Perennial Delphinium
This plant in my garden is in honour of Eldest*Grand
because she loves the colour blue.
Waiting to see where this storm actually goes, but my house is on the track on this map.
Waiting to see where this storm actually goes, but my house is on the track on this map.
Wow! I just noted that (sub)Tropical Storm Fay has an 80% chance of development and looks to be headed over my house. That could mean a huge dump of rain, which would be great if it raises the water table without endangering lives. We'll see. Flash floods are probably likely with this storm.
ReplyDeleteWell, good luck and have your Wellies handy. That horrendous rainstorm in western Japan is not a typhoon--it's too early in the year for that, but the flooding and landslides are record-setting.
DeleteThat's gonna roll right over my Favorite Daughter's house too. Don't like that.
Delete'It's like night and day': Trudeau's and Trump's Covid-19 responses fuel wildly different outcomes [Click] California has about the same population as Canada, and so far about 2,000 fewer Covid-19 deaths. So it’s not as bad here as in several other parts of the US. But it’s bad enough and then some.
ReplyDeleteP.S.: Our area has about a quarter of the deaths per capita as the state of California at large.
DeleteWhat % of the state is your area?
DeleteTo be more specific, by "our area" I meant Fresno County. I couldn't tell you offhand what portion of the state by area it is, but I don't think that is relevant. There are huge variations in both the sizes of California counties and their population densities. Our portion of the state population is about one fortieth.
DeleteKrugman: The Deadly Delusions of Mad King Donald [Click] “[Trump] has spent the past five months trying to will us back to where we were in February, when he was sitting on top of a moving train and pretending that he was driving it.”
ReplyDeleteWild bison to return to UK for first time in 6,000 years [Click]
ReplyDeleteBy controlling overgrowth of certain trees, they should help to fill the ecological niche of the aurochs.
DeleteThe end of California’s coronavirus miracle holds sobering lessons. [Click] I don't know that it's as bad as all that, but I grant that it's significant.
ReplyDelete
ReplyDeleteThe Cost of the Evangelical Betrayal [Click] “White, conservative Christians who set aside the tenets of their faith to support Donald Trump are now left with little to show for it.”
I was struck by one statement in particular:
“This pastor, a lifelong Republican. . . wrote that ‘for decades Hollywood has portrayed conservative Christians as cruel, ignorant, greedy, and hypocritical.’” Does anyone here have any idea what he is talking about? Granted that I am culturally deprived, this statement seems inaccurate.
It absolutely is inaccurate. Evangelicals have a deep need to see themselves as victims under constant attack. Their only regret is that they didn't live in the time of the Romans so they could prove their victim-hood and faith by being fed to lions. They seem to always see themselves as "the victim" even as they victimize others. They do not use their "faith" as a comfort or a crutch, they use it as a bludgeon to beat others. Jesus would not recognize them.
DeleteDuring our constitutional I found myself thinking that for the preacher in question and his cohort "Hollywood" is probably an amorphous, all-purpose boogeyman or straw man.
DeleteI'd like to point out that there is a large difference between the average American evangelical of a mainline church (such as Methodist or Episcopal) and the evangelical of what Wil calls a "Community Bible Excitement Church." The former are simply seeking to invite a friend or neighbour to church. The latter seem to think that anyone who doesn't believe as they do is going to hell, so they are going to force them into it, to save their souls.
DeleteAm I mistaken to understand that one of the distinctive features of Evangelicalism is the proposition that one can (or perhaps must) comprehend The Word of God directly through communion with the Holy Spirit? (Perhaps I do not phrase it quite right; I am not completely conversant in the language. But I think I say it well enough to get the idea across.)
DeleteNew York's hungry rats [join] alfresco diners after lockdown famine [Click] The restaurant owners want to put a stop to it. But they don’t seem to have tried hiring guards equipped with shotguns.
ReplyDeleteUS universities are charging full fees for 'virtual' class this fall. This is absurd. [Click] I absolutely agree. I remember an instructor at the University of California at Santa Cruz opining that if the students were to suddenly disappear the administrators probably wouldn’t notice for weeks—all they would sense would be that things were running very smoothly.
ReplyDeleteI mostly can't agree. Looking back, I largely feel that sitting in a classroom listening to a professor lecture wasn't significantly different from looking at a computer screen listening to a professor lecture. Nor is it obvious, given fixed coasts, why there would be any great difference in costs to the schools. (We'll skip over all the things the author talks about that have no connection to what tuition pays for.)
