Sarah Palin loses again

One of the last races for the House of Representatives has been called, that for the single congressional seat in Alaska. Democrat Mary Peltola beat Sarah Palin by 55% to 45%, a larger margin than the 3% margin in the special election held in August. Alaskan elections have an open primary in which people of all parties compete and the top four then move on the general election which is decided by ranked-choice voting of the four candidates. Peltola came close to getting 49% of first preference votes and thus would still have won if the election were decided by a plurality. The details of how the preferential votes were cast can be seen here.
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Tough turkeys

I am always interested in news reports of aggressive turkeys, like this one about a town in Massachusetts where some aggressive turkeys have made residents fearful.

People in Woburn, north-west of Boston, have been subjected to a barrage of attacks and intimidation by a group of five wild turkeys, with the situation forcing some to take up improvised weapons and residents reporting being trapped in their homes.

The turkeys, led by a male bird nicknamed Kevin, arrived two years ago. Initially the birds were docile, but as time passed they have become ever more pugnacious, leaving Woburners fearful for their safety and forced to adapt their behavior.

“They don’t let you out of your house,” said Meaghan Tolson, who lives in Woburn and has named the turkeys.

“They peck at cars, they stop traffic. They go after kids on bikes. If you’re walking or jogging, or anything like that, they come for you.”

Another article describes how this is a growing problem in many towns as the wild turkey population grows.

The reason for my interest is because of my own bad experiences with wild turkeys that I described here, here, and here. My actions in the face of those turkeys were, to put it charitably, less than heroic and so it made me feel better to realize that my own cowardly behavior when confronted with what are essentially overgrown chickens was not that uncommon. It appears that wild turkeys can cause serious injuries so avoidance and defensive behavior is advised.

Move Thanksgiving to October

Today is Thanksgiving day in the US, the day when families and friends get together to share a traditional meal. There is some controversy over the holiday but what I am concerned about here is the date. The date of the holiday has changed over time, sometimes for purely commercial reasons.

From the time of the Founding Fathers until the time of Lincoln, the date of observance varied from state to state. The final Thursday in November had become the customary date in most U.S. states by the beginning of the 19th century. … Modern Thanksgiving was proclaimed for all states in 1863 by Abraham Lincoln [who] … set national Thanksgiving by proclamation for the final Thursday in November.
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On October 31, 1939, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed a presidential proclamation changing the holiday to the next to last Thursday in November in an effort to boost the economy.[36] The earlier date created an extra seven days for Christmas shopping since at that time retailers never began promoting the Christmas season until after Thanksgiving. But making the proclamation so close to the change wreaked havoc on the holiday schedules of many people, schools, and businesses, and most Americans were not in favor of the change. Some of those who opposed dubbed the holiday “Franksgiving” that year. Some state governors went along with the change while others stuck with the original November 30 date for the holiday, and three states — Colorado, Mississippi, and Texas — observed both dates. The double Thanksgiving continued for two more years, and then on December 26, 1941, Roosevelt signed a joint resolution of Congress changing the official national Thanksgiving Day to the fourth Thursday in November starting in 1942.

Since nowadays retailers have started promoting Christmas well before Thanksgiving, the rationale for keeping it as the fourth Thursday in November no longer exists and the dates of the two holidays can be decoupled.

I argue that it would make more sense to shift Thanksgiving to (say) the fourth Thursday in October. There are several advantages for such a shift. A big one is that this is one of the biggest travel periods of the year and the weather is much milder in October, making travel much less risky. There have been many Thanksgiving horror stories where massive snowstorms have shut down airports, grounded flights, and created hazardous driving conditions leaving many people stranded and utterly miserable. Another reason is that currently there is a long stretch of time, between the Labour Day holiday on the first Monday in September and Thanksgiving on the last Thursday in November, where there are no holidays. Having a holiday in October would provide a nicer break. Finally, Christmas is also a big family holiday and currently Christmas comes quickly after Thanksgiving, too quickly in my opinion.

So that’s my case for shifting Thanksgiving to October.

Violent crime dropped rapidly after elections!

Not really. It is just that right wing media suddenly loses interest in the story once it is no longer useful to scare their voter base into thinking that Democrats are ‘soft on crime’. But you can expect coverage of violent crime to rise again just before the 2024 elections, irrespective of the actual data.

While mass shootings like the two that occurred this week naturally get a lot of attention, violent crime in general in every major category has been on a steep decline since the early 1990s.

Run-off election for the Georgia senate is still important

Once control of the US Senate had been decided in favor of Democrats with the win by Catherine Cortez Masto in Nevada that gave them a 50-49 edge, interest in the Georgia run-off election between Democratic incumbent Raphael Warnock and the batty Republican Herschel Walker dropped precipitously. If the Georgia race were still pivotal to control of the Senate, we would have had wall-to-wall coverage. Instead, now one has to seek out news about it.

But we should not think that this makes the race inconsequential. As this article explains, in practical terms there is a big difference between a 51-49 Democratic majority and a 50-50 tied body in which the vice-president breaks the tie in favor of the Democrats.

