition (1992)

the smashing pumpkins - gish (1991)

the smashing pumpkins - lull cd ep (1991)

the smashing pumpkins - cherub rock cd single (1993)

the smashing pumpkins - pisces iscariot (1994)

those are just the first ten 15 20 25 30 35 cds out of the boxes. i'll be updating in groups of five as they come out and onto the shelves (i have a five disc cd/dvd player in the listening room).

(skipping for now, will come back)

blogger music lists for existing cds (rebuilds):

chronological: https://deathtokoalas.blogspot.com/p/chronological-music-list.html

labels: https://deathtokoalas.blogspot.com/p/label-list.html

alphabetical: https://deathtokoalas.blogspot.com/p/music-list.html

discogs list (first 100 of many more to come): https://drive.google.com/file/d/1nNhi2Z4vRr0hEP5OiK-6xxZP1G_b9OBW/view

librarything (first 20): https://www.librarything.com/catalog.php?view=dgdgkdhldfjlfdhla&collection=1082249&shelf=list&sort=authorunflip&sort=authorunflip

the music web - starting with miles davis - is going to have a new page at the deathtokoalas blog. the point is that i want to use the timeline feature so it's likely to lose the scrolling aspect. or i might design a new blog for it. 

i actually didn't get into the shower on thursday morning but i did get in this morning, for round one. and i am done in here. so, the shift is going to be towards typing for the rest of the...

winter?

well, it's still summer, here. we've barely seen any fall weather, let alone any winter weather.

i'm going to want to do the following:

- design or redesign several laptop systems - the kitchen system, the studio laptop system, the apartment's network infrastructure, the typing system (and getting the writing projects started) and the listening room system

- catch up on the cd cataloging and book cataloging

- the coffee table book, including taking and uploading lots of pictures in here

- and also transferring cash into the rdsp and maybe moving some money around in it. i've been waiting out a few things first.

i could restart the reading project very soon, but i want to have things set up closer to the stereo so i can listen to music in there while i'm doing it.

the general philosophy of the budget is to provide tax credits for things that should receive direct funding instead. in some cases, this may be a way to avoid actually spending money (such as tax credits instead of grants for arts funding). in other cases, it's a way to push start up costs to the private sector instead of the public sector, which doesn't make sense when interest rates are going up. the result is that initiatives that ought to be funded with deficit spending simply won't happen at all. 

this is the same error that biden made in his supposed clean energy bill. it's been a few years. how did that work out? not very well - almost nothing actually got built, because the government was trying to spur private sector investment by offering tax cuts on it instead of providing for direct government investment. i made that criticism of it upfront.

normally, when an approach utterly fails, you don't see it emulated a few years later. this government seems to have learned nothing by the failure of biden's climate bills and is just reproducing them verbatim.

.....unless that's the point, which would be the case if the tax exemptions are really about tax scams (that is, institutions and other actors claiming tax credits without justification, in order to evade paying taxes). this would make some sense if that's how biden's climate bills were actually used, and the idea got pushed down to carney from his friends at big american institutions.

the result is a budget that's actually written to give investors excuses to evade paying taxes, in order to bankrupt the country, and to announce fake infrastructure funding in order to inflate stock prices. 

i've made similar observations about carney in the past. it seems to be the direction of this government - much of what they publish is basically bullshit, and it's all written to allow for international bankers to exploit loopholes in the laws and suck money out of the country.

the budget does have some tax credits that should have been announced instead of counter-tariffs, and that are overdue to respond to some of the self-inflicted damage that the counter-tariffs caused to our own productivity. 

one example is the tax credit on capital investment. the counter-tariffs were heavily geared at taxing capital investment, which was bafflingly stupid. now, they're offering tax credits to offset the taxes in the counter-tariffs. what is that going to cost in terms of bureaucracy to administer?

i would rather see them cancel the counter-tariffs and just go strictly with the budget items. but i can't criticize that. it's really necessary after pushing through the counter tariffs.

if they're going to spend money on infrastructure, i would have liked to see more money for the following:

- hydro-electric dams

- research & development at the university level

- direct funding for climate resilience

almost all "innovation" results from government spending at public universities. the private sector makes essentially no contribution to "innovation". carney's been rambling about this since day one, but there's no money for r&d in the budget. you don't get "innovation" without government funding and it's not there.

further, we need to generate more clean electricity in canada and the best way to do it is to build more dams. this is absent from the budget.

canada is also already dealing with the consequences of climate change. one example is forest fires. the depth of the recent king tide should wake some people up as to what's coming. and we're heading into december in southern ontario without a first frost.

there needs to be money available to deal with these issues in terms of building public infrastructure. it's not there.

i'm not concerned about gas prices and am opposed to temporarily removing the gas tax. everything else aside, money raised by temporary boosts in the price of oil should be responsibly invested into infrastructure for climate resilience. that isn't being done.

i don't support money for stupid things like hockey rinks, but it's a trivial amount in the federal budget.

there is a $45000 tax exemption in the budget for sales of original works. this does not help struggling artists, it's just a hand out to the wealthy. there is no money in federal arts grants. 

i would call on wealthy canadian artists to donate any tax exemptions they gain in the budget to artists that need grants in order to exist.

there's something severely wrong with the culture of a society that will spend $100 billion on weapons and less than $10 billion on housing.

this is a foolish waste of tax money.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/defence-budget-military-nato-trump-9.7411329

there's never enough money budgeted for the poor people that actually deserve it - the physically and mentally disabled, families dealing with retarded children, people displaced by fires or other disasters, people fleeing abuse or dealing with unplanned pregnancies, etc.

instead, the money gets budgeted for the crackheads. at every level of government. at every budget.

and for all of the billions or trillions flushed down the toilet on a problem that will never be solved, governments have nothing of value to show for it. the crackheads keep multiplying. it's a giant sucking sound to nowhere.

liberals need to stop looking at the issue as though addiction is caused by mental health problems and can be solved with more funding. drug addiction is a choice, it's not an illness. it doesn't have a cure. it doesn't have a solution.

i want to see this money rebudgeted to people that deserve the handout and i want to see governments at every level completely cut the crackheads off. i don't want to see another dime of public money at any level spent on helping drug addicts in any way at all.

i would, instead, support passing a bill that allows police to collect drug addicts as vagrants and drive them out of residential communities and commercial areas to designated, isolated regions, instead. municipalities would be able to designate regions as crackhead zones, where they can do their drugs in their tents, until they overdose. when they do, good riddance.

all of the billions of dollars spent on the failed approaches to solving drug addiction over the last several decades might have instead been spent on valuable public infrastructure. while this cannot be recovered, we can put an end to it today.

no more public funds for addicts.

not a fucking red cent.

spending money on trying to help crackheads is wasteful, stupid and pointless. you'd might as well just print the money into bundles, and light it up in a giant bonfire. it will accomplish nothing.

you can't solve drug addiction.

stop trying. it's a waste of time, a waste of resources and a waste of money.

just give up and leave them alone. and tell them to get the fuck out of your way when you see them on the street.

there's people out there that deserve funding help.

crackheads don't deserve anything except a kick in the face and to be spat upon when you walk by them on the street.

i strongly oppose throwing more money at these losers. the therapy doesn't work. 

you can't solve this problem, so stop wasting money on it.

just give up.

