Midterm elections are always bad for the President's party. The only two exceptions in recent history prove this rule:
2002 when the country was united after 9/11 and a blitzkreig special forces operation to remove the Taliban. Does anyone think that this country is united? Oh, and the contrast to the 2001/2002 Afghanistan war and Biden's botched pullout speaks for itself.
1998 when the economy was roaring and the GOP was making all sorts of noises about impeaching a popular President. Is the economy roaring? Is Biden popular/
Other than these two elections, you have to go all the way back to 1934 - in the midst of the Great Depression to find a midterm election where the President's party didn't get clobbered.
A President's popularity is a key factor here - see Bill Clinton in 1998. Joe Biden is under water by double digits, and 75% of the country think that it's on the wrong track.
And yet Democrats did well last night. They did very well. Hmmmmm ...
UPDATE 9 NOVEMBER 2022 09:52: Mike leaves a comment:
It looks like either the red side decided voting doesn't matter (possible after 2020, but wrong) or people are largely fine with how things are going. Either is depressing and gives little hope for the future.
But people aren't fine with how things are going. As I pointed out, 75% of people say the country is on the wrong track. The top issues (according to pollsters) were inflation/the economy and border security. Both of these are pocketbook issues. People continually report that their families are being hurt by these. I guess it's possible that they all shrugged their shoulders and said "It's all good, brah" but this doesn't seem enormously likely to me. It's another thing that makes you go "Hmmmm ..."
We continue to live in Claire Wolfe's "Awkward Time" - too late to vote ourselves out of this, too early to shoot the bastards in the face. But in CHurchill's famous dictum, it's better to Jaw-Jaw than to War-War. And so The Queen Of The World and I voted. I know, I know ...
Turnout had been brisk all day. I don't know if it's like this other places than here at the edge of Tampa suburbia. If so, this likely means Republicans will do well. If they do, I'm not sure what that will mean. Certainly there are a bunch of Young Turks coming into the GOP, but the establishment will not willingly give up their perks, power, and riches.
I have no doubt about the outcome for the House of Representatives. There are 438 House districts and self-sorting by the population combined with gerrymandering by the politicians means that it's really, really hard for a centralized voting fraud machine to swing more than a handful of districts. So the Republicans will comfortably control the House, perhaps with their biggest majority ever. Since the House is the ones that create the spending bills, this is an excellent position to cause all sorts of pain to the out of control Left in this Republic.
Republicans should continue their winning streak with Governor's races, and pick up some Senate seats. But these races are State wide, and so a small number of Democratic controlled districts could (in theory) upset the vote via industrial level fraud. We'll see how this looks tomorrow. If the Red Wave means that Fulton County needs over 100% of the vote to reelect Raphael Warnock, then that is something that you can catch. I'm not sanguine over this, at least in places like Pennsylvania, Arizona, and Georgia - in other words, the places where you can still smell the stench of the 2020 election.
So it's wait and see. But tonight TQOTW and I are off to Ron DeSantis' victory rally in Tampa. This will be the first political rally I will ever have attended. Since Ron is going to smoke his opponents, it should be a fun time, and I'm interested to see if it's different seeing the man in Real Life rather than in Youtube clips.
And I'd be worried about rioters in the street except that Gov DeSantis has made his position on that crystal clear. And this isn't Chicago or California.
There are times when a film and its music blend seamlessly into something that is more than the sum of its parts. There are times when the music steals the show from a mediocre film. And there are times when the music score - even by the greatest film composer of his day - is simply overmatched by the film itself.
Casablanca is one example of the latter. Now this isn't entirely fair, because Casablanca is arguably the greatest film ever made. But there it is anyway.
There's a reason that Max Steiner is called "the father of film music". As with many composers we've seen here over the years he was a child prodigy. He was born in Vienna back in the days of the Emperors. He was named after his grandfather who was the fellow who persuaded Josef Strauss (Jr) to write music for the theater. Richard Strauss was his godfather. A composer by ten years old, he enrolled at the Imperial Academy of Music at 14 and completed the entire 4 year program in 12 months. It likely helped that his tutor was Gustav Mahler.
