Saturday Night Radio Drama - Gordon Pengilly - Bailey's Way

 

Bailey's Way 

 
Written by Gordon Pengilly, Bailey's Way stars Esther Purves Smith as Tanis Bailey, a young rookie constable on the the Calgary Police Service determined to make Detective just as soon as she can.

David LeReaney as Sergeant Mann
Grant Linneberg as Detective Donaldson

A  repost of this series that Gordon Pengilly wrote for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation radio series The Mystery Project.   I like Gordon Pengilly's work, though it's not available anymore his Listening In The Dark is one of the best radio plays I posted here years back.  I used to listen to these with far less fidelity fading in and out on the shortwave back in the 1990s.   Good times.   The transfer isn't perfect but it's a lot clearer than I heard back then. 

Toccata For Toy Trains 1957 - Charles and Ray Eames

 

I've been watching the movies made by the famous husband-wife team that gave us the mid-20th century fiberglass furniture and other design.   

This one is mostly just fun, as with some of their others the music is by the Hollywood composer Elmer Bernstein,  conducted by him.   I like it a lot better than the music he wrote for feature films. 

Data Blindness Is An Epidemic Among Those With A Religious Belief in Polling

I DO LIKE a number of those members of Congress who are freaking out over the polling on Joe Biden's chances of winning against the two-time loser of the popular vote, criminally convicted, multiply successfully sued and prosecuted Donald Trump.   But I agree with AOC that these otherwise serious Democrats aren't presenting us with any real viable alternative to Joe Biden or Kamala Harris being the Democratic nominee.   Basing any such a call for the most successful Democratic President in a half a century to step aside on polling has a history of such conclusions to consider, something I don't think those expressing such faith in "data" have really understood.   The polls that showed that Alf Landon would beat FDR or Dewey would Truman were as based on data as the polls being pushed by the anti-Biden media now.   If there's one thing we know about polling today, it shares a lot of the same problems with polling done back then.   Here's some relevant history of that from the conclusion that Truman's chances of winning were hopeless, from the the department of Mathematics and Computer Science at the Oxford School of Emory University

In the 1948 presidential election, Thomas Dewey, then governor of New York, ran against the incumbent, Harry S. Truman. Three major polls (Gallup included) predicted Dewey would win. He did not. The Gallup poll came closest with 49.5% Dewey, 44.5% Truman, 5.5% other, and 0.5% undecided.

There were several problems:

First, they stopped polling too soon, and Truman was notably successful at energizing people in the last days before the election. The prediction came two weeks in advance of the election with 15% announcing undecided. It was assumed that the 15% undecided would split in the same proportions as those who had decided, leaving only 0.5% truly undecided. (The 0.5% undecided was Gallup's error factor.)

Second, the telephone polls tended to favor Dewey because in 1948 telephones were generally limited to more well-to-do households, and Truman was less popular among elite voters.

Third, one of the methods used sent interviewers into an area and told them to interview a certain number of people who met some given demographic criteria. For example, a pollster might be told to choose and interview 10 men, 11 women, 8 african americans, 2 asians, and 11 caucasians, etc... where the numbers chosen for each demographic is representative of the overall population.

Unfortunately for the pollsters, just because a sample is representative of the population demographically, doesn't mean that it will be representative with regard to the issue at hand.

Even worse, as long as the pollsters matched the quotas for their demographics, they were free to choose whom they like -- which can lead to substantial bias in the sample when pollsters avoid certain people that for some reason are hard to approach.

One of the things that analysis leaves out is the problem of people who choose not to talk to pollsters, ESPECIALLY THOSE WHO USE A PHONE TO REACH PEOPLE.   It's an absolute fact of polling in 2024 that only a small fraction of those called will willingly subject themselves to answering the questions asked.   I stopped talking to pollsters because I became convinced that virtually ALL POLLS ARE PUSH-POLLS DONE TO ACHIEVE RESULTS THAT THE PERSON PAYING FOR THE POLLS WANT.   I don't trust any of them, especially when they won't say who is paying for the poll. Virtually every poll done today, when so many must be as sick and tired of polls as I am, has an unrepresentative sample of the population WHICH IS THEIR ONLY SOURCE OF DATA,  that "data" that so many People with little to no actual critical knowledge of statistical analysis think means the same things as certain fact.   I have no idea who is going to win the election in November AND NEITHER DOES ANYONE ELSE, NO MATTER HOW DEVOTED TO "DATA" THEY LIKE TO BELIEVE THEMSELVES TO BEING.

