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

what, you didn't think the molotov-ribbentrop drop was comical?

meh.

in 2016, cruz and kasich actually made a deal to tell each other's voters to vote for the other one in states they weren't strong in. i don't remember exactly where it was, but they were down to the three of them. kasich could have maybe won some northern state, and cruz could have maybe won some western state. so, the deal was that cruz voters would vote for kasich in the northern state, and kasich voters would vote for cruz in the western state.

this fell apart, partly because the deal didn't really make a lot of sense - i would actually expect most kasich voters to prefer trump over cruz.

but, it was the closest thing i've seen yet to candidates figuring this out, in the context of american politics.

in canada, we actually have vote swapping exchanges, and we have what we call "strategic voting". it's efficacy is questionable, and it sometimes leads to unexpected outcomes (like trudeau's majority in 2015, which was built on strategic voting....the polls all showed minorities) but it's the right approach to solve the problem, at least.

i want to clarify a little bit of a misconception.

when you set up a prisoner's dilemma, you have a choice between competing and cooperating. you fail when you both choose competition over cooperation, and you win when you both choose cooperation over competition.

cooperating, in context, doesn't usually mean just dropping out - there's going to be more to it than that.

with buttigieg and biden, some kind of deal where they split the map up, molotov-ribbentrop style, would have been a better way to cooperate.

as it is, taking buttigieg out doesn't help biden much with the rank and file that make up his base, who are largely low information and uneducated voters, and the types of educated voters that buttigieg did attract are just likely to look elsewhere, as they have biden pretty low on their list. there's no actual co-operation, here.

so, and i know this is somewhat counter-intuitive, but this is actually less like the option of mutual co-operation and more like the option where they both defect, even if it looks otherwise at first glance.

the counter-intuitive twist is that, in the context of this specific two-person subgame, dropping out is actually defecting. co-operation would mean a deal where they split the map up, some kind of strong endorsement or maybe even announcing a shared ticket. as it is, i don't think there's much that buttigieg can do to deliver his voters to biden on such short notice, so dropping out is functionally just releasing them to the other candidates - and that's defection. unless there is cooperation, it doesn't undo the relation of competition, which is what defines the defection, and the players have still failed.

does that make sense?

ok, so i've doubled back several times now, but i'm sure i've cleaned up the three blogs until the end of january, now.

it's time to take that shower before i start focusing on february.

this is perhaps an underlooked factor regarding turnout in massachusetts, as kennedy is likely to generate an older and more conservative crowd, in contrast to the far more liberal ed markey.

https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/485397-kennedy-holds-6-point-lead-over-markey-in-massachusetts-senate-primary-poll

and, what can joe biden do for me?

diddly fucking squat, that's what.

i had a facebook page a few years ago called "uninspiring kennedy quotes", where i just tossed their own words back out and let them stand on their own, sometimes with a sardonic quip attached to it.

i loved doing it, but i didn't keep up with it.

i think we all need to stop asking what we can do for our country, and get back to asking what our country can do for us.

i'll tear down jfk all day some other time, but i want to catch up to what i'm doing tonight.

"ask not what your country can do for you..."

is that inspiring?

or is it truly a bunch of bourgeois bullshit that is at the core of why you don't have universal health coverage, 20 years into the twenty-first century?

sanders needs to be worried about how to win over educated white women in swing districts, not how to convince deeply religious, illiterate blacks in deep red states to vote for a jew.

if you want to rally the base, sanders is the guy. whether it works or not...

but, if you're concerned about these tactical swing demographics, the best candidates were buttigieg and klobuchar, not biden.

biden's argument was that he could increase black turnout to obama levels, and he failed to do that.

a sanders/klobuchar ticket would probably be unstoppable, and they do at least know each other well.

but i want to....

should they rally the base or win over swing voters? false dichotomy - think in dialectics, instead. they need to do both.

but, that's not the debate at hand.

biden won't be able to do either, and he's proven that. he will prove that again on tuesday, as he struggles for viability across the country.

but, the party just drove off a superior candidate who had a better chance of winning the general in order to appease a base of arguably homophobic and arguably antisemitic voters that is largely irrelevant in national polling.

and, they wonder why they're the country's natural opposition party.

this is why.

because they continually make bad decisions, like this.

i'll repeat the point: there was always an exactly 0% chance that i'd support a joe biden candidacy, in any way. he doesn't even get an epsilon. and, i basically live in michigan - i'm the type of voter you need to get to vote for you.

he offers me absolutely nothing of value at all.

maybe the best way to state what i'm saying is this - biden voters would probably support buttigieg pretty readily, but buttigieg supporters are going to have biden pretty far down the list of candidates. this isn't a commutative relation.

so, if biden were to drop, buttigieg would have likely gotten a huge immediate spike. i've made that point repeatedly.

but, buttigieg dropping will likely give these other candidates, mostly klobuchar, a bump, first. biden will need them to drop, too, in order to salvage any kind of bump. they may grudgingly end up at biden in the end, but you have to understand that voting against the frontrunner is not an accident, it's an act of protest. growing up near quebec, i understand this mentality quite well.

as buttigieg was stronger across the board, klobuchar dropping would have probably produced the more competitive single candidate. and there are some states where i wonder about the gender issue; i would suspect those anti-establishment protest votes will end up back with sanders, or that they won't vote at all. so, it could actually give sanders that extra bump in states like colorado or utah. but, she's the likely primary benefactor nonetheless.

will it be enough to predict some upsets in states like maine? i'd like to see some polling before i do that...

i will accept comparisons between the ira and the plo, but not between the ira and isis. the former has some vague value in the form of case studies; the latter is offensively stupid.

but, you'll notice that i'm broadly sympathetic towards the idea that the palestinian people deserve basic rights, even if i think they make a lot of bad tactical choices in trying to figure out how to get them. like the broader syrian people, the mass of palestinians are secular and want secular governance. i don't have any problem separating these things from each other. but, that's just the point i'm making.

he made a lot of errors, and i guess this is the last one. i insist that he would have beaten biden overall, who has shown no ability at all to do well in states that actually matter. now, we can't know what would have happened.

but, it's reflective of the pathological stupidity within the party, on their insistence in following losing strategies and their inability to understand their own voting base. these idiots legitimately seem to think that the vote in south carolina is more predictive than the vote in iowa. because they're idiots....

