Category: Uncategorized

Post #1927: Will those who succeeded in immigrating illegally please raise your hands?

 

This is the first of what may end up as a series of posts on the statistics of illegal immigration across the Mexican border.  

Unlike my usual style, I’m just going to present my conclusions here, and put the citation of sources, evidence, and analysis in separate posts.  If I get around to it.  Because, to be fair, the conclusions aren’t what I expected to see.  And this is a topic where I don’t think people’s opinions are much swayed by evidence anyway.

One simple question:  How do they know?

Source: How to Lie With Statistics,

I didn’t intend to do a series of posts on this topic.  I just wanted a simple answer to what I thought was a fairly obvious question.  The most basic question you can ask about a statistic, as shown above.

That snowballed.  But here’s where I started.

You’ll see various posts and news reporting (loosely defined) claiming that millions of illegal immigrants are coming into the U.S. every year, via the Mexican border.

These claims immediately pinged my bullshit detector, for a very simple reason:

How do they know?

For every law enforcement statistic I know of, official numbers count those who were caught.  But here, how do they count the people who weren’t caught, the ones who made it safely (but illegally) into the U.S., via the Mexican border?

Once you start prying away at that question, you soon discover a whole nested set of additional questions. A set of matrioshka cans-of-worms, if you will.

 

But let’s just stop at the first question.

How do they count the people who successfully illegally immigrate across the U.S.-Mexican border? Continue reading Post #1927: Will those who succeeded in immigrating illegally please raise your hands?

Post #1916: Messiah 4, COVID 0.

 

On Tuesday, my wife and I completed our 4th Messiah sing-along for the season.  We both seem to be feeling OK, so at this point I guess it’s safe to say that this year’s score is Messiah 4, COVID 0.

Moving right along

Source:  Virginia Department of Health.

Looks like we’re starting this year’s winter increase in COVID-19 cases.  The incidence of airborne respiratory illness tends to be on the rise at this time of year.  That includes pneumonia of all sorts, flu, the common cold, and now COVID-19.

Above is what I’d call a horizontal gee-whiz graph of that (per the nomenclature of the the classic “How to Lie With Statistics”).  Without context, you might be tempted to say, gee whiz, look at the increase.

Source:  Virginia Department of Health.

In context, by contrast, it’s not such a big deal.  Currently Virginia shows 14 new cases per 100K population per day.  Just two years back (January 2022), it was more like 214 per 100K.  So, upswing, yes.  Comparable to prior peaks, no.

Conversely, you might be tempted to say COVID is now no worse than the flu, but based on the data, you’d be wrong.  By the numbers, COVID-19 still accounts for about 3 percent of U.S. deaths (per the U.S. CDC).  Whereas prior to COVID, influenza and pneumonia together accounted for less than 2 percent of U.S. deaths, and the most of that was attributable to pneumonia (CDC, Deaths 2019, .pdf).

Finally, not to harp on it, but choral singing is about as good a way to spread airborne disease as exists, owing to the high rate of aerosol emissions when people sing in full voice.  (I’ve been over that in several prior posts).

Regardless, we attended four different sing-alongs.  All were in churches of various denominations.  In each case, the church was full, masks were few and far between, and there was a lot of gray hair in the audience.

When I run the probabilities, it’s a near-certainty that we shared a church space with at least one person who was actively infectious with COVID.  (Again, based on calculations outlined in old posts, I’d guess that with a total attendance of about 2000 in the four sing-alongs, and current incidence in Virginia, there was a 92% chance that at least one person was actively infectious in at least one sing-along.)

So it’s a pretty good guess that somebody picked up a new case of COVID as a consequence of those sing-alongs.  But almost nobody seemed worried about it — despite the advanced age of the average audience member.  No idea who drew the short straw, if anyone.

In any case, based on what has to be a fairly broad sampling, I’d say the market for mass singing of baroque Christmas music has returned to full normalcy.  In so far as that can be considered a normal thing to do.

Finally, you might reasonably ask, why so many sing-alongs?  Straight-up return on investment.  It took us seven years to get our parts (alto and bass) down rock-solid.  Might as well get our money’s worth.

Plus, to a degree, it’s surprising how much variation there is among services.  Some are loosey-goosey, some are run quite rigidly.  Accompaniment ranges from a solo organ to string quartet to full orchestra.  Soloists run the gamut from merely good to truly exceptional, transport-you-to-a-different world singing.