Unlike many German composers who came to America during World War II, he landed in the New World in World War I. He was on a concert tour in Great Britain when World War I broke out in 1914 and was interned as an enemy alien. But he had many fans in His Magesty's Scept'red Isle - not least the Duke of Westminster - and so was allowed to sail to New York. He was soon writing music for Broadway. RKO Pictures hired him in 1929 and music in Hollywood was never the same.
But the score for Casablanca was workmanlike, not brilliant. It sets the stage for the actors and while it holds up its end throughout the film, it definitely plays second fiddle so to speak. Again, the film is so spectacular that this is perhaps not surprising, but while Casablanca was nominated for best musical score at that year's Academy Awards, it lost to The Song Of Bernadette. In a way, the father of film music had a knack of having his music overshadowed by the film - Gone With The Wind also lost the Oscar to The Wizard Of Oz.
But Steiner's genius is fully on display in the scene that is sometimes called "the duel of the anthems". That scene would simply not have been possible without the music score, and it is one of the most memorable scenes in a film filled with memorable scenes.
His was a rare genius, even if he didn't win as many Oscars as you'd expect.
So some Covid Karen tells us we all need to forgive and forget about the damage, deaths, and pain inflicted by the Covid lockdowns. Lots of folks are talking about this - I particularly like Aesop's. Better people than I have written eloquently about the death and destruction, and about how forgiveness requires repentance. I really don't have anything more to add about that, either.
But one thing struck me about Karen's (actually Brown University Economist Emily Oster) article. Specifically, this:
The people who got it right, for whatever reason, may want to gloat. Those who got it wrong, for whatever reason, may feel defensive and retrench into a position that doesn’t accord with the facts. All of this gloating and defensiveness continues to gobble up a lot of social energy and to drive the culture wars, especially on the internet. These discussions are heated, unpleasant and, ultimately, unproductive. In the face of so much uncertainty, getting something right had a hefty element of luck. And, similarly, getting something wrong wasn’t a moral failing. Treating pandemic choices as a scorecard on which some people racked up more points than others is preventing us from moving forward. [My emphasis - Borepatch]
Whoa, slow down Cowpoke. There wasn't any luck involved at all. Case in point, Borepatch, March 22, 2020 - a week after lockdowns were imposed:
There are three very interesting Coronavirus narratives emerging in just the last day or two:
The virus looks to be less bad - and perhaps much less bad - than we had feared. As we learn more, we learn that the worst case scenario that had been put forward is much less likely.
The government response is strangling the economy. By their own admission (i.e. bills being discussed in Congress), there is at least a Trillion dollars of damage so far.
So look at this situation: things are not as bad as we feared, governments are to some extent demonstrably incompetent and untrustworthy, and the draconian crackdown/overreaction is destroying businesses, jobs, and people's lives.
Man, I sure was lucky in that analysis, wasn't I? But I guess that I'm particularly lucky because a month later I wrote this:
Most importantly of all, we're not tracking (well, modeling) how many of the Kung Flu deaths are people who had severe health problems and would likely have died soon anyway. Sure, there are stories about young healthy people keeling over from this; we know that this is a vanishingly small minority of the total deaths.
But we know that we are putting the population of the country under severe strain, and that this has very real consequences. Aesop left a comment from the health care front lines that illustrates this:
And yes, in one night, three of the traumas we had were domestic violence.
Normally, we see one of those a month; at worst, one a week. Not three in one night.
But it hasn't been that way every night. Yet.
Man, that's two in a row for Borepatch! How lucky can you get? But wait - there's more! Posted here September 3, 2020:
A groundbreaking new study commissioned byRevolver Newsconcludes that COVID-19 lockdowns are ten times more deadly than the actual COVID-19 virus in terms of years of life lost by American citizens.
Up until this point there had been no simple, rigorous analysis that accurately and definitively conveys the true costs of the COVID-19 lockdowns. Accordingly,Revolver Newsset out to commission a study to do precisely that: to finally quantify the net damage of the lockdowns in terms of a metric known as “life-years.” Simply put, we have drawn upon existing economic studies on the health effects of unemployment to calculate an estimate of how many years of life will have been lost due to the lockdowns in the United States, and have weighed this against an estimate of how many years of life will have been saved by the lockdowns.The results are nothing short of staggering, and suggest that the lockdowns will end up costing Americans over 10 times as many years of life as they will save from the virus itself.
