Why aren't certain factors in the US Presidential election apparently being reflected in polling?

The current puzzle (beyond the meta puzzle as to why anyone in their right mind has ever voted for him) is that there are clearly certain current factors which should be reflected in Trump's polling, but for some reason they aren't there yet: 

*  I think (I'm having trouble finding the exact figure quickly - thanks Google :( ) the Haley primary vote ran on average at about 30%, for a candidate who had taken to sounding pretty much like a "never Trumper".  (Given the jellyback that it takes to be a Republican politician these days, whether that will hold is an open question.)    

*  Trump's takeover of the RNC and immediately sacking a bunch of people must surely create animosity amongst some formerly loyal and influential party members.

*  Trump is clearly making more verbal fumbles in his speeches than before, and appearing "low energy" at times.  His "greatest hits" style of rambling before cultists (including reverting to patently childish insult) for an hour already feels old, and its wildly unlikely that he is going to change.   

On the Biden side, you have the nutty Left who are swearing they won't vote for him over Israel/Gaza, preferring to sit it out and risk having a president about 300% worse on the issue.  But really, I get the impression that this group is much louder than its actual numbers - much like the whining Bernie Sanders bros who didn't end up being all that influential.

I think - and this is just a hunch - that the anti-Trump wing of the Republicans must be larger, and knows to be discrete if they don't want to be harassed by family and friends - and as such should be much more influential in the final election vote.

But - this doesn't seem to be being reflected in polling.

I wonder why?

Update:  here's an article (not from Nate Silver) looking at the uncertainties in polling at this stage of election cycles.  It's pretty good.

Incidentally, I remain confident that Trump won't win - not only will the "anti Trump" faction of Republicans be important, continuing court battles will be a constant distraction for his campaigning, and if the polling remains close before the election, Democrat motivation (particularly amongst women) to prevent his return should be very high.

Off to the B Ark with these "you too can get rich with AI Youtube content" spammers

There is an annoying quasi-industry of content creators who have set themselves up as content creation "get rich quick" advisers on Youtube and Twitter.

The worst of these are those who claim you can make a lot of money by setting up "faceless" Youtube videos using AI to generate the script (and much of the imagery), and how to "spam" Youtube with such content to make the algorithm push it.   (Typically, you see a thread on Twitter about this, with 50 spammy "great idea, thanks for the advice" comments following.)

The thing is, Youtube content with AI generated content is awful and a waste of everyone's time.   It's recognizable almost instantly, and I find it very hard to believe that most viewers continue watching it once they cotton on that the bland commentary is from ChatGPT or its ilk.  

This is my "the internet has taken an unexpected turn for the worse" bleat for today.....

 

Kidnapping yourself doesn't work in Singapore

Not a very bright scheme, but with some added twists and more incompetent police force, could make a good basis for a movie?  (Or has this been done?   I suspect it has, but can't think of any specific movie.)

SINGAPORE: A 33-year-old man who allegedly faked his own kidnapping to recoup his gambling debts was charged in court on Monday (Mar 11) with attempting to cheat his aunt.

Liu Changjian, a Chinese national, is accused of trying to trick Madam Liu Ya Bo into paying a ransom of 30,000 yuan (US$4,170) for his release.

He had sent threatening messages to his aunt last week while pretending to be his captor, the police said in a news release.

Liu was at the Marina Bay Sands Casino on Mar 7 and Mar 8 when he put his plan in motion, according to court documents.

He pleaded not guilty and will next appear in court for a pre-trial conference on Mar 25.

Preliminary investigations revealed that Liu entered Singapore on Mar 1 as a tourist. He was supposed to return to China on Mar 6 but did not do so, the police said.

His aunt, who was in China, then received text messages through WeChat from an unknown person seeking a ransom of 30,000 yuan for Liu’s release. This person forwarded a photo of Liu’s travel document as proof.

When she alerted Liu’s father to the matter, the older man – who was also in China – called the Singapore Police Force (SPF) for help on the evening of Mar 9.

Officers from the Central Police Division conducted "extensive searches and investigations" to locate Liu, said SPF.

They found him "safe and sound" in the Marina Bay area within three hours of receiving the call for assistance.

Further investigations revealed that he had gambling debts of between S$20,000 and S$30,000, the police said.

He then staged his kidnapping and sent threatening messages to his aunt in hopes of receiving the ransom. However, it was not paid to him or anyone else.

From that account, it seems the "ransom" is sought was only a fraction of his actual gambling debt.  So there is that.

