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Messages - azure

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1
Spin Zone / Re: Mail in voting
« on: August 22, 2025, 03:58:13 PM »
Thought experiment:

Imagine a vaccine has been developed.  In order for the vaccine to be effective it must be cooked for exactly 60 minutes at 195 deg F (+/1 1 deg F). 

Unfortunately, the equipment monitoring the temperature was inop for the entire 60 minutes.

Do you use the vaccine even though you don't have proof that the temperature wasn't 195 deg F?

A better thought experiment:

Your scenario, but there is no option to get another batch of vaccine and cook it properly, BUT there is a way to test the vaccine to make sure that it is effective. The vaccine tests ok. In that case, yes, use it.

My understanding is that the machines in at least Georgia were checked by hand counting the ballots (a pretty relevant test, no?) and no significant discrepancy was uncovered that would have pointed to the machines having been tampered with. I think this was done for at least one other swing state - maybe Michigan, since I recall there was a big stink about whether the machines in Antrim County had been correctly tabulated.

2
Spin Zone / Re: Mail in voting
« on: August 22, 2025, 01:19:48 PM »
And this is where you and I disagree.

Absent evidence that the mail-in voting was secure, nobody can claim the results were valid.  I don't have to show any fraud occurred, I'm not making the claim, without evidence, that the election was valid.

but you are right, there is no point in discussing this with someone who is willing to accept unsecure voting.

I'm on record as favoring a return to in-person voting (with an absentee option for those with a documented need), so I definitely am not willing to "accept unsecure voting".

What I disagree with is the statement that "nobody can claim the results are valid". If all or even much of the alleged fraud was investigated and found to not have happened, or to have been orders of magnitude smaller than what would be needed to sway the election, then the claim is justified. Certainly at that point the burden of proof falls on someone claiming that the election actually was stolen.

What I'm willing to accept is that the security holes in mail-in voting didn't result in THAT election being rigged - given that none of the claims of fraud that I'm aware of have panned out.

3
Spin Zone / Re: Mail in voting
« on: August 22, 2025, 01:12:36 PM »
we all know that video can be faked...

That's not the problem - the problem is the images are so blurry you really can't tell what she's doing.

If this is Ruby Freeman (I think that was her name), I recall reading that she and her daughter were accused by Rudy Giuliani, and they sued Giuliani for libel or defamation and won a judgment.

4
Spin Zone / Re: Mail in voting
« on: August 22, 2025, 09:56:43 AM »
"Debunking"?  I hear that word bandied about, without evidence, all the time.  If two fact-checkers close their eyes and say "Pants on fire", that seems to constitute debunking.

Hence the scare quotes. I take claims of debunking with a grain of salt, too. But if the validity of a piece of evidence is hotly disputed, and I have no wait to tell which side in the dispute has the better argument, then it stays as an unproven claim as far as I'm concerned.

5
Spin Zone / Re: Mail in voting
« on: August 22, 2025, 09:54:48 AM »
I didn't say massive or widespread. All that was needed was a tiny amount of targeted fraud.

Massive, widespread fraud is not needed, nor even attempted. Out of the 3580 voter districts total in the U.S., only 19 of them controlled the outcome; in the 6 swing states, in the 2020 election. Those swing states and their key counties and districts were very easily identified and targeted leading up to the election.

That's ALL they had to target. 19 out of 3580 is one half of one percent.  0.53% to be exact.

The less massive and widespread it is, the easier to cover up and hide the evidence after the fact. You see lots of debunking of fraud claims, but most of it is debunking claims everywhere else, or generally as a whole, not those swing districts, and there were a lot of red herrings. So a lot of debunking is correct, but irrelevant.

A conspiracy theorist might even think that was deliberately orchestrated to drown out the real fraud in an ocean of fake claims and debunkings.

Yes, *targeted* fraud is easier to perpetrate. But consider - in e.g. GA, the margin was something like 11,800 votes. That's still a pretty massive fraud. So the question is, was there *that* much fraud? That's what I would need evidence for.

And the other question, and I recall raising this before, is whether those 19 districts were *known beforehand*. In order to perpetrate targeted fraud, you have to know which districts to target. My recollection (vague) is that the polls had the candidates within the margin of error over many more districts than that. So I'm not sure that a limited, targeted fraud operation could have been designed based on what was known before the election. It may have required a much larger and more difficult operation.

6
Spin Zone / Re: Mail in voting
« on: August 22, 2025, 07:24:52 AM »
Yep, left wing MSM sites will dispute and debunk anything that doesn’t fit a narrative.  They’ll play games such as “this was tossed out by the court” without going into detail, such as the judge tossed it without looking at evidence using a standing claim.  So it was tossed on the merits of evidence.   