DeleteIt has long been my opinion that despite protestations to the contrary, PhD-granting institutions do not concern themselves with undergraduate education; they tolerate undergraduates as a necessity for the graduate school. My advice to undergraduate students would be to attend a college that does not have a PhD program.
DeleteI did not observe that an any of the three schools from which I have degrees, although one of them (CSULB) had nothing beyond the Masters level. At the time I attended, Univ. of Chicago was best known for its innovative undergraduate program while at Caltech, where I got my PhD, it was notorious that undergraduate admissions were more selective than graduate admissions.
DeleteOHIO; As of Friday afternoon, there have been at least 62,856 confirmed or probable cases in the state, 3,032 deaths, and 8,701 hospitalizations, according to the Ohio Department of Health.
ReplyDeleteCoronavirus Will Be the Real Swing Voter in November [Click] It might be so, it might be so…
ReplyDeleteAn unexpected struggle for President Trump: Defining an elusive Joe Biden. "Bland as white bread" may be an advantage after all.
ReplyDeleteTrump Commutes Sentence of Roger Stone [Click]
ReplyDeleteOn Friday evening...
DeleteI am pretty pissed off that he did this. But Wil even moreso. He said, "Oh sure. Poor Roger can't be in a jail during COVID-19. But let's send all the children back to school during it."
DeleteSCOTUS Drawn Into Battle Over Florida’s Ex-Felon Voter Restrictions [Click]
ReplyDeleteIf these are the polls he’s using, no wonder Trump thinks 2020 is going well [Click] His sycophants are feeding his delusions.
ReplyDeleteWAPO has a paywall.
DeleteAre they Faux Gnus polls?
By Philip Bump
DeleteJuly 10, 2020 at 1:22 p.m. PDT
As far as ledes go — the anecdotes that journalists use to compel readers at the outset of a story — few I’ve encountered in my life have been better tailored toArizona my interests than one that Washington Post columnist Marc A. Thiessen used this week.
Thiessen got a chance to interview President Trump in the Oval Office and began his description of that conversation by explaining what the president was doing when Thiessen entered.
“President Trump was going over new polls — some internal, some not — showing him tied or leading Joe Biden in key swing states. ‘Pennsylvania tied. Florida, up one. Wisconsin, up one. Texas, up five. Arizona, Trump 49, Biden 45; North Carolina, Trump up three. And then Montana: Trump up a lot — 52-38,’ he said.”
Over and over, we’ve heard Trump wave away the idea that he’s in trouble in November, citing unspecified polls that show him doing well. And here some are — a couple without attribution and presumably internal, but a number with links helpfully included by Thiessen. The Wisconsin poll is from the Trafalgar Group; the Arizona and North Carolina ones from Gravis Marketing, commissioned by One America News; the Montana poll is from the University of Montana.
Actual polls, allowing us at last to evaluate whether Trump is right to feel confident about November.
He is not.
Let’s first walk through what the numbers say, in context. Here’s the margin Trump enjoys in the listed polls relative to former vice president Joe Biden, his likely Democratic opponent.
DeleteSummary of graphic:
Arizona Trump +4
Florida Trump +1
Montana Trump +14
North Carolina Trump +3
Pennsylvania Tie
Texas Trump +5
Wisconsin Trump +1
If you remember 2016, you’ll recall that Florida, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin were particularly close (and therefore particularly important) in determining the outcome. Trump leading or running close to Biden would suggest another tight race.
But it’s worth comparing the results Trump shared with the 2016 results. That result from Montana, where Trump boasted that he was up “a lot,” is a bit like LeBron James bragging about leading me by a wide margin in a game of one-on-one. Or, really, as if a starter for a Division II college were making the same boast: It’s not necessarily that he’s definitely going to win, but it certainly would be a surprise if he didn’t, and by a healthy amount.
After all, in 2016, Trump won Montana by more than 20 points. Meaning that the 52-38 result in Trump’s poll is actually significantly worse than he did four years ago. Specifically, it’s a swing of seven points, with Trump losing four points and his opponent gaining three. In Texas, a more subtle shift, with a five-point lead now comparing unfavorably with Trump’s nine-point win in 2016.
Summary of graphic, comparison to 2016 results
DeleteArizona Trump +1
Florida Trump -1
Montana Trump -7
North Carolina Trump -1
Pennsylvania Trump -1
Texas Trump -4
Wisconsin Trump +0
The rest of the results are similar to 2016, which is interesting in its own right. We’ll come back to this.
