Super Bowl LV Prediction

Going into this National Football League season I assumed that television ratings would be excellent due to the pandemic disruption of all sports leagues and subsequent fan demand for regular programming. That's why I was surprised a few weeks back to hear that television ratings were down significantly this year, meaning that the NFL's hold on U.S. consciousness appears to be waning again.

I've tracked this issue over the years because the National Football League, with the rise of the Internet giants and the diminishment of both broadcast television and Hollywood, is really the last cultural commons in the United States, and if the last cultural commons is trending towards spoliation we need to accept this as evidence that big change is underway.

There are plenty of reasons why the NFL is tanking, but I am interested in what it augurs. I think it's pretty clear the direction we're headed because we've already arrived: political stasis and constant civil conflict. The two major political parties are imploding, and to my mind this is something long overdue.

In any event, I've appreciated games played to empty stadiums this year. The absence of cheerleaders and obscene fans is a relief. The excellence of the athletes is on even greater display.

Week 17 approaches, the last week of the regular season. Green Bay travels to Chicago to lock down homefield throughout the playoffs. I have to say that of late I have been greatly impressed by the Packers. How they humbled the Titans in the snow of Lambeau was an incontrovertible display of strength.

So heading into the playoffs I have to pick the Packers to go to the Super Bowl. 

In the AFC can anyone beat the Chiefs? 

Yes, if Mahomes has a bad day. 

Las Vegas still favors Kansas City to repeat. I think that's right, though I wouldn't be surprised if a team like the Ravens or the Steelers pull off an upset.

The Super Bowl in February, Super Bowl LV, will be a repeat of the first Super Bowl, but this time the Chiefs will win.

A Pandemic of Homelessness

It's that time of year. The big dark has descended upon the Pacific Northwest. Sunrise is after 7:00 AM. Sunset is 4:30 PM. 

Each year around mid-November, due to the dark mornings and dropping temperatures, I'll start replacing my weekend road runs with laps on the community center soccer pitch. 

Due to a lengthy recovery from COVID, I've been leery about recommitting to running. Last December I posted my best 5K time in years. It seemed as if I were on my way back. I followed that performance with close to a personal worst a couple months later at a leap year 5K; a performance that augured my falling ill with the coronavirus.

Slowly but surely my strength is returning. Demands at work are off the charts. So all restored vitality is being sucked up by the job. Nonetheless, with the chores of grocery shopping and laundry already expedited, and with Thanksgiving approaching, my holiday ritual for which is a long early morning run, I decided to head out to the playfield at 5 AM this morning.

I walked the steep hill up to the community center rather than run it, as I usually do. When I got to the artificial turf soccer field it was pitch black. No moonlight nor any streetlamp glow. I noticed big tarped piles dotting the perimeter. I figured it was machinery for turf maintenance. 

When I started running my square laps I could see that tarped piles were actually homeless bivouacs. Underneath the blue tarps were igloo-style camping tents. They lined the four sides of the pitch.

I've been coming to this community center soccer field for two decades, and I've never seen anything like this before. Clearly it is something that the city's parks department must have signed off on. I know from being on that field early in the morning that city workers service it regularly.

Homelessness was a huge problem prior to the pandemic, a glaring indictment of "as good as it gets" American neoliberalism and Trumpian "the greatest economy of all time" hokum. Now that problem is being mainlined. Cities are transferring homeless from barracks-style shelters to hotels in order to reduce the number of coronavirus infections. Seattle is considering buying a hotel for the homeless. 

Hopefully some sort of socialized housing safety net comes out of this pandemic, a basic right to something like a home in a tiny house village. 

After I finished jogging I walked to a nearby Safeway for some Emergen-C. On the south side of an east-west street opposite the Safeway is a little pocket city park, a patch of green grass and shade trees. It too was filled with tents of the homeless. On the sidewalk leading to the Safeway entrance homeless slept.

