i mean, we could carry out mass immunizations once we get a vaccine. but, if the mortality rate is less than 1%, it seems unnecessary.

so, i know this seems counter-intuitive and contrary to all the fear the media is pushing down, but one of the best public health measures we can take, long term, is actually to spread this around as much as possible in the younger population.

if you avoid this now, and it happens again, it could kill you when you're older; if you catch it now, you're immune, if it does.

that's why i'm hoping i do catch it.

the thing we want to avoid, specifically, is situations where older people are in contact with younger people.

we actually probably want younger people to build immunity, in case this happens again when they're older.

does it make sense to close schools?

you're probably worried about the kids. but, a large percentage of teachers and profs are older people.

i'm going to label that as a justified reaction.

thank you for making the point that the focus should be on buying gear, not on "flattening the curve".

single payer health care does have a fatal flaw - it can put the system at the whim of fiscally conservative governments, who can devastate it in the form of budget cuts. if you want this system to work, you have to fund it, and the onset of neo-liberalism has led to massive cuts in much of the developed world. i don't know exactly what silvio berlusconi or his successors did to the italian health care system, but i doubt it was beneficial. 

it seems like they got swamped. i'm not denying that, and it could happen anywhere.

but, it's also exposing the consequences of a lack of funding, and what happens when you slash health care to balance budgets.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-hospital-bed-shortages-amid-covid-19-expose-the-deadly-cost-of-a-lack/

yeah. i know.

the only thing to fear, is fear itself.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/covid19-travel-bans-1.5495919

science is an authority, and i will listen to science.

but, the only authority that the state has over me is the threat of violence.

it follows that statist dictates that are not backed by science are invalid and should be ignored.

this puny, weakling virus will be annihilated by my superior immune system!

ahahahahaha!

i'm an anarchist. you're probably not. but, you need to know when to step away from your need to control things, and this is one of those situations.

the science does not support bans on travel, or bans on large gatherings, right now. i will not be heeding these restrictions, myself - and i fully expect to get this virus, and defeat it. i don't want to cower in fear of one another, i want to take this on headfirst, and develop the antibodies. bring it on! 

i hope that i can lead by example.

but, i will strenuously avoid old people, and i will state this clearly - if you are in an at-risk category, you need to take responsibility for your own safety, which means staying inside, even if you're not sick. if you're going to ban anything, it should be the movement of retired people. stay home, granny.

i know you want to help, and that's natural, but if you want to help then you should follow the science.

the only worthwhile thing you can do is avoid old people.

this is completely, utterly irrational.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/military-travel-halted-covid-19-1.5496537

https://www.vox.com/2020/3/12/21176669/travel-ban-trump-coronavirus-china-italy-europe

Canada's Chief Public Health Officer Theresa Tam confirmed that Canada is now advising against all international travel to limit the spread of the virus. She warned that travellers could be subject to another country's travel or quarantine restrictions, and if they become sick, they could find themselves in a health care system inferior to Canada's system.

this is admittedly worth considering carefully; that's a good point, and something to think about.

i am opposed to any bans on international travel coming in and out of canada. this is the first overreaction i've seen from this government, and you have to wonder if it's a function of his wife getting sick.

there is simply no reason to think that taking a flight to a different country is any more dangerous than going to the grocery store around the corner. i know you want to imagine that there is, but there isn't.

it's circulating, and you're going to need to learn to deal with it. you can't control this. stop pretending you can....

in the place of a pointless travel ban, i would support a statement by the federal government that at risk groups - old people especially - avoid human interaction as much as possible until the virus runs it's course. 

if you're over 60, stay inside; if you're under 60, avoid people over 60, but otherwise carry on your day-to-day lives.

so, why are they doing this? they're feeding into public perception for the need for Strong Leadership and State Control. it's a pr thing. and, this is dangerous.

i wonder if the white house is ultimately behind this, though. we can't be letting those idiots make bad decisions and force them into canada. we're a sovereign country. 

we need to continue to follow the science, and not give into the panic. this is a step backwards, and i'd call for it's reversal.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/trudeau-covid-19-1.5496367

you guys ever read the stand?

that was a perplexing night in detroit.

the show was good. but, people are...confused. and don't want to listen.

they're going to have to wait for investors to redevelop some confidence in the market.

there's lots of money out there, and, as i said, the real economy may benefit from some more real spending. you want to make sure there's lots of money....