i don't actually think this helps biden much of anywhere. buttigieg was mostly poling well in the rural areas, and biden gets most of his support from the rank and file in the cities. it probably helps klobuchar mostly, and sanders a little bit as he did well with these same voters in 2016. it may even help warren in a few places.

these voters made a conscious choice to vote against joe biden because they didn't think he could win, and the meaningless outcome in an uncompetitive conservative red state like south carolina shouldn't affect that - they will still vote against him because they will still think he can't win.

and, they're right.

jim clyburn & the illiterate voters of south carolina are wrong.

but, i can tell you who's smart and who's stupid, i can't control what they do. this was a mistake, but it's happened, and so be it.

expect klobuchar to see a spike in polling amongst literate suburban white women, who are probably the key to winning the general election.

and, i'll remind you that i used to be a bernie-or-bust sanders supporter but am now supporting the greens. i am not a party-first democratic voter; i'm not a democratic voter at all. i have rarely supported the democrats in past cycles; i have usually supported the greens. i'm an independent voice trying to analyze the problem objectively. so, i'm not a buttigieg supporter, or a klobuchar support, or a biden support or even a sanders supporter any more. there is a 0% chance i'd vote for any of these candidates, with the sole exception of bernie sanders, who i've stepped distinctly away from due to his decision to deprioritize the concerns of queer voters - a decision that has blown up in his face.

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/01/pete-buttigieg-drops-out-of-2020-presidential-race.html

comparing the nazis in idlib to the ira, or the situation in ireland to syria in general, is truly offensively stupid.

the situations have essentially nothing in common with each other; the ira believed in segregation, and that was wrong, but they never tried to eliminate any ethnic groups, they never set up concentration camps, they never tried to conquer the surrounding areas, etc.

it's an utterly ignorant comparison, and the people that are making it are utterly ignorant people.

you know who really needs to step down, after this fiasco?

jim clyburn.

biden is going to lose to trump.

the early results in these white states made it clear that he's not going to be competitive in the most important swing demographics, and his inability to excite black voters in the south at levels that obama did cemented it.

he's a loser; south carolina fucked up, and that will be obvious on wednesday morning.

i'm fucking sick of letting red states pick the nominee.

the midwest needs to hold it's ground and push back and beat the south this time.

i actually think the results in south carolina suggest that biden should drop, as he didn't demonstrate the kind of dominance that he needed to.

but, i also think this regional showdown is necessary - i think it's imperative that biden get smacked around a little in the midwest to get the point across to southern voters that he's not going to win there, whether they like it or not, and send the message to stop voting for a candidate that isn't going to win.

at the end of the day, it's far more important to be competitive in new hampshire than it is to be competitive in south carolina.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/mar/01/pete-buttigieg-quit-democratic-race-joe-biden-south-carolina

the thing about the latin speakers is that they may be a little bit socially conservative, and that might freak me out, and should concern a lot of democratic voters (support for abortion rights would be expected to be lower amongst ideological catholics, for example), but they do believe in government programs.

they actually do want single payer healthcare, unlike a lot of his supporters in other parts of the country. they are at least voting for his platform, or at least, part of it.

so, it's this confusing thing. but, this support is probably enduring, at least.

....it's just that, issues about influence from conservative voices aside, it's not going to seriously help in a general until 2050. it's too far ahead of the demographics, and it might not even be the right way - by the time that hispanics are ready to become a dominant electoral force, they may find themselves overtaken by asians.

arizona. focus on arizona...

we can get into debates about epistemology, but i don't generally care if conservatives exist, so long as i can just avoid them.

what i get frustrated by is religious people showing up in liberal spaces and trying to change them.

no. that's proselytizing. that's forcing your views on others. and, that's wrong.

if you're not comfortable in liberal spaces, then go to conservative ones - there's more than enough of them out there.

i don't know exactly what conservatives do for fun.

i guess they have events at church, and stuff.

that's your tribe. go join it.

stop deluding yourself otherwise.

what i would say to these people is this: the world's full of conservatives. go find some and make some friends.

no, i don't want to change the "toxic drinking culture" to make more space for religious muslim women.

rather, i think there should be more of an effort to promote integration by peer pressuring them to participate.

i don't want to live in a conservative muslim society. sorry.

https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/muslim-women-work-drinking-culture-law-a9363796.html?utm_source=taboola&utm_medium=Feed

regarding bernie, though.

now that south carolina is over, and this strategy to contort his own views to try to win conservative black churchgoers, who do not in any way represent the democratic party, has failed, maybe he can unravel this bullshit and get back to being bernie sanders again?

the outreach amongst latin-speaking voters has been effective. but, all he's done in trying so hard to reach conservative southerners is muddle his own messaging, and harm his chances in states he can actually win.

i'm going to guess that he's going to have to fend off buttigieg in vermont.

"this primary isn't a game" - elizabeth warren

so, that's an epic fail at winning the prisoner's dilemma.

they need to just turn the mic off, at this point. but, the rules make what she's doing pointless - if she's trying to bleed support from sanders, it's actually not going to work, because she's not even viable anywhere.

buttigieg and klobuchar at least have long shot paths. but, she's really running in the same category as tulsi gabbard, at this point.

and this was obvious - i said from the start that she wouldn't win a single state, and she won't. 

if she's running for 2024, she should drop now, because she's killing herself off.

ok, we're back up in the laptop.

i haven't showered yet, as i'm waiting for a second round of dishes.

i don't think he's home, but somebody sparked some very bad smelling drugs around 4:00 this morning, and it was bad enough that i had to react. they seem to have stopped once they realized i was awake. but, we're going to need to leave the fan on all day to clear it out.

i generally prefer to drink coffee over night and sleep during the day.

so, i'm going to spend the morning getting back to cleaning up these blog posts going back to mid-january, which is just that much worse, now.

i don't expect to leave the house again until mid-week, although i'm thinking about catching the beethoven concerto on the weekend (i initially missed that). there's some other things that i'm...