100% of this money should be spent on people that deserve it, like disability recipients or people dealing with autism. no further tax money should be wasted on trying to help stupid crackhead losers.

just bulldoze them into the ditch and let them die on the street. i'm tired of society wasting valuable resources on losers.

we should just introduce a crackhead tax.

a 5% tax on all consumption will go towards raising money for crackheads.

the canadian budget is a giant handout for rich movie stars and homeless losers. 

ugh.

we have serous problems in this country, and these are not those problems. this is very disappointing.

the type of voter that the republicans lost was not working class stiffs, it was upper middle class evangelicals. in fact, they don't seem to have done particularly poorly with lower income voters that would be more affected by "cost of living" concerns - or at least not worse than normal. these are typically democratic voters in the first place. there could not have been a big swing in this demographic to the democrats because the democrats already dominated it. but if the election was about gas, rent and groceries, trump would have lost voters at the bottom of the income spectrum. the fact that he actually lost voters in the middle to the top suggests it was probably more about social issues, like abortion.

concluding that iran cost the republicans the election is consequently the wrong lesson and it won't help the republicans rebuild their base, which is suffering from the absence of a ballot issue. if they want to come back, they need to find a way to get evangelicals out to vote, or they need to focus on swinging a different demographic.

there is no lesson in these results for the liberals in canada, but the conservatives may want to take note of the importance of continuing to string their base along on issues like abortion, because the alternative is losing them and becoming uncompetitive.

it's an open question whether the republicans can rebuild the reagan coalition in the next two years. if they can't, they may have a hard time generating voters.

the democrats have enough seats that they could try to govern and try to override vetos or even make a deal with the president (how about trump try making a deal with his own fucking congress?) but they're not going to. they're going to waste the next two years orchestrating a soap opera, because they never had any intent of introducing any legislation on anything that they ran on.

moving forward, i will call the soap opera level enstupidification brought on by the dumb and dumber congress by the title as the world burns.

"that's socialism!"

i think a better term is cultural marxism. it's not really socialism, exactly.

i don't watch women's sports either and i'm not sure i could name you five current male athletes either. in fact, i'm certain i couldn't name you five current male athletes, and i would name a lot of retired hockey players if i tried.

https://time.com/7346643/supreme-court-trans-athletes-womens-sports/

encouraging co-ed children's sports to the point of banning gender segregation - and using brown v board as a model - would be good for both young girls and young boys, as it would teach them to see each other as equals rather than place each other in a fraudulent hierarchy. i think it's healthy and positive and progressive to place boys and girls in situations where they compete against each other and both win and lose and also where they cooperate with each other in ways that aren't gender segregated. i remember the boys v girls soccer games when i was a kid and that should not be allowed, by law. integration should be enforced by federal law. segregation should be prohibited by federal law.

it teaches boys that it's not shameful to lose against a girl and it teaches girls that they can beat the boys if they try. both of these things undo the remnant christian cultural programming which is proving very stubborn and hard to abolish. 

it also teaches both boys and girls to work together in ways that transcend gender segregation, by building alliances with the opposite gender to defeat members of their own gender. this undoes the damaging gender war mentality constantly enforced by the culture and media.

that's an ideal, it's equality, and recent regressive policies are showing that it's going to be necessary to enforce that kind of equality through aggressive brown v board style mixing because the culture is too ignorant and too stupid to get there on it's own.

transfemale athletes are the only athletes in the world that don't take testosterone injections and want lower testosterone as a rule.

i think there's something to this:

https://theconversation.com/are-transgender-sports-bans-really-about-protecting-women-survey-data-tells-a-different-story-293927

it's an idea i would associate more with toxic masculinity than with gender equality. it fundamentally enforces a false gender hierarchy, and relies on a rejection of gender equality. if you accept gender equality, it should largely be a non-issue, so long as basic doping rules are enforced. 

i mean, ciswomen athletes have to be constantly tested to stop them from injecting themselves with testosterone. the same testosterone ranges and limits should apply to transwomen.

so long as you enforce the same rules, it shouldn't matter what sex you're born into. suggesting otherwise is ignorance.

but we know that americans are ignorant. and we know they're misogynist, too.

there are more concrete issues at play, as well.

some sports have change rooms, for example. i can tell you that i don't think i have some inherent right to barge into a female change room, but i don't think that's the same thing as participating in the competitive sport. i'm very cognizant of this concern and want to ensure i'm welcome in any space i try to enter.

the flip side of this is that i was the 11 year old kid that the girls dragged into the female washroom. to hang out. the teachers had to yell at the girls in my class to stop physically pulling me into the female bathroom. i wasn't just welcome in there, i was invited. 

and this is a difference that needs to be respected. we're used to having rights in our society and trans people do need to have some rights. however, being trans is, in some ways, more of a privilege than a right, and in a lot of ways the reality is that being trans means understanding it as a privilege that necessitates invitation, rather than a right to be enforced. 

trans kids shouldn't have to say "but i have the right", when they're excluded. rather, they should understand that they need to get invited. and, in most cases, they will get invited when they're trans. if they're not invited, there's usually reasons for that.

but these are decisions to be made by their peers, not by their parents. the thing that bothers me is when the parents try to step in to "protect" the kids, when the kids aren't asking for protection. that's a symptom of helicopter parenting past the age where it's needed. you need to let your daughters figure this out themselves, and they'll tell you who the girls are, who the cute boys are and who the opportunistic creeps are. the opportunistic creeps, to the extent that they exist, can't be told they have rights. but the girls are the best way to identify them, not your congressperson.

they're not going to really listen to you anyways, so it's up to you to do it the easy way or the hard way. it's easier to listen to your daughters and respect what they say than to try to force your values on them and get rejected.

some sports are very physical, like wrestling. pre-op transwomen participating in wrestling are always going to generate a set of awkward concerns. it's maybe the only sport where i'd support screening for physical sex as relevant.

is this fair? comparing women-only sports to white-only sports?

if the argument is about competition, then it is. it's the same argument, and no better one way or the other.

if the argument is about individuality, it's something else, and hence it may be more helpful to be more honest about what the actual issue is, which is not about competing but about wanting to be different.

what was the name of that movie about women playing baseball?

a league of their own

why? because women want to be different. it's an inherent characteristic of being a woman.

we don't raise boys like that, we raise them to fit in and tell them they're all the same.

could you imagine a movie about white athletes called a league of their own? 

i'm not a sports fan. i think competition is barbarism and sports don't belong in the schools. parents that want their kids to play sports should pay out of pocket to have them play in private sector leagues, after school. it should be against the law to remove your kids from class to compete in sports games.

i did not play sports in high school. i didn't even take phys ed as a class.

for that reason, i am not particularly interested in either side of the trans sports debate. i don't actually really care. however, to the extent that the issue exists and lingers to exist, it should be determined by science and not by prejudice or be driven by ignorance. there is a broad cultural problem in the united states that is worst amongst genetic women, exists in both parties and leads people to ignorant positions about trans people. in the recent weeks and months, many democrats made a lot of ignorant statements about transgendered women in sports.

the science really doesn't support the idea of gender as a segregating factor in sports in the first place. gender is sometimes correlated to more important factors, like weight or height. when you control for these more important factors, gender has no predictive advantage in determining competitive outcomes. for example, in swimming, the dominant factor is height. men are often taller than women (which is itself not genetic, but tied to nutrition in childhood). when you control for height, gender provides for no advantage in swimming competitiveness.

conversely, when you control for gender, height presents itself as an unfair advantage. should women over a certain height be banned from competing?

gender is an arbitrary metric that isn't the most important factor. that it has been made an important factor is mostly the result of ignorance, but also the result of snowflake culture. ciswomen like to think they're special. it's a broader problem.

it may consequently be more helpful to abolish gender as a category in swimming competitions and instead move to co-ed competitions that have different pools based on height. the tallest pools may be mostly men, but also include taller women that easily defeat the shorter women and face stiffer competition from men. the shortest pools may be mostly women and include some shorter men that couldn't compete with the tall ones. the middle heights would be co-ed and mixed.

if you want to follow the science, that's what it would tell you - that gender is not an advantage in swimming, it's irrelevant, and you should split people up by a more relevant characteristic, specifically height.