Also, given the many, many surveillance cameras in Singapore, the police can very likely easily tell whether someone is in the company of a kidnapper very quickly.

 

A witty exchange

I say that while not even having seen Memento:

 

Sounds significant

From the Washington Post:

 Adults who use marijuana daily are 25 percent more likely to have a heart attack than those who don’t use it, according to research published in the Journal of the American Heart Association and funded by the National Institutes of Health.

The study also found a 42 percent increased likelihood of stroke linked to daily marijuana (cannabis) use.

The findings were based on data compiled by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from 2016 through 2020 from 434,104 U.S. residents, ages 18 to 74, considered a representative sample of the population. Of the participants, 4 percent were daily cannabis users and 7 percent were nondaily, using it about five days a month.

Relevant information

Hey, I'm in the target audience for this lengthy explanation of increasing night time urination:

Keep waking in the middle of the night to pee? Here’s why – and what to do about it 

It's more detailed than your average discussion of the topic.

Another chicken sauce recipe noted

Here's another simple cream sauce to eat with pan fried breast fillet (although, as this recipe suggests, I normally slice through the fillet to make them a more uniform thickness):  creamy pesto chicken.

In case link rot gets to it:  simply pan fry the seasoned fillets in some olive oil until done, take out and fry a few cloves of garlic (or cheat and use some from the jar - some brands of chopped garlic aren't too bad, but I don't use the cheapest that come from China) and a punnet of halved grape tomatoes.  When the tomatoes are getting a bit squishy, put in 1/4 cup of pesto and 1/2 cup of cream, stir and put the fillets back in to warm up.

Nice.

A couple of recent Biden tweets

On the home front (a modern medicine appreciation post)

My wife had a hip replacement operation a couple of days ago, and although still in hospital, she's doing pretty well and will almost certainly be back home over the weekend.

She had been suffering from an arthritic (right) hip for a good (I would say) 3 years, although the way the pain radiated down the front of the leg, rather than come from the hip itself, it wasn't obvious from the start what the problem was.   X rays confirmed arthritic changes in the hip, and then there was a 12 month wait while our upgraded private health insurance kicked in, but now it's done.

In the big picture, this is one of those things where you have to have lived long enough to fully appreciate how much the world has improved.   According to this report*, this operation was performed over 50,000 times in Australia last year - a number I found surprisingly high - but that's a lot of people getting relief from some pretty serious pain and (usually) being restored to normal mobility each year. 

All this for an operation which just wasn't available when I was a kid.   (It seems it really only started being done in the late 1960's, and became more widespread over the next couple of decades.)    

One other thing that surprised me about it was the way they get patients "mobilised" and on their feet within a mere 2 to 3 hours from the operation.   As I expected, this is a well researched topic - that early mobilisation helps - but I wonder who first decided to test this.  I would bet that there was some time, probably when I was a kid (but maybe earlier), when doctors and nurses would have thought that it was a ridiculous idea to interfere with bed rest and get bodies moving so soon after major surgery.  But someone must have tried it, and kept pushing the timing earlier and earlier, and found it helped.  Did other nurses think that the pioneers in pushing for earlier and earlier mobilisation were cruel?    (I will look more into the history of this soon).

Anyway, all's well that end's well - assuming no problems arise over the next few weeks!

*  Maybe COVID delays account for some of this figure?  Here's the full paragraph:

As devices now last longer, they are going into younger people and the average age of acquiring a device is now 66. In the past decade, joint replacement became more popular. There were 51,894 hip replacements last year, which was a 95 per cent increase on 2002. Knee replacements increased 139 per cent over the past decade to 67,742 in 2022.

Indefensible

The recent article in The Guardian about the wildly weird way a retired judge decided to conduct himself is good reading:

 After Lehrmann’s aborted trial, questions arose regarding the conduct of the police, the prosecutor and some politicians. Allegations and counter-allegations. An independent inquiry was the only way to get to the truth. A retired judge, Sofronoff, was appointed.

But things went awry straight away. A connection was made between Sofronoff and a “conservative columnist” at the Australian, Janet Albrechtsen. Albrechtsen had written many, many articles attacking the prosecution of Lehrmann as political and severely criticising Drumgold. It was clear that Albrechtsen had taken a position on the very matters which Sofronoff was supposed to be examining. They went to lunch together in Brisbane and commenced personal contact relating to Sofronoff’s inquiry.

