ON MATTERS OF DUBIOUS INTEREST
Now we have Jeanine Pirro, queen of plastic surgery and maniacal statements who also needs a brain transplant. She is coming to Washington as inerim US attorney for DC. Pirro adds to a total of now 21, I think, ex-Fox halfwits appointed to high posts by Trump. A 7-year-old piece from my work in progress shows this is nothing new. What a talent pool. Continue reading “The Trump-Fox Feedback Loop”
Mort Sahl was a great comic from the 1950s. He knew we can’t stop predicting the future. But we need to try understanding what lies ahead in the Trumpian chaos, how to oppose it, how to give it a context. We so-called elites are cowed and stymied. How can one possibly meet the threats? Continue reading “Mort Sahl: The Future Lies Ahead”
Some of us remember that great movie, Dr. Strangelove (1964), in which Peter Sellers can’t restrain his impulse to give the Nazi salute. It looked like Elon was overtaken by the same urge, and he even turned around and gave it twice. Continue reading “Elon Appeared Sixty Years Ago”
Everyone has had it in for the media for a while now. It’s much worse with the polarization, and many now find the news irrelevant, especially the political news. That’s not true across the board, of course, but even some liberals, including me, have lost faith in the reporting we get. It’s tiresome, repetitive and frequently uninformed. Continue reading “Watching the News. Or Not?”
moment of silence for 9/11 victims
Despite the furor about his recent appointments, Trump hasn’t changed all that much. He still executes the same performance at rallies, peddling the same bullshit but more so. He feels invincible, I think, but many of us feel outrage fatigue. We are tired of his unpredictability and bored with his schtick.
We news junkies seem to be vastly dependent on polling in this most fraught of elections. That’s a big mistake. As has been many times demonstrated, the polls often conflict and are thus wrong. The “why so?” is complicated, as Robert Kuttner explained in The American Prospect. He cites Michael Podhorzer,
who astutely points out that all polling is “opinion journalism.” Why? Because pollsters make assumptions about who is a likely voter and how to weigh or overweigh different demographic groups. “The ‘opinions’ are not about issues or ideology, but about methodological approaches.”
There is a long history of presidential polls being wrong, some of which is explained here. The pattern has remained unchanged for about a hundred years. The polls now predict no better than they did then. Even so, the polling practice has proliferated. It’s a business, after all, and following polls can be addictive.
Last month, Pew came out with a study, “Key things to know about U.S. election polling in 2024.” It’s a little more positive than I’ve suggested, maybe because Pew is a major pollster. A big problem, they say, is predicting who will actually vote.
Roughly a third of eligible Americans do not vote in presidential elections, despite the enormous attention paid to these contests. Determining who will abstain is difficult because people can’t perfectly predict their future behavior – and because many people feel social pressure to say they’ll vote even if it’s unlikely.
Nate Cohn in a recent NY Times post says, “The newer opt-in [online] pollsters haven’t fared any better,” and newer ones keep popping up. So Why are they doing no better than traditional polls? The problem is, as always, “how to find a representative sample without the benefit of random sampling, in which everyone has an equal chance of being selected for a poll.”
Instead, the internet has made things messier and more difficult. So many problems in verifying the data, and so few solutions. I found another fascinating study that illustrates a difficulty other than what the critics have been talking about. Axios summarized it this way: There are stark gaps between what Americans say they think and what they really think about hot-button political issues.
I think the findings from that new study are amazing. To wit, how the general public [61% of all Americans] misrepresents its views:
You can check out more of these results here (scroll to Key Findings). If indeed valid, what these outcomes plainly mean is that nearly all public opinion polling sampling may be invalid. Can pollsters ever really discover how people are going to vote?
this Jell-O apricot salad.
Maybe she looks a little looney here because this photo was cribbed from a video of her jazz-buying spree in DC last year. Kamala Harris and her husband are big jazz fans, as some of you may know. Husband Doug Emhoff was written up in The Atlantic last month:
The second gentleman, who might also be called the first jazz fan, is such a devotee that he named his children, Ella and Cole, for Ella Fitzgerald and John Coltrane, two of his favorite musicians. . . .He said, “Jazz isn’t constructed. It’s a little messy, like democracy can be at times.”
Anyhow, Kamala calls Mingus “really one of the greatest jazz performers ever.” Well, who is going to argue with that?
The fact that she bought Mingus’s most ambitious (and his favorite) album, Let My Children Hear Music, impresses me. She has good taste. The music is a little messy and a little disciplined, like democracy. Here is the opening number from the album, which has an almost classical feel to much of it, despite the title―“The Shoes of the Fisherman’s Wife Are Some Jive Ass Slippers.”
To accompany the album Mingus wrote a strong extended essay, which got some notoriety. Here’s part of what he said:
I think the music on this record is serious in every sense. I say, let my children have music. I said it earlier. For God’s sake, rid this society of some of the noise so that those who have ears will be able to use them some place listening to good music. When I say good I don’t mean that today’s music is bad because it is loud. I mean the structures have paid no attention to the past history of music. Nothing is simple. It’s as if people came to Manhattan and acted like it was still full of trees and grass and Indians instead of concrete and tall buildings. It’s like a tailor cutting clothes without knowing the design. . . .
Sy Johnson―my good friend, now deceased―orchestrated, arranged and conducted much of the Children album. You can find his comments throughout my book Mingus Speaks. Here’s one such: Mingus’s “music is just full of earth and it’s always got its feet in the dirt. I mean it’s jazz, it has human cries in it, and it’s full of humanity.”
I’d like to think that may be what appealed to Kamala. Her humanity is the foundation of her appeal. It’s what people tune in to. And it’s more important than all the money she’s raised and all the memes that have taken hold online. That is what will beat Trump.
That’s what he said three times while the Secret Service was hauling him off the stage. Wounded and bleeding, he was worrying about his shoes. Why haven’t people commented more about this strange fixation on his footwear? It may be one of his notable oddities, of which there are many.
One theory has it that he wears elevator shoes, which come off easy, and he didn’t want people to see him three inches shorter than normal. Sounds like Trump, doesn’t it?
You may remember the first gold sneakers he was hawking online. That first offering, as the NYMag informs us, was “the $399 gold Never Surrender high-tops, which the website indicated were limited to only 1,000 pairs and had sold out within a day of their release.” There were other designs like the Potus 45 and the T-Red Wave, all with highly inflated prices. A psychologist writes:
If you frequently wear high-top sneakers, you’re perceived as having an avoidant attachment style meaning that you care little for the opinions of others and are incredibly self-reliant [read self-absorbed].
The Trump Store is moving beyond sneakers to lots more Trump schlock, from bibles and coolers to Trump teddy bears
and kitchen essentials and even dog leashes.
But the fixation on shoes continues. Here we have the Trump Golf Shoe.
And now the Assassination Special, the Fight Sneaker.
A whole load of other stuff was being hawked to lovers of trumpdreck at the convention. He must be as broke as Rudy Giuliani. These things will serve as fond mementos of a defeated and demented candidate who barely avoided death. They appeal to women as well as men.
Gals of a certain age with prominent veins should avoid such displays. An addiction to shoes often applies to women. Some of us will remember Imelda Marcos and her 3,000 pairs of shoes. We will remember Trump far longer.
