Galileo

By some circuitous route (doesn't matter), I ended up on his wiki page. This particular quote, like Ruby Begonia, strikes a familiar note.

Galileo's championing of Copernican heliocentrism was met with opposition from within the Catholic Church and from some astronomers. The matter was investigated by the Roman Inquisition in 1615, which concluded that his opinions contradicted accepted Biblical interpretations

He wasn't burned at the stake, as was Bruno and some, according to the wiki narrative, viewed his handling as cowardly.

Will the Evangelical Reactionary Radical Right Wingnuts under Garfield 2.0 deal with the Smart and Scientific Set the same way? What's your bet?

Best Case Scenario

As I've opined, the best case scenario for surviving Garfield 2.0 is for his demented directives to crash the economy along about June, 2025. If he does what he promised, not out of the question. Well... he's staaaaarted

President-elect Donald Trump said that he plans to institute a 25% tariff on all products coming into the US from Canada and Mexico, starting on the first day of his administration.

Do you know when he got the rag on about Canada? Lots of good hooch from there. Of course, Real Americans only drink Kentucky Bourbon swill. They ain't got no palate.

No more cheap avocado from Mexico.

Being an ignorant slut, Garfield 2.0 has no idea that taxing (which is what a tariff is, but you do know that, right?) goods for which there is an American equivalent primarily encourages American producers to raise their price to a penny or two below the import price. Why not? The import isn't going to get any cheaper. The CPI will soar. Well... may be. Being the Unitary Executive, Garfield 2.0 has the authority to order Census/BLS to report CPI at the number Garfield 2.0 wants. The Greatest Threat in action.

Of course, for the scenario to work out, Garfield 2.0 will have to not suspend elections in 2026 in addition to not messing too much with the macro-data. I'm not willing to make odds on that.

A Game of Chicken

Just happened to be channel surfing, and came across a "Good Eats: Reloaded" episode (2019) on chicken. In fact, left it to compose this. In the narration, Alton mentions the USDA requirements for "organic". They're rather extensive, and expensive. So, let's say that one of the agribusiness poultry oligarches calls up The Utterly Unhinged^© and says that these requirements are cutting into profit. "Could you please tell USDA to lay off? We'll pay a nice fee to USDA (and you, of course), to cut back on the requirements. Waddaya say, big guy?"

USDA poultry organic requirements. Feel free to read them, if needed.

Corruption - part the third

Well... not to be outdone by The Boss, we now find that Boris is up to his ears in shit. Why would we expect any different? We need keep in mind that The Gang of Six^© has deemed immune for any actions deemed (by whom, exactly?) an Official Act. So, one might surmise that Boris's influence peddling is standard operating procedure for any American Bidnezzman.

The internal investigation, which was confirmed by half a dozen sources and is not criminal in nature, has probed multiple instances of Epshteyn allegedly requesting payment in exchange for promoting candidates for administration positions or offering to connect individuals with people in the upcoming administration relevant to their industries, sources said.

In one instance he requested as much as $100,000 per month in exchange for his services, according to sources familiar with the matter.

Hey, if it's your cow, milk it to death.

Scammers

Well... at long last Cassava Sciences (SAVA) reported out the data in its first PIII trial. Not even close. As I type, the share is down 86%. Since it has no other compounds, that I'm aware of, the company is toast. What's particularly devious, just a week ago they hired a commercial officer, thus pumping the share.

The second trial is shut down.

What started out as a pain compound company, morphed into an Alzheimer's outfit on the basis of a compound with a fantastical MoA. Many in the scientific community called it out as garbage over the years, but relying on gullible retail plungers, kept the momentum going for more than a decade based on vapour. Quite a trick. Now, the turkeys have come home to roost. And a boatload of retail plungers won't be moving into their villas in France and St. Kitts.

There is a legion of nano- and micro- cap pharmas out there promising that they've found the answer, where Big Pharma has failed. Seldom happens, and when it has, it's because the nano-cap has developed a robust platform tech over many years, not just a single molecule. Caveat emptor.

