i just want to clear up a kind of a nasty misperception about the voting shifts in michigan that's been floating around through the msm for a long time, and was probably ultimately seeded by the clinton campaign - that large amounts of bernie voters switched to trump in the general.

the data really suggests something very different.

it's been stated everywhere, repeatedly, over the last few days that democratic turnout was way down in the 2016 primary, which is something i pulled out in my 2016 analysis of michigan's 2016 primary. there were more republicans than democrats that year, oddly enough - enough that the independents were actually decisive in the outcome.

what i pointed out at the time was that trump was pulling in a lot of democrats, and that was actually a media narrative at the time, one that was very quickly forgotten. but, this time four years ago, what people were talking about was how trump was swinging clinton supporters, which was allowing bernie to win.

then, the general happened and people blamed the low turnout on bernie supporters switching parties, when the data had been there for months - trump was swinging disaffected, long term democrats who couldn't fucking stand hillary clinton, and had been since the start of the year. what took everybody a little off guard was the extent of it.....

and, who were these people? they were mostly older white voters.

now, here we are in 2020 and turnout is being driven higher on this stampede of middle aged white people, who are breaking hard for biden. but, who are these people? they were the democrats who switched to trump because they couldn't imagine voting for hillary.

i hope that this clarifies this point - and perhaps lays to rest this nasty myth about bernie voters swinging the election for trump.

well, i would hardly consider two imported cases of a mild virus to be an emergency. this, like it is elsewhere, is an abuse of power. and, i will stand with those who end up victimized by any rights abuses.

i hope this doesn't result in hassles at the border....

https://www.wxyz.com/news/read-gov-whitmers-state-of-emergency-declaration-amid-first-coronavirus-cases

but, the capitalist narrative is...

according to capitalists, europe is struggling to contain the disease because they have thousands of cases. meanwhile, america is containing the disease effectively because it only has 1000 cases.

it's perfect ostrich logic.

in reality, europe (with the exception of italy.) is testing people at 100x the rate that america is, so it's finding a much higher percentage of the weaker cases. 

but, in america, if you can't see something then it's not there.

even in italy, what they're saying is that the system is overwhelmed, and there aren't enough resources to test everybody. so, we know there's a high number of unreported cases - just like in the united states.

there's 12,000 cases and 800 deaths. but, what we know about the mortality rate suggests that if there's 800 deaths then there must be closer to a million cases - and the data coming out of northern europe is proving that point.

again, we don't yet know exactly what they did wrong, but it's probably some combination of the way italians live, with a confusion of symptoms for the flu and a higher than average lifespan.

see, this is a crass and stupid political response intended to deflect attention from america's failing capitalist catastrophe. 

the europeans are the ones doing this right by actually carrying out a sufficient number of tests. that's why the mortality rate in germany is actually at the 0.1% threshold that so many experts want to put it at - they've done enough testing to actually catch enough of it. germany has proven that if you do this right, it really is about the same mortality rate as the flu. and, it's why norway and denmark have hundreds of cases and no deaths.....they're testing people at high enough levels to find cases.

on the other hand, there are tens of thousands of undocumented cases in the united states, and officials don't have the slightest concept of where they are, how they're spreading or how the virus is evolving along with them.

it's a startlingly terrible response.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/11/politics/donald-trump-coronavirus-statement/index.html

or, don't cancel church?

no. you know what i always say about religious folks, but i'm just being an ass. you cancel church....

they're cancelling concerts here. it's hysteria.

if you're going to cancel events, they should be events with lots of old people, not events where essentially everybody is under 35. so, church services should definitely be cancelled. i'd probably accept them cancelling events at the dso without much pushback.

but, i'd rather see venues put out warnings that tell concert-goers to enter at their own risk.

i'm willing to avoid old folks for a while, but i'd rather catch this thing and beat it than try and hide from it. i'm not afraid of this...

the coordinator at the divisional court has fabricated a motion, by excluding the affidavit i sent her and the documents attached to it.

wow.