It’s time to put our Messiah scores back on the shelf for another year.  We made it through yet another full season, and enjoyed it.  And we’re looking forward to doing it again next year.

Post #1915: I’m giving spit to 501(c)(3) charities this Christmas

 

I usually make handful of small charitable donations at the end of the year.

I’m not entirely sure why.  As a kid, I was reasonably religious, and considered it a duty.  Now I’m not (a kid, or religious).  Yet I still consider it a duty.  For sure, I don’t get any warm fuzzy feelings from it (Post #1693:  The Life Table … ).

As the twig is bent, I guess.

I often regret it.  Not due to the money.  Due to the endless stream of followup emails, calls, junk mail, and (increasingly) texts asking for more.  I don’t so much begrudge being pestered by the entities that I actually gave money to.  Much.  I expect that.  It’s that giving money inevitably gets me on some general-circulation list of suckers, and I then get a deluge of request from causes I’ve never even heard of.

So this year, I kept it old-school.  For any non-trivial donations, I sent checks, through the U.S. mail.  No cover letter.  No email address.  No phone.  No dealing with those annoying pleas to cover the credit card fee or leave a tip, on top of the donation.  Just a check, folded over, in an envelope.  Pretty sure they’ll cash it, regardless of how I send it.  And I figure, if they’re going to sell my name and contact info, I should at least make them work for it.

It was both oddly satisfying and oddly jarring, which gave me cause to reflect.

Some thoughts on sending spit to my favorite charities.

Accept no substitutes

First off, I’m using up an old box of business envelopes, the kind with moisture-activated glue on the flaps.  And, as is traditional for my generation, without hesitation, or even bothering to think about it, I simply lick the flap, then seal the envelope.

Kids these days a) for sure don’t write checks, b) may never have actually sent anything via U.S. mail, and c) likely would find it both odd and frankly gross to lick something, then send it to a stranger. 

And, objectively, sure, they have a point.  And, to be clear, you could seal those gummed envelopes using a sponge or finger dampened with tap water.  But I’ve been doing it with spit all my adult life. I see no reason to stop now.  Not, at least, until I run down that stock of old envelopes.  Or the next pandemic hits, despite the fact that it does not appear to be possible to spread pathogens this way (e.g., reference).

Mint envelopes

Source:  Etsy

Just in passing — because younger generations likely won’t believe this — this practice was so common that you could buy flavored envelopes.  With mint being the most common one.  And nobody thought it was the least bit odd.

While “gummed closure” envelopes are still widely sold, Bon Appétit claims that flavored envelopes are a thing of the past.  Mint envelopes from mainstream manufacturers are now relegated to the on-line graveyards of obsolete goods (here’s an offering, on Etsy), but they are still available as a novelty item (e.g., from Flavorlope).

I won’t even get into licking postage stamps, except to say that a) is a scratch-n-sniff U.S. postage stamp really coming ahead on the whole postage-as-food concept, and b) in Belgium, apparently you can still buy chocolate-flavored stamps.

Will “checking account” go the way of “cigarette lighter socket”?

Source:  Analysis of data from the Federal Reserve.  This only refers to checks cleared by the Federal Reserve, and does not account checks cleared by private commercial clearing entities.

My children literally did not believe me when I said that the proper term for the 12V power outlet in a car is “cigarette lighter socket”.  It is the last artifact of the days when all cars came with built-in ashtrays, because most adults smoked most of the time, and that included smoking cigarettes while driving.

In the modern world, the plugs for those 12V power sockets in cars are both comically large and bizarrely complex.  The end pin is spring-loaded to make contact with the “hot” terminal of the socket.  To connect them, you have to shove a couple of inches of plug into the socket.  They are completely unlike any other modern low-voltage plug.  And they only have that size and construction because, once up on a time, the thing you plugged into that power outlet became a red-hot metal coil, when in use.  True fact.

In a similar vein, neither my daughter nor my son has ever written a check.  Neither has an account for which they own physical paper-copy checks.  Yet both of them have “checking accounts”, meaning, deposit accounts from which they may demand withdrawals, at any time, in any amount up to the current balance in the account.  It’s just that all of their withdrawals are done electronically.

If cigarette lighter sockets can be renamed power outlets, at what point will “checking accounts” become “debit card accounts”?  Near as I can tell, that’s the only way anybody under age 30 ever uses them.