...but you can't force people to buy when they're too scared to. you have to wait.

looking forward, it might help to avoid announcing ridiculous blockades against europe.

stimulus isn't going to overpower fear.

the experiment was interesting, but the outcome was obvious.

i haven't said much about the stock market recently.

my arguments were always a little different. the way i see it, and this is broadly a type of mmt, is that the stock market is essentially a casino, and that the amount of inflation that occurs depends on how much money exists in the economy. so, when obama went through all this easing, the money trickled up to the top in the form of corporate profits and eventually ended up in the market.

when trump first took over, his new fed chair almost instantly reversed that under whatever kind of bullshit austerity argument and we started to see all of these jolts in the market because the money was starting to dry up. but, investor confidence remained exceedingly high - even as the money was drying up, these people wanted to keep gambling, so they did. i insisted that it was just a matter of time...

but, then the feds seemed to realize what they did, and went back to easing, and the jitters stopped. so, i stopped talking about it.

if you want to talk about the stock market in terms of what it's supposed to be, there's no doubt that it was in need of a ridiculous correction. stocks across the board were just absurdly inflated.

but, the stock market isn't what it's supposed to be today, and maybe never really was - it's a casino, and trump is really the right kind of personality to look over it. so, you can pump as much money into this thing as you want, and the stocks will inflate as much as you let them. you want the average to keep rising? just keep printing money.

investors are no doubt scared that they're going to run out of caviar and are pulling their money out to spend it. that could actually be great news for the real economy!

and, this is going to be a double hit for seniors which are taking it on the chin right now.....although you shouldn't cry too hard, because they're pretty rich, nowadays.

but, if you're into this shit, you're being presented with a helluva buying opportunity, because these numbers will rise quickly, so long as they keep printing money.

it's hysteria. but, it's a casino.....

sarah was (i guess still is.) about a half an inch taller than me, and she used to complain that she wanted me to be taller than her - although, i'd take the opposite position, in that i'd want to be about equidistant from the ground with any potential partner. i want equality; i liked being able to see eye-to-eye, and certainly didn't want to look down on anybody - i'd consider that weird and unsettling. and, i told her that. but, she wanted to look up to me and actually considered it a sort of pre-requisite.

so, she liked me in heels, on the very few occasions that i wore them. i noticed that. it was one of the few feminizing decisions that she reacted well to, because it gave her the opportunity to look up at me. oddly.

anyways.

the point is that i'm not tall, and my life experiences have not been as somebody that is tall. i'm short for a white dude, and about average for a white woman.

i am a short 5' 8". so, it's closer to 5' 7".

my father was a hair taller than me, and my mother is a hair shorter than me. my full sister is a good inch taller than me - she's a convincing 5' 9". and, i have an aunt that is 5' 11".

we know that height is primarily a function of nutrition and diet during childhood, and it is not clear whether the differences we see in gender across most cultures (although not all cultures.) are due primarily to genetic sexual dimorphism or to cultural differences in how men and women are nourished in childhood. in rural india, where poverty is endemic across both genders, the average height of men and women are both around 5' 4". on the other hand, the average height of women has been increasing dramatically over the last century inside of oecd nations, where gender equality is on the rise. women in northern europe are taller than men in much of the world, nowadays.

5' 8" would be relatively short for a woman in scandinavia, which is where my mother's ancestors are from, and which is the part of my ancestry that i most readily identify with, culturally. while it is a little taller than the global average for women, it is also shorter than the global average for men. i would be considered very short for a male in northern europe.

so, i don't consider myself particularly tall.

i meet women that are taller than me all of the time.

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

the data really suggests something very different.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

but, the capitalist narrative is...

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

it's perfect ostrich logic.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

it's a startlingly terrible response.

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

or, don't cancel church?

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

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

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

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

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

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

wow.

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

i'll have to call in the morning. 

fwiw.

my opinion is that sanders is done.

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

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

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

we cannot control the spread of this virus.

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

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

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

our hospitals need to update their gear anyways, right?