other sports would have weight as a more defining characteristic.

when it comes to high school kids who have barely gone through puberty, or gone through it at all, and who don't do specialized training, it's not clear what the point is at all. all high school aged sports leagues should be entirely, completely co-ed. there's no scientific basis for concluding 14 year old boys are stronger or faster than 14 year old girls and the data wouldn't uphold it. in fact, because girls tend to go through puberty at a younger age, they may actually have a limited competitive advantage in some sports, like short distance running.

the argument that cisgirls can't compete against transgirls isn't just ignorantly anti-trans, it's ignorantly misogynist, too. it's not based in science. it's not based in data. the types of skinny, unmasculine, pre-pubescent transgirls we're talking about are going to, on average, get their asses kicked by mature girls that went through puberty young. the science suggests the transgirls should be at a competitive disadvantage, pre-puberty.

that being said, transgendered athletes should be tested for drugs like any other. the only science based considerations have to do with testosterone levels. young boys and young girls should have comparable testosterone levels, until the boys get to puberty. the boys don't have a competitive advantage if they have comparable testosterone levels. but the trans kids should be on blockers to identify as trans kids.

i would not oppose testing trans kids for testosterone and estrogen levels. that's science, that's important, that matters - to an extent, in limited contexts. if a kid claims to be transfemale, they can't have off the charts testosterone levels. that is fair. but the sex organs don't matter.

definitions of gender in competitive sports when they matter (which is not often) should be hormone dependent and not sex dependent.

the girls category in high school sports is mostly not maintained for competitive reasons. the truth is that it's largely an anachronism from the days of girls-only and boys-only schools. we don't have black and white sports teams anymore, but we used to when we had black and white schools. are black people better at sports than white people? should we have whites-only leagues so the blacks don't outcompete the whites? the argument that boys are better at sports is really not any less dumb than the idea that blacks are better at sports than whites. it has some limited truth, but it's due to unrelated factors being correlated with race/gender rather than race/gender themselves. those independent factors should be decoupled from the inherent qualities to get to better defined competitive categories.

but, girls like being snowflakes. they like being special and different. that's how we raise girls, and it's what this is really about, not competitive fairness, which is just blatant misogyny. it's bizarre to hear so many young ciswomen stand up and loudly state they can't compete with men. in my day, those girls would get laughed out of the room. nowadays, they are told they are snowflakes, and have that inverted misogyny reinforced by the dominant culture, which wants them to be the weaker sex.

in fact, it's often the parents that say that, not the kids. right? their little princess will always be a special snowflake, to them. but that can't be public policy. 

so, what i would support is :

(1) no public funding for school sports. it should be strictly private sector and only after school.

(2) it should be illegal to take boys or girls out of class for sports.

(3) children's sports leagues should be 100% co-ed (pre-puberty). gender segregation in sports should be against the law. i played co-ed soccer when i was a young kid. the girls weren't at a competitive disadvantage, and they would have punched you in the face if you said they were.

(4) adolescent and adult sports leagues should base their segregated categories on measurably relevant categories like height and weight and not on irrelevances like birth sex. depending on the context, it may be relevant to screen for testosterone levels, but not for chromosomes or sex organs. 

(5) to the extent that gender sometimes needs to be defined in a sports context, it should be defined by hormone ranges and not by genetics or birth sex.

sherrod brown is the furthest left candidate in the group, and he used to be seen as right-wing, back when the democrats weren't a conservative party.

if you liked joe manchin, you'll love adam hamilton and you'll fall head over heels for james talarico.

and there's not one of them. or two of them.

there's, by my count, six of these new hard-right "blue dogs" in the democratic senate caucus that are so right-wing that joe manchin looks centrist in comparison.

it's a disaster for secularism in the united states. for now.

while canada has a constitutional right to free speech, our constitution has a clause that allows for it's suspension under the application of something called an oakes test. the canadian law in question is not restricted by the charter right to free speech in canada, but is explicitly intended to apply to political activity. 

promoting hatred against identifiable groups is only prohibited when it is (1) done in public (it doesn't apply to private communication, which is free speech) and (2) has a potential to lead to real foreseeable harm. standing on an empty stage and calling for the final solution isn't going to get you prosecuted. the prohibition against targeting identifiable groups is only intended to apply to actors with a real audience, that have a real possibility of taking power and that have the means to seriously apply real harm. further, that harm needs to be imminent and real.

all of these factors apply to the campaign in question, and to the candidate's reaction to very real terrorist attacks targeting the jewish community in michigan. it wouldn't be a slam dunk case, but el-sayed's campaign is legitimately exactly what the law was written to address and prohibit and, depending on the judge, it might have resulted in conviction and jail time.

further, the attempt to replace abortion as a federal issue with attacks on trans people was clearly a massive failure. there's some glimmer of hope in that realization.

it was obvious, or should have been obvious, that you weren't going to mobilize a fraction of the same number of people on restricting trans rights that you were going to on ending abortion. it's not the same kind of issue and the perception that it might have been shows how distant the republican administration is from the republican voting base. abortion was a major issue in the republican party and has since become a dominant issue in the democratic party. you can work up 1-2% of voters on trans issues, but they're mostly right-wing feminists. you're going to alienate more people running attacks on trans people. trans people aren't baby-killers. you can still get people to vote against abortion. religious people don't tend to hate the trans people the same way they hate the gays, because there is no clear restriction on being trans in any religious text. it's just not comparable as a get the vote out type issue.

anti-semitism, however, might be a replacement for anti-abortion, if the republicans decide to go down that path. jews were the original baby killers. og.

in canada, there's actually a law against targeting groups the way that the ad in question does. el sayed might have very seriously gone to jail if he ran that ad here. the seriousness of the situation needs to be understood. it's not trivial.

is donald trump aligned with the conservative movement's position on abortion access?

i don't think he is.

i don't think he's particularly invested, but he probably leans towards being pro-choice. he seems to think it's up to the states to decide. 

well, ok. but that position - removing abortion as a federal issue - instantly alienates a third or more of his party's base, which votes republican strictly on restricting abortion. if that's no longer a federal political issue at all, these voters may no longer be interested in voting for the republican party at the federal level. in fact, they may not be interested in voting at all. they may join the ranks of the apolitical, which is largely where they were before roe v wade. or they may focus strictly on state level politics, instead.

this should be a major victory for secularism in the long run, but it had the opposite effect during this particular cycle. the democrats ran very conservative candidates in an attempt to outstupid the republicans and they didn't succeed in swinging any votes from them at all. they won, but almost in spite of their conservative stupidity, rather than because of it. instead of voting for the democrats, republicans didn't vote at all.

there's consequently reason to have hope that the outstupiding competition, that the dumb and dumber congress, may be shortlived, if democrats (or republicans) clue in and make a stronger play for secular voters. 

if the religious right keeps losing control of the republicans, and the democrats remain insistent on trying to outstupid them by running on their right as some kind of purer religious group or something, it will open up a hole on the secular left for the republicans to walk through.

and i'll just say that i'd like to see these newly elected conservative and religious democrats lose, lose soon and lose big.

the kinds of anti-semitic ads that were run in the michigan primary are not acceptable and cannot be tolerated by democratic leadership. even if trump forgets about it within a few hours, the magnitude of the threat of tolerating this kind of thing for the possibility of winning a few votes should be clear enough. there needs to be clear consequences for el-sayed and his campaign, in terms of vocal condemnation by sitting senate democrats and exclusion from participating in government.

he won the seat, but he did not have a strong campaign and he should be seen as an easy target for the republicans in the next cycle.

if the democrats are not clear in their condemnation of the candidate's anti-semitic record, voters should draw conclusions and walk away from them.

there's far more evidence that the low turnout amongst republicans that decided the election was actually about abortion.