i faxed them a harshly worded statement, and may have to launch a complaint against the coordinator. 

i'll have to call in the morning. 

fwiw.

my opinion is that sanders is done.

but, i think he should give the debate on sunday a serious go, and see what happens next tuesday.

he should sit down on wednesday and plot his strategy for maximizing concessions out, from there.

we can control how much equipment we have. we'll have to act quickly, granted. and, the provinces have to fucking do it. but that's a budget choice. we control that.

we cannot control the spread of this virus.

we don't know how many cases there are. we don't know where they are. and, we have a massive economic relationship with a country we're in close proximity with, and that we know these unknowns are exponentially worse in. 

policy should be based around what we know we can control, not what we know we can't.

yeah, i'm a downer. but, i'm right.

our hospitals need to update their gear anyways, right?

if you put a large amount of resources into "flattening the curve", and you fail, as all evidence suggests you will, then you're just caught in a worse situation when the cases spike.

which, i believe, is actually the mistake they made in italy.

if we buy more gear, we can use it later; buying gear is never wasteful.

"If you can slow it down enough and flatten the curve, so the same number of people get infected, but over a much longer period of time, then ... what you're allowing is that the capacity will not be exceeded," said Dr. Anand Kumar, a critical care physician at Winnipeg's Health Science Centre.

yeah. and, if you can splice narwal dna with pony dna you can genetically engineer unicorns.

we need funding announcements, not delusional appeals to positive thinking.

we got some today.

i haven't been very critical of what the government has been doing here in canada, because there hasn't been much to criticize. but, let's keep the debate evidence based. let's avoid the magical thinking.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/canada-covid-19-coronavirus-spread-hospital-surge-capacity-ventilators-1.5493178

you know what?

i think i can look away from climate change for a while, for days, for weeks, and that it's still going to be there when i look back at it, again. there's no colloquial-misunderstanding-of-the-observer-effect at play, here. this is objective. it'll still be there.

i'm pretty confident of that.

you don't really think i forgot about climate change because i'm posting about other things right now, do you?

do you think i'm going to base my next vote on what's happening in the democratic primary?

that's facile. but, it exposes the sad truth - the federal liberals are basically unruly children, and you have to watch them every second to stop them from misbehaving, even after you scold them into line.

i'm still going to vote entirely on climate change, guys.

if you refuse to test people, you can manufacture what looks like a slower transmission rate. sure. and then you can tell people that your policy was successful, by cutting out proper measurements of the data.

i would hope that would fail a peer review because you're not actually flattening the curve, you're just sticking your head in the sand, in ignoring what's actually happening.

but, none of the policies they've tried have been effective in slowing the spread; they've probably just increased transmission rates. it's nice to talk about flattening the curve, but can you give me concrete suggestions as to how you plan to do it, that will actually work?

so, one of these options exists in reality; the other doesn't. and, these finite resources should not be squandered chasing fantasy realities that don't exist, they should deployed in the most efficient way possible to deal with what is real on the ground.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/11/science/coronavirus-curve-mitigation-infection.html

i self-identify as a nerd. i'm proud of it.

but, i didn't sit at the nerd table. well, i'd drop by to say hi sometimes, but i found the nerds boring. they just wanted to play cards. they were so quiet, and well-behaved.

i was an outcast, a punk, more than a nerd, and i actually ate outside of the caf, in the stairs, with a small group of other outcasts. we'd then go around and vandalize the school at recess.

there were months-long stretches where i refused to set foot in the caf at all....

so, when i found myself back at work, i would repeatedly either skip lunch, or eat it off site. i'd walk down to the tim's and get some coffee, or go to the gas station to get smokes.

biden isn't winning because his policies are popular, and sanders is not going to turn this around with middle-aged whites by appealing to policies. most of them won't watch the debate. he has to change the cultural messaging.

and, gramsci would tell you that that's really hard to do at all, let alone in six days.

https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/entry/office-popularity-like-high-school_n_5a3030c3e4b07ff75afe2f48

the media is not afraid to be racist; the media thrives on racism. it divides people, as it manufactures consent for the ruling elite. that, as gramsci understood, is it's fundamental purpose in a capitalist oligarchy.

