Skip to main content

The primaries is all bullshit?

When I heard Sara Palin refer to Native Americans as people who should go back to Nativia I suddenly realised that the objective was not to say anything smart, in fact saying something stupid made sure that you were in the news.  It seems that the new game plan for Republicans is to say stuff that is so dumb that it will bring notoriety to the person saying it, and coverage.  Scott Walker's Canadian Wall was a case of very stupid idea -- this is a country that cannot find money to maintain its bridges and overpasses and would spent 10 of billion building a wall.  It got Walker press for 24 hours -- granted unlike Teflon Trump (TT for short) it didn't work out as intended.  There use to be a saying good or bad press it doesn't matter as long as they talk about you!  It seems that the 1617 37 36 candidates to the GOP presidential primaries are now taking this strategy to heart.  Don't know if it will work -- it worked for TT and for Carson because they were the only ones really going "full retard" but if all of them try that strategy it may backfire; so many candidates saying stupid things will get lost in the overall noise.  However, what its doing to the Republican Party is something else entirely.  The nativiste racist and bigoted statement made by the various candidates will impact the party's brand for a long time:  

(1)  Walking back the stupid is going to be hard in the age of internet:  Eventually, one of these guys is going to be the GOP's candidate to the White House, and what's been said -- some of it simply terrible, is going to be hard to walk back.  Granted the electorate has short memory span, but this is not the 1990's we've got YouTube now -- so any pronouncement can be replayed as if they took place yesterday, and who's to say differently.  Jon Stuart was a brilliant user of the format.

(2) Citizen United is killing the GOP:  The stupid season will last a long long time.  Even candidates that are polling less then 1% support are staying in the race, because these candidates are funded by the "plutocrats"  who don't mind spending a bit of cash on their favorite candidate -- even if he doesn't resonate.  The likes of Perry, Santorum, Pataki, Gilmore and Graham have zero chance of going anywhere, and yet they stay in the race; and there's a long list of candidates who hardly resonate at all.

(3) PAC money is of poor quality:  The GOP is realising that PAC money is of little value; Karl Rove spent more than $100 million (Crossroad America) on a dozen races -- all for nothing, PAC spending had little impact on voting turnout.

(4) Donald Trump and Ben Carson are a real problem; the first is a loud mouth self promotor the second is simply nuts!  These two account for nearly 5053% of all primary voters! voting intention; and their crazy is keeping them on top of the more serious candidates.

(5) Summer polling is showing a distressing trend; All candidates (except the above)  are converging towards three groups:  5%, 3% 2% and lower.  The non traditional cash available to candidates from their favorite billionaires will make the race wide open, as there are few distinguishing features between the candidates (aside from the crazy remarks).  This will prolonge the race to the convention, with all these candidates and many proportional state races no one candidate will have enough votes to win the nomination prior to the convention.  A brokered convention could be interesting (and not in a good way as far as the GOP is concerned).

UPDATE:  Trump & Carson are now at 53% combined 33% and 20% respectively.  Perry is out -- first off its not his fault, secondly he didn't raise enough own money to pay his staff, and I forget the third reason...

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Ok so I lied...a little (revised)

When we began looking at farming in 2013/14 as something we both wanted to do as a "second career" we invested time and money to understand what sector of farming was profitable.  A few things emerged, First, high-quality, source-proven, organic farm products consistently have much higher profit margins.  Secondly, transformation accounted for nearly 80% of total profits, and production and distribution accounted for 20% of profits: Farmers and retailers have low profit margins and the middle bits make all the money. A profitable farm operation needs to be involved in the transformation of its produce.  The low-hanging fruits: cheese and butter.  Milk, generates a profit margin of 5% to 8%, depending on milk quality.  Transformed into cheese and butter, and the profit margin rises to 40% (Taking into account all costs).  Second:  20% of a steer carcass is ground beef quality.  The price is low, because (a) a high percentage of the carcass, and (b) ground beef requires process

21st century milk parlour

When we first looked at building our farm in 2018, we made a few money-saving decisions, the most important is that we purchased our milk herd from a retiring farmer and we also purchased his milking parlour equipment.  It was the right decision at the time.  The equipment dates from around 2004/05 and was perfectly serviceable, our installers replaced some tubing but otherwise, the milking parlour was in good shape.  It is a mature technology. Now, we are building a brand new milk parlour because our milking cows are moving from the old farm to the new farm.  So we are looking at brand new equipment this time because, after 20 years of daily service, the old cattle parlour's systems need to be replaced.  Fear not it will not be destroyed instead good chunks will end up on Facebook's marketplace and be sold to other farmers for spare parts or expansion of their current systems. All our cattle are chipped, nothing unusual there, we have sensors throughout the farm, and our milki

So we sold surplus electricity one time last summer...(Update)

I guess that we will be buying an additional tank for our methane after all.   Over the past few months, we've had several electricity utilities/distributors which operate in our region come to the farm to "inspect our power plant facilities, to ensure they conform to their requirements".  This is entirely my fault.  Last summer we were accumulating too much methane for our tankage capacity, and so instead of selling the excess gas, that would have cost us some money, we (and I mean me) decided to produce excess electricity and sell it to the grid.  Because of all the rules and regulations, we had to specify our overall capacity and timing for the sale of electricity (our capacity is almost 200 Kw) which is a lot but more importantly, it's available 24/7, because it's gas powered.  It should be noted that the two generators are large because we burn methane and smaller generators are difficult to adapt to burn unconventional gas, plus they are advanced and can &qu