ok.

maybe it was foundation. when i got home on friday morning, i didn't shower until after i'd slept. so, that is a possibility.

it doesn't explain the splotch on the bed sheet, though. hrmmn...

mattress is fine.

it's not bed bug shit....

are these possibly bed bug stains?

well, i haven't seen any. there's no bites.

the ones on the sheets were not bed bug stains. the ones on the pillow? it's not that much of a stretch.

but, there's no other signs of them around.

i've seen spiders in here, a few centipedes, a couple of crickets, a large amount of ants (not in a while) and a handful of sow bugs. there was that one maple bug when i first came in. that's it. it's actually been refreshingly bug free down here; that's an upside to living down here, after the last few spots, which were infested with roaches and termites.

i'm going to flip over the mattress to be sure.

this is my intended projection of myself.

the way that i want you to see me is as somebody that is physically incapable of having sex in a male gender role - because i'm entirely emotionally disinterested in it, and i'll never do it, and i want you to know that.

is that enough psychobabble for you?

i am almost completely impotent, and i want you to know it, and i'm proud of it and i'm happy to tell you about it.

well, think about it.

how much time does the average human waste thinking about sex?

a lot. too much...

i'd rather spend that time doing something more productive,

like ranting on the internet. and working on my art projects.

sex and masturbation are both just a pointless waste of time. i'm ecstatic that i don't have to think about them very often - and would be happier if i never thought about them at all!

so, i know these stains are not me. but, that doesn't prove they're somebody else; i know i don't have a good legal argument. but, these cameras are becoming necessary, asap.

i want to be castrated.

i want to be impotent.

i take high potency anti-androgens that are designed to prevent me from having penile function. 

twice a day. every day. on purpose.

it just doesn't work; i'm castrated, i'm impotent.

again: i'm not able to ejaculate, and i'm barely able to maintain an erection - it's a few seconds, at most, generally.

if i try really hard i can sometimes orgasm, but it's usually rather difficult, and i'm actually of the mindset that i'd prefer emancipation from sexuality. i don't have sex, and i don't masturbate very often, and it's all very much fully voluntary. it's like once a month, tops. really. i don't really like it...

i mean, just about the only thing that's going to get me off is imagining being penetrated. it's just not very satisfying, given the reality. so, i'd generally prefer to just avoid it.

i don't see any point in going to the cops because i can't prove anything. i mean, i guess i could ask for a dna sample. but, i know they're going to insist i did it myself - despite my insistence of the impossibility of it.

i'd have to get some camera footage before i could reasonably file charges....

i don't see any other obvious signs of entry, yet.

i left the house around 4:00 today, arrived at the superior court around 4:30, walked to the leddy library, printed some documents, missed the 6:00 closing time at the shoppers at campbell (got there for 6:15-sh), walked to the tecumseh shoppers, mailed the motion to toronto and got home for around 7:30-ish.

i have some receipts, and a lot of witnesses.

i'm not going to take pictures. it's already in the wash.

there were two stains on the actual sheet. one of them actually looked like dried toothpaste, oddly enough, whereas the other one looked more like a sex stain.

more disgusting to me were the three stains on my pillow that soaked through the casing and actually looked more like blood.

i have no idea. i just think it's important to document something.

i was one of the few people that predicted a sanders upset in michigan in 2016. i derived it by looking carefully at the polling, concluding there was about a ten point bias baked into it and working it out to sanders' favour.

but, the polls had clinton around 55, and sanders around 45. and, his win was not massive - it was a close outcome. sanders technically won, but they split.

the recent polling has sanders lagging well behind and biden jumping up way ahead. even if you work in that bias, which i cannot establish as this is the first two-person race, but even if you assume it's still there, a correction ends in a loss.

it may be a little closer than some of the polls are suggesting. but, it does look like biden is going to carry the state.

what i'm curious about is what some of the margins are. what is the margin with blacks, for example? in 2016, clinton did win blacks in michigan, but it was also the last northern state she blew him out with them. bernie got a big bounce with northern blacks from his michigan win; illinois and missouri were the next week, and were a toss-up. he tended to poll well with blacks in michigan, after that. despite the narrative, biden has actually underperformed with blacks this primary. does that continue? if so, i don't think this ends up too lopsided, but we'll see.

but, if he loses rural whites, which he probably will, what is the damage? is this going to be a 20 point swing from 2016? 25? 30? that's the number to keep an eye on....

i don't really care about the other states; i expect this to be over when we get michigan results.

you should not generally put any depraved behaviour past the cops.

these are people that volunteer to walk around with guns and tell people what to do. you have to be fucked in the head.

are the cops even trying to set me up with something?

well, it's very weird. i'm pretty sure there's a cop upstairs, and i come home to unexplained stains on my sheet.

like, are they fucking down here? are they getting off on it?

what the fuck?

i'm kind of grossed out by it.

that's about it, really.

again: i go out to mail something, and when i come in there's weird stains on my bed that i don't understand. this has happened a few times, now.

i am not capable of producing semen; i didn't sleep through something, and wake up and forget. 

it's very disconcerting.

but, i guess i'm washing my sheets tonight.

i'm going to have to set up a camera in here. but, like....did he want me to find it or like...i don't get it...

is it an intimidation tactic? what's the point?

i took a read through this bill, and it's kind of odd.

i initially interpreted it as some kind of weird omnibus bill and was wondering why there's a section of the law that allows the judge to seize material that is "obscene". that's rather overly broad. that would get struck down...

....but i looked into it more and realized that that's already the law, and what the bill does is add the line about conversion therapy. that means that ads for conversion therapy will be treated like child pornography or ads for escorts in canada, moving forward - odd considering that there was just a ruling in favour of advertising for sexual services.

i'm a civil libertarian, and my concerns about this are threefold:

(1) parents forcing this on kids should really be charged with child abuse. that's the right way to look at it. and, it's sort of what they did.

(2) governments have done some pretty awful things on this front in the past. look up the case of the seminal scientist, alan turing, which was just horrifically egregious. something in the human rights code would be useful on that front.

(3) i couldn't imagine somebody losing a charter challenge on this, when it comes to advertising it for consenting adults. i might snicker. i might think it's horrible. but, it would clearly be a speech issue.

so, i guess i applaud the government for taking some steps on this, but i'm not sure banning the advertisements is likely to stand up....especially given some recent rulings.

and, it may signal that the government is looking to fight any court rulings decriminalizing advertising prostitution or escort services, which....i have two minds about this. that's a really hard issue. this is less hard, on it's face - but it's basically the same precedent, which is why they put it in the same place in the code.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/federal-liberals-introduce-bill-aimed-at-cracking-down-on-conversion-therapy-1.4844453

actually, i'm going to fax her the documents tonight.

i'll just mail her the affidavit tomorrow.

so, that's what i'm doing this afternoon.

ok.

i'm not taking chances on this reply factum, and it seems like the coordinator is being stupid again, so i'm going to have to get out to mail something tomorrow.

she's left a few messages regarding a "motion record", but i'm not appealing anything, so that hasn't made any sense to me. she's refused to clarify the point.

i will nonetheless type up a bullshit motion record, serve it, get an affidavit and mail it in the morning. 

it's literally going to be a piece of paper that says "not applicable" on it twenty times. this is not a relevant thing to have to file...but whatever.

so, i'm finally caught up with this. that took a long time...

it smells awful in here.

the machine seems to be better with two gb of ram. every time i say that, it crashes. that upholds my hypothesis...

i'm going to stop to make something to eat, make some calls, take a shower and then get started on the master document for jan, 2014. let's hope i can keep the posting to the laptop, so i don't need to do this again.

and, am i sticking with 2 gb of ram, then?

i guess so.

for now...

dear cop upstairs,

please stop smoking drugs in the house, as residential areas are not an appropriate place to get stoned. please go to a bar or out to the woods if you want to get stoned.

as you know, i signed a non-smoking lease and i will enforce it if i can catch you.

thank you,
jessica

i also want to make a plea to the american left to strenuously avoid using the term "progressive", as it should bring up memories of explicitly racist policies from anybody that actually knows the history.

i wonder if this term "progressive", and the brutally racist past it invokes, is part of what's scaring off black voters.