I do know that no election has ever been won by throwing out the person who even the polls show has the best chance OF ANY NAMED ALTERNATIVE candidate to beat the worst person to have ever gotten the presidency BY LOSING THE POPULAR VOTE.   I certainly don't think that those who aren't willing to go on the record or those who have a track record of making wrong predictions are helping to defeat Trump by trying to reset the match this late in the game.   That has a record of proven disaster, despite what idiotic Hollywood bull shit magical thinking would have such idiots believe.   I think frequently consulted "Democratic pundits" as seen on TV and read in the NYT are as fully able to cut their babblage to the preferences of those who put them on the screen or in cheap ink on cheap paper. 

In Case You Might Be Wondering How Dangerous and Disingenuous J. D. Vance Is

THERE IS A KIND of Republican-fascist convert to Catholicism who sees it as nothing but a vehicle to power by tapping into the billioniare-millioniare supported "trad-catholic" cult.   J. D. Vance is only one of a number of such opportunists,  the serially divorced, serially adulterous Newt Gingrich is another that right-wing priests and bishops have allowed in to a religion in which the Catholic right wing bishops and priests have barring once divorced-remarried Catholics from the sacraments, though not if they are well connected Republican-fascists.   I have long been suspicious of recent Catholic converts among affluent white men and women, from the beginning of JPII's papacy, in fact.  I have long been suspicious of those who became priests and bishops under him and Benedict XVI, though not all of those.   I am entirely skeptical of those who went from the expensive, elite kind of Catholic preps into the Ivy League class of university, especially those who go to their law schools, especially those who are Republican-fascists, now.   There is simply no possibility of someone of informed good will to remain in that party or to join it, today.   It is an act exactly equivalent to remaining in an overtly fascist party in 2024. 

When he was running for the Senate, two years ago, Michael Sean Winters did an expose on J. D. Vance and the right-wing Catholic nut cases he has adopted as giving him his official views on so many things.   I can't do better than Winters does so here's some of what he said then:

Vance sees Catholicism in a similar fashion. The Catholic Church of his imaginings is part of a "post-liberal" America, and so it was unsurprising Vance took time off the campaign trail to speak at a conference of conservative, post-liberal nationalists at Franciscan University at Steubenville, Ohio. The event included people like Harvard law professor and Christian integralist Adrian Vermeule, former New York Post opinion editor Sohrab Ahmari, and Rachel Bovard, senior director of policy at the Conservative Partnership Institute.

"If the last 30 years has taught us anything, it's that the left's fascist orgy is not somehow going to abate," Bovard told the group. "No one knows what lunacy is coming next, but we all know what's eventually coming: normalized pederasty, forced euthanasia, postnatal abortion, persecuting dissident faiths, disqualifying religious traditionalists and political conservatives from banking, property rights and public benefits."

Who talks like that? These are Vance's intellectual running buddies.

Also unsurprising is the fact that one of the guests when Vance was received into the Catholic faith* was Benedict Option author Rod Dreher, the Methodist-turned-Catholic-turned-Orthodox writer who recently separated from his wife, left his children so he could move to Hungary and be near his hero, Viktor Orban.

Vance's fraudulence is discerned in the fact that while he celebrates Catholicism as a vehicle for his sociocultural vision, he departs from the teaching of the church on a host of issues, from immigration to labor rights to climate change.

To hear him invoke his religion, you would never think that religion assures us that the meek are blessed and the rich will be sent away empty. The ancien régime of his heart is the imagined moral landscape of the 1950s, when moms mostly stayed at home, gays stayed in the closet, and the business of America was business.

Maurras, of course, was a monarchist, which is not a viable option in 21st-century America. Still, does anyone doubt that Trump would accept a crown if it were offered to him?

We know Vance would not demur. At a campaign event, he stood by sheepishly as Trump robbed him of his dignity, saying the Senate candidate was "kissing my ass" to get his endorsement. The former president compared Vance to North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un in this regard. Vance, in true courtier fashion, said not a word. That was painful to watch.

The writer couldn't have known then that the Supreme Court on July 1st of this year, a ruling issued by right-wing Catholics,  Roberts, Alito, Thomas, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Coney-Barrett,  made what Winters believed was not a viable option in America just two years ago into what will become a fait accomplis if Trump or Vance becomes president next year.   I strongly suspect if Biden or Harris is president, the same "justices" will immediately start back tracking on their coronation plans.  