...do i really want to pay to watch a 70 something steve hackett perform covers of songs he helped write in the early 70s? they're some of the most substantive pieces of music of the latter part of the twentieth century. i just don't know if there's a point to it.

but, that's what i'm doing - cleaning up the blog and listening to music.

ok, let's get away from this now, for real.

that's a somewhat sketchy calculation though, because it relies on exit poll numbers. i pulled out the actual initial vote totals for a reason. 

what i want to know is what percentage of biden's voters were black. i guess we can do this somewhat implicitly - if he got 48.4% of the vote, and 34.16% of total voters were black and voted for biden, then 34.16/48.4 = 70.6%. so, almost 71% of his voters were black.

and, that would mean that the number of black voters he got was 0.706*255,662 = 180497.  this is in very close agreement with the previous number.

likewise, if clinton got 73.44% of the vote and 52.46% of total voters were black and voted for clinton then 52.46/73.44 = 71.43% of her voters were black. .7143*272,379 = 194560. again, this is pretty close and pulls out the same roughly 15,000 vote spread.

his numbers are worse than clinton's. that's my point. and, if you identified clinton's major flaw as her inability to appeal to black voters at the same level as obama did, as though she ever could have, then biden is not a solution - he's worse, and the results will be worse.

we can update those numbers with something more precise. the margin is roughly the same because the concept is just shifted, but there is a conceptual error in the previous post as a consequence of the confusing language; it's 40% of all voters that voted clinton and were black, not 40% of her voters that were black. i did it right the first time if you go back and look...

this is the correct and more up to date math. it's the same conclusion, which is what i pulled out intuitively and then sat down to actually calculate, but the numbers are bigger because they represent correct proportions.

clinton in 2016:
(61% of all voters were black)*(86% voted for clinton) = 52.46% of all voters were black and voted for clinton.
373,063 total votes were cast. so, she got 195709 black votes. roughly.

biden in 2020:
(56% of all voters were black)*(61% voted for biden) = 34.16% of all voters were black and voted for biden.
527,728 total votes were cast. so, he got 180272 black votes. roughly.

that's a decrease of 15000 votes. roughly. 

....amidst a huge increase in turnout, and what i believe is substantive population growth.

where did all of the new votes go? well, sanders went down, too.

they appear to have gone to the lower candidates. so, i may have been on to something, it just didn't catch critical mass.

iowa is maybe a lost cause.

but, if the democrats want to win in november, nevada and new hampshire are truly must win states. he badly lost in both states, he could barely crack 10% in the primary in new hampshire, and has been dismissive of the people that live there, since. does he expect to win there in november, with that kind of attitude? or will he forget to campaign there altogether?

a big win in south carolina like this would be seismic if this were the republican primary.

it's not. and, the other candidates should pay him no heed in his pleas.

we went through this in 2016, and they're just repeating all the same errors.

they've learned nothing.

should the other candidates clear out to make way for biden?

no.

these results don't strengthen his argument at all - they've demonstrated that his support amongst black voters was overrated, and he has yet to demonstrate that he can generate support amongst key white swing demographics.

south carolina will not be in play in the general, and the argument that black voters in milwaukee (somewhere that is in play) will vote for him because he won south carolina is just racist, and probably totally wrong on top of it.  

they should force biden to win a state that has swing demographics and will actually be in play before they get out of the way - a state like new hampshire, or nevada.

clinton got ~270,000 votes in 2016 and about 40% of them were black, as per the previous calculation. so, she got ~ 108000 black votes.

with 99% reporting, it looks like biden is going to get less than 260,000 votes and about 35% of them were black. so, that's ~ 91000 black votes.

you need to make up margins of ~20000 to win these states back, not lose them.

biden won categories - like "prefer switching to single payer" - that don't actually make any sense, indicating that it's questionable that some of these voters really even understood what they were voting for, and may have just done what clyburn told them to, perhaps against their economic interests.

this is not how democracy is supposed to work. you're not supposed to ask your congressman who to vote for, you're supposed to look at the issues and work it out yourself.

so, i hope that this is the last election like this in south carolina where one person appears to wield a veto on the outcome, and that south carolinians take the process more seriously, in doing their own research, in future elections. and i hope that, in 2024, a majority of them will know how to fucking read - and will put it on clyburn's footstool or gravestone if they don't.

but, these kinds of absurdities aside, biden's numbers are not impressive. only 56% of the turnout was black, and he only get 61% of it. so, about 35% of the total vote was black and voted biden, and about 13% were white and voted biden - indicating you should expect him to settle somewhere around 48% if the exit polls are close, and that's about right.

clinton and obama got over 80% on higher than 60% turnout. that means over 40% of the electorate was black and voted for them. clinton also did dramatically better with white voters. she got over 70%, indicating she got almost three quarters of them. this cycle, that has split up between buttigieg, sanders, warren and klobuchar, with buttigieg getting the highest share of it.

this is important, because it's the crux of the argument for his electability - he can excite blacks, and get them to turnout, overturning small margins in important states. ignoring the reality that blacks in detroit and milwaukee will probably vote for bernie in larger numbers anyways, he just debunked his own propaganda, by failing to match the numbers of the person that supposedly couldn't get the numbers up enough.

and, what of buttigieg? well, he did sneak over 15% in the exit polls with white voters, which is what i suggested was a possibility. but, it doesn't seem like they were concentrated strongly enough anywhere to get him any delegates.

this results aren't particularly surprising, but they are actually underwhelming for biden.

and, again, sanders needs to be concerned about youth turnout - and may want to ask questions about those closures i pointed out.

i'm not willing to change my narrative yet because i don't think that biden gets much of a bounce from this, or that it changes the trajectory of the race, much. 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/exit-polls-2020-south-carolina-primary/

true or false:

communists believe in the abolition of the state.

so, what have i been doing?

i've been sitting in front of this chromebook since i got back on thursday morning, trying to pivot and kind of failing to do it. i guess i got distracted by the need to make some calls, then got lost in the primary....

i also got lost in the need to eat up a lot of fruit before it started rotting, as i overbought a little for the month of february. that means i've eaten a few days ahead...

the weather is going to turn over this week, maybe for good. let's hope so. i'm eager for spring.

i've cleared the show listings out until wednesday at the earliest and probably until next weekend. as i've eaten a few days ahead to clear out the fridge, that also means i won't be getting a start on groceries until mid-week or later.

so, i'm going to get the reimage started, clean up the kitchen a little, take a shower and park myself in front of this thing for the next several days, with the intent to get some actual work done.