i want to ask an honest question, and ask for an empirical analysis of it. i suspect there's something to this, and i've pointed it out previously, several times.

what kind of an effect did ilhan omar have on sanders' decreased competitiveness in minnesota amongst rural white voters?

and, what kind of an effect are abdul el-sayed and rashida tlaib going to have on his ability to compete in rural michigan?

ok. 

i need to do something productive, now.

so, i'm switching back to the blog cleanup.

so, they catch the animal in the wild, put it in a cage, sell it at the market and then slaughter it in front of the customer, who takes the carcass home and eats it?

yeah. they should ban that; that's pretty barbaric. fuck.

oh, and apparently it's how this virus jumped to humans, too.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/05/asia/china-coronavirus-wildlife-consumption-ban-intl-hnk/

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/01/health/coronavirus-washington-spread.html

https://travel.gc.ca/destinations/united-states?utm_source=united-states&utm_medium=social-twitter-travel-eng&utm_content=2020-03-06&utm_campaign=CAAupdate#health

in fact, the canadian government has quietly issued a travel warning to the united states (along with warnings to china, iran and italy), which it claims is already experiencing community spread.

and, just to solidify the point - there are now several cases in canada of people catching the case in the united states, including one in colorado and one in las vegas. 

this would seem to provide support for the hypothesis that the virus is running wild in america, right now.

https://www.clickondetroit.com/health/2020/03/06/coronavirus-latest-testing-monitoring-numbers-in-michigan/

i'll get to this when i do the reviews.

but, i spent some time around 4:00 on friday morning helping an elderly man on woodward avenue outside of the diner, and he may still be there right now, pull a cup out of his wheelchair, so he could piss in it on the side of the road.

this man appeared to be both terminally ill and chronically homeless.

and, it didn't make me sad. it made me angry. why wasn't this man in a fucking hospital? why was he asking good samaritans passing by in the middle of the night to volunteer as nurses? 

i spend a lot of time in these areas of detroit. i see the kinds of people that can't get care, and it makes me want to fucking break something.

so, i have no delusions about the delivery system in that country, and am not hesitant in my analysis at all.

zero deaths in canada, guys. zero. 0. nada. zilch. nil.

if the administration doesn't shift away from this quarantine policy soon, it's going to wake up to an actual public health emergency that it could have and should have avoided by simply following the science.

again: compare the data in the united states to the data in canada, the uk, germany, norway, denmark ...

the closest comparison to what we're seeing in the united states is in iran - a country suffering from years of devastating sanctions that specifically target the health industry.

why is that?

is it because of the hyper-capitalist nature of the system in america?

so, let's understand this properly - this is less of a health care crisis, and more of a crisis in the economic system in the united states. it's not the virus that's killing people, it's capitalism that is killing people.

it seems like the media, and the democratic party, together, are attacking trump from the right on this - they want more backwards policies that don't work, more ignorance, more stupidity....

it's like a competition to see who can be the most retarded.

what do they need to do?

1) they need to end these counter-productive quarantines, that are just facilitating the spread of the disease.

2) they need to offer free testing to anybody who wants one.

3) they need to set up some kind of system of financial support to anybody that needs to take some time off work.

the smug attitude demonstrated in this article is not helpful, especially considering that the point that they're making is actually wrong.

it is true that mutations happen all of the time, and they're not always successful. a mutation is indeed just an error in transcription. sometimes, a mutation may have a positive effect on the organism's ability to survive and reproduce (in which case we'd say the organism is evolving), and sometimes the mutation may have a negative effect, and actually harm the organism's ability to survive and reproduce. most of the time, a mutation won't make much of a difference at all.

the reason that the issue of mutation is concerning in the united states is that the health care system is inaccessible to such a large percentage of the population, which means you're going to have thousands of people catching and spreading this disease (and probably already do.) outside of the understanding of health care professionals.

the trump administration seems to think you deal with this by quarantining people. if you just stop people with the disease from moving around, you should easily stop it, right? so that's why there's only a few deaths - the quarantine is working! but this is a retarded argument that health care professionals in every other country in the world will instantly reject as anti-science. quarantining people isn't actually likely to actually work and, worse, it generates large amounts of fear. i'd have a greater fear of getting quarantined than i would of dying of this, so if i thought i was going to end up quarantined, i'd avoid going to the doctor. so, what health care professionals everywhere else in the world will tell you is that you want to strenuously avoid policies that promote quarantine (except as an absolute last resort, with an extremely potent virus - which is not this.) because it just acts as a disincentive to get tested, which just spreads the virus even more. the argument you're hearing from the administration on this is completely backwards; the policy of quarantining is just another reason to think that the number of cases is likely dramatically under-reported, and is even probably one of the causes of that under-reporting. 

so, how do you deal with this? what you want to do is make it as easy as possible to get tested, and ensure that the disruption to people's lives is as little as possible. you want incentives to come to the hospital to get treated, not incentives to stay at home or go to work and let the thing run out of control.

how often do flu viruses mutate into different strains? well, why do you think you need a new shot every year? and, why do you keep getting it, even after your immune system has defeated it? so, the answer is fairly often - often enough that you have to keep taking flu shots.

we don't have data on how fast this thing is going to mutate, and that's really the mistake the article is making. if the inaccessibility of the american health care system means it ends up circulating in the population like the flu and ends up mutating at about the same rate as the flu (a rough guess, based on nothing.), then we could very well see the country act as an incubation area, and be in a situation where the rest of the world is playing catch up to these different strains that keep mutating in the american workforce, because it can't get access to basic care.

and, that is a real concern to look at it - regardless of how this smug article from the msm frames the issue.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/07/health/coronavirus-mutations-analysis/index.html

the political spectrum in the united states is just beyond absurd.

so, apparently, having a basic understanding of statistics, and insisting on following data and science, means you must be a republican, nowadays. democrats, on the other hand, insist on anti-science hysteria and conspiracy theories. talk about a party reversal.

no, i'm not actually a republican - i'm a communist. you don't listen.

but, if you want to understand my comments about the coronavirus and fear of it being used to take away people's rights, the text you want to start with was written by the most vicious right-winger of them all, naomi klein, and is called the shock doctrine.

and, what i'm actually calling on is for the forces of the left to flip the situation over, and use the coronavirus as a shock doctrine to increase coverage and reduce costs.

....and then the heat turns on, as soon as i posted about it.

fucking cops....

so, i was about to get going this afternoon when i crashed hard for about 12 hours or so. am i up? i don't know. i feel oozy, still.

it's gotten very cold in here, all of a sudden, it feels like it's well below 20. but, like, i don't even want to get out of bed to check. the cold air tends to make me bedridden because i don't want to get out of the blanket. it almost feels like there's an air conditioner running, which would be pretty depressing. i fucking hate air conditioners....they should be banned, outright. everywhere...

i'm kind of stuck. the heaters make the air brutally dry in here, which i don't like.....but i can't stand the cold air, either.

i'm going to make some eggs, i think. finish those dishes. i can get the temperature up in here that way. 

but, what does the thermometer say?