Spoilers

As of now, 18:54 24 November, the wiki report has an interesting sidebar. What if there weren't any other candidates but The Utterly Unhinged^© and Commie Law and the Junk Yard Dog^© and that the Other votes all went to Commie Law and the Junk Yard Dog^©? The latter not necessarily too far fetched, in that his zealots know better than to defect. Death and all that.

Trump  - 76,876,907
Harris - 77,317,255 

Landslide mandate my bony ass.

Captain Obvious - part the third

Well... The Musk Ox, et al, are on the verge of demanding that all Damn Gummint workers return to their offices. At the same time the putative DOGE (fun fact: the word actually means a Venetian Dictator) intends to save (high income) taxpayers money. "Danger Will Robinson", Cognitive dissonance here.

As Dr. McElhone was fond of saying, "It is intuitively obvious to even the most casual observer..." that these are mutually contradictory orders. Exactly how much the organizations save by not having bodies in the buildings is open to debate, but here's one estimate.

According to Global Workplace Analytics, a remote workforce helped IBM save $50 million on real estate costs.

And that's just part of the savings.

Stupid is as stupid does. Well... OK, the reason for ending remote work isn't better productivity or such, it's just intended to cull the best workers from the Damn Gummint so the Damn Gummint will fail, and give Garfield 2.0 and his henchmen the meme to assert that the Damn Gummint is worthless. And so forth.

By The Numbers - part the eighty first

Well... the MAGAnauts keep bleating about landslide and mandate and such. But we now know that Kim Don Jon polled under 50% of the popular vote, once again a minority dictator. He slithered in under the Blue Wall, which he did by a margin (as of 20 Nov) of 231,648 votes.

How did he do that? By the skin of his teeth. This is the number of precincts in the states.

PA    -  9,000 
MI    -  5,235 
WI    -  3,563 
total - 17,798

Simple arithmetic: just 13 votes/precinct made the difference.

Tough Love

Well... just about every day the Limp Wristed Lefties bleating that the sub-GED crowd is such a large part of the electorate (where's those jelly bean jar IQ tests that Confederate states used to use?) that they have to do something to carve them off from the MAGAnauts. How, exactly would that work? "Yeah, we're the reason you chuckleheads don't make $100,000 a year with no education and no skill set. It's all our fault, we know it. We'll order American Bidnezzmen to give you guys, and not those with education and skill sets, $100,000 a year." Not even The Utterly Unhinged^© is confident enough that he can bamboozle the sub-GED crowd with that one. Instead, he and the GOP going back to the Southern Strategy have sung the culture wars anthem.

What's amusing: going back forever the Evangelical Reactionary Radical Right Wingnut crowd have preached laissez faire economics, which requires that individual workers 'negotiate' with employers for wages, and the final answer will be what the employer is willing to pay. Based on education and skill set; unless the employer is your Dad, of course. The Evangelical Reactionary Radical Right Wingnuts are fully aware that they're flummoxing these bird brains; cruelty is the whole point.

The Limp Wristed Lefties have habitually been concerned with Doing Good Works, and ignored the marketing. The Utterly Unhinged^© was smart enough to be devious enough to get his signature on those stimulus checks. One might mention that Sleepy Joe's covid stimulus got the blame, a tad, for the latter inflation, but not The Utterly Unhinged^©.

It's beyond fantasy to play the same tune as Evangelical Reactionary Radical Right Wingnuts to convince the sub-GED crowd. They're in thrall to the notion that their lot in life is due, solely, to some amorphous Highly Educated Elite out to make their lives as miserable as possible. They remain certain that the cause is not the Billionaire Boy's Club to which The Utterly Unhinged^© is a card-carrying member.

What to do? What to do?

Straight talk. Tell the sub-GED crowd that the cause of their lot is that they're dumb as a sack of hair, no president or administration, Left or Right, can force employers to pay the sub-GED crowd upper-middle class wages. Never going to happen. Remind them that the Evangelical Reactionary Radical Right Wingnuts have been the bloc that have consistently blocked increases in the minimum wage for instance; "bidnezzmen simply can't afford to pay these people!!"

Remind them that Evangelical Reactionary Radical Right Wingnuts have consistently blocked aid to higher education, including STEM in high school.