one question, though...

obama won razor-thin margins on the back of a total dominance of a specific minority, and historic turnout within it.

that was never sustainable, and anybody trying to recreate it is delusional. 

my point here is not about representation, i believe in democracy, and i think everybody's interests should be heard. my point is that biden's electability argument actually took a major hit, here, if you look at the numbers properly. 

if you have to accept the inevitability of a decrease in black turnout in the post-obama era, and the numbers are in, now - you do - then you're going to need to find some other way to win.

i wish that sanders was winning large numbers of latin voters in states that matter, more.

but, i'd consider the possibility of winning arizona on the back of strong latin-speaking support to be much higher than the possibility of getting black turnout up in milwaukee. if you want to win wisconsin back, you have to grapple with the actual demographics - this trump card of 99% black support across the board for the black candidate is over.

no.

stop.

the argument was that clinton lost because she couldn't get enough black voters out, right? i'm not sure how actually right that argument was - you might have been able to make a numerical case for it, but a decrease in black voters was inevitable, and it was never realistic that you'd get the same kind of turnout that obama got in 2008. iirc, obama himself saw a decrease in black turnout in 2012.

you might remember that something kind of historic happened in 2008.

but, nonetheless, if that was the argument, then biden just eliminated himself, because not only has he seen black turnout come in less than clinton had, but it's a great distance from where obama was.

i know he won. but, that numerical argument that you can beat trump if you just increase black turnout fails when your candidate is actually decreasing black turnout.

is that clear?

we knew biden was going to do well with black voters.

but, it seems like biden didn't do nearly as well as clinton did, let alone as well as obama did. it's not yet clear if he got over some imaginary line or not.

- black turnout seems to be down, overall

- biden's percentage of that reduced black vote is much lower than clinton's, more than 20 points lower

- youth turnout appears to be down

sanders has every right to be crushed, and he sounds crushed. he just spent five years campaigning here, and might not crack 20%. but - and i'm sorry - he only ever had one tactic, which was to split the vote, and he refused to take it, instead insisting that he could win the votes of people that have made it clear for his whole life that they don't like him.

if black turnout ends up down across the board, that pulls biden's argument out from under the rug. i never thought this was a good argument in the first place. but if your argument is that biden is required to maximize black turnout, and he comes in with decreased black turnout, he's clearly a losing candidate in the general. so, i'd like to see a breakdown of white voters, who the numbers state are the more important demographic in the general.

the most important takeaway here is that biden wasn't able to get black voters out in high numbers.

if these numbers hold, biden will get a lot of delegates, but i don't think it will give him much of a bounce, and i'd still expect him to finish fairly far down the list in most states on tuesday.

let's see if we get any polling...

the actual reality is that there was actually a very large number of north americans of german descent that supported the nazis in world war two, and we had to go through a kind of denazification program to try and integrate them, a process that was only partially effective. it's shocking to say it now, but the nazis were actually quite popular here, within certain ethnic groups. while this denazification was happening, these people claimed they were being discriminated against and treated as second-class citizens - a claim that was no doubt sometimes actually true. yet, today we recognize that their sympathies were wrong, even as we question how they were treated, and wonder if mistakes may have been avoided. we realize that it was necessary to do something to stamp out this ideology as best we could.

i wasn't alive back then, but i would suspect that the contemporary support for islamicists in the middle east amongst arab-americans draws a very strong comparison to the support that german-americans had for the nazis in the 30s and 40s, and that a similar program of deislamification is going to be required. this may not always result in savory policies, they will no doubt cry discrimination and they will often be right. but, we will look back at the process as necessary to eliminate or at least drastically reduce the prevalence of a particularly vile strain of thinking from civilized society. it's going to take some people that are willing to take tough and potentially unpopular choices, and they are likely to be reversed by the courts, but you can't just let this run rampant, you have to combat it. and, with the right types of campaigns, we can win this struggle.

if you sort through this, i am consistent on this point - i have strenuously rejected the false dichotomy that the media and certain politicians (funded by specific agents.) wants to set up between islamism and nazism, and have rather gone out of my way to draw parallels between these two systems of thinking. if you condemn one, you must condemn the other - and you should treat proponents of these ideologies more or less interchangeably, because they are basically the same.

so, you can put my comments into that kind of perspective.

i think these islamicists need to be wiped out, and i think you're on the wrong side of history if you're in disagreement with me.

i don't fear the russians. really.

i like to poke fun at them, though.

i'm going to get hit by a tornado from their weather modification systems....

vodka best medicine, sterilize digestive system.

why russia not have case? let me tell you why, it's because russia is strong! when americans get stuffy nose, they go cry to doctor, hand out week's pay for silly medicine that not work, maybe die of irony. ha! in russia, we just give the kids vodka, drink borscht and get rest.

no, really.

i'd suspect there are cases in russia, they're just too stubborn to get treated. and, they might be right, too.

if i catch this, i'll probably shrug it off, too.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/russia-hasn-t-had-any-new-coronavirus-cases-why-is-that-1.5479374

"you should believe men!"

"no, you should believe women!"

fuck. i don't believe either of you. i want you to prove your fucking case.

see, this actually strikes me as facile bickering.

which one do i believe? no - that's the wrong question.

which one can produce credible evidence is the right question.

i haven't looked into the case and have no opinion on the matter, other than that i think this debate is stupid, from both directions.

https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/entry/chris-matthews-hardball-sexist-comments_n_5e597097c5b6beedb4eae952?ri18n=true

who is to blame for this shit, though?

her name is hillary clinton.

this is right from the un:

The humanitarian crisis still unfolding in Syria will probably deteriorate in a catastrophic manner unless the global community swiftly unites and mobilizes all tools to end the nine-year-long conflict in that country, senior United Nations officials told the Security Council today.

translation: the nato-backed islamic terrorists on the ground in idlib are on the cusp of defeat by a russian-led coalition of secular nationalists, and intervention in the guise of humanitarian aid is required to prevent total defeat.

it's a last ditch, desperate strategy, and it means they're almost done.

they even tried this with isis at the very end...which i found enraging....

any support toward the nazis on the ground in idlib will just result in an extension of this war.

if you want this war to end, which is what the syrian people want, then you should stand with the syrian government as they carry out their final anti-terrorist operations, and clear the area of the remaining nazi forces.