Heck, paper checks are no longer even physically “cleared” any more.  Historically, they’d literally ship the paper check back to the bank of origin, and eventually, back to the person who wrote them, as a “cancelled check”, that is, marked as already having been paid.  But these days, “cancelled checks” no longer exist.  Clearing (at least, clearing by the Federal Reserve) is done strictly with electronic images of the paper checks.  So, ultimately, payment by check is also payment in electronic format.  It’s just that you can start the process off with a physical paper check.

Wanna bet they’ll still take your money?

Every charity now discourages checks.  Donation has become synonymous with on-line donation.  Clicking the donation link immediately takes you to some (non-standard) form used for accepting your credit card/debit card/PayPal donation.

But they’re all willing to take your money in almost any format, including by check.  You just have to look.  So don’t be put off by the lack of a paper check option, as you click the donation link on website.  Of the charities of interest to me, 100% of them have at least a P.O. box to which they will grudgingly allow you to give them money by check.

On-line donation forms are inferior

And in the spirit of grudging, I have found that almost all on-line charitable donation forms are inferior to typical commercial vendor payment forms.  And I can’t quite figure out why.  Charities seem perfectly willing to give up 2+ percent of your donation in the form of a credit-card processing fee.  But somehow they can’t be bothered to pay for the software that will auto-fill your address in, once you start to write it.  Or at least fill in city and state, based on ZIP code.

Nope, you have to type every character, of every bit, of your address.  As if it somehow cost them oodles of cash to buy any commercial system that will do that for you.  For the privilege of accepting your money.  Makes no sense whatsoever, to me.

The amount of information required to donate on-line is non-standard

Source:  The SHQ-6, from “Appreciation of humor is decreased among patients with Parkinson’s disease”, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.parkreldis.2011.09.004

For non-deductible donations to political candidates, I understand why they ask certain questions.  It’s the law, so that we can pretend that our elected Federal officials are not for sale to the highest bidder.

Some charities allow you to give on-line by supplying only name and address (and credit card).  They then supply an acknowledgement page which you may save or print, to provide a record for the IRS, should you ever be audited.

Others refuse to allow you to donate on-line unless you cough up a valid(-looking) email address and phone.  If you try to give them money, while leaving those mandatory fields blank, their software will rebuke you and return to the form, rather than graciously accept your donation.

And yet, all of them will accept a check, which requires neither an email address nor a phone number.  So, clearly, they don’t actually need either piece of information in order to accept your money.  They need it to make it more efficient for them to go after you for more money.  Or to sell your contact information to others.

Hey, I can still do cursive, and it’s fast

Source:  Clipartlibrary.com

My final observation from this holiday season is that a) I am still capable of doing cursive writing, b) it’s surprisingly fast, once you’ve gotten back into the groove, and c) I can write a check faster than I can fill in most on-line forms.

(OK, I cheat on some of the capitals.  A proper cursive capital Q, for example, looks like the number 2.  Which makes no sense.   I’m not sure anyone would recognize an actual, done-to-spec cursive capital Q in a hand-written document.)

Depending on which sources you care to believe, cursive writing is either disappearing from public school curricula, or making a comeback in public school curricula.  So I can’t say which.

All I can say for sure is that, other than signing my name to the random medical or legal form, the only time I routinely use cursive writing is in this year-end charitable giving exercise.

The crazy thing about flowing cursive writing is that it’s like playing a musical instrument.  Mechanically, it’s all learned reflexes and muscle memory.  You don’t have to think about the details.  Sure, you can write it tediously, one character at a time, as if you were doing calligraphy.

But at 65 years of age, it’s somehow encouraging to see that I can still do actual on-the-fly handwriting.  I can’t (fill-in-the-blank here), but at least I can still write my own name.

For now.

 

Post #1907: Liz Cheney’s new book

 

Oath and Honor.  Read it.

Whatever your political persuasion — and particularly if you are a Republican — give it a read.

Mostly, it’s a day-by-day summary of what went on in the period leading up to, during, and following the January 6th, 2021 rioting at the Capitol.

To a large degree, it’s just a well-written recitation of the facts.  Calls that occurred, memos that were circulated.  Who said what, when.  With some patriotic appeals thrown into the mix, leavened with some general Republicanism.