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

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

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

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

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

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

we got some today.

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

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

you know what?

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

i'm pretty confident of that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

but there were populists back then, too.

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

so, what are the actual trends?

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

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

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

3) however, turnout is up. a lot.

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

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

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

why is this happening, exactly?

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

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

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

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

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

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

there's an old cliche.

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

the direct quote from franklin is:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

and, he has one chance to do it.

seems like this guy has a hunch, too.

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

listen.

i didn't like the hillary clinton that emerged after her stint as secretary of state. i was particularly concerned about her foreign policy; she was a war monger, and the mess she created is only being cleaned up, now. she scared me. really...

but, i didn't question her capacity to serve. and, in the end, i gave her the weakest endorsement of all time - which i'm not sure i don't regret. i'm sure i would have voted for jill stein when i got in the booth...

we'll see how bad biden gets, but what i've seen of him legitimately upholds the narrative that he's senile and incapable of doing the job. i'm not just saying that, and i think this is going to get worse.

i fully expect to sit here in november and tell you i cannot, in good conscience, endorse a man with his mental health to have his fingers on the button. i expect to tell you that this is irresponsible...

the people in iowa and new hampshire got a really good look at all of the candidates, and i think they made the right choice. it's unfortunate that the rest of the country didn't follow their lead, but so be it.

and, we're stuck with a choice between two senile buffoons that i don't want to make. 

again: clinton was a bad choice because she was evil. biden is a different problem. and, i simply don't expect to be able to endorse a man with such low intellectual capabilities, and such degraded mental capacities.

it's an important job...

i would expect bernie to stay in to try to influence the events at the convention, just like in 2016.

regarding michigan.

2016 results:

21% black turnout - 68% clinton, 28% sanders

70% white turnout - 56% sanders, 42% clinton

2020 results:

18% black turnout - 66% biden, 29% sanders

72% white turnout - 51% biden, 45% sanders

when you're talking about 3-4 points, that's the margin. so, maybe black turnout was down a little, and maybe white turnout was up a bit.....but it's too close to really state as much.

and, the percentage of black voters is almost identical.

but, the white vote flipped over. that's what happened.

i'm watching the nbc stream, and it's like soviet propaganda - they're looking right in the screen and saying the exact negation of what's true, even as they put stats on the screen that contradict it.

missouri is a place where the young people are leaving because there's no future there. there's no jobs. there's no opportunities...

so, it would make sense that the voting population is aging, because the state is aging, because the young people are leaving.

and, that is true throughout the rust belt.

(i remember the berlin wall falling, fwiw. i was eight. but i remember it.)

back in 2016, i keyed in a lot on missouri as an important swing state, and i did this for the very specific reason that the democrats had to find more urban areas to win over, and i knew the midwest was urbanizing very quickly.

the thing about missouri that i didn't realize then was that it's actually deurbanizing. and, in fact, so is wisconsin. and ohio. and iowa. and michigan....

the states that are urbanizing quickly are just a little to the west of the mississippi river: oklahoma, kansas, nebraska. and, if you look at the 2018 midterms, the democrats made some seriously surprising upset gains in that area - which was something i predicted, once i corrected my understanding of how the area was urbanizing, and how it was deurbanizing. 

does that mean kansas is in play? not yet. but, it might not be very long before kansas is more competitive than iowa.

several decades ago, now, missouri used to be what was called a "bellweather" state, and the reason it was seen as that was that it had demographics that were roughly a microcosm of the country. due to the onset of deurbanization, that is not true, anymore.

i look at missouri on a map, and i see a lot of potential in it. but, i'm not surprised by the results. i've learned to be disappointed by them.

ok.

so, it's taken some time, but the press is cluing in.

how many cases are there down there?

thousands. tens of thousands...

and, then, what's the mortality rate? pretty small.

but, i said this to the border people weeks ago: it's easy for me to shrug it off. i'm young and healthy. if i was 85, i'd have a different perspective.