Sofronoff has defended this, saying he was following a practice that commissioners make direct personal contact with the press. Sofronoff might think that, but no lawyer I know agrees with him. Everyone has been shocked by his conduct.

But even so there are varying degrees of personal contact. The constant contact between Sofronoff and Albrechtsen, as set out in the judgment, was pretty striking. It started even before the inquiry opened. It continued with a surprising intensity. Sofronoff and Albrechtsen shared more than 50 telephone calls for over 7.5 hours. They exchanged a huge number of text messages, many in a single day. Some emails were sent “secretively” to a private email address. Much of the traffic was initiated by Sofronoff. Meanwhile, Albrechtsen continued banging out negative articles about Drumgold on a daily basis.

The content of their contact was equally surprising. Even before the hearings started, Sofronoff sent Albrechtsen parts of the evidence with comments critical of Drumgold. During the public hearing, Albrechtsen even proposed to Sofronoff that he put particular questions to a witness – and Sofronoff agreed!

It gets worse. During the crucial phase during which Sofronoff was drafting his report, he was actually sending successive versions to Albrechtsen. Changes were made, but Kaye did not make a finding as to why the changes were made or who suggested them. We do know, however, that Sofronoff’s final report closely matched Albrechtsen’s anti-Drumgold narrative. Kaye found it would be reasonable to think that Sofronoff was under Albrechtsen’s “influence”. 

Lawyers can act very, very stupidly at times...

Update:   Oddly, Bernard Keane gives a quasi-defence of Albrechtsen which is more about admiring her ability as a quasi-journalist to entrench herself so deeply with a source!:

Albrechtsen was, clearly, a player in this inquiry, not a journalist. Nonetheless, she was doing her job of securing access to someone crucial to the issue she was covering. To obtain such high-level access to someone at the very heart of one of the biggest stories of the day was, bluntly, great journalism. I’d wager many journalists around the country can only envy the extent to which she got access to the head of a major inquiry. You can rebuke the use to which she put that access but still marvel that she obtained it.

But on the retired judge, he agrees it is bizarre:

The behaviour of Walter Sofronoff during the inquiry was, we now know, quite extraordinary — possibly unprecedented. It’s hard to recall any inquiry or royal commission in modern times that has been so characterised by such inappropriate contact between the inquiry head and a third party — let alone a member of the media engaged in campaigning directly on the issues being contested by that inquiry. Sofronoff’s justification that it was appropriate for him to have contact with the media doesn’t even come close to covering the sheer volume and time he dedicated to texting and speaking to Albrechtsen, lunching with her, sharing documents and evidence with her and, possibly, obtaining her input to drafts of his report....

Sofronoff, if he seriously thought part of his job was relations with the media — and that’s the first time I’ve heard the head of a major inquiry claim that — had the responsibility of appropriately managing those relations to the benefit of his inquiry, not giving privileged access and, potentially, a drafting role, to one member of the media.

I find it strange that Keane can find any degree of excuse making for Albrechtsen when he writes this as the big problem:

The problem is not with Albrechtsen, engaged in doing her job, so much as her employer. News Corp was — and is — engaged in a campaign of merciless character assassination of Brittany Higgins. It is devoted to the task of exemplary punishment of her for the damage she inflicted on the Liberal party — along with Liberal MPs and senators who continue to pursue her.

But Albrechtsen is one of the key assassins of Higgins.

I think Keane at times just likes to have eccentric takes for the fun of them.

Of course

Musk is greedy/cynical/dumb (take your pick) enough to plough a huge chunk of his wealth towards getting Trump elected.  I've been wondering if he'll post that appeal bond for him as well.  The NYT reports:

Donald Trump, who is urgently seeking a cash infusion to aid his presidential campaign, met on Sunday in Palm Beach, Fla., with Elon Musk, one of the world’s richest men, and a few wealthy Republican donors, according to three people briefed on the meeting who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a private discussion.
Mr. Trump and his team are working to find additional major donors to shore up his finances as he heads into an expected general election against President Biden. Mr. Trump has praised Mr. Musk to allies and hopes to have a one-on-one meeting with the billionaire soon, according to a person who has discussed the matter with Mr. Trump.  

Claude is causing a stir

Yesterday, it was this:

From the website she linked to:

Then this morning, this story about its language capacity seems a tad, um, scarily impressive?:

AUKUS doubts

I am easily convinced by the defence analysts who are saying there is a very big chance the AUKUS deal will just fall apart. 