The longer the pandemic persists the more homelessness is going to be forced from the margins of our neoliberal society to its center.

It's Morning in America: BlueAnon vs. QAnon

It's Friday morning and Trump's hope for claiming a second term appear to be dashed by Biden pulling ahead in the Peach State. Surveying opinion, Scotsman Craig Murray seems most sensible to me:

I hope that those who consider themselves of the left enjoy their relief when the electoral process finally puts to bed the extraordinary populism of Trumpism, and returns the USA to the smoother control of the regular media and political classes and their billionaire controllers. Because anybody who believes any more than that is happening is a fool. I said that I did not blog about the US elections because of the appalling partisan nature of debate. The truth is the system threw up, again, two truly obnoxious candidates entirely antithetical to the real interests of ordinary people in the USA. Biden will do nothing to tackle the appalling wealth and resource inequality which is the most startling problem the country faces. He will hopefully resolve social tensions in the short term. But the cause of those social tensions is a system of gross exploitation of the middle and working classes which is not sustainable in the long term, and which was the root of the Trump political eruption.

Kamala Harris was of course the most right wing possible Vice-Presidential pick. Her advance into power, despite being entirely rejected in the Democratic primaries, is in itself a huge condemnation of the system. I believe I am right in saying that Harris’s Primary campaign was so disastrous she managed to obtain zero delegates at all to the Democratic National Convention. Zero, None. Absolute bottom of the pile. Rejected by Democratic voters as the candidate in toto. Attempting to confirm this zero delegate fact, I just looked up the Wikipedia page on her primary campaign, which turns out to be the most entirely false, hagiographic and manicured Wikipedia page I have ever seen, on any subject, which is saying a lot. Apparently her Presidential Primary bid was in fact a tour de force of brilliant debating and political strategy, recounted in enormous detail, not an abject failure resulting in no delegates. The extraordinarily dishonest Wikipedia page is not perhaps in itself hugely important, but it is emblematic of the sinister manipulation behind the scenes of Kamala Harris’s rise to power.

Let us put a note in our collective diaries to look again in two years and see whether the USA has entered a period of renewed social progress, or just reinvigorated its position as a violent threat to the world. I am looking forward to the period when Biden’s mainstream cheerleaders have to find something positive to say rather than just respond “But Trump is evil”. I predict most of the responses below will say nothing much more on analysis than “But Trump is evil.” Knock yourselves out.

I think World Socialist Web Site's Patrick Martin makes an important point when he says:

While Trump at present lacks the political support to overturn the results of the election, he is laying the basis for a campaign to present himself as the victim of a “stab in the back.” This narrative will be used by himself and members of his family to perpetuate the development of a fascistic movement, which will become a permanent and significant presence in American politics.

Trumpism isn't going to evaporate after Pennsylvania and Nevada are declared for Biden. The Republican Party is headed for a bloody bestial internal struggle. 

Will the Lincoln Project neocons return to the GOP to knife fight with faux working class hero Josh Hawley or will they continue to hole up in the Democratic Party with the likes of Abigail Spanberger? Either way both national parties have houses built on melting ice.

Last night ABC News' George Stephanopoulos had to remind his viewers that Russia seeks to divide us. It was the BlueAnon mantra recited right before a commercial break, a bang of the gong for the Democratic faithful, as Trump flag-wavers rallied in Phoenix and Las Vegas, a patriot here and there with an AR-15 slung over the shoulder.

It's morning in America: Russiagate vs. Pizzagate.

Wrong Again: No Blue Wave

UPDATE: It looks like Biden is going to hold on in a squeaker, 270-264. Give Biden Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona and Nevada. That's 270. Give Trump Pennsylvania, Georgia and North Carolina. That's 264.

****

At this point, the early morning after election day, the presidential race is too close to call. Biden needs the vote yet to be counted in Michigan and Pennsylvania to come in overwhelmingly Democratic, something that is distinctly possible since many of the outstanding ballots are from urban counties.