19 degrees. yeah. i'm going to have to send an email...

this is such an absurd, cynical, backwards position.

if there's a lesson to be learned from this, it's how far behind we are in transitioning off of carbon, and how much work we have to do, quickly, to get off of it.

is our infrastructure reliant on oil? yes. would another 1973 create a lot of problems? yes. does that mean we should increase our reliance on the thing that's causing all of these problems? no. of course not. that's fucking ridiculous.

what it means is that we have a lot of work to do in converting the infrastructure, and we should be pushing the state to do it.

https://calgaryherald.com/opinion/columnists/corbella-why-im-hoping-the-railway-blockades-drag-on-a-few-more-months

ok.

so, the first thing i need to do is catch up on dishes.

i then need to do show lookaheads this morning. this weekend slowed me down on that front.

and, then i'll need to boot the laptop back up and finish what i was doing.

i don't really care if biden or trump wins in november, they're basically the same.

instead, i want to start talking about 2024, now. and, i'd invite the left to follow my lead on this. don't even bother with a biden v trump election, let's just move on to the next cycle immediately.

there has to be a generational overturn coming up, but we keep saying that and it doesn't happen. i'd expect that biden, bloomberg, sanders and warren are probably not coming back next cycle, and that a couple of them will probably actually be dead. steyer has a lot of money, but he might get distracted between now and then. i'd suspect that buttigieg will find another job.

only klobuchar is really likely to come back. and gabbard - who may never stop running.

and, that means you're really looking at a clean slate in 2020. after coming so close, and failing so badly, what does the left need to do to finally take over this party, and push the neo-liberals and religious conservatives out of it?

first of all, i want to see a younger candidate emerge because this may take a few tries. we might really be looking at 2028 or 2032 before we can actually win this thing. so, this person has to be in it for the long haul, and ready to fail a few times. but, what is the right strategy?

i think building on the start of sanders' movement is the right idea, and this is something we've seen a few times, now. where can a leftist emerge in the united states? it would have to either be in new england or in the pacific northwest. california is just too big. they need a smaller area to work with. kshama sawant is potentially the right kind of candidate, as she leans left in a real way and is in a relatively small district that she can probably hold for a long time. i'm not personally convinced of aoc's left-wing credentials, and it would help if she'd write some legislation; i would not consider her an ideal candidate, at this point. while it is going to be necessary to maintain the support of dark skinned voters in the north, it is probably not necessary to run a minority candidate; it is, however, important to ensure that this younger candidate doesn't have a long list of liabilities around issues of race. this candidate may not succeed in winning an outright majority of black voters in the end, but we don't need to give black voters excuses to vote for a neo-liberal candidate. so, that needs to be very carefully scrutinized, and anybody with liabilities of this nature should excuse themselves, under the recognition that it is important to keep an open door to african-american voters, even if there is an understanding that they are probably not going to be a part of the socialist coalition, moving forwards, by their own choice not to be.

so, the first attempt should be modeled similarly to bernie's 2016 run, both in terms of how he raised money and the policies he pursued. the first run has to attempt to build an unabashedly left-liberal movement by winning in states that actually support left-wing policies - which are states in the northeast, states in the west and states around the great lakes. this first run will probably fail, but it has to be able to elevate it's candidate as the leader of the left - which is not the same thing as the candidate for the democratic party.

the second run should attempt to build on this by trying to broaden the support base by chipping away at the rank and file of the party, but it should be done in a way that de-emphasizes identity (including race) and focuses more on issues of class. i understand that a lot of people will find that upsetting, but that's because they're neo-liberals. it should just be explained in cordial language that they're not aligned with the socialist movement, and should seek political representation that better reflects their views.

the voters most likely to react well to an election that is explicitly about class are voters in the midwest and voters in the southwest, which should be the states where the candidate focuses most of their energy on winning. the intent should be to try to maximize turnout in these states by appealing to economic issues, like universal healthcare and the (un)affordability of higher education. while race should be de-emphasized, open doors and accepting policies must be paramount. equality is equality is equality!

while the southeast should not be totally abandoned, minimal resources should be expended on trying to win church-going black voters. rather, the way to interface with the black church is to run a series of stalking-horse candidates that split the vote. that's the only way to get a socialist to win the nomination; that is what we should learn from bernie's disastrous strategy - it's never going to work, you have to find a way around them. and, once our socialist president takes office, there should be a very serious, organized effort to increase access to education in the deep south, in order to beak the political power of the black church once and for all. democrats will have a better chance of winning georgia again after a left-wing president makes a few important changes to tweak the demographics....

and, that's the coalition that a socialist candidate needs to build - "liberals", workers & poor people, western hispanics (with some caveats) and young people together should carry enough states in the northeast, the great lakes, the midwest, the southwest and the northwest to win enough states to get a majority at the convention.

the opposite, neo-liberal coalition that a socialist coalition will seek to defeat will consist of southerners (including southern blacks, southern whites and south-eastern hispanics), seniors and the managerial or "middle" class and will win states in the deep south and along the eastern seaboard.

regardless of how sanders does with southern black voters, and it was never very likely that he was going to do much more than eat away at the margins with them, because they lean overwhelmingly towards conservative value systems and the centrality of the church in their lives, his path to victory was reliant on his dominance amongst northern white "liberals" - who are secularist soft socialists that rarely or never go to church and mostly don't believe in god at all.

his campaign's tactic was to hold his base (these northern white liberals), sweep the states in the north and then do as best as he could by trying to chip away at black voters in the southeast and hispanic voters in the southwest. 

i stated from the start that this would fail, especially in the southeast, and that he should have been focusing more on trying to get turnout up amongst white voters in the midwest. he would also then need to find a way to split the vote in the southeast, because they were never going to support him. to be clear: my argument was never that bernie shouldn't want these voters' support. obviously, there's a lot of delegates there, and it would help to not get routed in the south. it's also useful to build an inclusive movement. i even argued that he shouldn't give up on the south entirely. rather, my argument was that bernie had absolutely no fucking chance in hell at succeeding in convincing these people to vote for him, no matter what he did, because they don't support his policies, and they don't like jews. by continuing to focus on the south, despite their repeated rejection of him, he was acting like an obsessive ex-boyfriend that won't take no for an answer.

the sanders campaign ignored my advice, and decided to put all of it's resources into trying to win the south, thereby abandoning the voters that vaulted him into the spotlight, and gave him a chance at a run. to use punk rock terms, what bernie sanders really did in his strategy was sell out - he turned on his hardcore fans to try to build a mainstream audience. as is so often the case, this backfired. badly. and, now we're waiting patiently for a disaster in michigan that will functionally end his political career.

he barely got 50% in vermont. if they can primary him, they will.

in the later stages of the campaign, i began to realize that his neglect of these northern voters had actually opened up serious liabilities in the viability of his campaign, as he was losing tons of support to klobuchar, to warren and most notably to buttigieg. i wondered out loud if he was sure he was going to carry vermont - and he did, but not very convincingly.

but, none of the other candidates really took off - the vote was splitting up, dramatically. he was getting exactly the split in the south he needed, too. by sheer luck, sanders was still ahead - despite following a hopeless strategy of abandoning his base and carrying out outreach to people that don't like him, and barely getting a third of the vote much of anywhere. it seemed like he was going to win big last tuesday, by sheer bullshit luck.

a series of events happened at the last minute that created a very volatile election on super tuesday, one that i'm not convinced of the fairness of. i feel like we got overwhelmed by a sneaky magician, that this is all sleight of hand. the results are too compact, too clean. it looks like the kind of bullshit election you see come out of russia. but, one thing is apparent from the polling that led up to the vote - sanders' strategy was a catastrophe, and i was right to criticize him for it.

we can't know for sure if abandoning the southeast to focus on building a coalition of white "liberals" and southwestern hispanics (along with young people everywhere) would have been a better strategy - the experiment wasn't done. i can make my case that it made more sense, and was more likely to lead to victory for a candidate like sanders that has essentially no appeal to southern blacks, but nobody can be sure that it was a better path. somebody would have to try it and see if it works or not.

but, it should be clear that i was absolutely right to criticize the strategy that he took, which has failed horribly.

and, i will have nothing but vicious and brutal criticism for joe biden, moving forward. i will not form a common front behind a neo-liberal candidate. i will not back the party. i will not fall in line.

thanks to 538 for doing the work, here.

but, it's just firming up my previous analysis about the unlikeliness of what happened, and what i've been saying for what is actually several months now.

first, note that if there were really that many people making voting decisions at the last minute, it does suggest that the two candidates that dropped were actually the two strongest candidates in the race. if the polls say that 60% of late deciding voters in tennessee swung to biden at the last minute, what that tells me is that there was a relatively good chance that one or both of (buttigieg, klobuchar) may have been on track for a serious upset - because most of the voters there probably weren't taking bernie sanders very seriously, due to serious ideological disagreements (voters in the south, both white and black, being much more religious and much more conservative than voters in the rest of the country). it also reflects the reality that there was an actual decision to be made among more moderate voters, while sanders was the only thing vaguely approaching a left-liberal candidate in the race. but, we've been robbed of finding out what might have happened...

so, i don't have any particular reason to doubt that a large number of voters decided late.