this certainly flew under the radar, but this poll - which represents a large percentage of voters nationwide and not a handful of people in metro detroit - is consistent with what the data states:

https://www.ewtnnews.com/world/us/abortion-pill-poll

while there was no "blue wave", this politico article is insightful:

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/11/04/abortion-resurfaces-as-a-decisive-issue-amid-blue-wave-01148984

trump's response to the midterms, which is to blame it all on the jews, demonstrates the dangers that come from playing with anti-semitic fire. 

there is no evidence that foreign aid to israel swung a single vote in the election, that the election was in any way about iran or that arabs or muslims held any substantive sway in michigan or anywhere else. these are all anti-semitic narratives. el-sayad benefited from the same decrease in republican turnout in michigan that existed elsewhere in the country and that nobody saw coming but he also dramatically underperformed relative to other candidates. if white republican turnout wasn't so low, he might have actually lost. he got extremely lucky.

however, trump is taking the bait on this because he's an idiot. it's all the jews' fault. of course. predictable; typical.

if the thinking was that the ads were directed at two or three neighbourhoods in the detroit metro area in an attempt to peel off a tiny swing vote in an in the margins election and would have no national implications, that was wrong. that's never how race baiting works in politics.

i don't oppose aid to israel. israel is a democracy and, despite narratives to the contrary, they are one of the most responsible recipients of us military money. the worst behaved recipients of us money are non-democratic countries like ukraine, egypt, saudi arabia, syria, the philippines, myanmar, bangladesh and a list of brutal countries in africa. what these countries do with us, canadian and european aid money to hold some plots of land from the chinese or russians is truly despicable. israel is, relatively speaking, an exemplary and paradigmatic example of the application of human rights. but i'm not exactly a proponent of it either. it's not a ballot issue for me.

what's more concerning is the potential for the issue to become a rallying cry on the far right. it's already an extremely serious problem in the centre-left, but the centre-left isn't the far right and doesn't think or act like the far right. 

the last thing the world needs or wants is a wounded donald trump to be blaming all his problems on the jews, but that's where we're going with this. racist fake liberal advertising needs to take a lot of responsibility for setting that up and jews that facilitated it need to pull their heads out of their asses. this won't end well. what the fuck are you thinking?

i'm done cleaning.

the  showers start tonight. 

there are conan skits from 25-30 years ago where the unstated punchline is about trump being gay.

it's just not news.

the observation that donald trump is obviously gay dates to some time in the 80s. he's been a flamboyantly queer media personality for like 50 years.

if you hadn't figured that out before this year....

i mean, a substantive percentage of queen's fan base still denies that freddie mercury was gay. they will aggressively argue with you. they don't get the band name. they don't get the songs. it just never clicked.

it's an issue with the boomer generation because the whole concept of homosexuality and masculinity flipped on them in their youth, and they grew up with this doublethink about it. football and wrestling are somehow not gay, to baby boomers. obviously gay men are not necessarily gay.

"well, has he said he's gay?"

right.

i don't think it's very likely that trump is trying to block access to the epstein documents out of concerns over him having sex with children. you can say what you like about donald trump, but he doesn't appear to have much difficulty attracting adult women to him.

rather, there are probably pictures of him making out with epstein himself and - don't imagine this - might also be pictures of him making out with clinton. i mean bill.

i think that's what the issue has been from the start. he doesn't want that in the news.

my analysis was correct and the models and arts majors and political scientists and journalists were all completely wrong. there was no "blue wave", let alone a "blue tsunami". americans did not show up in large numbers to throw the bums out. it doesn't indicate any level of shift in voter direction or any change in political ideology in the country. rather, what happened was that the republican party vote evaporated like the aral sea at the peak of the climate crisis. 

turnout for the midterms is normally low but it was down 20%. it was about 63%. it was due to massive republican abstention. that's what the difference was in texas and kansas and other places - republicans  just didn't vote. that's not what the models said, and it's not what the polling said, and it's not what the arts majors or the journalists said.

the polling oversampled democrats and then didn't correct it, but fed it into bad models to get the wrong prediction of a shift to the democrats. the media and the arts majors suggested a mass uprising against the president that the data didn't support and that didn't happen. the polling did project higher democratic enthusiasm - high democratic turnout - but it didn't pick up low republican turnout. those aren't the same thing, but the mistake in oversampling democrats balanced out with the polling miss in not measuring low republican enthusiasm, and they accidentally got the right result. 

it's frustrating to correctly analyze and correctly adjust the modelling errors, only for the models to accidentally get the right outcome because there actually was a polling mistake, in not picking up low enthusiasm in republican voters.

you could argue that's the difference between the "likely voter" and "registered voter" categories, but that didn't get it right either. this correctly picked up and in fact largely overshot democratic turnout (because it doubled up on it. the lv adjustment was accurate and correct. but they put the lv adjustment on top of the oversampling. if they had adjusted for oversampling before applying the lv, they would have had closer results), but they still missed the low turnout amongst republicans. high enthusiasm amongst democrats is not the same thing as low enthusiasm amongst republicans. they picked up the former but not the latter. excited democrats on their own can't swing kansas or texas. you also need cynical republicans on top of excited democrats, and the polling just didn't catch that.

in fact, this is extremely unusual and not obviously predictable. democratic enthusiasm waxes and wanes. republican enthusiasm has been unbreakable since roe v wade. and maybe that's actually it. 

if the polling had picked up low enthusiasm in republicans in addition to high enthusiasm in democrats (who are not left-wing. stop saying that.), the results would have still had the oversampling of democrats, but the data would have presented a better explanation for it. the overshoot would have been less and the modelling would have been better, although it would still be making the foundational ideological mistakes i've been pointing out for years. further, if i had caught it, i would have argued that the results were a little less unlikely, given that republicans are telling us they aren't going to show up.

i hold to my analysis that the likelihood of the outcome was so unlikely as to be negligible. a correct prediction of the outcome given the data was that it was essentially impossible for the democrats to flip more than two seats. the modelling projections were based on terrible mathematical assumptions and brutally bad data, and should have been nowhere close to correct. but, the extremely unlikely outcome actually happened, because the whole system missed an actual polling error, which actually decided the outcome.

people get hit by lightning from time to time. it does happen.

but it would have been more expected if the polling had picked up the extremely unusual and not very predictable republican cynicism on top of the more predictable democratic enthusiasm, and it didn't. there was no indication that republican turnout was going to crater like that, and it was neither fed into the modelling nor into my criticism of it. 

everybody actually missed the factor that decided the election and that actually allowed for the outcome, which was not general election polling, but low turnout amongst republicans, in key states. there was actually a clear polling miss, which is unusual - the polling doesn't generally have errors like this. the modelling was consequently wrong in projecting a swing to the democrats, which didn't happen. and the arts majors and journalists were wrong in projecting a political uprising, which also didn't happen. what actually happened was a cynical withdrawal amongst republicans, not an enthusiastic swing. nobody picked that up. nobody predicted it. nobody was actually right in their projection.

i also missed that because the polling missed it and my projection was off because there was a polling error that threw it off. everybody else accidentally got the result right because the polling error cancelled out the modelling or political science mistakes they made. 

chance works that way. 

the lesson for me is something i already knew: don't think you can outsmart the universe. there's always some factor you might miss. but republican abstention is really pretty obscure and not something that's very predictable. if this becomes a trend, that is truly a shift, but not the one being reported. 

have republicans lost their argument, by getting it done on abortion? has reaganism finally ultimately run it's course?

everything makes sense in hindsight, but i didn't see that coming and i don't think anybody else did either.

white conservative republicans should note that their decision not to vote resulted in a nigger arab taking control of the house of representatives, who wants to replace you with ragheads from  the middle east. 

and why didn't you vote? 

because you supported the fascist government in iran?