One thing though appears obvious: There was no blue wave. Texas didn't flip and Trump won Florida again. Republicans will likely maintain control in the Senate and even pick up seats in the House. The energized electorate was composed of more than just alarmed soccer moms; it included Trump loyalists as well.

The bottom line here is that the United States is a nation on its way down. How else to explain the inability of a well-funded opposition party to shellac an incumbent saddled with 13 million unemployed and over 200,000 dead from a pandemic?

It's difficult to rationalize. If Trump wins, the state polls in Pennsylvania will turn out to be even more inaccurate than they were four years ago -- a big blow to the mainstream media and the polling profession.

I'm not convinced that Biden has lost this. Trump's premature declaration of victory and call for a stop to the vote count is telling. As Republicans go to court it is unclear what arguments could justify halting the normal tabulation of election results.

On the other hand, maybe "the United States is a Bizarro world of inverted McCarthyism where the fellow traveler is a closet QAnon revolutionary."

Which Side are You On?

Glenn Greenwald's resignation from The Intercept is one of those rare "which side are you on" moments of brilliant illumination. Yves Smith has a helpful synopsis this morning with links to all the key pieces.

The story in a nutshell is that editors at The Intercept refused to publish co-founder Greenwald's story about evidence of influence peddling found on Hunter Biden's laptop. In response, Greenwald announced his resignation and set up shop on Substack.

I subscribed to Greenwald's substack, as well as Matt Taibbi's. Taibbi's take on Greenwald's resignation is definitive. I hope you read it. 

Taibbi plots the rise of Russophobia starting in 2016 as the key organizing principle of the Democratic Party. Russia went from being dismissed by Obama as barely a regional power to an omniscient many-headed hydra controlling U.S. democracy.

To me it has always seemed obvious that the the target of this new McCarthyism is the voting population of the United States. How to maintain fealty to a neoliberal order that produces more than anything else foreign wars and inequality? Gin up terror over foreign subversion by an official enemy.

As for The Intercept, its support for the war on Syria (Robert Mackey, Mehdi Hasan) and Russiagate (James Risen) shows it's squarely aligned with the U.S. national security state. On the other hand, I think Ryan Grim's reporting on progressive electoral politics is indispensable, and Ryan Devereaux has done great work on the Thin Blue Line.

In the end, does anyone doubt that Hunter Biden, a fucked up young guy, was peddling his father's name for personal advantage? I don't. At the same time, since I have never believed that Joe Biden is some kind of moral exemplar, I had no trouble voting the Democratic ticket. The battles yet to be fought are against the Democratic Party once it attains control of the federal government.

The 2020 General Election: It's Another Blue Wave

As I emerge from the chrysalis of my COVID illness I am confronted with increased demands at work. I am now working a ten-hour day Monday to Thursday and a five-hour day on Friday. Where I used to wake up and spend 90 minutes on this page I am now heading to the office first thing so I can be at my desk by 7 AM. I work through lunch -- pre-lockdown I would walk ten minutes to a coffee shop and read the paper for 40 minutes -- then I scurry home at 4 PM where I work remotely until 5 PM.

It's going to be this way for the foreseeable future. Social distancing at work means I am the principal person in the office most days -- a one-man band answering the phones, processing the daily mail, receiving deliveries, etc. Also, the building where the office is located has been sold, and we have a vacate date sometime at the end of winter. Herculean chores must be performed the next few months.

With the general election a little more than a week away I wanted to get my prediction down, for what it is worth.

I was wrong, as were most others, about 2016. I thought the gender gap was real and that Trump would lose the suburbs as a result. It didn't end up that way, but it is coming to pass in 2020. Trump is losing the suburbs. For instance, Maricopa County, home to the Phoenix metropolitan area, is polling strongly for Biden.

A recent national poll shows Biden up by 9 points. Biden is up in the industrial swing states -- Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin; plus, Biden is also up in Arizona and Florida. For all intents and purposes Trump has no path to victory without Pennsylvania and Florida.