There were several left wing “fact checkers” going so far as to claim affidavits were not proof and not admissible in court as evidence.  Of course they are a part of the evidence as it allows the prosecutorial side to depose those as well as the defense. 

Legal jujitsu was running amuck during this time and had the full protection of the MSM.

But there are sites, news sources, that are fairly neutral - I'd put WSJ in that category. It helps that their editorial page is generally sympathetic to Trump. But I wasn't a subscriber in 2020, and all the articles on the subject that I've found from the "interregnum" say things like "there is no corroborated evidence of widespread voter fraud".

I'm looking for neutral sites with evidence from multiple sources that points to widespread fraud - and so far I haven't found any.

7
Spin Zone / Re: Mail in voting
« on: August 22, 2025, 07:04:29 AM »
  Internet searches are really difficult huh?   Even this forum has a search function, and if you could figure that out you would find numerous links of such information.

Sure. But I'm looking for the evidence that convinced people here. I can find lots of claims and allegations, mostly on far-right sites. But I'm not sure how much of that is credible, and everything I've found so far is either hotly disputed or has been "debunked".

8
Spin Zone / Re: Mail in voting
« on: August 22, 2025, 06:37:01 AM »
I keep repeating YES. It happened and there is plenty of evidence it happened. What is not certain is whether it was enough vote fraud via mail in ballots to swing the election. That’s what we don’t have sufficient evidence of afaik. But we do have evidence that when combined with other means of tampering with the election, on the whole they DID swing the election, such as implementing mail in ballots in the first place, not reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptop, lying to the public about just about everything via a Democrat controlled MSM, etc. etc.

Ok. So please, where is this evidence? I mean, that fraud occurred on a massive scale? Seriously, I will re-evaluate my position if I see credible evidence. That's all I ask for here. Not statements that there WAS plenty of evidence, but the evidence itself, or links to it.

9
Spin Zone / Re: Here comes Erin!
« on: August 22, 2025, 06:34:49 AM »
But there is actual fertility decline. Levels of testosterone and sperm have significantly declined in males, and rates of miscarriage and other pregnancy loss seem to be rising among women even controlling for age.

Yes, I stand corrected on this. It seems this has been studied and is largely accepted now as a real phenomenon, though the factors causing the decline aren't well understood yet. Here is a freely available paper from last year on the subject. The author is a highly respect British/Australian biologist who specializes in human fertility.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11079147/#s12

Quote
Add in the metoo publicity “OMG he touched my boob 30 years ago, we must ruin his life!” And the pedo hysteria - don’t dare cop a feel of your 16 year old girl friend, she’s under the age of consent. I’ve seen teen boys post on anonymous boards they’re actually worried they are a pedophile because they like girls their own age or a couple years younger, which is not only biologically normal, but mandated by our nature. But the constant drumbeating about pedo in the media has them questioning their own budding urges. There isn’t much discernment in the news: If you find a 15 year old girl attractive you’re a pedo, end of story. Nothing mentioned about whether you’re a a 70 year old male or a 17 year old male.

No wonder the young guys today are terrified to even look at a woman. Phones are everywhere and there is constant danger of some misstep being blasted all over the internet. Porn is pervasive, easy to get and far safer than trying to tap an actual female.

And I won’t even get into the economic difficulties of raising children these days.

Women still want a man, after they’re done frittering away their most fertile years on a career, but because of dating apps, they now have access way beyond their local community and hence can choose only the top 5%, vastly decreasing the portion of males who will ever reproduce.

And it cuts both ways. Men tend to prefer younger women. Women focus on career during youth and suddenly get baby hunger as they approach 40 but surprise! Not many men want to start families with an “elderly primigravida”.

We are facing not only a crisis of an aging population with the Social Security Ponzi scheme, the upcoming generations won’t even have children to advocate for them in old age. People will be single and alone with not only no children, but no nieces and nephews - the backup plan of times past for spinsters and bachelors and couples with infertility problems.

A bunch of family-less old people being cared for by immigrants. And when the population collapse hits the third world immigrants - and it’s coming for them too - they’ll face the same thing. It’s our species-wide problem.

Yeah, I agree pretty much with this analysis of the socio-cultural environment we're in now. But I'm still not convinced we'll see a population *collapse* per se - I think it's still possible, and maybe more likely, that we'll see a decline in numbers until the social pressures to sustain the population begin to rise, and until the environmental factors exerting downward pressure on human fecundity reduce as the smaller human population puts less and less in the way of toxins into the environment. I'm more concerned, at least short term, with the possibility of worldwide economic collapse as the systems that depend on population size (like our "beloved" entitlements) start to fail.

