14OCT2022 – Coming Up for Air

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Today the younger cohort of the grandson army invaded the Compound with ruthless abandon and bottomless appetites.  So basically, all writing efforts were abandoned and we settled into a format of games (chess, billiards and scrabble), junk food (chocolate chip pancakes, mac and cheese and ice cream sandwiches) and Dinotasia.  And it was a lot of fun.  The little guys are getting alarmingly good at pool and chess.  I find myself feeling more and more like a trapped beast.  Their mockery of my performance in these games of skill is becoming crueler.  But I soldiered on pretending that I was just toying with them.

Camera Girl spent her time in the kitchen whipping up breakfast, lunch and endless snacks to keep these ravenous locusts from attacking the woodwork and linens.  When their mom showed up to cart them off, I collapsed into a pile of shattered nerves and vowed that when they show up tomorrow morning that I will shackle them to the wall of the deepest ancestral catacomb and promptly wall them up.  Well, we’ll see.  Maybe we’ll skip the Dinotasia.  Tomorrow there’s a local soccer game we’re attending with the littlest guy and then they’re back with their siblings for whatever weekend events their parents are presiding over.  But I like when we get them in age groups.  The older and younger cohorts no longer overlap in tastes and activities.  In fact, I suspect I’m no longer grown up enough for the older kids.  They’ve outgrown Dinotopia and I’ve started to balk at some of the Marvel Comic Universe that is their staple diet.  I’m going to have to pick and choose to find stuff for us to watch together.  But we can start thinking about ways to treat them as adults soon.  College age grandchildren is something new for me.  But we’ll figure it out.  Maybe I can get advice on computer coding problems I’m having.  It’s sort of a return on investment for the forty-five years I’ve invested in this social experiment.  Am I asking too much?

So, I’m way behind my reading for the day and I’ll see what’s worth writing about.  What is interesting is a sense of panic seems to be slowly oozing from behind the façade of the fake news industrial complex.  It’s as if they’re slowly signaling to the true believers to prepare themselves for the fact that maybe the abortion crusade isn’t going to save them from the Mid-Term wave that seem to be regenerating.  For all of the happy talk about Joe Biden’s renewed popularity, inflation is ravaging the household budgets of the working and middle classes and urban crime is frightening the pants off of even the suburbanites who live within fifty miles of the dumpster fires that used to be our cities.

Well, hang in there, folks.  I’ll be up to snuff soon and full of annoying opinions and outrageous pronouncements.  I’ve got a new movie review and some other stuff coming up and I’ll astound you with my sagacity and perspicacity.  And if not those then some other -city words that I haven’t looked up in the thesaurus yet.  To be continued.

Neil, I Got an Answer on Where This Photo Was Shot

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Neil:

I have it on good authority that this is the view from the Sunlight Creek Bridge.  It’s the highest bridge in Wyoming. The drop from the bridge is 285 feet.  Here’s a link.

I’m glad you asked.  I really need to get a map of the places I went to and put names to the places I visited.  Especially some places outside of the park like the Tetons and Beartooth Mountains.

 

 

 

 

Someone Is Going to Handicap the Pollsters

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Real Clear Politics (RCP) provides an average of the various polls for all the elections going on.  The idea is that the average of a bunch of polls will be more accurate than any particular poll.  But if most of them are biased then that will hardly produce an accurate estimate.

But they’ve just announced that they are going to use this present election (and past ones) to assign correction factors for the various pollsters going forward.  In other words if the YouGov poll is always 3 points too high for the Democrat candidate then going forward RCP will apply a -3 point correction on their polls.

It’s actually a really good idea.  With a really large database of historical data I could see how a statistician could develop a model that provides a much better estimate for how people will vote.  I’m looking forward to this.  I suspect once these pollsters start getting rated on accuracy the worst offenders will start squealing like stuck pigs.  But over time it will boost the honest pollsters and who knows it might convince some of the worst offenders to mediate their lies.