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/03/coronavirus-testing-numbers/607714/

so many of us want the authorities to take control, and think they can defeat complicated problems by writing and enforcing the right rules. but, it doesn't work.

it doesn't help us understand physics, even if we used to think it did. it doesn't help us solve social problems, even if we wish it did.

and, it won't help us contain an epidemic, either.

if there is one thing i am sure of in this world, it is that authoritarianism is always the wrong approach - that we can't control anything, no matter how hard we try. we are at the perpetual whim of uncertainty and chaos, and we need to start to understand that and act like we do. 

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-03-09/how-coronavirus-spread-from-patient-zero-in-seattle

these researchers had a hunch that the number of cases in iran was dramatically underreported and did some math to deduce more convincing numbers, which is around 20,000 cases.

that would put the death toll in iran around 1%.

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.02.24.20027375v1.full.pdf

access to care is only useful if the doctors take the issue seriously.

the story is still being written, but it seems like the system didn't take the issue seriously enough.

but, i still need to repeat the point that italians like to touch each other. it's crude, but it's true.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/10/from-confidence-to-quarantine-how-coronavirus-swept-italy

i got my motions scheduled.

good...

thank you to popular science for writing the article for me.

https://www.popsci.com/story/science/healthcare-paid-sick-leave-coronavirus/

so, we should expect cheap tp for a while, then, as demand falls to nothing, once supply recovers.

i'd wait.

https://globalnews.ca/news/6654420/toilet-paper-fight-coronavirus/

the cause of the crisis in alberta is poor planning by decades of conservative governance.

what's happening in alberta is not an unexpected crisis, or an act of god - they were told this would happen, and they didn't listen.

i guess they should have listened when the smart kids predicted this twenty years ago, huh?

they've made their bed.

https://www.macleans.ca/economy/the-coronavirus-market-crash-leaves-alberta-running-on-fumes/

again: this is a catalyst, not a cause.

it should be allowed to run it's course. 

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/mar/10/delivery-and-digital-services-thrive-on-coronavirus-outbreak

https://www.retaildive.com/news/the-impact-of-the-coronavirus-on-retail/573522/

i'm going to throw an argument out there about the fears of this hurting the economy, because it's 20th century thinking that isn't taking recent changes in consumer habits into consideration.

the concern is that people will be afraid to go shopping, which will put the economy into a recession. ok. and, that would have been an entirely reasonable concern, even ten years ago.

but, something that's happened over the last ten years is that people have stopped going to malls, anyways - they do almost all of their shopping on the internet, with the glaring exception of groceries.

now, i'm not saying that the kind of effect this will have on businesses is obvious, but i can make a few suggestions:

1) if a longterm fear of going outside kicks in, it could be the final end for certain businesses that have seen their profits come down in the internet era. these would be stores in malls that sell goods that can be easily purchased online. this should be seen as a natural die-off, and nothing should be done to help these businesses. in the end, we may look back and see this as a major catalyst to end certain retail sectors, but we shouldn't delude ourselves - the virus is not the cause of these failures, and this was happening anyways.

2) the corollary of this fear of going outside hurting brick & mortar stores would be that the business would be shifted to online stores, who could see a major uptick in sales. 

so, is stimulus pointless? no. it just needs to be understood where it's going.

and, is recession inevitable? not in totality. certain sectors may get hit, but it's likely to be more of a shift in gdp than a decline in it, because it's increasingly the case that most people do most of their shopping at home, anyways.

as was the case in 2008, we may see a restructuring kick in that signals a final nail in the coffin of these brick & mortar businesses that were dying anyways. and, as was the case in 2008, this restructuring will probably be permanent.

so, that's my read on what the smart kids do about this - they realize the shift in technology that's happening, and they adjust.

so, i would support stimulus, but i would oppose bailouts to brick & mortar stores. this shift needs to be embraced. and, that may be the longer term consequence of this.

it's a good excuse to ram through funding on carbon transition.

https://www.macleans.ca/economy/economicanalysis/canada-needs-a-coronavirus-stimulus-plan-heres-what-it-should-look-like/

it's hard to criticize it, considering that they're right. this was predictable, and it's obvious where they're going with it. when trump gets a chance to rip him in person, it's going to be devastating.

there's an article up at the guardian comparing biden to brezhnev. it may have reached a little. but, what we're seeing happen in the united states is eerily similar to the gerontocracy that took hold in the soviet union near the end of it's collapse.

the next generation of leadership is going to need to institute a lot of put off reforms. let's hope that the better comparison is to an upcoming perestroika, and a newfound imminent glasnost.

for now, i'd get ready for an awful election.