and, as westerners, we should all be embarrassed about where our government and press have stood and continue to stand on this.

so, i want to kind of translate this because the mainstream press, which now includes many of the sources i used to rely on, is just going to lie to you about what's going on.

idlib is essentially a terrorist safe haven - it's not isis, not by a long shot, but it is the closest thing remaining to it. in my perspective, wiping out what's left of these islamo-fascist nazi militants is just the last step in eliminating isis - so i support carpet bombing the region, with the intent to inflict a maximum death toll. if they're still there, they're not civilians, they're active participants, and i don't support taking nazis hostage, i support killing them on the spot. they need to be wiped right off the face of the earth.

the thing is that these nazis that are left in idlib are also the ones that we supported, in the west, via aid, mostly via turkey.

what the west, and this was under clinton's direction when she was secretary of state, tried to do in syria was essentially a replay of reagan's attempt to drive the soviets out of afghanistan, and while the end outcome appears to be essentially the same, it had a higher likelihood of success. nobody should have supported these groups, in contrast to assad - assad has some issues, sure, but he's at least a secularist. there's no justification to support islamicists over secularists, ever, under any circumstance  - that's just reactionary, plain and simple. but, had these groups not broken into pro-turkish and pro-saudi factions and started fighting each other, it probably would have worked.

what ended up happening was that the pro-saudi faction turned into isis, and the pro-turkish faction got sort of stranded. the syrians & russians focused most of their attention on isis, initially, and eventually managed to defeat them (although the western press gives the credit to the kurds, who will be utterly destroyed if the saudis ever get their way in the area). now, they're turning their attention to the turkish-backed forces in idlib, in an attempt to actually end this war and reassert syrian territorial integrity.

i've been clear that i am hoping that the russians will insist upon a shift to civilian power in syria, when the time is appropriate for it, and i do believe that they probably will.

in the mean time, we've had a kind of shift of american policy. the amount of support that the saudis were providing to isis was always this shady issue, with conflicting reports and even some straight-up propaganda about them helping to fight them. the turks have not felt the need to hide their support for the rebels in idlib, which are ideologically essentially the same, and have even tried to resort to manipulating public opinion by framing the issue as a humanitarian crisis. this has accompanied a shift in american policy - withdrawal from syria - that i was initially cautiously optimistic about, but i now see is a realignment with the terrorist forces to try to destabilize the russians.

so, what these nato voices are doing here is standing up for their assets, and they're doing it by using a variety of methods: propaganda about humanitarian catastrophes, cynical ploys at the united nations, appeals to temporary ceasefires, etc.

but, the reality on the ground is that the turks are in a stupid position and need to get out - it's a matter of time, and they're playing a dangerous game that they can't win.

i don't think that these people can be reformed; it's an ideology at the root of the problem, a belief system that needs to be eradicated. the entire civilized world needs to be united against this. it's a shame that we're on the wrong side of it.

so, expect this to continue for a while, but realize that the syrians are on the cusp of victory, and the americans would be best to encourage the turks to just get the fuck out.

https://www.dailysabah.com/politics/un-security-council-to-hold-meeting-on-syria/news

i guess the other explanation regarding the poll closures is that bloomberg paid somebody off to stop biden from running up the score.

the major beneficiary of this would of course be sanders. 

something else to keep in mind is that it is sometimes hard to vote in the united states if you're black, and, contrary to public perception, those concerns continue to be real in the democratic primary, as well.

in past years, i would have suggested that this would benefit biden at the expense of sanders, as they'd have done the research. this year, i'm not convinced that this is where the establishment has it's thumbs. it's a good experiment, actually. if biden ends up with 60% of the vote, you'll know why; conversely, if sanders pulls out a surprise upset, you may want to start asking some questions about voter suppression.

but, if there are accessibility issues, it will certainly help the candidates that do better with white voters, regardless of which class of black voters gets targeted.

https://prospect.org/politics/south-carolina-closing-poll-stations-without-notice/

clinton didn't just need to win in the south, she needed to run up the score.

biden may end up winning most of these states, but i think it exceedingly unlikely that he's going to run up the score. and, that consequently won't be enough - i don't even think it will be enough to beat buttigieg.

why am i doing this?

because there's a misconception about what happened in 2016. it is absolutely true that clinton did very well amongst southern blacks, but she also did extremely well amongst southern whites, and she wouldn't have run up these huge margins in the south, otherwise - it was a broad base of support in the south that aided her, not just specifically black voters.

biden is doing well with southern blacks - i do not dispute that - but he does not appear to have that broad base of support. he is not doing well with any white voters at all, and his support amongst latin speakers appears to be both middling and extremely tenuous.

south carolina is overwhelmingly black in it's democratic primary because it is overwhelmingly republican in it's general disposition, and that's where all the white voters end up. i'll remind you that they can vote tomorrow if they want, but most of them won't. so, biden's dominant support in the black community will likely be decisive; everybody realizes this, i offer no dissent.

but, almost all of these other states are not majority black, and that opens up very large spaces for some of these other candidates that are polling much better than biden is amongst southern white democrats - buttigieg particularly, and potentially klobuchar.

so, this mistake that is being made is that clinton relied on blacks, and it's wrong - she relied on the south more generally, and if you were to pull the whites out of her southern coalition, she'd have faltered, just as she would have if you had pulled the blacks out. she needed both, and she got both.

the evidence seems to suggest that biden will not be able to reproduce that cross-racial southern coalition, and people are going to be surprised by what happens in some of these states like virginia and tennessee.

biden could still win these states, but he's going to be scraping for votes, and it could split enough to give sanders some wins in places he otherwise had no reasonable expectation to win in.

i had to nap a little.

these are the existing popular vote numbers:

sanders - 28.49%, 163082
buttigieg - 23.28%, 133252 
klobuchar - 15.24%, 87250

warren - 12.94%, 74040

biden - 11.83%, 67695

i know that it's the delegates that matter, but this is maybe a better metric, to understand what's going to happen in these states on tuesday that have barely been polled at all.

south carolina is the biggest state so far, it is true. and, a very, very strong showing could potentially pull him up into second place.

but, if he polls in the low 30s, he could very well win south carolina and still find himself in third in the popular vote, even if he catches buttigieg in delegates.

