There's just zero leadership within the Democratic establishment.

It's a party run by an entrenched, aging cadre of folks who have been around forever *because* they never made waves or rocked the boat.

I say "aging" not to be down on elders, but because the elders in the establishment have not built up any meaningful back bench of younger leaders and actively fight emerging young leaders.

The problem isn't the presence of elders, it's the absence of any sort of age diversity.
In lieu of accepting a diversity of age in leadership in a way that would allow for younger voices to be represented, they pay a small universe of privileged younger operatives to tell them what they want to hear-- that they can win young people with slick, empty marketing.
That's how you get a campaign like HRC in 2020, with its attempt to replace actual attention to millennial generation issues with a slick and often cringey hard push on celebrity surrogacy (and perpetual mom-trying-to-do-instagram vibes).
It's condescending, it's misguided, and we see it in every jokey Biden White House press release.

The playbook is, be 2007 Obama without making any of the bold promises that millennials naively assumed 2007 Obama was making (explicitly and implicitly).
Except, millennials learned from Obama that vague rhetoric doesn't mean big action.

We've learned to want actual meat in terms of promises *and* in terms of action, and the Dem establishment is still hoping they can sell us Shepard Fairey poster platitudes.
And again, it's not even like they're playing chess.

They're just the most party loyal, the ones that displayed the least real leadership, risked the least for justice or positive change.

They're just bureaucrat lifers.

There's no grand plan beyond, retire in a coffin.
They're coasting off Trump's loss right now.

What scares me is that they simply aren't equipped to counter the inevitable next wave of white supremacist electoral populism.

They weren't equipped to handle this past one, and Trump very much isn't the end.
The fact that they can't even manage to use this impeachment to compellingly close that chapter, tell this story, and build some shared narrative here is ample evidence of that.

It's beyond disappointing, but also completely predictable.

This is the state of the party.

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global health policy in 2020 has centered around NPI's (non-pharmaceutical interventions) like distancing, masks, school closures

these have been sold as a way to stop infection as though this were science.

this was never true and that fact was known and knowable.

let's look.


above is the plot of social restriction and NPI vs total death per million. there is 0 R2. this means that the variables play no role in explaining one another.

we can see this same relationship between NPI and all cause deaths.

this is devastating to the case for NPI.


clearly, correlation is not proof of causality, but a total lack of correlation IS proof that there was no material causality.

barring massive and implausible coincidence, it's essentially impossible to cause something and not correlate to it, especially 51 times.

this would seem to pose some very serious questions for those claiming that lockdowns work, those basing policy upon them, and those claiming this is the side of science.

there is no science here nor any data. this is the febrile imaginings of discredited modelers.

this has been clear and obvious from all over the world since the beginning and had been proven so clearly by may that it's hard to imagine anyone who is actually conversant with the data still believing in these responses.

everyone got the same R

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I’m torn on how to approach the idea of luck. I’m the first to admit that I am one of the luckiest people on the planet. To be born into a prosperous American family in 1960 with smart parents is to start life on third base. The odds against my very existence are astronomical.


I’ve always felt that the luckiest people I know had a talent for recognizing circumstances, not of their own making, that were conducive to a favorable outcome and their ability to quickly take advantage of them.

In other words, dumb luck was just that, it required no awareness on the person’s part, whereas “smart” luck involved awareness followed by action before the circumstances changed.

So, was I “lucky” to be born when I was—nothing I had any control over—and that I came of age just as huge databases and computers were advancing to the point where I could use those tools to write “What Works on Wall Street?” Absolutely.

Was I lucky to start my stock market investments near the peak of interest rates which allowed me to spend the majority of my adult life in a falling rate environment? Yup.