because you don't like trump's very overdue and very welcome normalization of homoerotic messaging into hypermasculine conservative culture? he's right. you're a bunch of closeted homos, jerking off to the football games.

for your solidarity, you will be replaced with raghead niggers. congratulations on your enlightened abstentions, which are directly in opposition to your self-interests.

the democrats have succeeded in stealing the title of stupidest party on earth from the republicans, and the outstupidification and enstupidification is about to begin. this is going to be the flat out dumbest two years in the history of the united states congress. your brain will not stop hurting.

the world would be in a better place today if republicans had shown up to vote yesterday. by allowing the democratic party's loser patrol to win elections in conservative states through attrition, they have done a disservice to themselves, to their states and to the world around them.

i don't want canadian content. i want global content.

if you want to watch canadian content, watch it. don't make me watch it, too. like, fuck off.

https://www.ipolitics.ca/2026/11/04/its-up-to-carney-to-protect-canadian-content-on-our-screens/

this man is a retard and should shut his stupid mouth. all he's doing is harming cross-border relations.

the american congress has no executive power to adjust the existing trade relationship and the results of the election will have no effect on canada's problems with the executive branch. however, the expected shift to the hard right in the house will have an extremely deleterious effect on the rights of american citizens, and the democrats' deplorable foreign policy may make it more difficult for revolutionary movements to take hold across the world, while providing for increased support for fascist governments in ukraine and iran.

the outstupidification that enforced itself is a sad result for the world's freedom seekers and a victory for fascism, religious conservatism and political authoritarianism.

doug ford does not speak for canada. he's barely able to speak for himself.

https://www.castanet.net/news/Canada/636749/-A-victory-across-the-world-Ontario-Premier-Doug-Ford-says-after-U-S-midterms

this is the video walk through the whole new apartment.

it's easy to forget sometimes that the american electoral system is a trap. there wasn't really a revolution in the united states until 1861, and it failed. the system in france was revolutionary, but it was overthrown. the british/canadian system, for all it's conservative pomp, is the one most likely to enact change, but it's not easy.

canada was created in 1867 to end the gridlock in the remaining british colonies.

in the united states, the stasis and gridlock was built into the system by design. it's the point. madison wasn't gaslighting anybody, it's just that nobody knew how to read. it's all right there in the constitutional papers.

the party systems are more about power than politics. there's a ruling party and an opposition party. they flip periodically. it's a shell game. the whole thing is designed to prevent an overthrow of the landed class. it's like a mock magna carta to keep the status quo in place. 

the american electoral system is very intentionally designed to have two essentially identical parties perpetually in a fake fight with each other. that's why you can't have a third party. it breaks the rules of the game. when voters are angry about something, they vote for the opposition instead of burning the place down. this creates the illusion of democracy, and keeps the gentry in control.

some things have happened since, like the industrial revolution. there's an entire alternate history of the united states built around fights over central banks. today we have bankers instead of gentry, but the system is about the same.

what we saw in the united states yesterday was an example of the system allowing for venting without altering the composition of power. we've gone from a senate controlled by the religious right in the republican party to a senate controlled by the religious right in the democratic party. texas, iowa, kansas and michigan replaced hard right conservative republicans with hard right conservative democrats. i don't know what to call the new senator from maine. americans vented without breaking anything, like they're supposed to do. yippity doo da yay.

yodelling is actually an underappreciated compositional form. 

what actually happened was that the registered republicans didn't show up. 

when they did the minimal amounts of real polling at the end, the polling was massively skewed towards the democrats, in terms of sampling. the results the media reported were not a correct reflection of what the polling said. i accurately corrected the news reports that inaccurately reported on the polls and my projections were what the polling actually said. 

the media's projections of the polling results were in fact broadly wrong (because they misread the data).

however, the fact that republicans didn't show up to vote recreated the skew in the data. it was not good modelling - it was mostly terrible modelling - but it was just dumb luck. it should have come out in the wash, but it accidentally worked.

that's why they have the elections.

are the democrats going to hold these seats? i doubt it. if they do, what's going on is more like realignment than political shift. as a socialist, i wouldn't vote for most of these candidates for local dogcatcher. these are people, almost without exception, that i would go out and campaign aggressively against. i don't agree with them on anything. and i think they're ugly and gross people i wouldn't talk to at a party, too.

as a result of this election, democrats are going to be more likely to oppose women's rights and more likely to oppose queer rights, while being more likely to support using the state to enforce religion and less likely to stand up for jews. this is threatening to pull the party into the contemporary dark ages of the conservative movement. it's not a swing to the left anywhere in any sense and will not result in more equality, more liberalization or anything approaching it, anywhere.

the democratic party may have won but liberal democrats and liberal democracy massively lost. the victors are the religious right and the increasing normalization of conservative value systems.

the democrats elected a bunch of disgusting losers, including

- people that believe in god

- men with despicably poor personal hygiene

- high school dropouts

it's the loser patrol. it's really embarrassing. who would be proud of this?

it's a massive shift towards the worst kind of small-c conservatism. democrats didn't change the centre of the country. the centre of the country changed the democrats. 

if these are the kinds of deplorable candidates that the democrats need to run to be competitive, forget it.

10 years after trump came down the escalator, have the democrats finally figured him out, by outstupiding him?

it's not even clear that it worked.

give it another few days before you draw conclusions.

when they called texas, very early, the bigoted right-wing conservative christian candidate for the democratic party was ahead by 20 points, on the strength of urban voters and early ballots. it was immediately very clear that the entire thing was manufactured to inflate the strength of the democratic showing and that not only was it obvious that the vote would come way down but it was not obvious that the democrats were going to win at all.

right now, at 2:00 am est, there's still 10% of the vote left and the spread has decreased from 20% to 9%. it's halved. they haven't counted things like military ballots.

i understand that the projections are supposed to be made on the strength of the characteristics of the remaining vote to be counted, but it was abundantly obvious that almost all of the remaining vote was in republican areas. with 11% left to count and a much reduced spread, that is still the case.

i have also watched the spread slowly decrease in kansas, south carolina and iowa, where the same dynamic is at play: the early votes put the democrats way ahead and the republicans have been slowly catching up all night but haven't caught up yet. they seem to have stopped counting for the night. maine and michigan have bounced around a little more. maine still has a lot of counting to do as well. the republicans caught up in nebraska and appear to have caught up in alaska.

the democrats clearly had a good night. the news reports in the liberal media and the aggregate sites all over-projected the democratic results, but the democrats did still have a good night.

i believe the decisions in texas, kansas, south carolina, maine and iowa were premature. the final result will be outside of the margin of error reported in the final polls (the results will be closer than predicted) because the polls overweighted the democrats, but the democrats did have a very good night and they may barely win a few of these seats when the counting is done.

i don't think that the democrats have flipped kansas, texas or south carolina and that the final results will reverse the decisions made by the liberal media projections. they may have actually flipped maine and iowa, but there's still a lot of counting to do and, even if they did, the calls were still premature. the results are going to continue to tighten dramatically in all of these races. the media should have waited.

the candidates elected by the democrats are broadly terrible candidates - bigoted christians, uneducated loggers, transphobes and muslim extremists. this is nothing for anybody to be proud of. democrats should be embarrassed by the low quality of their candidates and americans should be embarrassed that the only strategy that democrats have found to compete against the republicans in most of the country is to outstupid them on the ground.

i'm watching the kornacki stream on youtube and it's the same narrative i've been drawing attention to.

the journalists keep trying to present a narrative about a democratic landslide. it's "historic", apparently. they want to wrap this up early. but kornacki can't find the data to back up the claims the journalists are making.

i'm not saying the democrats won't win the house. they could.

but it's going to be a long night.

