January 25, 2021

Thinking outside the box on the filibuster

I have mixed feelings about eliminating the filibuster because I don't assume that Democrats will always be in power. Thus I am concerned about handing assholes a weapon and an excuse to bludgeon us with it.

Having said that, it sucks and makes it hard to govern.

So I think a compromise is in order. I think it should be like a coaches challenge for instant replay in sports. You get a certain number of opportunities to use them and that's it. With such a quota, Senators would have to pick their battles and couldn't just lock everything up.

I know is sounds insufficient but the filibuster isn't going away. We don't have the numbers for it even if I loved the idea. I would like to see it reformed so it wasn't abused so badly.

Aside from that, the concept of individual holds where a single Senator can block something just needs to go.

January 11, 2021

Radical Right is a self fulfilling prophecy

We don't want to lock down the economy if you would just wear a fucking mask.

There was no intention to confiscate your guns until you got violent with them.

We were all against a surveillance state until you started plotting violent overthrow of the government

No one wants there to be FEMA deprogramming camps so stop acting like you need cult deprogramming.

There was never a thought to curtailing your speech until you talked like a violent insurrectionist.

It is often hyperbole to call people Nazis but you keep doing Nazi things.

We don't want to cancel you but you continue to behave outside the boundaries of polite society.

Stop being assholes and maybe these things won't happen to you

January 8, 2021

Meanwhile...COVID is still killing us at record rates

I try not to look at individual days because reporting delays associated with weekends and holidays tend to pile up and skew the data. Seven day trends are better as smoothing the noise in the data but even that falters over a long weekend like the holidays.

So I have been waiting to see if the drop over the holidays was at all real or whether the trend line would bounce back up. As expected, the trend line bounced. As of yesterday, the 7-day average hit its all time high of 2834 and will surely go up further today. And I expect it to keep going up through next week.

So here is a prediction. Just a hunch on pretty close data monitoring and some simple logic

I think the 7-day average for deaths might peak right around Inauguration Day.

Don't get me wrong, the shit will still ravage us for months and people will still die for most of the year. But there will be a peak.

I realize that many will think this is a pollyanna prediction but here is my logic.

- Peak transmission probably happened over the holidays. Travel and get togethers being the biggest offenders.
- New Years Eve was likely smaller as a spreader event than Christmas because many gathering places would have been closed. And people are more cautious of public gatherings than they are of family gatherings
- Illness to death is about a 3-4 week lag
- Slowly but surely the vaccine will affect the death statistics. Most of the deaths are coming from the elderly and vulnerable. Since the most vulnerable people went first so that impact will be disproportional to its actual penetration into the population. So even at 50% effective (ie 1 dose) it can begin to bring down deaths sooner that you might expect.

Just my thoughts.

I think it would be perfect if that threshold happened on 1/20 just as a cosmic acknowledgment that better days were coming. It's got to be better than it has been.

No matter what, I expect that peak to be no more than a few weeks later.

January 8, 2021

I suspect we will start hearing about the Vampire Defense

You are allowed over the threshold if you are invited in.

"But, but, but I couldn't have been trespassing since the cops let us in..."

January 8, 2021

When I knew this time was different

I, like most people, have very strong memories of isolated moments where you can just feel something has shifted.

This video is one of those moments for me courtesy of Newt Gingrich in 2016. Following that famously dark and self-aggrandizing speech by Trump at Republican Convention, Gingrich was challenged on the reality of it. This newscaster asks him to justify all the fearmongering since the statistics show Americans to be safer than ever. He essentially said how people feel is just as true as the reality.

Of course, unsaid is that people are made to feel that way. They are made to feel angry, cheated, scared, offended, etc.

We have a reality problem in this Country and it is killing us. Of course there are plenty of perpetrators including politicians, pundits, r/w media, social media, etc. But the real problem is the cynical idea that it is OK to manipulate people as a means to an ends for the exercise of political power.

It used to be that there were manipulators on the inside and true believers on the outside. It has only gotten worse as the true believers are now in positions of power. The monster has broken free of its cage and the manipulators are no longer in control.

January 7, 2021

This was a painful, but necessary display

Yesterday, despite increasing levels of insanity, Congress was all set to make the protest official. GOP Senators and Representatives would lend their credibility, position and reputation to put a gentile political spin over all of the conspiracy theories to give it a veneer of legitimacy.

Then the MAGAts jumped on to the table, dropped their pants and showed their assholes to the world. In one day, they did more to shock the system back into reality than four years of investigation will ever produce.

Most of you will believe I am crazy but I think that yesterday's dangerous and embarrassing spectacle will turn out to be a net positive. Sometimes a festering wound needs to boil over to let the poison out.

All along I have felt like Hilary got it right that about half of his supporters are deplorables. The others are traditional conservatives who just could not see themselves as anything else so they went along for the ride. This is a wake up call for them.