In the end, it's going to be a generational slog. Neither Commie Law and the Junk Yard Dog^© nor The Utterly Unhinged^© could take out a magic wand and turn a sub-GED knuckledragger, especially the bunch that want to be that way, into an MBA or chemist or linguist. What the Limp Wristed Lefties can do is offer an opportunity to climb out of ignorance, while the MAGAnauts want to keep them with a belief in persecution and retribution. Not against their real oppressors, but the imagined Highly Educated Elite.

For The Defense

A friend used to be a Federal Public Defender, aka criminal mouthpiece. With more talk of The Utterly Unhinged^© ordering Gaetz/etc. to prosecute anyone who said a discouraging word about The Utterly Unhinged^© or one of his minions, and most of the victims will turn out to be just GS-11 worker bees, the office will be flooded with victims. I guess he could come out of retirement and lend a hand. The Supremes said he can do this.

Life in Trumpistan - part the first

The world of fake news just got fakeier. This one's a beaut.

Project 2025 — the controversial blueprint for a newly reimagined federal government that Trump tried to distance himself from during the campaign despite numerous ties to its authors — called for NOAA to be "broken up and downsized" and said the agency was part of the "climate change alarm industry."

Lutnick, scientist du jour, will decree that global warming is a hoax and NOAA will never again use the term. I'll bet anything.

Here's a detailed review. We're not in Kansas anymore.

It would not be the first time The Utterly Unhinged^© tried to scrub science from the Damn Gummint.

"But this is what Americans can expect from Donald Trump, who as President abandoned the NSC's pandemic unit, suggested nuking hurricanes, lied about storms paths, said injecting Americans with bleach would kill sickness, and denied basic climate science," Singer added. "It's no surprise his allies' Project 2025 agenda builds on that extreme legacy."

Already the private sector, in the form of home insurance companies, is well on its way to clear out Florida. May be Gov. DeMented will end up in some storm shelter with a mass of Mexican illegals. Such a pretty sight.

Thought For The Day - 19 November 2024

C'mon Man!!! Are Joe and Mika so dumb as to think a visit now to The Utterly Unhinged^© will, in any way, stop him from siccing any and all departments of the Damn Gummint on them if they should utter one little word of criticism? Really?

[update]
Well... now that reporting is out that The Utterly Unhinged^© margin has slipped below the vaunted 50% landslide value (49.9%), how soon will the Gym Boy Jordan bloviate on Fox or Newsmax or News Nation that the Dems must have fiddled the total vote count. Must be those Jewish space lasers again. Very handy, those Jewish space lasers.

By The Numbers - part the eightieth

The wiki is a very useful reference, in that it aggregates data for you. At the moment (13:51 18 Nov), The Utterly Unhinged^© has a 2.6 million vote lead, and sits at 50% of the popular vote. So, enquiring minds want to know, how close is this 'win' for the corrupt? Turns out, kinda close.

If we limit ourselves to just the 50 state elections, Dubya and The Utterly Unhinged^© both had negative margins. And The Utterly Unhinged^© has the third smallest lead, by a bunch, when winning from ahead.

2024 - 1.72%
1968 - 0.70%
1960 - 0.17%

The next closest race: Carter at 2.06%.

Parsing through the table, the sore thumb sticking out is the wild gyrations in margins. Some in low single digits, others well above 20%. Harding, King of Corruption (died before he got caught) and Coolidge his deathbed successor, bested FDR's margins; all of them. More proof that Menken was right.

The Greatest Threat - part the fourth

David "I'm not as crazy as MAGA" French opines today that

Donald Trump is planting the seeds of his own political demise. The corrupt, incompetent and extremist men and women he's appointing to many of the most critical posts in his cabinet are direct threats to the well-being of the country, but they're also political threats to Trump and to his populist allies.

French's latest attempt to be the Compassionate Conservative. Baloney. As detailed in previous episodes, The Utterly Unhinged^© is singing

Where never is heard a discouraging word, and the sky is not clouded all day

There will be no government data which exposes the MAGA Kleptocracy. (Much, if not most, Federal data collection is done by Census, irregardless of the department publishing.) Shut down data collection at Census and the Fed. IOW, there's a small nexus, more or less, to strangle. Shutdown news media which tell the truth. You think I'm kidding?