it doesn't look like we beat the record today, but that's two days this week where we came within a degree of it. the high here in detroit was 23 degrees celsius, on nov 3rd.

it's a good day in michigan to get out to vote and it's going to be pleasant this evening. if turnout is low, it won't be because it's shitty out (i guess it might be because it's too nice out).

the forecast here is pushing well past nov 10th without any sign of first frost. 

there's a possibility of a first frost in the long range on nov 16th, but two weeks is a good distance from now, and we'll see if it happens.

can we get to dec 1st in detroit without an overnight frost event - that is, without an overnight low below freezing, at all? 

what if this continues until the solstice? that is a remarkable change in the climate, here.

i don't support allowing government backed student loans to be used to pay for access to profit-based private educational institutions, regardless of whether these are upper class institutions or low quality diploma mills.

government student loans - osap in ontario - should exclusively be available for publicly owned universities and colleges.

students that want to attend for-profit private sector educational institutions should be restricted to accessing funding in the private sector.

this is a left-wing position.

that is it. totally. finally. for real.

today's vacuum run found no sign of fresh rodent activity anywhere at all. just squeaking in the walls. whatever. eat the bugs.

i still have a lot to do but i should be able to retreat to monthly cleaning.

the next thing to do is the video and picture update i talked about. this is going to be a pretty big update.

then, i need to spend the next several days in the shower, and then shift to the typing. due to the fact that i spent so much time setting things up in here before i got back to the typing, there's going to be much less left to do, in terms of remnant purchases. that is, pretty much everything i've already bought is installed and what's left to do will need to be purchased fresh in the new year.

am i done in the kitchen? no. i need to buy some more caulking, and may get some small appliances. i have a lot of work to do in the side entrance still. i have some shelving left to buy and install for the library, and i have to install the pi in the listening room. i need to buy a new filing cabinet for my bedroom and fix my celestions. those are the big things.

i know they sell streaming devices that require you to pay for a subscription service but that's not what i mean. i have no interest in music streaming sites.

what i mean is a device that looks like audio equipment and can be connected to your existing stereo system that is essentially a sound card with a large hard drive, so you can store music files locally. it would be a specialized mini pc with a high quality dac and large storage capacity, plus a few usb and other ins and outs, for external storage.

you can buy receivers or bluray players with usb connections that let you scroll through them and i could accept that and have considered it for a secondary system (in my bedroom). but i can't imagine scrolling through a 5 tb drive looking for something. i need a search and i need a file explorer. i need an os.

you could in theory do this in one piece. a little mini pc running a specially distributed linux distro with a good dac and a large fanless drive capacity and a kvm out and maybe a remote touchscreen would be something i'd buy. you'd just send the audio out into your amp, or maybe it even has it's own amp, with inputs to connect a cd to it instead, and direct speaker outs.

the streaming devices strike me as useless.

i am from this point boycotting any site that uses cloudfare.

as soon as the checking thing comes up, i hit the back button.

find some other way to protect your data from ai. stop slowing down the internet.

i've been thinking about getting a standalone bluray player for blu ray audio and also for sacd. i have a blu-ray burner connected to my 32-bit recording pc but it's intended for data archival. it could spin something. there's an m-audio audiophile card in there with rca outs so i'm sure it'll maintain quality to a point. but it's not what i really want for listening.

i don't have any bluray audio bds or even any dvd-audio dvds. i do have a couple of hdcds and a couple of can sacds my dad gave me that don't play in the panasonic. they do play in a sony dvp ns-325 in the kitchen, and in some of the drives in some of the pcs i have (i think it's more to do with windows 7 v windows xp because it only works on the win 7 pcs). i believe they were regifted because he didn't like them (ege bamyasi and tago mago).

(update: i actually just checked the disc and it plays now. i don't know why i had problems with it before. however, it's a hybrid disc that has sacd and cd layers not a sole sacd disc. maybe something got stuck or maybe i had a wrong setting on or something.)

the raspberry pi dac that handles digital audio in this system is technically better than the panasonic and was very cheap. that's the difference in 20 years of manufacturing.

Tones up to 24 bit/384kHz

Built-in transducer for high sound quality TI Burr Brown (TI PCM5122)

112db SNR dynamic range and -93db THD distortion factor

Available with RCA and Jack 3.5mm output connectors

the pi eliminates the motors and fans. it's super quiet.

i don't exactly know why dedicated digital audio players (wav, flac, mp3, alac) never hit the audiophile market. people got used to hooking their pcs up, or plugging in their ipods through the headphone out. there's not a lot of point in paying for a good playback audio system if the sound source sucks but there have been few solutions. a modern netbook is pretty quiet, but i've never seen a netbook with an rca out or even a digital out. you'd have to take it out through the headphones, or via usb card, which is largely just visual theatre (they connect to the digital headphone out). the pi with the audio hat was my solution for that and it sounds great, you just need to plug your 5 tb hd into it and it sends flacs out to your stereo in high quality, without fan noise.

the cd player i use is a five disc panasonic f-87. it has a cd mode and can output in 5 channel dvd-audio (24 bit) or in 2 channel cd audio (16 bit). it can also play hdcds but not sacds.

Audio Only mode (switches off video circuitry)

192kHz/24-bit audio D/A converter

audio signal-to-noise ratio 115 dB

price: was $350, got marked down to $130 over time.

you won't find a better dac, or a more affordable 5 disc player.

i send it out through the rca connections to a jvc amp, which is connected to kef corellis from the late 70s. it sounds spectacular.

do digital-audio-converters sound differently based on how much they cost?

the correct answer is that they do not.

you can check stats and specs on dacs. while you may find the odd one that is particularly terrible, mostly in very low end equipment from 40 years ago, the reality is that the specs on dacs have been standardized for decades. the companies don't save money by trying to sell you dacs with low specs, but they may make money by trying to upsell you dacs with specific brand names, or trivial differences.

the reality is that the cheapest dacs on the market in 2026 sound as good as the highest end ones do. there's no difference. it's just marketing, it's not science.

i would actually like to see a stronger attempt by the political left to do outreach to hindus, and make hindu cultural concepts more central to left-wing politics.

i don't see very much appealing in islam or muslim culture. the male supremacy, the religious laws and the authoritarianism are inherently conservative ideologies. islam is foundationally, fundamentally incompatible with liberalism or with socialism. it's a definitionally conservative ideology. there's a reason that muslim democrats are always conservatives. i have a certain cultural affinity with non-practicing jews, but i'm never going to align with male supremacist conservative muslims. islam aligns far better in the north american political spectrum with the christian right than it does with the secular left.

but hinduism shares a common origin with indigenous european paganism and indians and europens share a common cultural history that jews, christians and muslims are distinctly outside of. embracing hinduism in the west could be a type of decolonization from judaism.

i would be far more likely to support a hindu or a buddhist for high office than a muslim or a jew, or a christian, for that matter.

haley stevens is on the ballot tomorrow as a representative of her district, which has a large jewish population. is it possible that she was actually trying to save her seat? does she have internal polling suggesting that the republicans are not just going to win her riding at the senate level but are going to flip her seat? if she does win the seat, could she hold it as an independent?

all of these things are entirely possible.

i'm not making a prediction as to the outcome of the house. it's not because i haven't looked at it, it's because i think it's too difficult to project. this is a very hard problem to solve; it's certainly not as easy as applying national polling over a curve. the models being deployed are very inaccurate. i will tell you that i think it's going to be close. 

it will be amusing if haley stevens does win and el-sayed doesn't, and if the democrats then need haley stevens' vote to get to a majority. oops.

they should have waited a few days before reacting. outright endorsing mike rogers may not have been the best choice for her political career, unless she thinks she can hold her district as an independent, but she might turn out to be right. the democratic party may very well be the one that ends up looking foolish, again.