If you, like me, paid attention to the January 6th Committee hearings, or have perused their final report, you won’t find a lot of surprises. If nothing else, this book was a lot more concise and readable than the final report from that Committee.

It sounds dry as dust.  But it’s the opposite.  I couldn’t put it down.  I picked up a copy yesterday, finished it today.

In part, that’s because Cheney was Chair of the House Republican Conference at the time of the attack, and so was the number three person in House Republican leadership.   She gives fresh details about what was going on inside the House Republican Conference and within the Republican hierarchy, as Trump attempted to prevent the orderly transfer of power in the U.S.

Spoiler alert:  Republican leadership in general does not come off looking good.

But also, in part, it’s because Cheney is an excellent writer with a fine no-nonsense style.  If it’s a lie, she’ll call it a lie, and call the person who said it a liar.  Where she encounters disinformation and propaganda, those are the very words she uses to describe it.

But mostly, I think that she has nothing but contempt for people who do not respect the Constitution.  And she’s not at all shy about calling them out on that.  Things like elections, the rule of law, separation of powers, and the peaceful transfer of power matter deeply to her.

The patriotism and the writing are both refreshing and occasionally hilarious.  Even if I pretty much completely disagree with everything else she stands for.

Really, it’s a great read.  It’s worth it just for the anecdotes about Pelosi.

Not only is it currently the #1 selling book on Amazon, but Amazon is sold out.  I had to trudge to my local bricks-and-mortar Barnes and Noble for my copy.

Note:  Source for the Uncle Sam image is:  James Montgomery Flagg, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

In related news

This book came out on December 5th, and the next day former speaker McCarthy announced his retirement from the House.  After reading this book, I wonder about the extent to which that’s cause-and-effect.

I don’t see how anybody could read this book — just reading the plain facts of what McCarthy said and did in response to Trump’s numerous attempt to disrupt the counting of the electoral votes, and so prevent the peaceful transfer of power — and ever have any dealings with him again.

In particular, don’t miss the part where she calls McCarthy “a pussy”.   But does it civilly and indirectly by agreeing with Trump, on that one point (page 174).  And goes on to explain why McCarthy so quickly caved to Trump after January 6th.  His dereliction of duty was, ultimately, all about the money (page 148).

Looking forward

Substantively, looking forward, I saw just two big takeaways from this book.

First, Congress fixed the ambiguities in the law governing the count of electoral votes.  In a two-page chapter titled “Never Again”, Cheney notes that the Congress rewrote the 1877 Electoral Count Act.

This was in response to three of Trump’s illegal schemes to remain in power:

  • Having state legislatures override the popular vote.
  • Presenting slates of fake Electoral College electors.
  • Having the Vice President reject electoral votes and so determine who would be the next President.

Whereas constitutional scholars already agreed that those were illegal, they are now made explicitly illegal in black letter law.  A succinct summary of what the Congress changed can be found on Senator Collins’ (R, Maine) website (reference, .pdf).

So, with any luck, never again will a sitting President attempt to overturn the outcome of an election by those means.  As Trump did.  In addition to organizing and sending a mob to disrupt the January 6th counting of the electoral votes. (And, of course, flatly asking state officials to commit vote fraud, as in telling the Georgia Secretary of State “find” another 11,780 votes for Trump, or risk criminal prosecution (reference).

Second, let me offer two quotes regarding a second Trump Presidency (emphasis mine):

"One thing was now unavoidably apparent to any objective observer:  Donald Trump had demonstrated that he is unfit for any office." (page 361).
"... They are working to return to office the man responsible for January 6th.  

We the people must stop them.  We are the only thing that can stop them.  This is more important than partisan politics.  Every one of us -- Republican, Democrat, Independent -- must work and vote together to ensure that Donald Trump and those who have appeased, enabled, and collaborated with him are defeated.

This is the cause of our time."  (page 368).

Post #1895: Home testing for airborne mold spores, a quick review of options

 

This is a quick review of home testing for airborne mold.

Bottom line:  I’m going to start with some $3-a-pop agar plates (Amazon).  Despite numerous drawbacks.

We’ll see what develops.

Note:  Results are shown in Post #1898.

Intro

I want to check a few areas of my home for an excess of airborne mold spores.  This is a shot in the dark, so I don’t want to spend a lot of money on it, if I can avoid doing that.