i don't think he's going to get a bounce, anyways. apparently, the dominant factor in the polling reversal is the endorsement of jim clyburn (who is 79 years old.), which is very specific to the state, itself.

but, he's going to have to win by a convincing number to even catch up to second, going in to super tuesday - and then he has to face a broader, non-black electorate that he has tended to poll 4th or 5th in.

i was literally moments away from getting back to work on what i was doing, when the power flickered off and on.

i'm going to have to reimage.....

it seems to be a little bit better with 2 gb of ram, and i'm wondering - does the surveillance software have a 4 gb minimum system requirement? is that it?

if so, that's rather egregious and gets to what my point was, the whole time - i think anybody would push back against police surveillance, but what was actually pissing me off was that it was slowing my computer down.

please rewrite your software to be more efficient, you noobs.

well?

does anybody have a body count for jfk?

http://www.socialist.ca/node/1992

also - jfk was infinitely worse than fidel castro.

sorry. those are the facts.

i just don't understand how anybody can line buttigieg and biden up beside each other and pick biden - that's just an irrational decision, that has to be driven by something emotional, like a connection to obama, or an aversion to his sexuality.

i insist that it can't hold up, in the long run, even if biden wins this state by a large margin....

once we get enough data in to gloss over these anomalies, that should be clear enough.

asking white south carolinians what they think about trump directly is like asking ukrainians what they thought about stalin.

you're not going to get a straight answer. 

but, there's a lot of evidence that there's a lot of unease, particularly amongst evangelicals.

buttigieg has an opening, and these firms that are polling democrats and independents might have missed it.

i'm not saying that's going to happen, i'm saying it's a potential curveball, and one that would not be inconsistent with what we saw in the other early states.

so, what's my projection of south carolina?

biden seems like he's going to win in a landslide, and that would appear to be unavoidable to project.

sanders will get a few delegates. it seems unlikely that anybody else will.

what are a few wildcards to note, though?

south carolina is an open primary, and the kind of state where republicans tend to take their faith seriously. i would suspect there's a fair amount of restiveness in the base. buttigieg, in particular, has the potential to appeal to white, rural republicans - and they can vote in this primary if they want to. the data is not there to suggest a surprise surge, but don't be too surprised if he eeks out a third place finish, and a small number of delegates. he tends to do better than his polling, so if the polling has him at 12-13%, he's on the bubble. i'm going to stop short of suggesting this is likely, though - it's an outside possibility. he'll probably walk out without delegates.

klobuchar could also appeal to some write-in republicans, but this particular electorate is very religious and i question her ability to break out. if she's going to have another surprise surge, it's going to be somewhere like michigan or illinois.

i don't know why steyer has fallen, but i don't know why he rose in the first place, and it seems clear enough that he has. you wonder if it was real or not. i also wonder what kind of write-in that bloomberg can produce, in a state that is more ideologically in line with him.

but, whatever flukes happen, it seems clear enough that joe biden, that old racist, is going to ride the black vote to a landslide win, here.

and, then we'll see if the rest of the country cares or not next week.

they should just eat the damned locusts.

https://www.theweathernetwork.com/ca/news/article/running-out-of-time-east-africa-faces-new-locust-threat

it was indeed automatic.

it's in the mail...

the letter says "you may start using the program as soon as you receive and activate your new card".

that sort of suggests it's in the mail.

i really wish people would be more clear.

the border agent couldn't answer the question, though. she took my number and promised to call me back....

so, they didn't try and sneak anything in on me, and i've left another message with the motion coordinator.

last call is nexus.

so, the answer to the question is that the tribunal served the respondent with the request for deferral and she will be expected to respond to it with the other responses by march 24, 2020. i consequently do not need to serve her because they did it for me.

that is not explicitly stated in the correspondence, but it does make a lot of sense, in hindsight.

so, now i need to call the divisional court...

let's kind of think this through, though.

if a new virus shows up in china and starts killing chinese people, is it more likely that it was created by the chinese or by their enemies?

if the chinese were going to create viruses and let them loose, you'd expect them to let them loose here, right?

so, who is the most likely suspect, if we take the premise seriously? it would be the americans, of course.

which is making the infection rate in iran seem curious.

but, i still think this idea is dubious, because the virus is just too weak for that. it might save the chinese some money on public health care. it's hardly weapons-grade material...

so, did they create this thing in a lab?

they could have. if they did, they'd probably let it loose in iran first.

but, you'd think they'd be a little more efficient.

so, i'm going to classify that claim as highly doubtful. but, anybody trying to browbeat you with the idea that that's "debunked" or "wrong" should be treated as a propagandist - it's entirely plausible, in principle.

like, apparently the country with the second highest death toll is iran.

that's just kind of a curious fact.

ok, i'm calling now. for real.

let's try the human rights tribunal, first.

the data they've given us says that chances are that you'll catch this thing and have it pass without even knowing you have it...

but, again - why is the who freaking out, then?

they don't have elections to worry about. they're not pandering to their base. they're supposed to be beyond all that shit.

we'll see what happens...

let me answer a question directly, though.

will this be a pandemic?

well, we have flu pandemics every year. that word is presented as this scary, terrible thing, when it really isn't.

so, yes - the experts are suggesting it's likely, but that doesn't actually mean anything, and the mere existence of a pandemic doesn't justify the kind of reactions we're seeing.

i don't understand what's going on with the coronavirus at this point in time, and i haven't presented a hypothesis.

i have pointed out that the reaction seems to be unjustified, given the weakness of the virus. this is really just as virulent as the flu.

or so they tell us, anyways. i can hypothesize about actors and motives, but i can't make up data. the data says this is not that scary. but, then, why are they doing this?

so, what i've drawn attention to is that contradiction - they tell us this thing has a 0.5% mortality rate, and then they treat it like it's ebola. they, here, is not the media, it's not "liberal" politicians, but it's rather the global authorities that you expect to operate outside of the alarmism, and actually adhere to the science.

so, when these agencies tell you that this disease is not very dangerous, and then act like it's a serious threat to global health, it makes you wonder what's actually happening.

are they hiding a deeper death toll in order to prevent mass panic? that would explain why they tell us one thing, and act as though another is true.

or, is there some kind of power grab going on behind the scenes?

i don't know....

i know there's a contradiction.