The right-wing "trad-catholic" cult might seem marginal or funny or unimportant to those who don't watch it and keep track of it but the fact that Republican-fascists have packed the Court with either its true believers or those who like Vance will play it to and use the cult to get power for themselves.   I doubt J. D. Vance believes in anything except money and power,  as apparently Putin's media in Russia is crowing, he's more like Trump than Trump is and he's approximately half his age.   

This is no Chick Publications - Southern Baptist fever dream c. 1960 that suspected that a  Catholic president would rule the country according to orders issued by Vatican City.   This is more like what will happen when someone cynically uses the trad-catholic propaganda network based in Napa California in line with what billionaire tech bros like Musk and Thiel want.   As Winters points out, "trad-cathoicism" has no use for Catholicism as Christianity which takes what Jesus and the writers of the New Testament say seriously.   "Trad-Catholicism" is no more Christian than the hallelujah peddlers and millionaire TV hucksters who preach hatred of the poor, the dispossessed,  the widow and orphan and stranger living among us so as to benefit from one of our indigenous forms of fascism, white supremacy in order to practice the other,  the extraction of wealth from those lower on the economic scale so as to concentrate wealth and power in ever fewer hands.  

This is what Democrats should be shouting from every available venue instead of trying to dump the most successful Democratic president since LBJ, who could outdo him if he had Johnson's advantage of a really Democratic Congress instead of one hampered by Manchin and Sinema.  What he has accomplished with what he was given by circumstances and the voters has been a graduate level course in why deep political experience in DC is essential for a Democratic President's success.  

But instead of me wanting to fight with Democrats, I'm more interested in exposing Trump, Vance and the stinking Republican-fascist party who are trying to put their ilk in power on a permanent basis,  including the Republican-fascists on the Supreme Court.

AOC On What Is Motivating The Dump Biden Stuff

 

This Has To Be A Whichever Democrat Instead of Trump's Nazism Year

I WILL VOTE for whichever Democrat has the nomination,  I fully expect that to be President Biden and I'm entirely OK with that.   He has had a phenomenal three and a half years under extremely difficult circumstances.   I will vote a full-Democratic ticket, again.   Luckily I am from the First District of Maine so I don't have to hold my nose to vote for Jared Golden in the Second District.   I'd vote for him if I had to though I wouldn't be OK with it and I don't trust him to not cross the aisle after the election.   Though if Democrats retain the House I expect he won't. 

The choice is you have a democracy next year or you don't for the rest of your life.  Franklin's famous answer to what kind of government the Constitutional Convention had given us, "A republic, if you can keep it," should be among the things that all Democrats go forward with because we have never been so close to losing that due to Republican-fascists, especially those on the Supreme Court and lower courts.  

I'm not tired of Joe Biden, though I'm getting tired of all of those who are floating the idea that he should quit at this late stage.   Where were they a year ago when that might have been possible?   If selling Biden is hard for them, selling them the possibility of democracy as soon as next January when the only alternative is Republican-fascism should be far easier to sell. 

Going To Youtube, I discover Microsoft Is Down

Apparently it's another of its forced updates that have caused millions of computers to crash.   That's why I quit Windows for Linux almost five years ago,  it's not perfect and there are all kinds of changes I had to make to use it but I haven't regretted the decision in the past.   One of the best things about Linux is that it's free and even some of the less widely used distros have enthusiastic user communities.   Updates aren't forced on you with them.

Vicious Racist Lou Dobbs

is dead.   

Good riddance to racist crap. 

British Media Reveals

 that the father of Trump's would-be assassin was on a Republican-fascist party database of gun nuts who they knew could be counted on to support Republican-fascist candidates.   You know, the guy who asked to borrow daddy's big gun to go do some target shooting.   The database is used to rile-up gun nuts for political support, especially in Pennsylvania. 

But the media is spinning this as "both-sides."    We don't need a new candidate, we need a new media.

Republican-fascist Politicians Promoting Gun Violence EVEN AGAINST REPUBLICANS!

HERE IS THE real proof from official Republican-fascist campaign ads showing who it is who has been promoting political assassination in the country.  