I could hire a pro to do that for me.  But, cost aside, do I really want my tester to be somebody who’s primarily in the business of selling mold remediation services?  Particularly when you can expect to find some level of mold more-or-less everywhere.

So, I’m scoping out the test-at-home market.

Here are my notes.  I knew zip about this, as of two hours ago.  Here’s what I’ve learned in two hours.

Testing for airborne mold spores.

The first split in the decision tree is whether you are testing for surface mold or airborne mold.

Surface mold is … mold growing on a surface.  With those, you swipe a surface, then test the swipe in some fashion.

That’s not what I’m looking for.  I want a test for airborne mold.

Airborne mold is mold spores suspended in the air.  (For all intents and purposes.)  Mold spores are reported to range from about 3 to 30 microns in size, so some of those will float long distances/stay suspended for long times, in air.  Some will not.  (The cutoff for “airborne” particles is conventionally taken at 5 microns.)

The first thing I learned about airborne mold tests is that the price of the test typically does not include the price of the lab analysis of the test.  A typical lab fee is $35-$40 per test, and most places say that you need a minimum of two — one outdoors, one inside — to test for excessive mold.

What, exactly, the “lab test” does, varies from type of test to type of test.  For the agar-plate-style tests, they identify the types of mold that are growing.  For the air-sample tests, I’m pretty sure they give you a count of spores found.

Three styles of tests

Petri-dish agar tests:  Crude, and cheap if read them yourself.  (Amazon example)  One type of test is a Petri dish coated with sterile growing medium.  Take a sterile dish, uncover it for an hour, in a room where the air has been undisturbed for a while.  Then cover it up for a couple of days, in a warm place, and see what grows.

These seem to be sold as either read-it-yourself or send-to-the-lab tests.  Read-it-yourself boils down to counting the number of mold colonies that have formed, regardless of size.  Most common rule seems to be that four and under, for a one-hour exposure, visible after two days, is OK.

So the test is crudely quantitative, in the sense that you may see few mold colonies, or you may see a lot.  But there’s no direct link between the number of colonies you see, and the actual amount of mold spores in the air.

As I read it, a lot of factors can partially compromise these tests.  Mainly, there are several ways in which you can get false negatives (no mold on agar plate, when unhealthful levels of mold are present).  And, based on photos, it’s surprisingly hard to count the mold colonies.

I view agar plates/Petri dishes as a form of one-way testing.  If you end up with a plate dotted with mold colonies, after the one-hour-exposure/two-day-incubation routine, then you’ve found something.  If you don’t get that, or don’t get it clearly, then it’s not clear what you can conclude.   In other words, they may sometimes tell you that you have a mold problem.  Plausibly, they are not reliable for indicating that you don’t have a mold problem.

Around $3 a plate if you just buy agar Petri dishes yourself.  Around $40 a test if you want ones that you can send to a lab, and have the lab read them.  For lab-read tests, it looks like a minimum of two tests — one outside your home, one inside.

Air sample testers:  Quantitative, must be lab read, pricey.  (Amazon example.) A second type of test uses an air filter and a fan (air pump).  This is lab-read-only, but it has two big advantages.  First, the in-home portion of the testing is done in under ten minutes.  (Versus having an open Petri dish sitting around for an hour).  And the test is quantitative — the lab reading will give you some idea of how much mold was in the air.

I only found one on the market, and that rounds to $300 for three usable indoor tests.  Minimum of two tests — one outside your home, one inside.

Plus, at the end of it, you’re left with yet another useless battery-powered device to get rid of.  In this case, it’s the “air pump” used to draw a known quantity of air through the filter medium.

Dust swab:  Like a COVID test.  (Amazon example.)  Yet a third type of test asks you to swab the dust in a room, and test that for mold.  That looks very much like a COVID test, so I assume there’s a reagent there that reacts to some surface compound commonly found on mold spores.

There’s some chance that, like a COVID test, the results are a simple yes/no.  Yes, mold is present in the dust.  No, it’s not, or not at detectable levels.  So I’d call this a non-quantitative test.

Around $40 a test.

PM 10 air quality meter:  No.  I already own a meter that monitors airborne particulates (so-called PM 2.5 and PM 10).  A quick back-of-the-envelope convinced me that a PM 10 air quality meter probably wouldn’t function well as a mold detector.  (Independent of the fact that all kinds of non-mold material could be in PM 10).  Near as I can tell, there’s just too little mold in the air, at the limit of what’s considered healthy, to trigger a PM 10 meter.