Bold in original. That's some medical response, right there.
In all honesty, this really isn't controversial at all. We've studied the health effects of unemployment for decades and decades. We know what happened to employment, and how many people lost their jobs. Applying known health impacts to those people allows us to quantify mortality due to the lockdown. It's just math.
What is interesting here is the analysis of age at death. For virtually all (90%) of Covid deaths, the patient was very old. This means that there were few "life years" left for that patient. However, for unemployment caused mortality the age at death was much younger, and so there were many more years for each of these people.
The process of higher mathematics gives the result that is in boldface in the quote.
It's hard to see a more counter productive government response.
Man, I must be the luckiest man on the face of the earth, stringing these analyses and predictions together like that. I'd better buy a Powerball ticket for tonight! [/snark]
So what is it that makes me so much smarter than a Brown University Professor? I wrote about this in the April post linked above, specifically:
Once a government executes a particular power, they will want to do it again. Most of the country in under house arrest; where does that lead in the future? To SiG's point that people will answer this by saying that people will die and isn't it heartless to let them die over a hypothetical, let me reply by asking how many people? Because we don't know the number because we're not measuring the factors that would tell us the answer: how many are very sick and would die within the next 6-12 months? Sure their lives are valuable but do we wreck 50 million lives to give them and extra 6 months? That sounds harsh, but that's exactly the tradeoff that we are making.
It's the Unseen. And the costs are Unseen, too, because no Governor in the land wants to make it explicit to the voters just what are all the many miseries that have been unleashed on them by said Governor. That it is Unseen is not by accident.
And so our policy makers see the situation poorly, looking through a glass darkly at only a portion of the situation. Of course the resulting public policy is hideous. Interestingly, the misery is concentrated on Trump voters (the hourly wage class), not the governing class (who work from home via videoconference). You can't get to your factory job that way, but the salaried class are doing fine. No doubt this is all a coincidence.
Even a private University like Brown cannot exist without the generous support of the Government. Professor Oster has a financial incentive to follow the government with respect to this policy, and when a person's dinner depends upon their support for a particular policy they tend not to see any evidence that runs counter to that policy.
Oh, and no doubt Professor Oster did just fine during the lockdowns while working class people in Providence lost their businesses. No doubt this was all a coincidence, too.
Moving on is crucial now, because the pandemic created many problems that we still need to solve.
Student test scores have shown historic declines, more so in math than in reading, and more so for students who were disadvantaged at the start. We need to collect data, experiment, and invest. Is high-dosage tutoring more or less cost-effective than extended school years? Why have some states recovered faster than others? We should focus on questions like these, because answering them is how we will help our children recover.
Many people have neglected their health care over the past several years. Notably, routine vaccination rates for children (for measles, pertussis, etc.) are way down. Rather than debating the role that messaging about COVID vaccines had in this decline, we need to put all our energy into bringing these rates back up. Pediatricians and public-health officials will need to work together on community outreach, and politicians will need to consider school mandates.
The standard saying is that those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. But dwelling on the mistakes of history can lead to a repetitive doom loop as well. Let’s acknowledge that we made complicated choices in the face of deep uncertainty, and then try to work together to build back and move forward.
Point of order, Professor Oster: it wasn't the pandemic that caused all this damage. Rather, it was the government imposed lockdowns (supported by "experts" such as yourself) that did. Some of us called this very, very early: April 21, 2020 to be specific:
There is simply no rational, science-based justification to keep the lockdowns in place anymore. We see this recognized by Governors (who are starting to end the lockdown) and by the population in general (who are starting to willfully violate the lockdown). Everybody but the "experts" is starting to recognize this, and the "experts" may be refusing to recognize it so that they don't get blamed.
We knew this from the very beginning, but dim-bulb "Experts" like Professor Oster got this public policy wrong all the time. They got it was catastrophically wrong. Yet somehow the "experts" keep wanting another chance to get things catastrophically wrong again. And again. And again.
Professor Oster wants us to give these same "experts" one more last chance. There's a Country music song about that.