So, French makes his case with

If he can't govern well, his populist partisan realignment will come apart before it can truly begin.

Which is Pollyanna on crack. As Bannon and the Project 2025 crew avow, the point is to not govern. The point is to create anarchy. And, as history and logic tell us, anarchy favors the rich. Which is the point of The Utterly Unhinged^© and The Musk Ox.

He closes with a view through scarlet glasses

Senator Roger Marshall of Kansas defended the Gaetz pick, saying, "Trump was elected to turn this place upside down." That's what Trump thinks. That's what MAGA thinks. But MAGA should beware. If Trump's cabinet picks help him usher in the chaos that is the water in which he swims, then the question won't be whether voters rebuke MAGA again, but rather how much damage it does before it fails once more.

The MAGAnauts, as The Utterly Unhinged^© promised:

Former President Donald Trump called on Christians to flood the polls in November, promising that if they vote him into office, they "won't have to vote again" in four years.

Of course he was serious, although clearly not Christian himself, and of course his zealots believed him. And, of course, these idiots still believe that their lives will be so much better with The Utterly Unhinged^© laying waste to governance. And his cabinet has stated plainly that the Trump Dynasty is just beginning. Ignore the law. Break the law. The Supremes will call this all "official duties" and therefore not actionable. Send the Army to quell demonstrations. Toss apostates into detention camps. Not actionable. All right out of the dictator's handbook.

We Have Liftdown!

We have liftdown!! Just fell to 50%!!! 8:30 EST 18 Nov. Now, that's a landslide. Still ~7,000,000 to count still most in CA. Come on The Utterly Unhinged^©, you can do it. Be a true dictator! The minority sucks up all the resources. Just like Putin and his bungalow on the Black Sea.

At least half of the voters down't want a criminal president.

Question For The Day - 16 November 2024

As the days go by, The Utterly Unhinged^©'s margin steps down to below the landslide 50%. As I type, he's at 50.1 which is a 2.70 million margin, with more than that still to be counted on the West Coast.

Obviously, 50.1% ain't no landslide. Gym Boy Jordan has been silent on corrupted voting this time around. Will his head explode if Commie Law and the Junk Yard Dog^© pulls The Utterly Unhinged^© to 50% or lower??? I hope so.

update - 16:30
For context, 2020 total vote was 157 million (late into 2022, so about as close to 100% as one can get), while we're at 150 million, IOW, there's still room for Commie Law and the Junk Yard Dog^© to drive The Utterly Unhinged^© under 50%. Oh joy, oh joy!!! Fuck that mandate.

Protect the Women and Children!

Well... that didn't take long. Protect the women and children!!! RFK is only proposed to take over HHS, and the bio ETF takes it in the neck. Cool. Lost more than 5% as I type. Your mileage may vary.

The Greatest Threat - part the third

Well, that didn't take long. New reporting that The Utterly Unhinged^© intends to stifle NOAA and its children.

In the 2018 book "The Fifth Risk," which details efforts to shrink the federal government under Donald Trump's first presidential administration, the author Michael Lewis described what it would mean to lose NOAA information. "Without that data and the Weather Service to make sense of it," Lewis wrote, "no plane would fly, no bridge would be built and no war would be fought — at least not well."€

The Utterly Unhinged^© will keep his Superwide Sharpie ready for action.

Stupid is as stupid does

Trump has called climate change a hoax and said he would rollback climate regulations, and, according to Lewis's book, officials in the Trump White House did not know that NOAA existed or what it did when Trump took office in 2017.

Nominating Gaetz, although may be only a semi-pardon, is clearly a shot across the bow of the populace

"So, you say I'm a total whack job? Try this for size. And there'll be more where that came from."

What's odd is that the Republicans should be able to do simple arithmetic: he can't last much longer. Did you see the video of him being stuffed into that garbage truck? He starts out as a lame duck paper tiger. Now, it is true that Alzheimer's Ronnie was handled by Nancy for most of his second term. Same sort of thing for Wilson. FDR was physical, not mental, in case you're asking. Can there be a worthy successor? Not usually, outside real monarchies or dictatorships. We're not yet in the latter. Knock on wood.