The diehard Republican has a couple responses when confronted by the slew of polls and other markers of Democratic strength like record-breaking Dem early voting and ActBlue fundraising totals. 

The first GOP argument, which cannot be discounted, is a significant voter registration advantage in big swing states like Florida and Pennsylvania. Republicans apparently earned this advantage by door-knocking during the pandemic. Good for them. You can't fault the party for working hard. Whether increased registration translates into a significant increase in votes is another question. It is of course better than nothing, but just because someone comes to your door and registers you to vote doesn't mean that you will actually fill out a ballot, let alone vote for Trump.

The second Republican argument is that all the polls in 2020 are even more off than they were in 2016 because of a "social desirability bias." The American Conservative summarizes this argument as follows:

Two pollsters who got 2016 right think that the mainstream polls are wrong again, and although they grant that the election is very close, at this point they predict a Trump electoral college victory. Patrick Basham of the Democracy Institute predicted a Trump win in ’16 and also got the Brexit referendum right as well. Basham, in his latest poll for 2020 predicts an easy electoral college victory for Trump with all battleground states ending up in Trump’s column. Robert Cahaly of Trafalgar Group in his 2016 polls predicted the exact number of electors awarded to Trump. Now Cahaly predicts that most battleground states will go for Trump with an electoral college victory in the mid-270s.

What both these pollsters are aiming to tackle is what is called social desirability bias in the polls. Social desirability bias is when a poll interviewee gives an answer to a question based on what he considers socially acceptable, rather than his true opinion on the subject. It has been observed that voters were more likely to choose Trump in a poll that felt more anonymous, such as a poll that used an automated, interactive voice response system instead of a live caller.

For me, this doesn't pass the smell test. It would mean that the United States is a Bizarro world of inverted McCarthyism where the fellow traveler is a closet QAnon revolutionary. It just doesn't add up. Trump has completely fucked up the federal response to the pandemic, and he fomented a race war over the summer, not to mention his overt messaging to the militia movement. Do you think a Grosse Pointe Park soccer mom is cheering for the Wolverine Watchmen?

So Trump loses. He holds the Confederate States of America minus North Carolina and Virginia. Trump's performance in Georgia and Florida will tell us whether the election will be a rout. If Trump holds on in Florida and Georgia he'll limit the size of Biden's margin in the electoral college.

In Florida Trump is doing much worse this go-round with senior citizens due to his handling of COVID. I think Biden wins there. In Georgia Biden has a real shot. Remember, Stacey Abrams lost in the 2018 gubernatorial race by just 50,000 votes despite a massive voter purge by the GOP.

All in all it's another Blue Wave.

COVID Long-Haulers + My Pitch for Astragalus

The New York Times published a story earlier in the month about COVID "long-haulers," people, such as myself, who continue to struggle months after being infected. The NYT story emphasizes the psychological struggles of long-haulers. 

The story re-posted today by Naked Capitalism, "Thousands of New York ‘Long Haulers’ Struggle with COVID-19 Months After Diagnosis," is much more sympathetic to the plight of the long-haulers, situating them in a larger health crisis that has to date been under-reported rather than shading the story as an example of pandemic mass psychosis.

I can bear witness to the brutal reality of the long haul. For the most part I've stopped walking home from work, choosing the bus instead, because the two-mile uphill climb is too much for me now. My heart isn't right.

After a ridiculously unproductive couple of visits to my primary care physician (and ridiculously expensive, even though I have good employer-based health insurance) I decided to forego further rabbit-holing in the corporate health industrial complex and take charge of my own recovery.

One positive that I can report is the Chinese herb Astragalus. I read online that it helped with myocarditis.  German studies published this summer revealed a connection between COVID-19 and cardiac problems. Astragalus has made a difference. Three capsules taken daily -- one morning, noon and night -- have reduced my nasty and incapacitating arrhythmia.