She was standing at the front door When I came home last night A good book in her left hand And a rollin' pin in the right She said you've come home for the last time With whiskey on your breath If you don't listen to my preachin' boy I'm goin' to have to beat you half to death
Give me just a one more last chance Before you say we're through I know I drive you crazy baby It's the best that I can do We're just some good ol' boys, a makin' noise I ain't a runnin' 'round on you Give me just a one more last chance Before you say we're through
First she hid my glasses 'Cause she knows that I can't see She said you ain't goin' nowhere boy 'Til you spend a little time with me Then the boys called from the honky tonk Said there's a party goin' on down here Well she might've took my car keys But she forgot about my old John Deere
So give me just a one more last chance Before you say we're through I know I drive you crazy baby It's the best that I can do We're just some good ol' boys, a makin' noise I ain't a runnin' 'round on you Give me just a one more last chance Before you say we're through
Someone (maybe LindaG?) left a comment a week or two back about how "Signal is removing support for Android". There seems to be some confusion about this, enough so that Signal put up a good blog post that explains what's going on.
Short answer: Signal is still going to support Android, but they are removing the SMS feature from their Android app. This is overall A Good Thing. So keep using Signal on Android.
Longer answer: SMS (Short Message Service, generally called "Text" by everyone normal) is what phone companies use to allow short, text based person-to-person or group chat messages. It's been around for a long time - at least 20 years and probably longer. It was a clever hack to the telephony protocols that allowed short messages to be sent without setting up a circuit (i.e. phone call), so it gave users something they liked without really adding much stress to the phone network's capacity.
The fly in the ointment is that SMS really isn't very secure. We've known about this for a long time; I posted about this probably almost ten years ago (too lazy to chase this down in the almost 14,000 posts here).
Since Signal is all about security, they've finally dropped their SMS support feature. I think this was just used as an add on to their login mechanism - you not only had to enter your password but you had to have a second method of verifying that you are actually you. Signal would send your phone (well, the Signal app on your phone) a text with a secret code that you'd enter to complete your login.
Since SMS is not secure, this isn't a great way to add this second authentication step. So Signal has added their own mechanism where their server sends a (secure) message directly to the Signal app. In general, this is a security improvement over SMS. There's more detail at their blog post, but as I said earlier, from a security perspective this is A Very Good Thing.
So I hope this clears up the confusion. Signal is still there, on Android, and more secure than ever.
Since Silicon Greybeard asked in the comments, here's how to access the HTML code in Blogger. Having created written instructions for users many times over the last 30 years I have learned that instructions with screen shots are understood more clearly and are better received than text only instructions.
1) Log into Blogger.
2) Select "Design" in the upper right hand corner.
3) Select "Theme" from the menu on the left.
4) Click the drop down arrow attached to the "Customize" button.
5) Select "Edit HTML" from the drop down menu.
6) The code that appear is the structure of your primary page. Here there be dragons. You have all the editing power, including the power to make an unusable mess. If you want edit the widgets, like blogrolls and text boxes in the margins, click the icon with the four little boxes in the top right.
7) Select the desired item from the drop down menu. Since we have our blogroll broken into categories, there are several in our menu, named "Bloglist1" and so on.
8) If what you are doing is trying to restore your full blogrolls, open each "Bloglist" and find 'numItemsToShow'. You can search the page or just scroll until you find it. Change that number from 10 to a number large enough that your blogroll is no longer truncated.
Anything else you want to do could be done in the HTML. You could copy the page out into an HTML editor, make changes, and copy it back. Blogger works fine for what we use it for and this is the first time I had made a change at this level. No one I know designs pages in raw HTML, it's all done in some WYSIWYG editor, like Dreamweaver, but if you're comfortable in the code, any text editor can be used.
In support of Borepatch, I went into the HTML that underlays the blog and set all the blogrolls to display 100 items before hiding anything. So if you look at our blogroll, you now see the entire list again. It had been hiding anything more than 10 for at least a couple of years.
Since we are talking about the blogroll, I recommend looking through our lists and visiting some of them to see some very fine content. Far better than the usual drivel and dad jokes we manage to post here. The only thing stopping me from picking some to recommend is that I would be passing by equally deserving blogs and I don't want to post the whole list.