MAGA is as MAGA Does

One way to parse the election is to look back, a bit, on the level of education of the Red states. Here's the fake news.

Of the 20 states with the lowest per pupil spending, 17 (Alabama, Arkansas, Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Kentucky, Mississippi, North Carolina, New Mexico, Nevada, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Utah) were in the South or West regions. The remaining three were Missouri, South Dakota and Indiana.`

Of that list, only New Mexico and Colorado voted Commie Law and the Junk Yard Dog^©.

The Red state education motto: "Ya don't need no book larnin to walk behind a plow mule or make babies. We need more White babies." Of course, Mother Earth is either at or finger nail close to her capacity. Naturally, the White countries will suck resources from the Shithole countries to keep us obese and happy. Just as we've always done.

Now that MAGA has the Damn Gummint by the nuts, expect funding for all kinds of nutball Evangelical Reactionary Radical Right Wingnut programs. Ya know, like teaching that the Bible is 100% accurate history, Mother Earth is 6,000 years old, and that our ancestors frolicked with dinosaurs. And, of course, climate change is a woke hoax.

The net result of this assault on science and reason is that today's breeders of rug rats will bestow on their own a burnt out cinder of a planet. Always keep in mind Dr. McElhone, "The world is not linear." Once you're in the bend, the ride upward is rapid.

The Greatest Threat - part the second

Well...

Now that Gaetz and Gabbard are on the board, time to game plan the data threat. Soon after the inauguration, The Utterly Unhinged^© will sign an executive order requiring all agencies to pre-file any public statement through the White House. Either The Utterly Unhinged^© will approve, or one of his loyal servants will. There will never be any bad news about the self-serving machinations, and that includes stuff that benefits The Musk Ox and other toadies. Kleptocracy is the rule of law.

We're on the road to dystopia. Too bad it's not just another Hope and Crosby song fest.

Question For The Day - 13 November 2024

As the days go by, The Utterly Unhinged^©'s margin steps down to below the landslide 50%. As I type, he's at 50.2 which is a 3.16 million margin, with more than that still to be counted on the West Coast.

Obviously, 50.2% ain't no landslide. Gym Boy Jordan has been silent on corrupted voting this time around. Will his head explode if Commie Law and the Junk Yard Dog^© pulls The Utterly Unhinged^© to 50% or lower??? I hope so.

2024 Post Mortem - part the first

All the data isn't in yet, and won't be for some time. What we need to see is the precinct level data to know whether The Great and Powerful Odd^© has, in fact, flipped a significant number of bricks in the Blue Wall. As of now, the data say no.

Here is an instant analysis from the NYT, and it, so far, supports my instant analysis of last Wednesday: the pussy Dems just stayed home. I suppose that enough of the city slickers figured that there'd be so many city slickers out for The Great and Powerful Odd^©'s neck that their vote wouldn't be needed. They were wrong.

Counties with the biggest Democratic victories in 2020 delivered 1.9 million fewer votes for Ms. Harris than they had for Mr. Biden. The nation's most Republican-heavy counties turned out an additional 1.2 million votes for Mr. Trump this year, according to the analysis of the 47 states where the vote count is largely complete.

You can't win if you don't vote.

Whether or not The Great and Powerful Odd^© has turned the USofA into Trumpistan for good and all is a question that can't be answered right now. There's still counting on the West Coast, and enough votes to make The Great and Powerful Odd^© a minority president, yet again. He sure ain't gonna be a landslide.

To answer the question, one need compare the precinct level votes to, at least, 2020 to understand whether The Great and Powerful Odd^©'s margin in popular vote came from additional voting for him (my guess right now) or from Dems. who decide to go MAGA (not my guess right now). It's difficult to see what a Dem. would find appealing in The Great and Powerful Odd^©? He's gotten only more batshit since 2016 and 2020.

Phasers to Stun

Those of you who don't follow pharma as a fact of life may find the RFK, Jr. meme puzzling but not dangerous. Well, it is dangerous. But there is inherent danger in all of pharma, and in CNS space (central nervous system drugs) particularly. Such drugs rely, (almost?) exclusively on subjective surveys of symptoms and behaviors. The space is reknowned for 'unexpected' placebo effects in trials. After all, if what you're measuring isn't some sort of titer, can you trust all the humans involved in generating the data?