I hate to say it, but Tony Abbott's preference was probably right - we should have gone into a collaboration with the Japanese to buy their submarines.

Beware the rays

I'm a bit surprised about the numbers:

Queensland Health data shows 43 people were admitted to hospitals across the state with stingray injuries in 2023.

That number has increased from 29 admissions in 2022.

Townsville Hospital and Health Service said its emergency department had treated six confirmed stingray injuries and another six suspected stings in the 12 months to January 2024.

Deaths from stingrays are extremely rare.

Most famously, wildlife icon Steve Irwin was killed in 2006 after a barb pierced his chest.

James Cook University stingray researcher Jaelen Myers said stingrays used their barbed tails as a defence mechanism.

"They don't want to be aggressive toward us in any way – they're very gentle-natured, they just want to mind their own business," she said.

"When they bury in the sediment, which a lot of the time they do, they're hard to see.

"If you're walking around at the beach and you step on one, then it's going to try to get away from you because it's freaked out and it might lash its tail out."

In past years, I had noticed quite a lot of small stingrays in the Noosa River, and close to the swimming area frequented by kids (and their parents.)   Basically, there just seem to be a lot more stingrays around South East Queensland now than when I was a kid. 

But I hadn't really realised that (apparently) even small ones can cause a wound requiring hospitalisation.

 

Why is "non-binary" a thing?

This question arises in my mind (again) while reading a Guardian piece on Hannah Gadsby, which consistently uses the PC approved "they" and "their" pronouns.

The other insistently "non-binary" person I read occasionally is the grievance whirlpool Sandy O'Sullivan (on Twitter), who always seems to be on the edge of a nervous breakdown.  

Oh, and some female soccer person was in the news recently for "coming out" as non-binary.

What seems very, very clear, is that, not so long ago, these women could simply have called themselves "butch lesbian" (or, if they felt a vague interest in men sexually) "butch bi woman", I suppose.  Everyone would understand that this was an apt descriptor.  That is, a woman sexually attracted to other women, who presents physically (usually deliberately, at least to some degree, in terms of fashion and physicality) as somewhat masculinised, and who likely has a somewhat "non [gender] traditional" mix of interests.  

In other words, everyone would assume that she felt like neither a "typical" female or male.  

It's clear that this can come with the territory of same sex attraction - although everyone also knows that that there can be gay women (and men) who share most stereotypical gender interests - guys only attracted sexually to men but who are heavily interested in cars and motor sports and don't care for the other type of "drag" at all, for example.

Maybe you could say that "non binary" women don't want to use "butch" as a self descriptor because it could be used an insult when it first started being commonly used.  But then, queer people are supposed to be happy about how they've "reclaimed" insult and use such terms with semi ironic pride.   I mean, seriously, if "Dykes on Bikes" has been no insult for the last (I dunno?) 30 years, surely the same can be said about "butch".  

Oh look - here's a painfully long Wiki entry on the use of "butch" and "femme" categories for lesbians.

The point I am trying to make is that it's been obvious for a long, long time that some people (be they gay, bisexual, or even straight) don't feel as if they have the "typical" gender interests, and that early feminism responded to this by critiquing overly conservative attitudes as to what it meant to "act like a real woman" (or man). 

Just thinking out loud here, because I feel there are more important things to spend time reading up on, the new thing in the "gender discourse" seems to be an implicit surrender to conservative attitudes of "this is what it takes to be a 'real' man or woman", and an insistence that not feeling like being able to "fit in" to either category deserves it's own special self identity (and the basis of great insult if people don't share this form of analysis -  including using language in a way it has not been used before.)  

As such, I find it hard to credit that "non-binary" is anything other than an exercise in category building of no use other than attention seeking, and even grievance-mongering.    

Update:  Here's the nonbinary soccer player talking, and SBS trying to explain:

Non-binary refers to people who do not relate to being either exclusively male or female.

Someone who is non-binary may feel like a mixture, somewhere in between the two, or may feel that they have no gender at all.

In a video shared by Adelaide United and Pride Cup, Wilson said their perception of gender "does not fit" the traditional definitions of man or woman. 

[Well, exactly the same as a butch lesbian or fem man doesn't "fit" traditional definition.]

"For me personally, I don't really feel like I'm anywhere near that; I feel like I'm separate from it," Wilson said.

"Other non-binary people may feel between, or they may feel a bit of both, or they may have that fluidity where they flow (between).

"It's really important to understand that every non-binary person experiences this differently and they will all have their own stories and they will all feel it some way differently."