"Bigger than the Beatles" is a cliche in the music world. Buck Owens wasn't bigger than the Fab Four, but he was first - he recorded "Act Naturally" before they did, and his version inspired them to record their cover. Owen's career peaked in the 60s and early 70s but this 1974 gem is just plain fun for Halloween. And you can play it for the kids without scaring them.
There are a lot of blogs on the blogroll here that Google won't display. Sure, it let's you add them to the blogroll but it only displays ten. When the heck did they start that?
Apologies to those of you who mysteriously dropped off - it looks like I'm going to have to do major surgery to get everyone back.
It routes around it. Big Brother Google (you do love Big Brother, don't you?) cast Big Country into the Outer Darkness, yea with bell, book, and candle.
John Morris had a long career writing music for Mel Brooks (he scored "Springtime for Hitler" in The Producers), but this is his most iconic work from Brooks' equally iconic 1974 film Young Frankenstein. It's a very rare film, a satire that was both critically and commercially successful despite (or perhaps because of) its intentionally retro approach. Filmed in black and white using the laboratory devices from the original Frankenstein film, the movie works on many unusual levels.
For example, Aerosmith's iconic song "Walk This Way" was inspired by Marty Feldman's line in the film.
It's one of The Queen Of The World's and my favorite films, especially around Halloween.
Here is the City of Prague Symphony Orchestra performing the theme from Young Frankenstein.
Nimrodmaroon emails to ask if I'd ever heard of Bad Liver. I hadn't but holy cow, this is right up my ally. They were a (fittingly weird) Austin bad from the 1990s that has been described as "thjrash-grass", "contemporary bluegrass", and acoustic-metal-bluegrass". How can you not check them out after that?
This song is less weird than many of theirs - almost normal bluegrass but with a little seasoning of we're-not-in-Kansas-anymore-Toto. I like it.
Do note that at present the EU & UK are having about a 10% to 20% reduction in their natural gas flows. This is about 5% to 10% reduction in their “Carbon”. Now both currencies have dropped about 1/3 of their value vs the $ US (that is also losing value fast to inflation….). They also have a political revolution in the starting phases, governments being turned out, and massive marches in the streets. It isn’t even winter yet… With that small a step toward the WEF “Decarbonization Goal”, this is what you get. What do you think will happen with a double of that “decarbonization”?
He then goes on to point out that the EU's "accomplishments" to date are only about 10% of the decarbonization goal and that to meet these goals each of the next ten years will have to do even more than what the last year has seen. He points out:
Street Protests in the EU / Europe writ large are the prelude to riots that are the prelude to insurrections and revolts. I’ve often said these Elite need to remember “The French Haircut”. Yet they do not.
A lot of folks in Europe are going to die this winter. We'll see what things look like in March, but I wonder how many of the EU governments will still be in power by then.
I've written for years and years about how the Climate Temperature Models seem hopelessly broken. So just how broken are they? This broken:
A major survey into the accuracy of climate models has found that almost all the past temperature forecasts between 1980-2021 were excessive compared with accurate satellite measurements. The findings were recently published by Professor Nicola Scafetta, a physicist from the University of Naples. He attributes the inaccuracies to a limited understanding of Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity (ECS), the number of degrees centigrade the Earth’s temperature will rise with a doubling of carbon dioxide.
File this under "prediction is hard, especially about the future". Gosh, it almost seems like the climate system is massively chaotic and difficult to understand, or something ...
The paper groups dozens of models used in the CMIP 6 reference model into low, medium, and high ECS. Here are the four major temperature databases and their results against the three groupings:
The black lines are the actual temperatures; the yellow bands are the model's predicted temperatures. Notice that the actual temperatures have diverged outside the yellow predicted ranges (i.e. recorded actual temperatures are lower than predicted for all temperature data bases and all model groups). Long time readers know that I prefer the UAH satellite temperature record because (a) it is truly global and (b) it is only minimally adjusted. I have been vocal for a long time that adjustments to the other temperature records are excessive, and may be wildly excessive.
Let me emphasize here that the models have been wrong for 40 years.
There is another paper just out that corroborates Prof. Scafetta's results. In other words, the accepted scientific consensus for ECS is out of whack. Gosh, it seems like "Consensus Science" doesn't understand things as well as they tell us they do.