Decision

I bought 10 sterile agar-coated Petri dishes, at $3 each, from Amazon.  Unless I want to ship them off to a lab to be “read”, this seems adequate, at least for an initial check.

That, despite their lack of … well, pretty much everything you want in a test.  But the bottom line is that, under the right circumstances, this will send up a warning flag if excessive amounts of mold are present.

This whole exercise is a shot in the dark.  And I’m not even sure what “normal” mold levels would look like, on any of these tests.  So this seems like just about the right place to start.

Post #1894A: A minor technical followup on the NY Times/Siena poll results

I’m still looking for loopholes.  Hence, three remaining questions:

  • How was the sample selected, and in particular, did it require a successful match from voter record to cell phone record?
  • What was the overall response rate?
  • How well does this benchmark with the actual 2020 results?

L2 file?

After reading the end-notes on the detailed tabulations of the NY Times/Siena College poll, my main remaining question is:  What is the L2 file?

Survey respondents were chosen (in a sophisticated-but-neutral way) from persons on the L2 file.  That file is the “universe of observations” for the survey.

Based on the U. Penn description, the L2 file contains public information on about 200M persons who recently voted.  And, about 95 million cell phone numbers.

The file itself was developed by L2.com.  Having dealt with mailing-list vendors before, I recognized much of the subsidiary information that they merged onto the publicly-available voter records.

But if that’s an accurate description —  95M cell phones, 200M voters — then roughly speaking, a bit less than half the L2 file had phone numbers attached to the voter data.

Did this survey draw from persons on the L2 file who had a phone number listed?  Or did it draw from all persons on that file.  The documentation simply says:

The survey is a response rate-adjusted stratified sample of registered voters on the L2 voter file.

I’m pretty sure they meant response-rate-adjusted, that is, they adjusted the likelihood of being sampled based on some prior estimate of likely non-response rate.

In any case, if the U. Penn description is correct, then this is a valid question to ask. Along with the obvious followup:  If it’s persons with listed cell phone, could that matching process — the process that added the cell phone number to the voter record — possibly have induced a bias?

Response rate?

The other thing not stated was the response rate.  They said that 94% of the people they called “were reached” on the phone.  Like this:

 Overall, 94 percent of respondents were reached on a cellular telephone.

But you’re left guessing as to what the actual response rate was.  At least, as far as I could tell, from the documentation cited above.  (The “reached” figure speaks more to the validity of the added phone data, than to the response rate. You can reach me, and I can say “no thanks”.)

Don’t people lie (on average) about how they voted in past elections?

That said, the big advantage this survey has is that it shows a modest win for Biden in these states, in 2020.  That is, it corresponds to the actual 2020 results.

Whatever their methodology goes, it accurately shows that Biden won the popular vote, by a small margin, in 2020.  It’s hard to say that the 2024 projection is hugely biased in some fashion, when you can see that no such bias exists for the actual 2020 results (as estimated from this poll).

Then I got to wondering:  Don’t people lie, after the fact, about having voted for the winner?

The problem is that if I Google anything near that topic, all I get is stuff about the 2020 election.  So any answer to whether or not this is material — if people tend to say they voted for the winner — will have to wait until I figure out some better way to find an answer to that.

 

 

Post #1894: Commentary on the NY Times/Siena College poll results.

 

I find myself grasping at straws, trying to explain away the NY Times/Siena College polling results showing Biden soundly losing to Trump in 2024.

This survey predicts Trump taking five out of six swing states in 2024: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Nevada.  But not Wisconsin.  Source:  This

Having spent some time down in the details, let me summarize:  A poll that correctly reproduces the 2020 Biden win (in six swing states) now calls for a big 2024 loss. 

Worse, it’s a good poll.  By which I mean, a well-executed poll.  I saw almost nothing in methods that I strongly disagreed with.  (And I used to be in the statistics biz.)

Insert rambling detail here

I have to admit that I woke up just totally pissed off about this poll. After my wife clued me in on it yesterday.  Her response to the results was “people suck and I hate them all”.  Seems like a valid viewpoint.

I just plain wanted it to be wrong.  That’s not science.  I looked for obvious errors, and didn’t see any.  So far.  FWIW.  It’s the gold standard — the best available estimate of how these swing states are likely to vote.