Apparently blogger isn't allowing for directly posting Youtubes these days.  No idea why, can't find anything about it online.

nother Open Letter to Vandiemenlander

IF PRESIDENT BIDEN is supposed to take the blame for everything OTHER FRIGGIN' PEOPLE say at secondary campaign events he didn't even attend when are your fellow Republican-fascists going to be forced to answer for what people they invited to speak NOT TO MENTION THEMSELVES say on their behalf.   Trump's boys and their spouses have said worse many, many times.

Trump has been inviting violence from his supporters since he told them to beat up protesters and lied that he'd pay for his thugs' legal defense.   He's been advocating it since well before that.   He appointed his fellow fascists to the Supreme Court where they have prevented any effective gun violence prevention because our effective indigenous Murder Inc. is a major supporter of Republican-fascism.   

I'm not going to get into yet another endless round of going down every rat hole you want me to because it's pointless to do it with Republicans because they aren't interested in truth or equality or even effective and efficient policy, they are all about power and violence. 

The immunity decision of the Republican-fascist Roberts Court will require ruthless violence to make it the effective law of the land and from Coney Barrett to the one step down to Gorsuch, Alito and Thomas, they're all in on that violence as long as they're protected from it. 

Your party is a fascist party and that is guaranteed to come only through violence.

Manly Men's Men

 I think it's hilarious that MAGA world is about to have a VP nominee who wears mascara while having a beard.  Of course it's got a leader who's wearing even more makeup than J.D. does.  I don't think the anti-divorce, women should say in abusive marriages guy is going to do anything to quell Roevember.  

Mehdi Hassan Compiles The Video To Prove What I Said Below

 Here's a link to the Youtube.   For some reason they're not letting me post the video tonight. 

Compare

 the reaction of President Biden to the attempted assassination of Donald Trump and Donald Trump's  other Republican-fascists in Congress and elsewhere, in the news media to the attempted assassination of Nancy Pelosi in the attack in which her husband was almost murdered.  

That's everything you need to know about the difference between the candidates and the two parties and the whore house that the media is.

THERE ARE TWO

candidates running for president of the United States in 2024.

One made a strong, impassioned statement against gun violence just this week.

One spouted threats of political violence and encourages his followers to be violent.

One has criticized the Supreme Court for decisions permitting unrestricted, unregistered guns to terrorize the country.  

One has favored and appointed Supreme Court "justices" to the Supreme Court who enable gun violence by their rulings.

One champions the peaceful practice of politics and the peaceful transfer of political power.

One advocates political violence and tried to violently prevent the transfer of political power.   And he has repeatedly treatened violence against his opponents and promised to use it if he become president, again.

One has said he would not use the shield against prosecution the Republican-fascist Supreme Court invented two weeks ago.

One, on whose behalf that grant of criminal impunity was invented, certainly will use it if he can.

There are two real political parties about which you can say the same things, we all know which is which.  But we all know who will take the blame when the things they vigorously oppose and have opposed happened last evening.  

ALL OF THAT IS ON THE RECORD AND HAS BEEN ON THE RECORD FOR WELL OVER NINE YEARS AT THIS POINT. 

We know who the Republican favoring "free press" will side with in covering the attempt to kill Trump and it isn't Joe Biden.  They will side with the advocate of guns and gun violence, the advocate of political violence just as they have for the past three years and as they increasingly have this year.  The media is by their conduct all in on political violence when used to further Republican-fascism,  forget the lying hypocrisies from them, their words are as cheap as Trump's advocacy of hate and violence.   

We can be pretty certain Trump never figured the violence he advocates could come back on him, that he could depend on the bubble of protection he gets at public expense.   Just as he has always been able to depend on the protection that affluence gave him all his life.     Maybe if he and his hypocritical supporters like the totally hypocritical wind bag J.D. Vance had read that Bible they wave around they'd have read the passages about living and dying by violence, sowing the wind and reaping the whirl wind.  It's 100% certain that nearly 100% of the news media and their owners never read it or took it seriously as a moral law of reality.  

The biggest question is if Trump will learn anything from probably his first serious near brush with death.  I wouldn't bet on that any more than the news media learning anything or asshole Republican freshmen senators from Ohio or Republican-fascist House members.  Apparently they don't realize that unstable people can target Republican-fascists, even rich, straight, white guys like himself, as well as the more often targeted Democrats and poor People of Color and the children who are killed in such large numbers due to Republican-fascist politics and Supreme Courts.