what i'm far more skeptical about is the idea that so many people that self-identified as very liberal (with the meaning of the word 'liberal' in the confused american sense, presumably - in context, it doesn't mean support for private property or free markets) would vote for biden. that's an incoherent piece of data. it's like doing a poll and learning that 40% of christians voted for satan. i see it in front of me, but i don't believe that statistic.

regardless, as mentioned previously, it doesn't matter if sanders' support has collapsed amongst whites, which was the obvious conclusion to draw, although i do once again thank the site for doing the work. nobody really expected sanders to be competitive with religious and conservative southern blacks, except maybe for him, in whatever fit of delusion brought it on. but, he was supposed to win northern whites, and by large margins. that was the reason he was competitive in 2016 - he often won northern whites by large margins.

if he's lost that support, and it appears as though he has, he's going to lose michigan, and perhaps rather badly. he can't win in these states without carrying white voters by a large margin, and they seem to have abandoned him fairly thoroughly.

the result is that we're going to be stuck with another democratic nominee that is basically the same as a republican. we're going to have to listen to him talk about god, and how he loves the troops and how america's the best and all of this other nauseating, conservative bullshit.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-we-know-about-the-voters-who-swung-super-tuesday-for-biden/

i was talking about this a bit last night.

first of all, trump is actually right. sort of. simply adding up the number of cases and dividing out the number of deaths is a facile and naive way to calculate the death toll, and the who shouldn't be doing it like that, and they know it.

trump initially argued that the quarantine measures were working and that's why the number of cases in the united states was so low; this is the ignorant statement. the death toll in the united states is actually alarmingly high - 11/158 = 7%. if the true mortality rate were 7%, this would be a very scary virus! but, the mortality rate is nowhere near that anywhere else....

what the who is doing wrong by just performing a simple division operation is making an apples-oranges comparison across a wide variety of health care scenarios. the bubonic plague killed millions of people in the middle ages; nowadays, it's easily treated with anti-biotics. so, a morality rate is a piece of data that is intrinsically connected to the care systems in place. you should be talking about "the mortality rate, in a specific healthcare delivery system".

so, if you live in western europe, canada or just about any other oecd country with the glaring exception of the united states, which is frequently an oecd outlier in health-related concerns (including infant mortality) due to the overwhelmingly capitalistic nature of the care system, the mortality rate is <0.5%, and actually really is on par with a strong flu. a strong flu, perhaps. but a flu.

on the other hand, if you live in iran, which is suffering under crippling economic sanctions that make it difficult to buy medical supplies and basic medicine, then the death toll is much higher. and, if you live in china, it appears to be in between - which is around 2-4%.

so, what is the true mortality rate? there is not one. but, i'd like to think the american health care system can at least keep up with china's, even if it lags far behind the rest of the oecd. it would follow that the quarantine process is actually not working at all, and there must be hundreds or thousands of unreported cases in the united states. otherwise, you need to accept that america's health care system is so dysfunctional that it's about as useful as the one in iran, when they are under sanctions. 

american capitalism: delivering domestic health care results that are almost as good as the countries it sanctions, since 1993.

the sanctions on iraq are estimated to have killed millions, and were particularly vicious on the children. 

but, when i said this was the best argument for universal healthcare, i actually meant in terms of preventing the spread of the virus. the video mentions reasons why people might not get tested - no sick leave, no insurance, etc. but, what that also means is that there's potentially far fewer checks on the spread of the virus, and that if there really are thousands of cases in the country then it may be acting as an incubation region - viruses are constantly evolving, constantly mutating. if you don't treat people properly, if you make it so difficult to get treatment, if you just let it run wild, you risk making your country the epicenter of mutations, and potentially creating the dangerous pandemic that people are currently irrationally projecting.

so, it's not just the case that america should be embarrassed for lagging so far behind the oecd in it's morality rate. it's also the case that one of the ramifications of america's capitalist health care system is that allowing this to go untreated could allow it to mutate into a more deadly strain.

the cubans used to sarcastically send doctors to the united states on humanitarian missions. they don't do that anymore.

but, the country could legitimately use some help from some ngos, like doctors without borders, to get these tests out there.

this shouldn't be a crisis - the mortality rate in western europe proves that we have the science to beat this. but, capitalism might turn it into one, if we let it.

warren may have been running directly against sanders, but warren herself is not the same thing as her voters. how much of warren's support will go back to bernie?

bernie has been polling poorly with women, and you'll notice that warren realized, herself, that she had a big identity vote bloc behind her - it was a huge part of her messaging over the last few weeks. it could be that warren took a large swath of female voters away from him that would have otherwise supported him, and that's the reason those numbers are noticeably lacking.

so long as they don't end up cynical and stay home, i'd guess that bernie's numbers with women will probably improve. but, there's also reasons to think they may end up cynical and stay home, which would be very bad for the party's chances....

it's been pointed out from day one that her voting coalition was very different than bernie's and, in truth, better resembled an aspect of clinton's - that bourgeois, professional or managerial class type of voter that leans democrat mostly on social and cultural issues. if joe biden were hillary clinton, you might expect most of her voters to move to biden. i previously surmised that biden would be unlikely to hold these voters, but if you take the numbers at face value then he did actually hold them - however fleetingly. 

the thing is that these are the same kinds of voters that have the worst reactions to the haunting spectre of socialism.....because they're wealthy. they'll have other excuses, of course. but, they're on the other side of the class war.

so, they're going to have a hard choice between a candidate that is not very intellectual and they probably mostly don't like, but may align more with them on issues, and a candidate that they may not agree with at all on core issues.

the ones that will go back to bernie are the ones that maybe were a little confused about where warren actually is on the spectrum, but they were the ones that already left, which is why she had to drop in the first place.

so, with the exception of a small group of voters that prioritized voting for a woman at the top of the list of things, i might suspect that we've already watched more or less everybody that was going to go back to sanders go back to him, and that's what left is more inclined to lean towards biden.

but, i think the more foundational issue for the party is how you keep them engaged when the race is between two options they don't like.

i'm home.

it turns out the main show started late after all, so i could have hit the fusion show early. everything else aside, it was a smooth night.

that was my fourth time seeing sunsquabi, who are a lot of fun to dance to. the concerto was great to experience live. beethoven was such a badass....

i didn't get out to the bar to talk, and am not going out again this weekend, as a nasty north wind has blown in. it should clear out nicely by sunday, though.

i need nachos, i need a shower and i need sleep.

i'm going to have to get to writing some of these reviews. soon.

i've referred to this in the past as the "princess paradox".

https://dsdfghghfsdflgkfgkja.blogspot.com/2018/05/aug-31-2011-so-i-experienced-princess.html

i am an equal opportunity hater - i will hate you the same, regardless of your characteristics.

it is true that i refuse to give women any sort of deference due to their gender, and i am aware that this often rubs them the wrong way.

but, this is a reflection of my base gender egalitarianism - and their reaction is a reflection of their societal expectations, as brought on by years of sexist conditioning. 

and, i simply don't care how they react.

actually, i think that the idea that there's a gender imbalance on this page is empirically wrong.

it's kind of like accusations that i have a specific problem with islam. yes, i have a problem with islam, but it's only more intense than my problems with christianity or judaism in terms of there being a difference of scale. where is there a christian isis? there isn't one. well, there's some awful christian groups in africa, but even they really pale in terms of barbarity. but, i would advocate carpet bombing militant christian fundamentalists, too. you can take my word on that.

with the gender thing, i think you're just cherry-picking the data. i don't deny being pretty vicious towards women, but i'm also pretty vicious towards men, and perhaps you notice one more than the other due to the social conditioning - you're supposed to be more respectful to women, and i thoroughly reject that as sexist. i insist on being just as rude to women as i am to men, and that kind of frames the issue in a skewed manner. but, if you look at the issue closely, you'll see there's no actual bias, and that my attacks are pretty much 50/50. probably the single biggest target of the most vicious criticism on this page has been justin trudeau. 

so, some people may try to lie to you and confuse you and deceive you about that.

don't listen to them. consider the source...

better yet, sort through this writing on your own and see for yourself.

the intercept, huh?

this is very similar to my own analysis, this perception that everybody going back to biden on three second's notice doesn't make any sense. he doesn't mention that warren is a more rational end point. i'm sure he's thinking it.

but, it's an interesting deduction at the end - that they've forgotten why they rejected biden in the first place. ryan and i both give this class of voters a lot of credit for being independent thinkers; maybe ryan pulled something out about the effects of technology on our memories.

it still doesn't explain the totality of what happened. it's hard to even use that argument to get to a plurality, let alone an almost complete absorption of not one but two candidates on mere hours notice.

it also doesn't explain the total switch in direction. both buttigieg and klobuchar were insistent they were going forward, until mere minutes before they dropped out. there must have been a memo from head office....

i would suspect that the position that warren is angling for is education secretary.