As we've found drugs for 'normal' disease, the CNS space emerges as a Final Frontier. What to do, what to do? Well... take a flyer. Most CNS maladies don't have the TAM of normal diseases, so end up with eardrum haemorrhaging prices. In all, billion dollar M&A is becoming more common. AbbVie dropped a cool $9 billion for an outfit that had a spiffy schizophrenia drug in trials. Turns out, the wheel came up 13 Red. Oops.

What is amazing is that the drug failed in PII!! That's not supposed to happen with a drug. The whole point of staged phase trials is that PII is supposed to, designed to, prove what was seen in pre-clinical and PI: the spiffy new drug is the silver bullet. The way that happens (most drug failures happen later in PIII) is that the sponsor, working with the CRO carefully vet sites, patients, data recorders, and the rest of the whole nine yards in order to have a sample (typically an order of magnitude smaller than the follow-on PIII) of patients who can't possibly fail. Or, that's the intent. Not this time.

In the first trial, AbbVie tracked numerically bigger reductions in PANSS scores, 14.7 and 16.5 points, in the emraclidine arms than in the placebo group, 13.5 points. However, the difference fell short of statistical significance. In the second trial, placebo beat one of the two emraclidine doses numerically, racking up a 16.1-point improvement compared to the 14.2-point reduction in the treatment group.
-- my emphasis

No doubt, finding drugs for such CNS maladies is a good thing. But we're not messing with some virus or bacterium that we can slay without hurting the rest of the body too, too much. The current crop of drugs targeting Alzheimer's, Parkinsons, ALS, and such are all in the same swamp.

The Corruption Begins

The corruption begins. The Great and Powerful Odd^© demands that any appointee need not be vetted. Just like a dictator. Are you really, really surprised?

The mob gave us this notion of "governance". Not what the Founders had in mind, but what Andy Jackson invented. The Great and Powerful Odd^©'s Heeero.

The Greatest Threat

To repeat the title: what does gentle reader consider the biggest threat from The Great and Powerful Odd^© sitting in power? There are a host of possibilities, naturally, after all, this is a madman.

Beyond the Revenge Tour, which will be extra-legal and likely reserved for the high flyers who defied him, I'll illustrate. Remember when he sat down with the 'official' map of Hurricane Dorian, and with his signatlure Superwide Sharpy added a blob to the end of the cone of uncertainty to put the storm into Georgia and Alabama? NOAA responded by saying that he was an idiot. Well... may be not so honestly.

Now that the Supremes have codified the Unified Executive assertion, NOAA will not do that again. NOAA will not ever mention global warming or hurricane intensity and such. What will happen is that no department will ever, ever release data that casts anything The Great and Powerful Odd^© does or says as false.

That goes, in particular, for all economic data. Employment will always be great. Inflation will always be low. Migrants will always be killing citizens. Interest rate will always need to be lower. You get the notion. It will happen. All those billionaires who patted themselves on the back for getting him back on the Throne, will be sailing blind through their seas of troubles, having no idea what the numbers really are.

He's asserted that he knows more about monetary policy, and should be allowed to meddle with interest rates

"I feel the president should have at least a say in there. I feel that strongly," Trump said at a press conference in August, referring to the Fed's interest rate decisions. "I made a lot of money. I was very successful. And I think I have a better instinct than, in many cases, people that would be on the Federal Reserve — or the chairman."

Of course, he made his money by scamming lenders from here to Timbuktu, bankrupting 6 of his 'companies' in the process. And, it's just a fact that the real estate business always wants interest rate lower than whale shit. To remind: The Great and Powerful Odd^© couldn't get into the BBA program at Wharton back when that program accepted any warm body. He slunk off to Fordham as a frosh. Then, his brother arranged to get him in the side door of Wharton for his last two years. And, no, there's not a shred of evidence that he graduated at the top of his class, not even cum laude. Grifters will grift.

It's a brave new world, grasshopper.

Lunatic Left

The GOP has been stoking the anger of the sub-GED class for decades, at least since Nixon's Southern Strategy. The Great Unhinged just soaked it in gasoline and tossed in a lit match. The Left Wing pundits, with the loss to The Great Unhinged are wringing their hands. It's a losing battle. Here's why.