i needed an extra day but i'm done in here. i have one more vacuuming run on the floors to do, but i washed the pads of the steam map on sunday and redid all the exposed parts of the floors last night and it made a difference. the sheets are in the wash. while i can sill hear the squeaking in the walls, i haven't seen any signs of anything in here in a few days and i'm convinced they can't get in here. that means that's it, i'm done.

my door hasn't shown up yet so i'm going to have to call the guy, probably tomorrow.

there should be pictures and maybe a video up here in the next 24-48 hours. that's the last step before i get in the shower and shift to typing projects for a few weeks.

to summarize.

likely flips:

north carolina (d+1)

true tossups:

michigan (d-1)

ohio (r-1)

likely holds, unlikely flips:

maine (r hold)

iowa (r hold)

georgia (d hold)

new hampshire (d hold)

longshot flips:

texas (r hold)

alaska (r hold)

minnesota (d hold)

not in play:

kansas (r hold)

south carolina (r hold)

nebraska (r hold)

i think this is a more accurate map, based on the last minute data, and will more accurately reflect the results, tomorrow:

the polls were not wrong. 

rather, the journalism was very biased and very poor.

the new york times siena polls released yesterday look like better polling and they are better polls but they have some of their own caveats. these are still small sample sizes and the margin of errors are being oddly reported. the reported margins are less than they should be because the results are being reported as raw.

i often like raw results better than adjusted results but if you look at the answers they tell you why statisticians adjust the results.

this is one of the responses to that poll in michigan:

let's take the 15% of non-responses out. then , 40/85 = 47% and 45/85=53%.

but we know that trump got 49.73 and harris got 48.31 in michigan in 2024. this indicates that this sample has about a +5% democratic skew and should overrepresent democrats by about 5%.

it's consequently not really surprising that the result has el-sayyad ahead by ten points. they've clearly oversampled democrats rather substantively. crudely just cutting that down by 5% is not mathematically correct, but it would bring the survey results back into the margin of error. the results were adjusted, but they were clearly not adjusted correctly, and i'm willing to make accusations about intent. the reported result in the michigan poll should not be over 10%, it should be closer to 4-5%, once adjusted to correct for the oversampling of democrats. the next step is to apply a bradley effect, which we already saw in michigan in the primaries. the expected outcome should be a coin toss - this poll doesn't change the projection, which is too close to predict. it also doesn't adjust for the last minute stevens endorsement.

the truth is that the best polling prediction for the 2026 michigan senate race is the results of the 2024 senate race. not much has changed.

i don't see any good reason to think el-sayyad should do better against the same candidate in michigan two years later than elissa slotkin did. slotkin is clearly a much stronger candidate than el-sayyad is and better reflects the region's preference for moderate white women as candidates. she doesn't carry the islamist baggage that el-sayed carries, which should result in a worse outcome than a moderate jewish candidate, in michigan, which is a moderate state with a very small muslim population and a comparably sized jewish population. there are more buddhists and almost as many hindus in michigan than there are muslims or jews. all four are tiny minorities, but it's the hindus that are the fastest growing group and most likely to be a state-wide electoral force in the near future. for now, the moderate white women in  minnesota, wisconsin and michigan should be expected to outperform the minority candidates across the board. joyce benson should be expected to beat el-sayed by 5 or 10 points. 

if el-sayyad wins, it will be extremely close. conversely, if rogers does pull a win in michigan off, the conservative activists that blocked the moderate female in favour of a right-wing candidate with substantial religious baggage should be strongly criticized for it.

the same oversampling is clearly present in the other results and pretty startling in kansas, texas and iowa. in fact, i'd argue that a correct adjustment for over-sampling democrats should have the republicans ahead in these three states, and that the results were inaccurately reported.

so, the upside is that these are better quality polls with more transparent results. the downside is that the results show a dramatic oversampling of democrats across the board that was not properly adjusted for, and that was inaccurately reported with a clear political bias that suggests intent, and may even imply manipulation. 

i'd rather get good quality polling that was badly reported and that i can deconstruct than not get good polling at all. but don't trust the hype on this. the polling results actually normalize the data. the reporting of this data by the new york times is very poor.

in fact, i see enough evidence in the siena poll to conclude with confidence that the republicans are ahead in iowa, kansas and texas and should be expected to hold those three seats. those states are not really in play.

democrats are also strongly oversampled in these polls in ohio, maine and alaska but crude adjustments don't put the seats out of reach of democrats, they just return them to closer races. 

i still don't see any evidence that suggests alaska is anything more than extreme long shot. sherrod brown is an unusually strong candidate, but he has lost before, and the data is not conclusive. while the data in maine remains inconclusive, collins still has a strong incumbency effect.

canada should not have a single soldier in latvia. i would not consider it acceptable to have a single hair harmed on the head of a single soldier to protect a square mm of land in latvia.

get canada out of latvia.

bring these troops home.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/article/ctv-news-in-latvia-canadian-soldiers-in-defensive-battle-ready-position-near-the-russian-border/

my suspicion is that haley stevens represents a growing silent majority in michigan that is more frustrated by the right-ward shift in the democratic party that el sayyad represents, and which the leadership just recently endorsed, than they are supportive of the republicans. the distance enforced by the outgoing governor is also instructive. they are going to quickly realize that they made a mistake and regret it, but it's too late now.

it's too late for this to affect the polling, which remains too close to make a decision, but i suspect that this will tip the race in favour of the republicans. there were already concerns about turnout. the actions taken by the candidate and the leadership, together, are going to amplify the existing issues, and it may even have some multiplier effects.

expect the republicans to have surprisingly strong results state wide in michigan on tuesday.

chuck schumer is a despicable person and has been for decades.

no surprises, there.

the drama unfolding in michigan is exactly what i predicted would happen and why i opposed nominating el-sayad. he does not represent the views of a substantive percentage of michigan democrats, who should hold to their principles and not to their party allegiances and should not vote for somebody with such deplorable, hard-right, crypto-fascist politics. if it walks like a nazi and quacks like a nazi, it's a nazi.

el-sayad is not an apolitical muslim caught in the middle of a debate he has nothing to do with and he's not being targeted for his ethnicity or his religion. he's a right-wing political activist that is running for office on an anti-semitic platform, is being endorsed by anti-semitic actors and has, to the end, run anti-semitic ads at arms distance, to allow for plausible deniability. he cannot be allowed to hide behind a facade of racism or play a victim's card. he's an aggressive belligerent and his campaign is the cause of the problem. israel is not an important election issue in michigan in 2026.

the polling is inconclusive for the various reasons i have already explained. my gut is that el-sayad never had a real chance and that he's going to lose the election. if that happens, the democrats should not call him back.

haley stevens probably made the wrong choice in endorsing the republicans. she probably should have instead endorsed a smaller party or advocated abstention from voting. she's not likely to survive the process, either. however, i applaud her for placing country over party and condemn the democratic leadership for it's collectivist mentality and it's irrational alignments that expose a wrong-headed attempt to grab naked power. chuck schumer does not agree with el-sayad on anything and strongly disagrees with him on almost everything. his position places party over country, and party over individual. it's a dangerous precedent - it's playing with fire.

elections are not a sport. it's not about picking a team and cheering it on. political allegiances are transactional in nature and rely on support for a political coalition resulting in material gains for the individual. when political coalitions shift or attempt to shift in ways that harm the material interests of members of that coalition, they should break from it, they should not maintain allegiance out of loyalty. stevens did the correct thing in principle if not in practice.

i would call on conscientious voices that are concerned about the rise of anti-semitism in the contemporary centre-left to avoid supporting el-sayad by voting for a smaller party, by abstaining or by voting republican, if they insist. it is more important that you hold to your principles and to your self-interest than that you support your party. the opposite approach - supporting a party that is becoming unprincipled out of inertia or loyalty - is how you end up in berlin, in 1934.