Here’s my take on the main message:

Biden’s too old. 

And other stuff, sure.

Weirdly, the main writeups seem to skirt this issue.  But to my eye, this is something that everybody agreed on.

Separately, smears work, disinformation wins.  Seemed like more than half of everybody think Joe Biden’s dirty, and has taken payments from China and Ukraine.   Which, as far as actual evidence goes?  In any case, one President makes his tax returns public, one does not, I’m gonna stick with the one who does.

Yes but.

And now, from the Democratic side of things, comes a string of “yes, buts.”

There’s some nuance to it, but I think I can boil them down as:

Yes, Biden’s too old.  But if my only alternative to Biden is Trump, then “too old” doesn’t exist.  If Biden’s breathing, I’m voting for him.

And I have some reasons for preferring Biden.  In no small part, it’s fair to expect Biden to assemble a far more competent team than Trump.  Fewer cronies, fewer toadies.  Fewer of his own children, for that matter.  And for sure, with Biden, we’ll likely have fewer Chairmen of the Joint Chiefs mockingly threatened with execution.

So you can “yes, but” it to your heart’s desire.  Yes Biden’s 80.  But Trump’s 77, fat, and his dad died following a period of dementia.)  Yes, Biden sometimes does old-guy stuff, but Trump rarely utters a coherent sentence.  If I gotta listen to one old fart ramble, please let it be Biden, and not Trump.

And there’s that whole fate-of-the-Democracy thing.  We got one joker in the Senate, saving up military appointments.  Hell, what worked for McConnell for the Supreme Court sure ought to work for the military.  Given how much Trump admires dictators, the idea of a military run top-to-bottom by Trump acolytes does not appeal to me.

But he’s stuck.

And I mean Joe Biden.

Is there any way that Biden could withdraw from the race?  I’m not seeing it.

Wouldn’t he then be obliged to support his vice-president, as the Democratic presidential candidate?

Do you think that America is ready to vote for a Black woman, to be President?  Separately, do you think Harris is a good candidate?

My answer is no and no.  I don’t see Harris as a viable winning Presidential candidate.  So Biden’s stuck there.  If he drops out in a normal and reasonable fashion, then the Dems lose in 2024.

So he can’t agree that he’s too old.  Even if he thinks he is.  And he can’t drop out, for that or any other reason.  He options are to fight one more election.  Or to lose.  No reasonable person can expect Biden not to fight for it.

Post #1890: Vote-by-mail … maybe?

 

Edit:  11:30 AM Monday 11/6/2023 — no change. 

I finally gave up and emailed the elections office.  Sure, they have my ballot.  They’ve had it for more than a week now.  And it’s been accepted.

The problem is Fairfax County’s description of the ballot tracking system.  They say it tracks your ballot.  Right up to the point where they’ve accepted it as valid.  Full stop.

They don’t say that it only tracks ballots returned by mail.  Which appears to be the case.  So the accurate description of absentee voting is that if you do the entire transaction by mail, they’ll let you know when your ballot was received and accepted.  But if you drop the ballot in a drop box, you get no further information.

I didn’t expect to that, because you have the right to “perfect” (i.e., correct) your mail-in ballot if you filled it out wrong, e.g., failed to fill in the date.  If you mail it back, you get an on-line site where you can find out if your ballot was defective.  But if you drop it in a drop box, it’s up to the County to track you down, if they can. 

Original post follows:

I like to vote by mail.

Among the things I like about it is that the mail ballot is tracked across four “handoffs”:

  • Office of Elections to USPS
  • USPS to you
  • You, back to USPS, filled out.
  • USPS to Office of Elections

Fairfax Country knows who has my ballot, based on those four handoffs.

Except when it doesn’t.  As above.  Which happens to depict the incorrect-and-getting-incorrecter status of my ballot.

My ballot’s real status is that I had it for a month, I filled it out and dropped it in a drop box over the weekend.

The County, by contrast, thinks the USPS has still has it, and never delivered it to me.  (It must not have been scanned as “delivered” by my carrier.)

For the nerds among you, note that the extremely long time apparently held by the USPS set off no red flag with the County?  Possibly, once the letter leaves the mail carrier’s hand un-scanned, that error cannot be easily fixed.  There’s no longer anything to “scan out” that’s in the possession of the USPS. 

I’m sure all will work out in the end, but still … it’s not what I wanted to see.