Savvy election watchers understand that individual polls provide a less-accurate picture than polling averages. Every poll has a margin of error; aggregating the polls into an average reduces that error. So how do Trump’s polls compare with the current averages in the identified states?
Poorly.
Abbreviated Summary of current polling averages graphic:
Arizona Biden +8
Florida Trump Biden +6
Montana Trump No average
North Carolina Biden +7
Pennsylvania Biden +7
Texas Biden +2
Wisconsin Trump Biden +8
The average in Arizona has Biden doing eight points better than Trump’s poll — and leading. In Florida, Biden’s doing six points better in the average, also winning. There’s no average in Montana because it’s considered solidly red, but there is in North Carolina … where Biden’s doing seven points better in the average than in Trump’s poll. And, again, leading in the state.
In Pennsylvania, Biden is doing seven points better and winning. In Wisconsin, Biden is doing eight points better and winning. Only in Texas is Trump’s poll close to the average, which has Biden doing only two points better.
You’ll notice a pattern between the last two graphs. Excepting Texas and Montana in each, the differences between Trump’s polls and 2016 are fairly consistent across states, as are the differences between Trump’s polls and the polling averages.
Why? Perhaps because the polls Trump is citing are using a model of who’s likely to vote that closely mirrors the 2016 electorate.
When CNN released a poll showing Trump trailing Biden by double digits nationally, the president was furious, tweeting out a laughable memo attempting to undercut CNN’s results. (Those results have since been replicated numerous times by other pollsters.) Among the reasons that CNN’s results weren’t to be trusted, it asserted, was that they weighted the results according to the actual distribution of partisanship in the country and not to the 2016 electorate. In other words, CNN tried to emulate the electorate as it is and not as it was when Trump won, according to exit polls.
DeleteIf the polls Trump is relying on now actually did weight their results to the 2016 electorate, that might help explain the similar results. The polls from Gravis indicate that they “are weighted by voting demographics,” which seems to support that idea. This also might explain why pollsters weighting according to party registration end up with results a consistent distance away from those results.
It’s worth noting that neither Trafalgar nor Gravis score particularly well in FiveThirtyEight’s rankings of political pollsters. Gravis gets a C; Trafalgar, a C-minus. Both pollsters were off by more than five points on average in their polling. This doesn’t mean their results are necessarily wrong. It does suggest, however, that one might be wary of accepting their results as more accurate than averages of a broader range of pollsters.
We’ve seen behavior like this before. In 2012, Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign was confident that it knew who would turn out to vote. Its internal polling showed Romney faring well in key states — because it was making incorrect assumptions about the electorate. The campaign was truly surprised when its polls turned out wrong.
The polling average that year was less generous. FiveThirtyEight’s analysis of polls gave Romney an 8 percent chance of winning on Election Day.
He did not win.
For some unknown reason WaPo is letting me through this evening. Usually I have to resort to using a particular browser.
DeleteThank you so much, Alan! NOW I see!
DeleteLong story short, Trump is surrounded by sycophants (not news) who cherry-pick the polls to give him the results he wants in order to save their miserable little jobs, and the doofus doesn't bother (or perhaps doesn't know how) to check the Real Clear Politics polls average. I will delete the above transcriptions at the end of this blog day (10 PM way out here).
Delete1277 cases (+5)
ReplyDelete56 deaths (0x23days)
Now 155 active cases
Recovered 1066
In Hospital = 2 (-1)
Tests 74,098 (+1349)
So, today we learned that in the past week we have had 54 new known cases and no new deaths. It makes me sad that there are so many, especially as NONE of them are related to the 3 outbreaks that have taken place in the state in the past 6 weeks. A month or so ago we were seeing maybe 7 new cases in a week. Sigh.
WaPo: After months of decline, America’s coronavirus death rate begins to rise [Click]
ReplyDeleteIf you have not yet seen The Borowitz Report today, you're in for a treat.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.newyorker.com/humor/borowitz-report/americans-overwhelmingly-favor-sending-trump-back-to-school-in-fall?fbclid=IwAR2s3wI9hXW0KWTSU8q8Pt4HXgzxTxJ71MfAy9Z413B4y5Wls-PNZWuGW58
I am sure it will be a treat; on my way there momentarily!
DeleteI am in absolute agreement with the concluding point!
Delete