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/03/10/trump-biden-clinton-age-senile-124797

i'm advocating finding ways around them. 

but, if you want to go right through them, if you want to be a socialist and win south carolina at the same time, you have to hold that mirror up - you have to get them out of their clutches.

and, that is going to be a vicious, nasty fight that will take decades and might even lead to violence.

there's a white king and a black king, isn't there?

everything that bernie sanders says about him reflects an understanding of the white king, when he talks to black voters about him. and, i'm not sure he even realizes it.

biden is probably worse, but he doesn't hit those nasty trigger points in those obvious ways.

sometimes, the more you talk about something, the deeper you dig yourself in - and, sometimes, you don't know it.

was jesus a socialist revolutionary?

i dunno. kind of. a bit.

but, i know you're going to lose a lot of white people if you set up a political rally outside of a church and you start talking like that.

it's a bunch of white people coming in from new york and trying to redefine their history in terns they don't recognize, or reject.

of course they don't like it.

trying to present dr. king as a socialist rather than a reverend is the kind of thing that's going to confuse them and scare them off, as though you're an agent of satan or something.

he's basically revered and seen as a saint or a prophet, not as a socialist revolutionary. contradicting or muddying that means you're trying to undo things without even realizing what you're trying to undo.

martin luther king may have had socialist sympathies, and he may have been surrounded by socialists, as well.

but, he attracted people because he was a church leader, not because he was a socialist.

and, when the movement tried to move more towards socialism, wihout the explicit religious foundation, it faltered.

socialists used to understand the retarding effect of religion, and the necessity of breaking the power of the church.

there's really no better example than amongst black voters in the south. 

the real reason that they won't vote for socialists is that they've been brainwashed by christianity. and, this is the oldest problem on the left - how do you get them away from the church without triggering them and pushing them in further? 

the best answer anybody has been able to come up with is to lure them out of the grips of the church by sending them to school. but, it means you need to get into power first.

so long as the church remains the dominant force in southern society, these voters are lost to the socialist cause.

i would guess that a part of the reason that sanders does so poorly with black voters is that he reminds them of the activists in the 60s that they were taught to reject, and ultimately did, under the guidance of the religious authorities.

what happened to this movement? it was suppressed, but it ultimately got abandoned and rejected. and, by who? the people that sanders is trying to get to vote for him.

so, invoking this stuff is probably hurting him more than it's helping him.

this is a ridiculous article, as though citing a couple of people can be extrapolated to an entire subculture.

it is true that these radical black movements were shut down by force, with prominent leaders being assassinated or jailed. but, it's also true that they were broadly unsuccessful in generating any sort of critical mass.

 

the reality is that black voters looked at the black panthers, and looked at the church, and picked the church over the black panthers.

sanders does get a few black people to vote for him - about 10-15%, in most places. further, they skew younger, which would help him in the 2032 election cycle - and while nobody should be surprised if he at least tries this again in 2024, we can rule out 2032 pretty effectively. 

the reality is that that 10-15% is just about the maximum reach you're going to get from this black left today, and was about the maximum reach you were going to get from it in the 60s. it's never been more than that, and fantasies to the contrary are just a type of historical revisionism.

activists can often shout louder than silent majorities. but, the data has never upheld the urban legend of the black left. it's just another 60s counterculture myth erected by revisionists in the 90s.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/10/us/black-socialists-bernie-sanders-blake/index.html

yeah - whoever was in here and jerked off on my bed also dismantled my firewall, and fucked with my system services.