Guest Contributor – NostraDumbass – 12OCT2022 – How We Got Here

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The pendulum “snapped” when the supreme court ruled it was okay to discriminate on race or sex as long as the only ones being discriminated against were caucasian males. They called it “Affirmative Action”. Jimmy Carter showed me how it works when I was enlisted in the army, where women and minorities were promoted at the first eligibility window and caucasian males were made to wait until the end of eligibility window. Not based on performance, simply based on sex or race.

We now have sexual preference and a whole host of people with mental issues clamoring for the same “Affirmative Action”.

The pendulum increased it’s freefall speed when ambulance chasers were allowed to advertise their prowess on television and radio. “Dan Newlin got me $650,00 dollars! Thank you, Dan”.

So now everything is a lawsuit waiting to happen. Right or wrong doesn’t matter, as long as the ones that get rich off this are the shysters.

What is slowing the pendulum freefall down a bit is that the “victims” are so numerous that they fight over the pecking order of who should be compensated rewarded first. Like children, they would rather no one get anything if they don’t get theirs first.

Crime is a Problem.  Who Knew!?

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I was reading an article that Salena Zito wrote on the out-of-control crime in Philadelphia.  And I came across this information,

“A new Morning Consult-Politico poll released late last week shows over three-quarters of voters said violent crime is a major problem in the United States, with only 17% of respondents calling crime a minor problem and only 2% saying it was not a problem at all.”

Well, who’da thunk it?  I can remember just a few weeks ago the polls showed that crime was a much lower priority than inflation but magically now it’s grown.  And yet the people living in the cities where crime has become a daily ordeal will still vote overwhelmingly for Democrats and especially progressives who release criminals almost as soon as they’re caught.  In fact Philadelphia recently re-elected the Soros-backed district attorney that has turned their criminal justice system into a revolving door.

Maybe the pollsters are starting to let the cat out of the bag.  Or maybe things just keep getting worse and even the progressives living in these cities are starting to panic.  Well, I’m beyond caring whether the urban dwellers will come to their senses.  But I am interested to see if reality will have any effect on the Mid-Terms.  Nevada, Georgia, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania all have tight senate and state house races.  They also have big cities that are filled with rampant crime.  It stands to reason that if these races go to Democrats, even in conditions like we have today then there is no point at which the Republicans will be able to win them back.

And that’s an important thing to know.  Cause and effect are the names we give to what we use to analyze the world around us.  When someone pulls the trigger on a gun and someone falls bleeding to the ground with a hole in his chest, we see a cause-and-effect relationship.

If we see the country falling apart, we expect to see Americans vote against the people responsible for this failure.  If we don’t see that response then we have to assume that either the people like what’s happening or voting is, for whatever reason, no longer a measure of the people’s will.

And whereas there is a difference between these two distinct reasons, the result is still the same.  And it is that result that interests me.  As I’ve stated incessantly, I’m looking for clarity.  I’m looking for the answer to the question, “Can we vote our way out of this?”

And everything I see about this election seems to confirm that this is the perfect test case.  There are just so many things going wrong at once that there’s no conceivable way to paint this situation as a coin toss.  There can’t be a starker contrast between what the two sides stand for and what results each side produce.

From the same article I read,

“As one mother in Center City pointed out, President Joe Biden was in Philadelphia one month ago and never once mentioned the violence ripping her city apart. “Which is funny,” she said, “because he said he was giving a speech on the battle for the soul of the nation. Has he looked around at the soul of this city?”

Not once in Biden’s 3,000-word speech did he say the word “crime” or “homicide” or “gangs.” He did, however, identify what he said “was happening in our country today that is not normal” — MAGA Republicans, who he said “represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic” and are “a threat to this country.”  Biden added that Republicans “do not believe in the rule of law.””

Joe Biden accusing Republicans of disbelief in the rule of law is so Orwellian that it almost makes me laugh.  That is until I remember that even if Joe Biden didn’t legitimately win the 2020 election, he still must have gotten close to 50% of the electorate voting for him anyway.  That means that almost half of Americans are either too stupid or too corrupt to reject a malevolent, cretinous liar like Joe Biden.  That is no laughing matter.

So, another data point.  Americans know that crime is out of control.  Will this influence the elections?  Stay tuned in less than four weeks for the answer.