it is because the media is racist that it is trying very hard to obscure the data that's coming out of this primary, and it's happening with a lot of signals from the party itself. this is an old divide that we've really seen the media clampdown on this cycle.

they want there to be a black party and a white party, and they want voting decisions to be based on tribal allegiances instead of policy differences. this is the ideal world for the neo-liberal establishment that runs both parties; you float democratic candidates that are virtually identical to republican candidates, then you herd people into fighting with each other over race, instead of aligning based on class.

in fact, it's the oldest trick in the book in the united states. there's neither anything new about this, nor is there anything liberal about it. it's the same trick that got white servants and black slaves fighting against each other, instead of working together to overthrow their common enemy. it really goes all the way back to the roman policy of bread and circuses; there it was greens and blues, here it is blacks and whites.

but there were populists back then, too.

in order to understand the trends coming out of the cycle, you have to all but ignore what the media has said.

so, what are the actual trends?

fishiness in the data aside, this is what it says, whether you think it's trustworthy or not:

1) bernie is winning huge majorities of young people, but youth vote is way down. bernie has failed to excite young people enough to win.

2) biden is winning huge majorities of black people, but the black vote is way down, too. if your argument was that clinton didn't get enough blacks out, and that's why trump won, biden is getting less blacks out than clinton did. so, he hasn't been winning using that tactic, and he won't win the general with that tactic.

3) however, turnout is up. a lot.

so, if youth turnout is down, and black turnout is down, who is driving turnout up?

the answer is older white voters, who are showing up in unexpectedly huge numbers across the country and voting for biden.

that is the movement that's underway, here - middle aged white people flocking to the democrats. stampeding, even. like a herd of obese elephants looking to consume. more. more...

why is this happening, exactly?

i'd have to assume that not many watched the debates, as they wouldn't, that they couldn't, vote for biden if they did. a lot of these people are quite educated. what is going on here?

if you believe it, if you take it at face value, it must be cultural. it's rachel maddow. it's saturday night live. it's a broad idea that it's not socially acceptable to be a republican, right now - that the cool middle aged kids vote for the democrats.

i remember leaving university and going to work and feeling like i'd gone back to high school, in terms of how people interacted with each other. i felt like i'd grown down, that i'd reverted to life as a teenager, not like i'd grown up and become an adult.

if that's true, bernie has roughly 6 days to destroy biden's popularity amongst middle-aged voters. 

and, he just wants to be a nerd and talk about policies.

so, your average boomer appears to essentially be thinking something like this: biden's cool, like me; bernie's a nerd, like my kid, who has to use their phone to google how to brush their teeth every morning and can't be trusted to bring back the groceries without fucking it up. 

there's an old cliche.

"those who would exchange liberty for security will receive neither".

the direct quote from franklin is:

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

this is a little taste of the wisdom that is so lacking around us right now.

these quarantines are not preventing the spread of the disease, they are making the situation worse, and they need to be stopped.

https://jacobinmag.com/2020/03/joe-biden-gaffes-democratic-presidential-campaign-trump

https://theintercept.com/2020/03/09/it-was-democrats-and-their-media-allies-who-impugned-bidens-cognitive-fitness-yet-now-feign-outrage/

bernie shouldn't blame anybody but himself; he picked a foolish strategy to play, and it predictably failed. i saw this coming from months away, and he just doubled down when i called him out. it's his own damned fault.

but, he has one last chance - the debate on sunday.

this is the first and potentially the last one-on-one debate. if he can completely embarrass joe biden, he could turn it around. 

he needs to be vicious....he has nothing to lose.

something that has been obvious to observers throughout this process is the juxtaposition of bernie sanders, who is still very sharp, with joe biden, who very much isn't. bernie needs to draw that contrast.

and, he has one chance to do it.

seems like this guy has a hunch, too.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-strictly-by-the-numbers-the-coronavirus-does-not-register-as-a-dire/