A 51-49 Senate would give Democrats an outright majority, meaning that [majority leader Chuck] Schumer wouldn’t have to negotiate a power-sharing agreement with Republican leader Mitch McConnell. The two parties had to do that two years ago and also in 2001, the last time the Senate was evenly split.

In early 2021, confirmations of new President Joe Biden’s nominees were stalled for several weeks while Schumer and McConnell worked out an agreement on how to split committees and move legislation on the Senate floor. Using the little leverage he had, McConnell threatened not to finalize a deal until Democrats promised that they wouldn’t try to kill the legislative filibuster that forces a 60-vote threshold.
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Expect House Republicans to investigate Hunter Biden

One of the first things that Republicans are likely to do after they take control of the House of Representatives on January 3rd is to launch investigations into Joe Biden’s son Hunter and whether he used his father’s name and influence in some shady dealings. There is a laptop involved that purportedly has evidence of this. It is being portrayed as either a storm in a teacup or a big deal. These hearings are going to be a rerun of the notorious Benghazi hearings from 2014 to 2016.
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A true MAGA warrior

In Arizona, Republicans Kari Lake lost her governor’s race to Democrat Katie Hobbs and Republican Blake Master lost his senate race to Mark Kelly. Both are ardent Trumpists and as true devotees are now, of course, claiming the election was stolen from them. Lake is refusing to concede but Masters had previously conceded the race.

But in a race for the Arizona state House of representatives, a Republican who won has decided to take an even stronger stand.

In Arizona, Republican Liz Harris won her race for a seat in the state’s House of Representatives – but has pledged not to cast any votes until the entire 2022 election is redone, 12News reports.

“Although I stand to win my Legislative District race it has become obvious that we need to hold a new election immediately. There are clear signs of foul play from machine malfunctions, chain of custody issues and just blatant mathematical impossibilities. How can a Republican State Treasurer receive more votes than a Republican Gubernatorial or Senate candidate?” Harris wrote in a statement.

I have an answer! Maybe people liked the state treasurer more than they liked the gubernatorial and senate candidates? After all, they are separate votes, no?

There is no way that there is going to be a do-over for all the races in Arizona so I wonder how long Harris will stick to her guns, since the above article says,”If Harris follows through on the threat, it could cause some serious problems for her Republican colleagues. They control the Arizona House, but only by two votes.”

Maybe we should be like Larry

The collapse of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX has been all over the news.

Cryptocurrency exchange FTX, which has filed for US bankruptcy court protection, said it owes its 50 biggest creditors nearly $3.1 billion.

The exchange owes about $1.45 billion to its top ten creditors, it said in a court filing on Saturday, without naming them.

FTX and its affiliates filed for bankruptcy in Delaware on Nov. 11 in one of the highest-profile crypto blowups, leaving an estimated 1 million customers and other investors facing total losses in the billions of dollars.

What seems to have happened is a lot like an old-fashioned bank run where too many depositors wanted their money back at the same time, exhausting the cash reserves of the company. But in the case of actual banks, they are regulated by the government and there are systems in place to assist individual banks weather such runs and protect depositors. In the unregulated crypto-world where they prided themselves on being independent of government entanglements, there are no such safeguards

The company has filed for bankruptcy and Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of FTX, has ben pushed out of the company and is now in the Bahamas.

The collapse of FTX has given a new lease of life for the ad the company aired during the last Super Bowl featuring Larry David.

The case for more public toilets

It is curious that given that although going to the bathroom is a basic human function, society does not make it easier for people to do so when they are out of their homes. Some activists are trying to change that, by criticizing the statement by Starbucks CEO suggesting that they might close their bathrooms to non-customers.

“Let the people go!” an activist group is telling Starbucks after the coffee chain’s boss threatened to close down its bathrooms.

The American Restroom Association is marking World Toilet Day on 19 November, an awareness-raising day started by the United Nations to celebrate toilets and advocate for proper sanitation systems, by calling on Starbucks to keep its restrooms open to the public.
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While Starbucks has not officially changed its bathroom policy after Schultz’s comments, the American Restroom Association (ARA), which advocates for safe and well-designed public restrooms, notes that some Starbucks locations have closed their restrooms to the public.
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The trolling of Musk goes on

I might as well join the pile on of trolling of Elon Musk. A prankster calling themselves a ‘projection activist’ projected a rolling caption with insults onto the Twitter headquarters in San Francisco.

This prank was no doubt timed to coincide with Musk’s statement that he would be in the building over the weekend to meet personally with the remaining engineers in the company who were commanded to come there at short notice.

It is not clear what would be accomplished by such meetings. There is no way that Musk could properly gauge the quality of a person by seeing a few lines of code during a brief meeting, especially since Twitter is not like any of the companies he already runs and has an entirely different culture. It seems like Musk is jerking people around just because he can. It is a petty tyrant move whose only result is likely to make even more people quit.

There is an old saying that people do not leave bad jobs, they leave bad managers. And, boy, is Musk a lousy manager, at least as far as Twitter is concerned.. How the other companies he runs have survived so far beats me.