There was, is, and always will be a skill/wage function. The more skill, the higher wage; assuming that the greater skill comes as result of ability and larnin. This function is out of the control of a Party or a President, at least in the short to medium term. And, moreover, that Party or President has to be serious about improving the skill level of the low/least skilled people. The GOP has never been interested. Educated folks tend toward Liberal because they simply understand the world better; not just life in the holler. The GOP would rather the latter.

Here's where the rubber meets the road: at least many, if not most, of the white uneducated, unskilled, underpaid underclass are in that condition by choice. Many may not realize it, and fewer would admit it. They favor huntin and fishin and fightin over book larnin. Just go look at the education data by Red and Blue. It ain't a pretty picture.

There's data to back this up, as Sosnik has previously written. In an August report on growing income inequality in the US, the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis documented that for every dollar of wealth in a household headed by a college graduate, a household headed by a high school graduate has 22 cents

How then, to entice people who feel persecuted by the Lunatic Left to vote Democrat? They expressly ignore the fact that it's been the Dems who've legislated to provide them better opportunity. It's a fact that low-to-no skill labor earned a better wage when unions were not busted. The GOP, and their friends in bidnezz, did that. It will take a generation or two of increased engagement with education for the sub-GED class to move up. There was a time, even in my memory, when downtrodden parents were happy to see their kids finish high school and may be college. These days, not so much. Such families have been convinced by the GOP that their grievance (or just plain jealousy) against the educated folk is real, and not their fault. But it is. Such folk continue to elect politicians who offer shitty schooling; that has to stop.

As always the Evangelical Radical Right Reactionary Wingnuts offer up battle in a culture war instead of a path out of poverty. "Our reactionary view of the world is better than that Liberal shit of Blacks and Jews and Queers. We must rid the Real USofA of such 'absolute garbage'. It's us or them!"

The Electoral College was supposed to protect the country from government of, by, and for the illiterate mob. It's failed. Miserably.

The Great Unhinged and his cabal will party like it's 1829. Too bad the rest of us have to live that way, too.

The Senate Bump

Luckily for me, the question has been answered. Is there a case when a President was elected through the EC solely by the fact that shitkicker states get the unfair advantage of 2 extra electors. IOW, what is the EC result if only based on House seats? Turns out, 3 Presidents got away with murder. The last being Dubya, and The Supremes couldn't have put their thumb on the scales to save him. Here's the story.

With the two electoral vote bump removed, Gore would have won 225-211.

Hell of a democracy.

Lazy Bastards

2020 registered voters - 240,000,000 
2020 people voted      - 158,427,986

2020 sat on their asses and didn't vote - ~81,000,000

2024 people voted - 140,439,667

It looks like neither landslide emerged. Just a bunch of lazy bastards. The Blue Wall fell by 242,000 votes.

@22:33 6 Nov.

By The Numbers - part the seventy ninth [update beta]

A sad day for democracy. All those who voted for The Great Unhinged^© because they want a Strong Man as president will reap Menken's fury. So will the rest of us who wanted no such thing.

Which brings us to an early (likely incomplete), post-mortem: how come? While all the numbers aren't in, it's clear that the Latino vote abandoned the Democrats. And, why would that be? I've long harbored a distrust, in the political sense only, of that bloc. The reason is that most of Latin America has a history, and currency, of autocratic rule are worst, and one party control at best, energized democracy not so much. Thus immigrants from such countries are enured to the likes of The Great Unhinged^©. And they voted that way. Irregardless of the simple fact that political support has always come from the Dems and The Great Unhinged^© blamed them for the ills of the USofA!! "Poisoning the blood" and all that. That's cognitive dissonance that boggles the mind. Whether the Latino bloc has pulled off Jill Stein 2016 is not yet clear, but they put a big dent in Commie Law and the Junk Yard Dog^©'s total. The answer will pop up in the news soon enough. One has to wonder how many of these legal MAGA Latinos will end up being deported? Just like the VA 'illegal' voters who were actually legal. I hope it's millions.