10
Spin Zone / Re: Here comes Erin!
« on: August 22, 2025, 06:12:47 AM »
The system is hugely complex and in many cases chaotic.  Most of the variables are unknown or poorly known.  Or in some cases, very wrong.  It's the scientific process to try to measure everything as accurately as possible, then come up with a model that tries to explain what happened (diagnostic analytics), what is happening (explanatory analytics), and what is going to happen (predictive analytics).  Then there's prescriptive analytics that suggest what we should do to get a result.  There's greenhouse gasses, the absorptive capacity of the oceans, the greening (and desertification) of land masses, ice melting and not melting, the variability of the sun, the shifting of the magnetic field, humans putting out various gasses and planet-forming, cow farts, and on and on.

It's a hugely dynamic, complex, poorly understood system.  Things happen very slowly over millions of years, or very quickly over days and even hours.  We can peek into what happened in the past, and maybe even measure what's going on now.

It's great to try to say "X then Y", submit your analysis, and see what happens.  That's the scientific process.  But when politics gets into the act with people screaming "But we don't want Y so we must change X", or saying that "we don't agree with your analysis so it must be suppressed", that's when we get into trouble.  Especially when money is involved.

There are few things we know for sure.  I think it boils down to: The climate is changing.  It seems to be warming.  Now: Is that good or bad? (It's both good AND bad.)  Should we try to stop it from warming?  Why or why not? CAN we stop it from warming? Can we stop the climate from changing?  If we try to stop it from warming, what should we do?  Is that thing we do good or bad?  What are the direct and indirect consequences?

I suspect that there are no good answers to these questions.  Our discussions here are good ones, and I think that we are all in violent agreement, although it doesn't seem so sometimes.

Good analysis. The one point I would question is whether the *climate* is chaotic. It's generally accepted that *weather* is chaotic, but climate refers to the average of weather over a region over timescales of years and decades rather than hours, days, or even months. When I was studying climate science more seriously 10 years ago, the paradigm was that climate is NOT chaotic and can be treated as an energy balance problem, albeit a very complex one.

In some ways it was thought that the simplest aspect of this was the energy balance that determines the average global temperature: the Sun delivers a certain amount of energy to the Earth that depends on its distance to the Sun, and the Earth also radiates a certain amount of energy that depends on its temperature. The balance between those two processes determines the temperature at the top of the atmosphere (TOA). The average global temperature at the surface is determined by the way the temperature changes with height, which is affected by many factors including the Greenhouse Effect. Among those factors is how much heat is being stored in the oceans as opposed to being released into the lower atmosphere - and that's one of the wildcards right now. But other factors include feedbacks like the ice-albedo feedback - the polar caps tend to reflect rather than absorb sunlight, and as they melt, more surface is exposed that is better able to absorb sunlight. Or the water vapor feedback - the warmer the surface layer, the more water evaporates from the oceans and the more water vapor the atmosphere can hold, but water vapor is also a GHG so it contributes to the warming of the surface layer. These are ALL wildcards that we still don't have a great handle on, as recent research makes clear.

The energy balances that determine which locations on Earth get warmer and which get colder with global warming, and how precipitation patterns change, is a much tougher modeling problem. 10 years ago the models really sucked, and I'm not sure that they've gotten much better since then.

Although there isn't universal agreement on what to do about it, I think we here are in pretty good agreement that trying to stop climate change by abandoning fossil fuels is not going to work until we have alternative sources available that market forces can sustain without government subsidies. And we're just not there yet, for better or for worse.

11
Spin Zone / Re: Mail in voting
« on: August 22, 2025, 05:48:01 AM »
  Then why not the legislature amend the law as set forth in the constitution?  Why did judges and even governors feel they could just usurp the law?  The governor could have called a special session of the legislature, had them create a bill and he could have signed it.  So why bypass that process if everything was on the up and up?

Expediency, would be my guess. The pandemic didn't really become a thing until spring 2020, when the election was only a few months away. Amending the constitution is a long process. The easiest and quickest way was by asking the courts to greenlight it.

Quote
  States make different methods to vote for those who truly can't get to the polls, and none of it is insurmountable.   But those mail in ballots have layers of security and require signatures, and must be postmarked before no later than election day.

  When the 2020 free for all mail in voting went into effect, ballots were mailed to everyone on the voter rolls.  Didn't matter living or dead or had long moved away.  Then requirements for signatures were relaxed.  Several states even accepted mail in ballots passed election day or even no post mark.

 Now enters the "ballot harvesters".  These activist would go door to door offering to pick up ballots.  Someone have several ballots mailed to their address for people that previously lived there?  No problem, the ballot harvester would take them off your hands.   See where this is going?  And it was all "legal".

Again, the question in my mind was never "could it have happened". I agree that universal mail-in voting has security holes and should be abandoned. The question was, did it? That's the crux of it, to me. Did this actually happen in 2020? Full stop. If you can't supply evidence that it actually did happen, then there is no point in discussing this further.