we'll have to see how this plays out, but it really has to be one or the other - either the death toll is far greater than is claimed, or this is going to be used as an excuse to take away people's rights.

again: i could shrug it off if it was a politician overreacting. but, these are the global health authorities, and something is not adding up.

you can call me a media critic.

but, i criticize all media - i'm not aligned with any party or group.

i don't even have a cell phone. i use google to call out.

but, the reason i got off social media is that i got sick of correcting all of the nonsense people were posting. i felt like i was just wasting a lot of time with it. and, i realized it was a bad source of data.

youtube can, in theory, be a source of quality journalism, and there have been some good sites out there over the last few years, but there appears to be some powerful people trying to shut it down and turn it into a source of lightweight commentary that acts as a propaganda arm for the party machinery.

journalists need to try to find ways to evade that as best as they can. and, trust me - if i can track you down, if i can find you, i'll watch you. get yourself out there. i don't want to watch the mindless garbage on youtube, and i won't - that's why i gave up cable in the 90s.

it's very sad to see amy goodman reduce herself to a propaganda outlet for a cfr stooge. but, if you watch her, she seems to get giddy about lying, as though she's emancipated herself from the shackles of honest journalism. but, she's not a good liar - you can see it in her facial expressions.

i don't want to say it's sad to lose her, because she should be retired, anyways.

i think there were some financial transactions behind the scenes, there. it's a shame. but, this is what capitalism does.

i don't actually read social media. i don't have a twitter account, and while i still use facebook for local show listings, i don't actually read any feeds. i have a total of zero friends on facebook. i haven't sorted through a social media feed of any sort in five or six years. these ideas are my own.

...but if you think that i'm aligning with certain personalities on the right, you're actually just wrong. that's just another baseless smear by people that make a lot of money from routinely smearing people.

what does the young turks do? they're not journalists. they don't write articles, they don't do research. rather, their job is to smear people; they're professional gossip clowns that traffic in lies and misrepresentations. and, cenk uygur is an actual, legit rush limbaugh wannabe - something i've pointed out on many occasions in the past.

there seems to be some money floating around behind the scenes that is essentially trying to align all of these other media sources - democracy now, the real news, etc - with the young turks, using a series of shady shell operations like pacifica radio. i've only seen some cursory reports, but i've watched the coverage shift dramatically and i am convinced there's something pretty awful happening.

my best guess is that there's a fear that media coverage leading up to the next election might lead people away from the democrats. so, they're trying to get all of these alt-left sites aligned with the party line.

but, let me be clear - i'm not repeating the views of other people, here. i think for myself, and i produce my own ideas. that is a typical, cynically right-wing (and terribly wrong.) idea of how people behave, and i'm happy to sit here and poke giant holes in your flawed concept of "human nature" all day, if you insist on it.

so, go ahead and read through this, and then read through the views presented by those on the populist right, and tell me if you think they're even consistent. they're not.

why do they key on me, though? why don't they just ignore me? if i'm so wrong...

my hypothesis that the deep state was out to get hillary clinton (and prop up donald trump) started taking shape in early 2016 and is developed in posts to this site over late 2016 and early 2017, when i stepped away from it. i was claiming they'd never let her win as early as 2013. i have accused the nsa of rigging the election in favour of donald trump, and then blaming it on the russians as a distraction mechanism. i have called donald trump a pawn of the deep state, a creature of the intelligence agencies and a front for the cia - all before he was inaugurated.

is that what those other people are saying? or is it actually the precise, exact opposite position?

some of these people are no doubt working for the same groups that rigged the election for him....

think for yourself, people. it's critical. don't let other people define things for you, and when it comes to what these dishonest smear artists say, just consider the source - which does not have a good track record for honesty or fact-based reporting, at all.

i want to find this, or at least figure out what happened to it.

....because if i'm actually citing a repealed law, i should stop doing that.

ok. 

i'm going to make those calls and then see if my firefox filters really are useful here or not.

what the filters do is block all of the completely useless sites that appear at the top of the google search, making it possible to actually find useful information on the internet, again, like it used to be back in the olden days.

this act, from 2015, also has some overlapping language with the act i'm remembering, but can't find - suggesting it may have been created, partially, to replace the act i'm remembering.

https://www.ontario.ca/laws/statute/14s15

that law i posted - the public works protection act - is not the law i cited back in 2013 to the food not bombs activists, but it contains the kinds of provisions in the law i did cite.

it has been repealed.

is it possible that i can't find what i'm looking for because it's been repealed? yes. the wynne government in ontario was pretty unabashedly liberal. that's the kind of thing they would have done, after 2012. 

i can't prove that, though.

if you can find the information i can't find, great.

the only other thing i can think of is that it was actually a city of ottawa bylaw, but i don't think that's right, either.

i'm trying to figure out what the right search terms to use for something i haven't looked at in seven or eight years.

and, i have to get the language exactly right, too, or the search won't return it. it's trained to send back common results, and ignore these kinds of appeals to very specific academic terminology.

so, i'm trying to give it these wonkish phrases and it wants to send me to "constitutionalrightsfordummies.com", instead.

it's very frustrating...

i can't find it, and i'm giving up.

as mentioned, i initially did this research in relation to some questions posed by some food not bombs protesters at city hall.

food not bombs is an anarchist soup kitchen that attempts to get the christians out of the process and get directly at the lumpenproletariat. it's essentially a ploy to talk to homeless people about anarchy. i didn't get much out of it, because nobody stopped to talk.

we had a choice between "serving" at the city hall or across the street, and i heard a lot of kind of populist fallacy common sense type rhetoric about reclaiming the city hall for the people. but, i remembered from one of the cases i had studied (i don't remember this, either) that this was actually backwards - you actually have less rights on public property, for the reason that your constitutional rights are so intrinsically tied into property in the first place. 

i tracked down the precise laws, and i wrote up a summary and i posted it in some local activist spaces. there was a debate, but i think i got my point across - be careful bringing drugs into public spaces. you might think you have greater protections in public spaces, but you're actually not protected at all!

i can't find them. and, i'm giving up.

it was anti-terrorist legislation written in about 1980 or so, but it's still on the books. but, it hasn't been tested, and it would get struck down if it was.