"bob dole doesn't think jessica murray is funny."

Warren associates and the camp of former vice president Joe Biden also had talks about a potential endorsement if she drops out, according to two people familiar with the conversations.

the prisoner's dilemma is a model, and it applies in a wide variety of scenarios. i pulled out games being played between warren and klobuchar, warren and buttigieg, buttigieg and klobuchar, buttigieg and biden, biden and bloomberg and ...

i've never described warren and biden as being in this relationship, and i've actually never described warren and sanders as being in this relationship, either. sanders and biden are quite clearly not in a prisoner's dilemma.

so, the usefulness of this model is indeed coming to an end, except for one corollary - which is that, after repeatedly choosing competition over cooperation, anybody would be daft to actually trust elizabeth warren.

warren has previously demonstrated, repeatedly, that her self-interest is more valuable to her than her principles. you will recall that while she applied to be clinton's vp in 2016, she did not actually endorse bernie sanders.

bernie will take her in, because he's a fool.

but, the operative question here is if biden will have her or not; if she ends up endorsing bernie, it's going to be because biden tells her he doesn't want her around.

and, biden probably doesn't need her, at this point - she pissed away all her leverage by waiting too long.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/elections-2020/warren-sanders-allies-scramble-to-find-her-an-exit-ramp/ar-BB10KwF6

completely unjustified, and a ridiculous abuse of power that should be punished severely at the ballot box.

i would hope that the aclu is reacting properly, but they're kind of a misnomer, nowadays.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/california-declares-coronavirus-emergency-amid-worries-about-cruise-ship-passengers/ar-BB10L3EY

but, just to finish the thought on something i said yesterday.

do you remember, in the debates, when castro accused biden of not remembering what he said five seconds ago, and everybody gasped but kind of realized he was right?

that's what the general is going to be like.

and, trump will not be as gentle as julian castro was.

...but the map is all of sudden looking kind of hostile to bernie sanders.

he has to win michigan. that's not obvious, anymore.

and, he has to win washington, which is not obvious anymore, either - although probably a safer bet.

there are still more delegates to be awarded in states that sanders did well in (california, utah, colorado) than states he split (texas) or states he lost (tennessee).

the partial results currently have him down 65 delegates. he could actually make that up, by the time everything is counted.

it's worth pointing out that the united states has 158 cases and 11 deaths from coronavirus, and canada has much fewer cases, but zero deaths.

germany has 322 cases and zero deaths. switzerland has 93 cases and zero deaths; the uk has 87 cases and zero deaths. spain has 2 deaths out of 228, and france has 4 deaths out of 285. there is one death in san marino. while most countries have seen few cases, the only other country with deaths is italy, which has a very high poverty rate.

if you look at just france, the mortality rate is 1.4%. in spain, it's 0.8%. put together, and it's 6/513=1.1%. add the uk & germany & switzerland, and it's 6/1015 = 0.5%. i'm not cherry-picking countries in western europe - the more countries i add, the lower the death rate gets, because there aren't any more deaths.

while there are probably unreported cases, the official numbers put the death rate in the united states at nearly 7% - 15x as high as western europe.

why is that?

could it have something to do with the health care delivery system in the united states?

this is the best argument for medicare for all that's ever existed....just look at the numbers. if you're an american, you should be embarrassed - your mortality rates are comparable to those of developing countries, not those of the industrialized world.

so, i took a nap, and i'm in for the night.

i decided yesterday that i wanted to get something to eat while i was watching the results come in, so i got most of my grocery shopping done for the month last night (and made some eggs when i got back). i finished that up with a last run this morning, before crashing when i came in.

i need to take a shower, and hopefully the laptop comes out of hibernation nicely...

the weather forecast has taken a turn towards the crappy tomorrow night, and i'm wondering if i want to go out at all. we'll see tomorrow.

i'm sorry to say it, but i watched most of the debates and...

trump is going to rip biden to little pieces. all of those pauses, trail offs, etc - trump will mercilessly annihilate him as a senile nincompoop, and even lifelong democrats will be forced to agree that, while trump's policies may be scary, biden is just not fit for the job.

it's going to be one of those elections.

bob dole is actually still alive, though.

woah.

"bob dole doesn't think he's much like joe biden."

but, with bloomberg gone?

bernie is going to just get smashed in some of these remaining states, like it's 2016 all over again.

and, he's not doing well in the north, like he was then, either.

i do not want warren to drop. clearly, she should drop. but, it's not going to help sanders the way he thinks it will..and it's going to set up this disastrous choice, from a general election perspective.

say terrible things about clinton if you want, i have and will again, but she was a smart, educated, capable woman that had the ability to attract all sections of the upper class. she did well with the nouveau riche, with old money, with educated professionals, etc - she was just awful on actual policy and it freaked out a lot of wonkish types, on the left.

biden is a friendly, apish dunce - a village idiot, more in the style of a gerald ford and, kneejerk reactions aside, he's just not going to maintain the support of these necessary swing demographics, even if he somehow managed to shock and awe them into it for the short term. he can't speak their language. he's really not one of them.

if the party walks down this path, where it forfeits the educated professional in favour of appealing to the low information voter, it's going to lose all of the most important districts in november. it won't even be close.

if warren reminded me of dukakis or adlai stevenson, and ran the risk of being smeared as a liberal egghead, what biden reminds me of is a bob dole or a john mccain, and runs the risk of getting completely shunned by actual smart people.

they need to keep the warrens and the buttigiegs kicking around because they need to have a way to appeal to these people.

bloomberg dropping does not surprise me.

he has better things to do than waste his time talking to voters.

i can imagine there were probably some people that had no idea, and got hit with an unexpected hydro increase, from a government that campaigned on decreasing hydro costs. if they voted for them, that would have been a nice shit sandwich.

but, i actually understood what they did and adjusted.

and, now i should get compensated for that....

so, remember when i was freaking out about the electrical, and how they changed the formula to undo the rebate?

i've mostly avoided the issue by not doing laundry, which has let me kind of balance the usage out to roughly zero. it's been a dollar or two one way or the other.

well, i got a letter in the mail letting me know that this actually wasn't a nefarious ploy but an "honest mistake" (this is the doug ford government and, for all his phony populist rhetoric, the tories are not known for caring much about poor people - it's actually not hard to believe that it never crossed their mind), and they've:

1) fixed the formula to apply the discount before the rebate

2) will recalculate the last several months worth of usage and send me a lump sump credit

given that my electrical has legitimately gone way down, this could be almost enough to wipe out the balance. and, if i understand the change correctly, i should actually now have much more space to consume without it hitting the limit.

which would be great.

as i want to start using some of this gear soon....

now, if i could get a similar letter from the cra about the carbon tax...

so, what's the summary, then?

- the exceedingly compact movement of buttigieg & klobuchar voters to biden in the fourth northern states that voted today raises some serious questions about the sanctity of the results. however, sanders' showing was fairly weak, anyways, after months of neglect - which is kind of exactly why clinton lost there, isn't it? biden may have cheated, but he's only going to get away with it because sanders has lost enough support in his actual base to allow him to.

- while biden won the south, which was widely expected, he did so with much weaker levels of support than clinton did, partly due to bloomberg showing up and splitting the vote. bernie was not able to take advantage of that anywhere within the south. worse, he squandered the opportunity by polling poorly in the north. the dropped candidates are not likely to have performed very strongly in these states, so i didn't look at the consistency of the results very carefully.