12
Spin Zone / Re: Here comes Erin!
« on: August 21, 2025, 11:40:19 AM »
They can't. There is no math they can do, because EVERYTHING is a variable. Everything. Try solving that equation.

<faceplant>

Of course you can solve equations in which everything is a variable. It's called algebra. Of course to get actual answers (numbers) you have to measure enough of those variables to leave only as many unknowns left as you have equations.

The problem isn't that everything is a variable, it's the complexity of the system that include the atmosphere and the hydrosphere. You cannot model the entire Earth on the scale of molecules, you have to do it as a lattice of points or cells, so you lose precision right away. To make the computations tractable you also have to make simplifying assumptions that may or may not be true. The results typically have wide error bars, even so.

And yes, because of that, calibrations of proxies used to assess things like temperatures thousands of years ago have significant uncertainties. That's why Mann's hockey stick was deceptive, because it didn't make clear the uncertainty involved in joining temperature graphs based on two independent proxies.

13
Spin Zone / Re: Mail in voting
« on: August 21, 2025, 11:27:21 AM »
Correct! This was another example of illegal election rigging that doesn’t necessarily require outright vote creation, just takes advantage of the huge proportion of mail-ins that are Democrat for whatever reason.

All of this is why I posted that Time article about the organized conspiracy (their own words) to “ensure a fair election”.  The argument that this means actual “fair” is shown to be a lie in that none of what they did helped the Republican side, only the Democrats.

I'm having a hard time seeing that as electioneering. Ideally, elections are decided by the majority of ALL eligible voters. But in practice, only those voters who take the trouble to actually vote have a voice, because voting is voluntary. There are lots of reasons why people don't vote - apathy, inability to research the candidates, family responsibilities (e,g, caregiving), lack of transportation to the polls, perhaps personal or health issues to name a few. In 2020 states like Vermont adopted universal mail-in voting so as not to encourage people to expose themselves to the virus, though the polls were still open for those who preferred to vote in person. A side-effect, of course, is that a lot of the people who were otherwise too apathetic or ill-informed to bother to vote filled in those ballots that everyone received.

If the majority of eligible people who fail to vote happen to be ones who would tend to vote Democrat, then all that means is that the Democrat vote would have been undercounted due to the choice of eligible voters to not vote. Giving those people an easy way to vote just brought the election closer to the ideal case where all eligible voters vote. I don't see that as election rigging at all - even if the decision was made knowing it would tend to boost the Democrat vote, and I'm not convinced anyone knew that for certain in advance.

14
Spin Zone / Re: Here comes Erin!
« on: August 21, 2025, 05:34:33 AM »
Again, for the 600th time. Please tell me how much climate change is Natural, and how much is Man Made. Please!

You fucking can't. So take your taxes, appliance bans, EV subsidies, Green Energy, ICE vehicle restrictions, bans on fossil fuels, CO2 limits, Carbon Credits, etc., and shove them, you know where.

(Rant not meant for anyone here, just the Al Gore's of the world)

Even if you could, depending on other factors we only know approximately, it's a fool's errand to try to FORCE a weaning from fossil fuels. We are utterly dependent on them right now and we've backed ourselves into a corner where that's not going to change for the foreseeable future. The situation is akin to an alcoholic who is so addicted that he can't even sustain a gradual reduction in drinking. We have to accept that and work on adapting to the ongoing changes, and on thinking and engineering our way out of the current bind. Once we've done that, the market will take care of the problem.

The issue isn't only climate change, it's also that the global supply of oil is finite, though we don't have a solid idea of how much is left. Our current energy portfolio is not sustainable in the long term.

Rush, good points, I'll try to answer after work.

15
Spin Zone / Re: Mail in voting
« on: August 21, 2025, 05:24:24 AM »
Absentee Ballots can be used for military and others that can't vote in person, but a good reason and documentation is needed. We've always had them. Why loosen the standards?

I agree. The standards were loosened during the pandemic - justifiably, I think - but it's time to return to in-person voting for those who can, with the absentee ballot option available for those who NEED it, if only to stop the squabbling about this. Everyone agrees that in-person, paper ballots are as secure a form of voting as any we have, right? So why not just do it that way?

Vermont's Gov. Phil Scott yesterday opined that he does not support such a move because - well, it's not clear why, but apparently because it would be a lot of work, and expensive, to switch the whole system back. Maybe the controversy hasn't gotten too heated here - this is a state where way left progressives and MAGA people live, work, and eat side by side in a live and let live atmosphere. I can live with that - we'll probably never see a situation where VT's 3 electoral votes are crucial in a major election. But states that have become, or recently were, swing states should definitely consider it, imo.

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