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

this one, too.

i apologize. i suggested that it would be a clean split, and she would barely win, not that he would win.

he won by 1.5%. so, that's correct up to reasonable error - and certainly closer than anybody else.

the last video points out that the error that the msm made was that it looked at aggregate polling over weeks, instead of recent snapshots, which had sanders gaining very quickly.

but, the signals i got in 2016 are not present right now and i'm not repeating my analysis - it looks like biden will win big.

there are writeups for each of these videos.

in european history, there is a broad dividing line between the romans and the germans, going back thousands of years, with the celts lining up in between.

the romans, drawing from the greeks, are a people that believe in order and empire. they believe in a society rooted in law, and in later years they became dominated by an expression of greek philosophy called christianity.

the germans, on the other hand, were anarchists. they believed that rules should be malleable and adjustable, they believed in grassroots democracy and they rejected dominance and empire. 

i'm oversimplifying this because i don't want to write this essay right now, i just want to get the point across - i don't want to be an imperialist italian, i want to be an anarchist german. so, i will align with my mother's heritage rather than my father's.

but, i know i am both - and i know i have ancestry outside of europe, as well.

my mother only ever spoke english. i'd guess her father ever only spoke english; his ancestry is scottish/welsh all the way back. her mother only ever spoke english, but my mother's mother's mother's side was norwegian, and her father was irish. so, that's how far back you have to go on that side to get a culture that is not anglicized canadian.

my father spoke french, and i should probably speak better french, too. he did not speak italian. both of his parents spoke french and english, and i don't think they spoke anything else. you'd have to go back to my grandmother's parents or great grandparents before you got to any italian or jewish or native, and while i've seen pictures of my grandfather's mother (who was french canadian), his father's ancestry remains a serious mystery, and is likely some combination of jewish, eastern african and native american. 

i'm simply too far removed from an ancestry outside of this province to have any attachment to it.

but, culturally, i'd rather be norwegian than italian.

fwiw, i have no particular attachment to italy. i know i have italian ancestry, but i'd never identify myself as italian.

i was not raised with any italian heritage; i wasn't even aware of it until i was in my mid-teens. you know how i learned this? i invited a zito over to my house for a school project in the 8th grade, and my dad told him that his mother's name was zito. i had no idea up until that point; i would have told people he was french. 

i don't speak italian. i wasn't raised religiously. 

the most italian thing about me is that i eat a lot of pasta. really.

i'd identify more readily as norwegian, from my mother's side, which is a culture i feel a stronger affinity with.

but, i'm a canadian. my ancestors come from 20 different countries, and i'm not really strongly connected to any of them. the only language i speak is english, but i actually have no english heritage. i probably look more jewish than anything else...

but, i like the culture of the northern european barbarian more than i like the settled culture of southern europe or the middle east, and would prefer to identify with the later rather than the former.

why is italy getting hit with mortality rates more similar to china and the united states than mortality rates comparable to other oecd countries?

that's a complicated question that i'm not ready to take a guess at, and that is no doubt not particularly pressing to the people on the ground. but, i can point a few things out about italy.

italy actually has an unusually high poverty rate for a western europe country; it's poverty rate is actually comparable to that in the united states, which is unusual for western europe. it's a country with a lot of open markets and public functions, which is different from much of northern europe - but so is spain. 

this article suggests that italy just has an unusually high number of very old people, so, oddly, it's high mortality rate is a consequence of it's longer average lifespan:

https://inews.co.uk/news/health/coronavirus-italy-why-so-bad-cases-deaths-lockdown-northern-areas-explained-2444517

these are things that will need to be worked out over time.

for right now, it is an outlier on the continent, and i suspect that this isn't all that surprising to most europeans.

if you remove italy from the dataset, the mortality rate in europe remains under 1%. 

they've done studies and concluded that people watching fox are actually less informed than people that don't watch the news at all. 

i'd like to see these studies replicated for msnbc and cnn. it's no doubt just as true, and maybe even worse. 

just turn your tv off. it's fucking trash. all of it.

so, you'll note that as more testing has been done in the united states, they've found hundreds of more cases and the mortality rate has gone from ~7% to ~3.5-4%, which is about on par with that in china.

the people arguing for hundreds of unreported cases have been proven right, and the smug idiots in the culturally liberal msm have been proven wrong. again.

will it come down more than that? i don't know. i just knew that the mortality rate in the united states was higher than logic would suggest that it should be, and something wasn't adding up. there had to be more cases than that.

but, the numbers are making more sense, now. what's next is an open question - can the united states bring it's numbers down to the levels in western europe? or are the results of it's health care system fundamentally more in line with china's?

the experiment is playing out, and we'll find out.

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/