iirc, the way the law is written is almost a direct negation of the relevant charter right against illegal searches. it's literally something like "the police have the right to search you without a warrant or probable cause if you are engaging in suspicious behaviour on provincially owned property", and it explicitly defined a rail link as a protected area.

i'm going to give up fairly soon. i wish that google wasn't so useless nowadays :\.

i still can't find the bill i'm looking for.

but this is the story i want to tell.

https://dsdfghghfsdflgkfgkja.blogspot.com/2015/06/during-occupy-moment-number-of.html

actually, it's not. i'm still looking for what i'm looking for...

this is the law i'm referring to:
https://www.ontario.ca/laws/statute/90p55

in fact, that's something that mr. blair should know about because he exploited that law to arrest protesters during the g20 fiasco.

i want to clarify a comment i made about charging the protesters with terrorism. because the issue is to do with rail service, specifically, this is actually true, at least in ontario. it stems from a law written during the bill davis years (it is pre-charter) that has never been enforced and would probably be struck down if they tried, but it's there nonetheless.

i cannot find this law right now, and i'm on the chromebook so i'm stuck without my filters (google wants to send me to "know my rights" sites, which are completely useless), but i've had this argument quite a few times. people seem to think that being on public property gives them more rights, when the exact opposite is true.

so, for example, police can legally search you without a warrant if you are on any kind of municipally or provincially owned property. again - that hasn't been tested in court. but, there is a law that explicitly gives police the right to search you at city hall. 

in this same law, rail service is categorized as a specific type of infrastructure, and disrupting it is actually considered to legally be terrorism under the law, here. it would also be considered terrorism to disrupt the electrical grid.

i'm not suggesting they should be charged with terrorism. but, mr. blair was legally incorrect in his response, as he often is.

ok, that was a lot of distractions.

i'm going to get a bit more fruit, because i want to eat it up, and then get back to what i'm doing.

with the weather, it could be a few days before i get up and go anywhere. 

so, apparently trump wants to take money away from fighting ebola in africa, a disease with an up to 90% mortality rate, and use it to fight the coronavirus, which has a roughly 0.5% mortality rate, which is on par with the seasonal flu, instead.

this is baffling.

and, it is reasonable to call it racist.

somebody needs to stop him from doing this.

buttigieg should expect to be competitive in most states:, 
Arkansas, California, Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Utah, Vermont, and Virginia

biden should expect to be competetive in far fewer states:
Alabama, Arkansas, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia

klobuchar has a few shots, too:
Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Vermont

i don't think warren should expect to be competitive in any of these states, although she may win delegates in a few.

only sanders can expect to compete everywhere, except for the black-dominated alabama:
Arkansas, California, Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, and Virginia 

and, bloomberg? we don't know. i don't expect him to do well, though.

i'll just remind you about the demographics in the remaining deep south states.

these are 2016 results:

arkansas: 80% white. 66% clinton.
tennessee: 67% white. 66% clinton.
texas: 46% white. 66% clinton.
virginia: 61% white. 64% clinton.

so, skin colour did not seem to be a predictor factor in 2016 at all, actually - about the same number of people voted for clinton, regardless of the demographics of the state.

that might be a little different this time, oddly. biden really only seems to be polling well with blacks - nobody else likes him. latin-speaking voters appear to prefer sanders. and, white moderates mostly want buttigieg.

biden could very well see himself win south carolina in a landslide, and then barely register in almost all of the super tuesday states.

i hear bloomberg is polling well in alabama, too.

it's increasingly becoming clear that we're going to wake up to a mess on wednesday.

who votes on tuesday?

Alabama, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, and Virginia 

you could potentially see three or four or even five victors, if bloomberg pulls anything off.

or, bloomberg could cut enough into biden's numbers to give sanders some more weak victories.

but don't expect a biden win amongst black voters in south carolina to mean much to voters in massachusetts or vermont, who are still going to be looking at the candidates that did well in new hampshire.

so, what's the polling update, then?

it would appear as though steyer is falling, and biden is gaining those votes back. if these polling numbers hold, biden will win in a landslide.

if. we've seen this before. but, i'm not going to make numbers up - the polling says what it does.

this is the first example we've seen of what i was saying about bernie's competitiveness being a sort of a mirage - he's only appearing to do well because the vote is so badly split. any consolidation will see him leapfrogged.

really, the story in new hampshire and nevada was that the centre of the party couldn't pull it together behind one candidate, allowing sanders to win with a rather small plurality. if new hampshire would have decided on either buttigieg or klobuchar, they would have won by a large margin. likewise, if iowa or nevada would have gone all in on buttigieg (biden got under 15% in all but two counties; buttigieg was really the more competitive candidate, overall, despite underperforming with white voters in las vegas).

so, bernie may get beaten very badly here, if the split undoes itself. and, that may happen over and over again in these southern states, if they've come back to biden, in the end, and are sticking with him. but, that doesn't mean sanders is done....

black voters in the south may expect moderate northern and western voters to fall in line behind biden. i think it's increasingly clear that that's not going to happen, not any more than the opposite did.

so, rather, what's opening up is a potential schism in the moderate wing of the party, with southern blacks insisting on biden and the rest of the country increasingly settling on buttigieg, who still appears likely to do well everywhere except the south.

for right now, the thing in front of us, immediately, is south carolina and the polling does seem to suggest a landslide victory for biden, driven by a consolidation of the black church vote.

but, unlike previous cycles, there appears to be little evidence that this is going to clinch him much of anything, or even that the rest of he country is going to take much notice about who south carolina votes for at all.

so, the case they sent me is about an athlete that got caught doing drugs, and then tried to appeal a decision made by an international body to the divisional court in ontario.

it would indeed be rather obvious that the divisional court in ontario would not have jurisdiction to hear a judicial review of a decision made by an international body. that much is pretty obvious.

however, there does not appear to be any logical application of that precedent to the question of whether the divisional court has jurisdiction to hear a case that is clearly governed by the judicial review procedure act. 

so, i don't know whether to interpret this as a disingenuous stalling tactic or total incompetence on behalf of the city's lawyer. i have reason to believe both things.

i'm going to have to call in the morning to try and get an update and make sure they didn't try to sneak something in on me.

if this is their honest argument, the judge should essentially laugh at them. no. really. i will not be surprised if i watch the judge burst into a fit of laughter.