- the west does not appear to be suffering from the same anomalies that are appearing in the north, and the results are more or less in line with expectations.

after being beaten in the north, fairly or not, bernie should be crushed and defeated. however, bloomberg has split the vote up enough to prevent biden from putting him away (fairly or not), and this will carry on a while longer.

however, bernie had better win a few of the states that propelled his 2016 run, and by substantive margins, or he's going to run out of states to win in and have to concede.

california would also appear to be roughly in line with the polling, including for the two recently dropped candidates. was there a lot of early voting? or is this actually hiding a last-minute spike for these candidates?

if buttigieg was flirting with viability right before he dropped, then a showing of 7% would be about in line with expectations. and, i guess these voters end up back where they were.

or, the small amount of support he had might have been very dedicated....

but, it doesn't seem like they cheated in california, or, not right now, anyways.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/elections/election-results/california-democratic-primary-live-results/

utah is actually...not screwy. how 'bout that.

buttigieg got about half of his polling numbers - roughly what you might expect from somebody that just dropped. biden got a small bounce, not 90% of buttigieg voters. and, bernie got a little bounce, too. warren & bloomberg are roughly in line with their polling numbers.

are the mormons the truly independent thinkers, here? 

or did the biden campaign overlook this?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/elections/election-results/utah-democratic-primary-live-results/

colorado seems to be kind of weird in a lot of ways.

first, the polling was actually pretty accurate, with the caveat that buttigieg and klobuchar are not being tallied, apparently. these were apparently all mail-in ballots...

so, i'm going to withhold analysis.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/elections/election-results/colorado-democratic-primary-live-results/

all things considered, if sanders had won the important blue and purple states that he was supposed to win - maine, massachusetts, minnesota - then he'd be in a decent position, right now - because bloomberg came through and split the vote in the south.

it shouldn't matter if biden cheated or not, because sanders should have never ceded that much ground to buttigieg in the first place.

sanders didn't lose because of his policies, he lost because of poor tactical planning.

i've had a running commentary on this, and i hope it is useful to future candidates that run into this same problem of trying to find a way around these red states in the south.

what happened to bernie is kind of like what happened to the last romanov - he got involved in a pointless war brought on by his mindless ethnic solidarity for the serbs, and then had to face a revolution at home.

was the czar morally right to stand in solidarity with the serbs? well, you're ignoring the calculation of his own ambitions, as the romanovs had been seeking to swallow the slavic speaking areas of eastern europe for quite some time. standing in solidarity with the serbs over the death of the archduke was really just a cynical ploy. of course.

but, let's hope he keeps his head on for the rest of this and figures out how to get out of it.

i don't think they sing cardi b songs in church very often, bernie.

will biden win these northern states in the general?

no.

regarding the states in the south, this is nowhere near as bad as last time, and it might not be insurmountable for sanders - if he can figure out how to win in states like minnesota.

but, if michigan looks like minnesota, he's fucked....

my skepticism about the sanctity of the results aside, it had been clear for a while now that sanders's decision to focus on the south instead of shoring up support in the north was a major tactical mistake. he was never going to get all of these religious fundamentalists to vote for him, and he should have had the intuition to key in pretty quickly on the centrality of religion in the south. i heard him say things like "we have a big lead in the north and can afford to focus elsewhere", but that's just taking them for granted. you have to tend to your base, or you lose it.

he won all those states by huge margins four years ago. even with fishy results, why was a coalition of centrist candidates able to beat him in these states? why couldn't he get above 35% in states he dominated four years ago?

i've pointed this out before: he's running for commander in chief. that's a tactical mistake that a smart general just doesn't make. it's called "thinning out your troops". it's akin to fighting wars in foreign lands, instead of fixing the problems at home.

so, you can follow my arguments or reject them, but it doesn't change the reality that sanders' decision to put all of his efforts into winning in the south has backfired very, very badly. not only did he not win in the south, but he lost states in the north that he should have won very easily. this should be deeply concerning to him, as it may reflect badly on his ability to compete in a slew of other states he's expected to do well in. we may find out very soon that he's done, and this is over - not because biden cheated, although it seems as though he did, but because he didn't tend to his base, lost their enthusiasm and in the end lost their interest.

he can't win the nomination solely on the strength of hispanics and teenagers, but he ignored everybody else, and they appear to have moved on.

so, there's going to be a narrative about how sanders got beaten badly in the south, and it's inaccurate. he seems to have improved his totals in most places, and biden is not getting numbers anywhere close to the ones that clinton got - mostly due to bloomberg, who is just aimlessly splitting the vote out of vanity. if sanders does turn this around, bloomberg may find himself a rather hated person, because he's prevented biden from really putting him away.

rather, sanders got beat badly in the north - areas he was supposed to be dominant in, and this is a consequence of his tactical error of focusing resources on winning red states in the south.

this should be a lesson for the next northern liberal that tries this - don't make the same mistakes as bernie!

for right now, i want to say "if his campaign does not realize the error and course correct, it's days are numbered", but the truth is that it's probably too late.

he'll probably win arizona, though.

it's a farce. it's theatre.

i knew that.

i'm not sure bernie does...

and, yes - it is the same thing in maine, where there was not much polling done, but you have to scrounge together all of the buttigieg/klobchar/biden voters to even get close to 34%.

buttigieg was polling ahead of biden, who you wouldn't have expected to end up viable if this was done last week.

and, the other three candidates - sanders, warren, bloomberg - were all running in line with their averages. no bumps at all.

so, that's four states, now, on one night, where you have to accept that biden swallowed virtually every single klobuchar voter and virtually every single buttigieg supporter - an event so rare, that you would consider it virtually impossible (not technically impossible.) to happen even once.

what are the chances?

(1/10^6)^4 = 1/10^24.

Yotta is the largest decimal unit prefix in the metric system, denoting a factor of 10^24 (1000000000000000000000000), or one septillion. 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/elections/election-results/maine-democratic-primary-live-results/

these are the exit polls (conducted by major corporations.) for massachusetts, and tell me what jumps out at you about them.

men: 34% biden
women: 34% biden

white: 36% biden
black: 36% biden

democrats: 34% biden

independents: 32% biden

what do you notice about those numbers?

& check this one out - in massachusetts:

very liberal: 27%
somewhat liberal: 37%

conservative: 36%

listen, i'm the one that pointed out that sanders' numbers were an illusion, and he'd get leapfrogged once some weaker candidates dropped out.

but, i never thought for a second that you could just sum the totals together. i expected some bleeding, in a few directions - including towards sanders.

the math is too clean, it's without error, and, in the real world, everything is defined by error. when you see an absence of error, you expect human engineering - a designer, a creator. in the real world, there is no designer, no creator.

when you see the error dissipate, there's strong reasons to suspect it's because the results were fabricated - real results would be messy and full of error, not defined by these clean transfers of votes.

while the results of the vermont primary are not surprising, you see the same very curious result that you saw in massachusetts - biden got 90%+ of the buttigieg/klobuchar vote, while warren & sanders got no measurable bump at all.

this kind of groupthink is just overwhelmingly unlikely; there's, like, no split. as though somebody added the numbers up to make sure they made sense...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/elections/election-results/vermont-democratic-primary-live-results/

the results are not as extreme in minnesota as they are in massachusetts. you would expect at least some klobuchar supporters in minnesota to move to warren, and she did get a minor bounce. sanders also appears to have gotten a minor bounce.

but, you still have to accept that klobuchar convinced almost all of her voters to vote for biden, who had been polling in single digits here since he announced.

i could run through all of the same arguments, with the caveat that they're all a little weaker - it's 80% rather than 90%, and still very hard to believe, if that little bit less hard to believe. but i won't. i made my case and it's transferable....

https://www.washingtonpost.com/elections/election-results/minnesota-democratic-primary-live-results/

i suspect that i'll find a pattern here with this.

what you would expect is to be able to model the movement of voters from buttigieg & klobuchar to biden using a probability distribution. so, you'd end up with some type of curve. and, there's even some artistic license here, there's no specific right answer.

but, when you do the work and realize that the probability distribution that you pull out via empirical analysis is.....uniform? that sets off alarm bells, it raises red flags.

it's not technically impossible, and rare events do happen. but, it's exceedingly unlikely to happen even once, and approaching impossible to see it happen in several states, all on the same night.

i would advise the sanders people to...i don't know what they do. conduct independent local polling. ask for readouts from the machines. i don't know. but, do something.

it's like we're entering the twilight zone of election results with this.

education rankings of states so far, for reference:

iowa - 29.

new hampshire - 8

nevada - 43

south carolina - 44

massachusetts - 1

colorado - 3

vermont - 4

virginia - 6

minnesota - 10

utah - 11

maine - 18

california - 25

north carolina - 31

texas - 39

oklahoma - 40

tennessee - 41

alabama - 46

arkansas - 47

is it possible that he won more by default than due to the endorsement? that is, that a very large percentage of people said "my preferred candidates have dropped, and i have to vote because it's a civic duty, and he's the best option left, so i suppose i'll vote for him. i guess. if i have to."

potentially.

and, you'd have to assign something like that to a few voters, regardless.

it's the margins, though. that's 5% of buttigieg voters, or something. it's not 90% of them....