if the polling can't actually make an accurate prediction, does that make the polling useless?

not exactly.

it makes cheap polling useless. unfortunately, almost all media polling today is done on the cheap. in the modern united states, you need large sample sizes to get accurate polling results. i haven't seen a single accurate poll so far this cycle. they publish polls with less than 1000 responses and 5% margins of error in races that are likely going to be determined by a point or two. these kinds of polls are in fact essentially useless, especially if they don't use sampling.

you can't just add up sample sizes, either. the math doesn't work like that, but it's what the aggregates try to hack their way through, because the media wants a magic number to sell to it's audience.

in theory, a poll with closer to 5000 respondents that uses good sampling could get a result with a 1-2% margin of error. if the spread is more than 4 points, that poll would be seen as predictive.

but the elections nowadays are so close (often 1-2% spreads) that the kind of polling that is actually done across the board has little to no predictive value and if it happens to get the right outcome landing in the centre of the projected range of outcomes, it's really just via dumb luck. you'd need to be getting closer to 10,000 respondents to get predictive polling results in these very close races.

conversely, if you do bad polling with small sample sizes, you can get results that suggest a race is more competitive than it actually is, and the media might do that on purpose to generate headlines for clickbait and/or manipulate outcomes. i suspect that's the case in kansas and maybe in texas.

that doesn't make the polling completely useless, though. if media outlets want to keep doing these low quality surveys on the cheap, they need to start to be more honest about the results and state the truth of it upfront - the results of the polling data are not sufficient to make a projection. the results of the election are consequently unclear. that is a valid survey result - we did the polling and we don't know what's going to happen.

that's where we are in both the house and the senate, despite what the media is trying to project.

i just watched a very bad video by a very bad statistician named harry enten that made a very bad presentation with a very bad error in the middle of it.

it doesn't take a mathematical genius to know that there's a difference between +4 and +9.

yikes.

i have seen and heard very few statements that are more ignorant than that, especially coming from somebody that the liberal media presents as an "expert".

we need a quick math lesson. this isn't tough but it's necessary that the general population understands this in the digital media age. this is basic media literacy.

when you see a headline for a video on youtube that says:

democrats DESTROY republicans in new kansas poll, ahead by four points

what does the polling actually say?

what the polling says (if it uses standard methods, which is increasingly less likely. this is best case. in fact, the polling is probably worse than this in 2026) is that there's a 95% chance that the democrats will get a result between (x-m, x+m) and the republicans will get a result between (y-m, y+m) where m is the margin of error and, according to the headline, x-y=4, so y = x-4  and the second interval can be rewritten as (x-4-m, x-4+m).

if the headline says the democrats are ahead 52-48 and m=4 then that translates to the polling saying:

range of outcomes for democrats: (48, 56)

range of outcomes for republicans: (44, 52)

that means that what the poll says is that there's a 95% chance that the results will be between a maximum democratic victory of 56-44 and a maximum republican victory of 52-48, with the most likely outcomes in the middle of the distribution (generally following a normal or bell curve, or bell curve that has been transformed to the left or right of the curve). it does not say the democrats will win by 4 points, or even that the democrats will win at all, but it does say that that outcome is in the centre of the range of outcomes.

in this case, which is a reasonable representation of what you see in the media, there is no difference between the democrats being ahead by 8 and the republicans being ahead by 4. anything in that range of outcomes is in the poll's prediction range.

so, if the headline says the democrats are winning by 4 and the republicans win by 1 is that a polling miss? not if the margin of error is four points. the polling says that is in the range of outcomes to be expected, with 95% confidence. it does not say that the democrats are going to win by 4 points.

this conceptual error is at the root of why the polls are often seen to be "wrong". they aren't wrong. the journalists that wrote the news report didn't understand how to report them.

polling does not present a predicted result, it presents a range of possible outcomes. the media essentially never reports this correctly, but you still don't expect self-identified, even if visibly drunk, experts on tv to get it so startlingly wrong so flippantly.

why does the media do that?

because it wants to generate a good story. it wants viewers to think it's experts are clairvoyants and can consult their crystal balls to come up with good results with confidence and certainty, so you'll go back to their channel for the next fortune telling.

this is completely ignorant bullshit, but it's standard, and the consumer needs to be able to deconstruct it. a good introductory stats course (the standard text is by jay l devore, https://www.amazon.ca/Probability-Statistics-Engineering-Sciences-Devore/dp/0538733527) will help.

the ad in question in michigan is unquestionably anti-semitic and not in the realm of acceptable discourse. if you think the ad is ok, you should be condemned and boycotted. i would support aggressively acting against groups that support the messaging presented by the ad.

it's not ok to run as a nazi or using nazi tropes. that has to be condemned. there can be no tolerance, and it doesn't deserve a second chance. i would call on the democratic party to remove el sayed as a candidate as a result of it. if he wins the election, he should be forced to sit as an independent.

he has stepped away from the ad, but these are people he has deep connections to. that is not believable and there needs to be consequences.

don't vote for the nazi running for the democrats in michigan. once you condone this kind of anti-semitism, it can be extremely difficult to undo it. 

this should be the end of this candidate's political career.

maintaining animals in captivity is barbaric and should not exist at all. people that enjoy gawking at animals are psychologically unstable and should be diagnosed with a mental illness. i would call on the government to make this a priority. certainly, it should be seen as infinitely more important than denying access to suicide on demand.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/jane-goodall-act-elephant-captivity-9.7403457

i would rather have the sun come up very early and go down very early than have it come up very late and go down later, which is what happens when you shift to permanent dst. in detroit, the sun won't come up until like 9:00 am and go down until 19:00 in the dead of the winter. that's awful. so, i would not like to see permanent dst. i'd like to adjust it in the opposite direction, so that the sun comes up an hour earlier than standard time rather than the opposite. that would lead to a shortest day from 7:00-17:00 rather than from 9:00-19:00, and reassert more normal daytime hours through the rest of the year (sunrise before 7:00 am, sunset after 17:00 pm).

the shift they're proposing, which would have the earliest sunset at 19:00, is bizarre and the worst possible option. i like the dark evenings at 16:00 or 17:00 and i hate the late sunrises after 6:30.

i have now finally cut all of the wood for the various floating shelves in the kitchen and bedroom, put everything away in the kitchen (that is going away), have set up some extra temporary shelving for temporary items and have gotten every single box up off the floor in the front, the studio and the bedroom.

i have one more major run over the floors to do (which requires scrubbing on my knees with lysol and doesn't lend itself well to showers in between scrubbing) and then the great wash-up continues, after a mild pause for the last few weeks to get all the floors cleaned up.

i very seriously expect to actually finally be done by sunrise, and then finally get my sheets in the laundry this afternoon, and finally get in the shower over night tonight.

there's still no sign of a weather crash here. we're still consistently 15+. the temperatures this week are forecast in the 18-22 degree range, which is getting close to ten degrees above normal.

the idea that us aid to israel is inflationary is certainly specious, stupid, offensive and anti-semitic. further, it has nothing to do with the election. this is odd, given that an actual cause of inflation - trump's tariffs on canada - is so readily available in michigan. you'd have to want to really go out of your way to blame the jews for being money grubbing to run an ad like that in the existing context.

further, tucker carlson is certainly a strange ally for somebody that has been, in my opinion incorrectly, marketing himself as a leftist.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/30/us/politics/el-sayed-stevens-michigan-senate-event.html

the mouse seems to like the music, too. 

it's warm in here. nice smells. a few bugs. good tunes. what more would a mouse want?

the cat liked the tunes too when it was stuck in the vent. the rats hated it.

if you were ever looking for a hierarchy of musical inclination in lower mammals.