The other conundrum: of the 10 states voting on abortion, 7 passed and 1 'abstained'
Here are the passed:
Missouri - Trump
Nevada - ? Trump
Montana - Trump
Arizona - ? Trump
Colorado - Harris
Maryland - Harris
New York - Harris

Nebraska implicitly defeated 6 week ban by keeping the 12 week ban (for now) and a majority passed the viability amendment, but by less than the 12 week and thus lost; quite a catch, that catch-22.

A good deal of cognitive dissonance on display. Not enough, on this basis alone, to give her the White House.

The Big Question: will all this reactionary shit cause significant brain drain in these antebellum shithole states? One can only hope.

By The Numbers - part the seventy eighth

Well... prediction time. As one might imagine, Commie Law and the Junk Yard Dog^© is my preference, for a host of reasons. But that don't amount to a hill of beans, and all that.

The 'honest' polling has Commie Law and the Junk Yard Dog^© with a 3 to 4 point lead, nationally. But, as we all regret, that doesn't amount to a hill of beans, either. On another forum (not one of mine) the electoral college came up, yet again. Which led me to explore its history again. The most mind boggling is that for the first few elections, the electors were appointed by the state legislatures directly. No voting required.

In spite of Hamilton's assertion that electors were to be chosen by mass election, initially, state legislatures chose the electors in most of the states.

Moreover, we find that electoral colleges have been shitcanned in every Western democracy that had one; except here, of course.

By the end of the 20th century, electoral colleges had been abandoned by all other democracies around the world in favor of direct elections for an executive president.

Which, more or less, brings us to reading some tea leaves. We know that the Gold Standard Iowa poll has Commie Law and the Junk Yard Dog^© ahead of The Orange Shitgibbon^©anon., which has sent him into near earth orbit. We know that Dems are out voting Reps in early voting. We know that wimins are out voting male chauvinist pigs in the early voting. We know that Sleepy Joe earned 7,000,000 more votes than The Orange Shitgibbon^©anon. in 2020.

The Evangelical Radical Right Wingnuts have, at least since Nixon (but really long before), not run campaigns on political issues, but rather culture wars, which are wholly based on population density, i.e. shitkickers and the Bible vs. city folk and education. Not the Koran or The Vedas or The Tripitaka or any of those other pagan religions count. It's not as if the shitkickers have advanced any part of USofA life over the last 225 years, now have they? Along that line, I'm always amused, although not recently for obvious reasons, by photos of bin Laden directing using a satellite phone. What better way to drag the globe, the Western part anyway, back to 600 AD? Of course the Evangelical Radical Right Wingnuts want us to go back to 1 AD, or even earlier if they can find some text that fits their male chauvinist demands.

In sum then, what's going to happen? We know that Sleepy Joe earned 7,000,000 more votes than The Orange Shitgibbon^©anon.. We know that wimins are pissed at The Orange Shitgibbon^©anon. for not only killing Roe, but boasting about it. And we know that females are out voting males by a non-trivial margin so far. So, we can surmise that Blue voting is running ahead of what Sleepy Joe earned in 2020. What's it all mean, Mr. Natural? My guess is that Commie Law and the Junk Yard Dog^© end up 10,000,000 ahead of The Orange Shitgibbon^©anon. when all is said and done. Whether she gets to 270 isn't clear. In 2020, Sleepy Joe's 7,000,000 was made from CA's 5,000,000 and small change elsewhere. What we do know: if The Orange Shitgibbon^©anon. does get the Oval Office, he'll do a Russian Gulag with gusto. The Supremes have said he can.

By The Numbers - part the seventy seventh

Even though my paternal grandmother had a genealogy done way back when (those forbears came here from Jolly Olde England in 1638), I don't follow UK/British news on purpose much. I knew that the Tories had lost in the last election, but I didn't recall the numbers. Well here they are. That's gotta hurt.

The Tories were dumped from government in a July general election, going from 372 to 121 seats in the process, reflecting public anger over their management of the economy, crime, immigration and standards in public life.

And, of course, they go all in for The Orange Shitgibbon^©anon. shit. Their very own Black Nazi? No, she didn't say that, but the report reads like someone who is. May be. Sort of. Will the Olde Sod tell us about us? Just remember: it ain't 1829 anymore.