- sanders appears to have gotten no bounce at all, not even in the rural areas that he carried comfortably in 2016. buttigieg was winning these voters from the start, but it's an anti-establishment vote, and you'd expect them to vote against biden, not for him. sanders actually did fairly poorly in these counties.
- warren did not get a bounce, either - and you'd have expected her to pick up some educated white women, at the least, from klobuchar.
- maybe bloomberg was never going to get a big bounce from buttigieg dropping, but you'd think you'd see some minor uptick. nope. 

biden literally got the entire thing, as though somebody just reproportioned it in a spreadsheet.

....which i suspect is actually the truth.

so much for massachusetts..

The most educated state was Massachusetts, and the least educated was Mississippi, according to the report.

biden will do well in mississippi.....

there's two reasons why the education factor makes it so hard to believe:

1) educated people tend to think for themselves. endorsements don't tend to have the kinds of effect on educated people that they have on uneducated people. they don't tend to follow trends, or be easily peer-pressured. 

2) biden is a complete dunce, which is the reason he had so many problems with them in the first place.

i could believe it if the endorsement pulled 30% or even 50%. but, if you believe this, it was an exercise in groupthink.

so, i can't debunk it, but i don't believe it.

it would seem as though they passed the prisoner's dilemma in massachusetts, at least - quite well. maybe a little too well.

but, this is more of a question for a behavioural psychologist than it is for a nerd with a math degree. i can't debunk this by telling you the numbers don't make sense; i'm more skeptical about the reality that they make too much sense.

let's start with massachusetts, which i find to be the least believable outcome.

biden had been doing well in south carolina for months, so the results were obvious. the recent polling in massachusetts had biden way down the list (behind not just sanders and warren, but bloomberg and buttigeg) at around or below 10%. steyer never registered in this state, and bloomberg roughly matched his polling.

in fact, sanders and warren roughly matched their polling, too.

so, the only possible way to understand massachusetts is to deduce that 90%+ of buttigieg supporters and 90%+ of klobuchar supports both moved, en masse and tout ensemble to biden - which is the kind of thing you see in alberta or quebec, but is almost incomprehensible in what is plausibly the most educated state in the nation.

so, you can pull these numbers out - they're there. but, you have to believe that the mass of eggheads in massachusetts did what they were told, and voted for the village idiot. and, out of what, exactly? fear?

so, if you're naive enough to fall for it, this is, indeed, very easy to understand - just add biden's 10-% to buttigieg's 15+% and klobuchar's ~7% and the number's come out in the wash. easy, right?

but, it's very hard to believe it.

and, i don't quite, myself. it seems a little too tidy...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/elections/election-results/massachussetts-democratic-primary-live-results/

let's see if i can try to make some sense of these results, one thing at a time.

i need to remind you that i made a guess, based on intuition. but, this site does not exist as a platform for my gut. it has enough work to do in digesting. and i don't give it a lot of energy.

i don't take my gut very seriously, and would suggest that you don't, either.

my official prediction was "anybody trying to tell you they can predict what's going to happen is full of shit."

there was no data...you need data to predict things....

but, i'm pretty skeptical about these "results". so, let's see if i can figure out how they cheated, or debunk claims that they did.

there's some complaints about people who voted early wanting their vote back, and it does seem unfair and undemocratic.

an easy way to deal with this would be to move to preferential voting. that way, if your first candidate drops out, you can move to your second choice.

that is, if they actually count them, anyways.

the senate primary in massachusetts is not until september.

so, the argument that the chance to vote for a kennedy pulled out a lot of older voters doesn't work.

these results are really unbelievable aren't they?

i don't know why i bother. i know better.

biden winning massachusetts is about as believable as trump winning pennsylvania.

there's no polling, no way to check up on them...

my prints have now been officially destroyed.

so, i'm caught up to the end of february and i need a short nap...

the review of the act, dated to april 2011, states that:

Through my consultations with the parties listed in Appendix 2, I heard that while we are not in a time of war, as in 1939 when the PWPA was enacted, we live in an age of international  and  local terrorism  threats.  Our  democratic society  must  be  vigilant in maintaining a proper level  of security while  recognizing  that  democratic  values and security issues can conflict where public order is at issue.  It is important to highlight that provincial legislation exists dealing with both terrorism threats and emergency situations.  I  have  been  informed that  federal and  provincial couunter-terrorism  plans  exist  that address preventing and responding to acts of terrorism.

(http://www.mcscs.jus.gov.on.ca/sites/default/files/content/mcscs/docs/ec088595.pdf)

it then cites the Emergency Management and Civil Protection Act, which i suppose i need to flip through next.

so, we learn here that the act had certainly been contemplated in the context of anti-terrorist legislation, and that it was enacted in 1939, when canada went to war against the nazis as a part of the british empire (and in response to the german invasion of poland, rather than the bombing of pearl harbour). it's intent does appear to be directed at combating terrorism, in the context of the second world war.

i mentioned earlier that i thought the bill was written during the bill davis era, and i do have a very specific recollection of that. the bill that i read in early 2013 was dated to the late 70s - it was davis era, and, notably, pre-charter. i am certain of that.

so, is there a variant of the bill from the 70s that specifically mentions charges of terrorism?

or am i reflecting on some commentary that i read?

i am deciding that this does not matter - the act was repealed, i admit as much, and i do consequently acknowledge that my analysis was out of date, whether i can find this or not....

reading through the pwpa, it's easy enough to figure out what the thing that i read at the time, whatever it was, said: it must have argued that tampering with or trespassing on to what was defined as a "public work" could lead to terrorism charges.

but, given that i'm dealing with what may have been a commentary on legislation that was repealed five years ago, this may be quite hard to find. the author may have even taken the page down.

i am acknowledging that the law i was thinking of was repealed, and it might be best to leave it at that.

iirc, i found a case that cited the act, and i went and looked it up.

and, i was right to point out that it was of questionable constitutional value - it was indeed repealed a few years later.

but, it was the law at the time, nonetheless.

i was mostly concerned about my friends getting searched for marijuana, or magic mushrooms, and having no defense because they were at city hall - and not understanding what the law actually said.

but, let me find that case.

this is the repealed law:
https://www.canlii.org/en/on/laws/stat/rso-1990-c-p55/latest/rso-1990-c-p55.html

and, according to canlii, my hunch was correct - it was indeed replaced with this one, as i suspected:
https://www.canlii.org/en/on/laws/stat/so-2014-c-15-sch-3/latest/so-2014-c-15-sch-3.html

the new law would not include railways in it's scope. so, what i was citing has been repealed, and i should stop citing it.

but, i still need to find the connection between the public works protection act and the charge of terrorism, which i must have read in a case...

i'm notorious for not keeping track of sources, at this point, aren't i? i'm bad at this, i admit it. but, i'll argue it's more important to remember the content of what you're reading than it's title or author...

on third thought, it must have been the public works protection act that i'm thinking of, or some case that cited it.

in the public works protection act (which was in force over the winter of 2012-2013, but has since been repealed),

1) there is a reference to

any railway, canal, highway, bridge, power works including all property used for the generation, transformation, transmission, distribution or supply of hydraulic or electrical power, gas works, water works, public utility or other work, owned, operated or carried on by the Government of Ontario or by any board or commission thereof, or by any municipal corporation, public utility commission or by private enterprises,

....as being a public work, which is the collection of things i remember.