 Wilson, who uses they/them pronouns, said it is important to use the correct pronouns when speaking to people.

"Not every non-binary person is going to use they/them, they might have no preference with pronouns, they might use any.

"It's a really important thing; you don't realise how much of a difference it makes.

"I didn't realise, but finally hearing people refer to me as they/them is this phenomenal, euphoric feeling."

Seems an odd thing to get "a euphoric feeling" about, when it's basically just getting people to conform to your adoption of an invented category that was considered unnecessary until (more or less) yesterday. 

I think it's possible that this is going to go away as a thing in due course.   

Update 2:  I feel a bit guilty in that I once speculated that in trying to understand "transgender", we might be better off allowing for a third category of gender following roughly the tribal idea of "two spirit" people who inevitably feel they are a combination of the two gender "spirits".   If I have some sympathy to people in a traditional quasi-religious system calling themselves "third gender", why should I object to your (typically dismissive of religious belief) modern woman or man using "non-binary" as very similar category?   

I feel there is a difference here, somehow, but have yet to put my finger on it!

A cute idea

A witty start

From the Washington Post review of Dune (part 2):

Imagine a world devoid of color or warmth, foundering amid environmental catastrophe and tribal factions that threaten to bring humanity to the edge of fatal fanaticism.

But enough about election-year politics. Let’s talk about “Dune: Part Two.”

The complaint is entirely legitimate

I know, left wing pundits (on Twitter, at least)  have taken to acting like Right wing pundits in the way they've been claiming too readily for the past 6 months that Trump's verbal stumbles are signs of dementia or other mental health issues.

However, the clips from this recent Trump speech do, to my mind, indicate something is genuinely "up", although personally I would guess that being hyped up on some drug or other might be the most likely explanation.  Does he travel with Junior, because I have a hunch cocaine would explain a lot...

What is 100% clear, however, is that if Biden abandoned a sentence midway with an "..…..ahhh", the NYT and other MSM would be promoting it as a serious, serious reason to be panicked over his capacity to be President.

The double standard is real.

Mercury in tuna still a thing for some time yet

The New York Times reports:

In the 1960s and 1970s, the horrors of mercury poisoning in Japan and elsewhere shocked the world into curbing releases of the toxic metal. Since then, mercury pollution from human activities, like burning coal and mining, has declined in many parts of the world.

But when a team of French researchers analyzed thousands of tuna samples from 1971 to 2022, they found that mercury levels in the fish remained virtually unchanged.

That’s most likely because “legacy” mercury that has accumulated deep in the ocean is circulating into shallower depths where tuna swim and feed, the researchers posit in a study published this month in the journal Environmental Science & Technology Letters.

Using modeling, they predicted that, even with the most stringent mercury regulations, it would take an additional 10 to 25 years for mercury concentrations to start falling in the ocean. Drops in mercury in tuna would follow only decades after that.

 

Have we seen peak gaming?

I noticed this story on NPR:

Close to 1 in 5 American gamers identify as LGBTQ+, according to new research from GLAAD. But LGBTQ+ gamers often face harassment in gaming communities and games with voice chats that anybody can join — common in multiplayer, team-based games.

The research indicates that 52% of LGBTQ+ gamers faced harassment while playing online, and 42% have avoided a game due to anticipated harassment.

"It's difficult when you're trans to hop on voice chat with random people because you open yourself up to criticism or potential harassment," said Veronica Ripley, also known as Nikatine, a full-time Twitch streamer and founder of the Discord community Transmission Gaming for trans gamers.

I guess this feels not so surprising:  it kind of aligns with my expectation that people who identify as queer are likely overrepresented in the cosplay community.  As explained further in that NPR story:

"A lot of folks in our community use video gaming to see that representation and want to see themselves in characters," said Ray Lancione, president of Qweerty Gamers, streamer, and former video game community manager. "Our community [uses] it to find each other ... finding people that are like-minded or similar sexualities, genders."

But it all makes me wonder, too: have we already reached "peak gaming"?   We always seem to be hearing of smaller games companies winding up, and bigger companies laying off staff.  And it feels like a long time since there seemed to be much excitement about forthcoming games.   (Not that I go looking for game trailers or anything.  And also, it does seem that the odd phenomena of Twitch streaming of game play is still very popular - but I wonder if that phenomena itself makes people feel less need to play the game themselves?)   I also wonder whether the rise in queer presence make bro boys question their own interest in gaming?   

This is not an important topic, but just wondering.