2) "any provincial and any municipal public building" is covered as a public work, which would include city hall.

3) a guard or peace officer (not even a cop!):

may search, without warrant, any person entering or attempting to enter a public work or a vehicle in the charge or under the control of any such person or which has recently been or is suspected of having been in the charge or under the control of any such person or in which any such person is a passenger;

...which is what i was trying to get across.

4) A guard or peace officer may arrest, without warrant, any person who neglects or refuses to comply with a request or direction of a guard or peace officer, or who is found upon or attempting to enter a public work without lawful authority

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

so, this is the law i cited to the food not bombs kids to try to make them understand the danger they were in serving at city hall, which they naively thought they had special rights at because it was "public property", i'm certain of it.

but there is no reference to terrorism. that must have been case law. let me find that....

so, what's going to happen today?

even the last minute polls appear to have had buttigieg in them. we have no idea. all i can give you is my gut.

- i think that sanders will be competitive everywhere, except alabama.
- i think that both buttigieg and klobuchar will see their voters mostly move to warren, and sanders will get a bigger bump than biden, mostly in rural counties. this could be a 10+ point bump for warren in some places.
- steyer, on the other hand, will see almost all of his voters go back to biden, and this will be a 10 point bump in some places.
- however, i do not expect warren to win any states; that 10+ point bump will be lucky to get her to 20%, in her best states.
- i do not expect bloomberg to win any states, either. however, i do expect him to cut deeply into biden's totals.
- i do not expect biden to be competitive in the west or the north. he will be competitive in the south, and he will win some states, but his delegate total will be severely hampered by bloomberg, and sanders may come up the middle in a few places.

anybody trying to be more specific than this is full of shit.

and, it's a problem because we can't independently verify the results. they could cheat very badly, and we wouldn't know.

but i still need to stress the importance of not trying too hard to push her out.

it was a mistake to push these other candidates out, and now the party needs her in to appeal to the demographics that they need to win.

a better strategy is just ignoring her.

so, what happens when a player repeatedly defects, as warren has done?

the other players take note, and learn to defect against her, too.

which is what should happen, now.

so, warren may win the game against klobuchar by defecting, and, likewise, she may win the game against buttigeg by defecting, but these victories should be pyrrhic, because it should broadcast to the other players that she's a defector.

or, as she put - a capitalist to her bones.

i know that warren doesn't think this is a game, but that's really an unfortunate comment from somebody that should, and i'm sure does, know better.

the subgame between buttigieg and biden was one thing. even with the endorsement, i suspect it works out to a D,D because there's not enough time to really meaningfully co-operate. i may be abusing the notation, a little.

but, there wasn't really a game being played between biden and klobuchar - the subgame was between between klobuchar and warren.

i stated a little earlier this evening that the system would award warren's bad behaviour. another way to state this is to point out that this is the situation where klobuchar cooperates, and warren defects. in that situation, warren gets a big pot and klobuchar gets nothing.

you can call klobuchar stupid, if you'd like.

but, warren's the one that keeps arguing this is about character.

so, i got a little sleep, there.

let me get back to this...

biden is going to have to pick a running mate that will appeal to educated voters (and they liked obama because he was one of them), and he's probably best to do it right now, to stop them from wandering off.

he won't carry the demographics he needs to win by himself.

sanders essentially has the same problem.

what happens if warren drops?

well, what happens in strictly literal, blunt terms is that the key swing demographic that won them the 2018 midterms ends up disenfranchised. they're not going to like any of these options, and they may end up staying home or voting republican.

i can't imagine many of these people voting for joe biden, who they're mostly likely to interpret as a dunce. and, they're afraid of sanders...partly from the propaganda, but nonetheless...

warren was the weakest candidate in the field, but she's also proven the most stubborn, and the system is likely going to reward her bad behaviour.

but, at this point, does it help sanders or biden if she drops? it probably helps trump. i know i just flipflopped, but the options just changed. and, you want her on the ballot to give these swing demographics somebody they can vote for so they can be dragged along, even if she doesn't have an actual chance.

if she drops early, and the voting pool ends up restricted to leftist revolutionaries in the sanders camp and low information voters in the biden camp, if educated voters don't have anybody to support and tune out, it's going to undo the results of the 2018 election.

so, what are the battle lines, here?

- biden is the candidate of uneducated & low information voters, the rank and file which make up a substantive part of the base and include a certain type of union worker and a large percentage of churchgoing southern blacks.
- bloomberg is basically splitting biden's vote in half.
- warren is emerging as the elitist candidate of educated whites (and perhaps of educated non-whites, too) - even if she was actually their third or fourth choice, initially. she's...just....still....there...
- sanders is the candidate of change, even if he's not that radical, and he really isn't. so, he's doing well with young voters, with latin speaking voters, with northern blacks and with what's left of the party's traditional left.

the best thing we can do for tomorrow is try to extrapolate results from these demographics.

and, i think it means that sanders does very well, that bloomberg stops biden from running up the score in the south (sanders may steal some states, even) and that warren does well enough with educated whites (the most important demographic.) that she ends up with enough delegates to piss everybody off.

only sanders and biden have realistic chances of actually winning states.

it's just an error in understanding the demographics.

biden's team doesn't seem to realize how badly it did in the first two states amongst the most important voters, or what that means about how appealing he's going to be to them in the upcoming contests.

they bizarrely seem to think that the opinions of illiterate south carolina voters who were told what to do by their congressman is going to overturn the empirical analysis of educated northerners, who are the key swing demographic. it's delusional. but, it's why this party loses over and over again - it's swallowed some kind of kool-aid about race and can't interpret anything rationally any more.

as badly as sanders has fucked up, everybody else fucked up more, in the end. and, he's going to stumble in and save them from their own stupidity....

i'm going to wait until the morning, but sanders should win a strong majority of delegates tomorrow.

i think they picked the wrong candidate. but, if they're going with biden, the guy that he needs to drop is bloomberg - like steyer, and unlike buttigieg and klobuchar, bloomberg is pulling directly from biden. that's where his support went, and where the split is and what he needs to fix to leapfrog.

i suspect the big winner here is warren, who may end up exceeding expectations and ending tomorrow in third place. frustratingly....

and, sanders?

he should stay in massachusetts; he must have sat on a four-leaf clover or something, because he's pulling a lot of good luck out of his ass, after doing this explicitly all wrong for months.

are they reading this?

it's not just minnesota. we're going into super tuesday with a lot of unknowns, now, but klobuchar was probably sanders' strongest challenger through the three northeastern states and a swath of the midwest.

presuming that buttigieg and klobuchar supporters even realize they've dropped, or haven't already voted, this opens up opportunities for sanders to take the pot in states where biden still probably won't end up viable.

i don't think there's been enough time to convert buttigieg supporters into klobuchar supporters, so these are two different groups of voters. and, we just don't have any polling. we're stuck with our intuition.

but, i'm exceedingly skeptical.

i know i've talked about sanders' position being shaky and predicted he'd get leapfrogged, but it was with the assumption that biden was about to drop out. these statements were really implicitly explicitly about buttigieg, who was the only one of the three that could create a common front where it matters. it really seemed obvious to me that he was the candidate that got out of this...

i might have said something differently a few weeks ago, but, after watching the debates and seeing the numbers come in, i just don't think that there's much of anything that biden can do to convince more educated voters that they should vote for him. he's going to have a brick wall, there. they just won't do it; he's just not remotely appealing to smart people, and that's why they picked these other candidates in the first place.

there's no question that they had to consolidate, but they've picked the wrong demographic groups to consolidate around, and i think it's going to blow up in their faces.

steyer is a different question, as he was pulling voters directly from biden. and, biden has gotten a bump from steyer dropping, no question.

i wonder, though, if these buttigieg and klobuchar voters take a last stand with warren, though.

we might get some tracking polls tomorrow morning and we might have to make bad guesses based on them. but, anybody telling you that they can predict this is full of shit. the changes are too dramatic.

have they passed the prisoner's dilemma? they're trying. but, i might have to give them an E for effort, in the end. they picked the wrong candidate to rally around....

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/02/us/politics/amy-klobuchar-drops-out.html