• Menu
  • Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Before Header

  • About Us
  • Lexicon
  • Contact Us
  • Our Store
  • ↑
  • ↓

Balloon Juice

Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

The worst democrat is better than the best republican.

But frankly mr. cole, I’ll be happier when you get back to telling us to go fuck ourselves.

Radicalized white males who support Trump are pitching a tent in the abyss.

Giving in to doom is how authoritarians win.

An almost top 10,000 blog!

JFC, are there no editors left at that goddamn rag?

When your entire life is steeped in white supremacy, equality feels like discrimination.

It’s a good piece. click on over. but then come back!!

“Loving your country does not mean lying about its history.”

The press swings at every pitch, we don’t have to.

Every reporter and pundit should have to declare if they ever vacationed with a billionaire.

We are aware of all internet traditions.

They love authoritarianism, but only when they get to be the authoritarians.

There are times when telling just part of the truth is effectively a lie.

Not loving this new fraud based economy.

Is it negotiation when the other party actually wants to shoot the hostage?

Pessimism assures that nothing of any importance will change.

Sitting here in limbo waiting for the dice to roll

Stamping your little feets and demanding that they see how important you are? Not working anymore.

Red lights blinking on democracy’s dashboard

This isn’t Democrats spending madly. This is government catching up.

I’d like to think you all would remain faithful to me if i ever tried to have some of you killed.

We’re watching the self-immolation of the leading world power on a level unprecedented in human history.

Our job is not to persuade republicans but to defeat them.

Mobile Menu

  • Seattle Meet-up Post
  • 2025 Activism
  • Targeted Political Fundraising
  • Donate with Venmo, Zelle & PayPal
  • Site Feedback
  • War in Ukraine
  • Submit Photos to On the Road
  • Politics
  • On The Road
  • Open Threads
  • Topics
  • COVID-19
  • Authors
  • About Us
  • Contact Us
  • Lexicon
  • Our Store
  • Politics
  • Open Threads
  • 2025 Activism
  • Garden Chats
  • On The Road
  • Targeted Fundraising!
You are here: Home / Archives for 2020

Archives for 2020

On The Road – Captain C goes to Japan: Second Tokyo 2

by WaterGirl|  December 31, 20205:00 am| 22 Comments

This post is in: On The Road, Photo Blogging

All good things must come to an end.  Captain C, thanks for taking us along on your trip!  ~WaterGirl

Captain C

We come to the end of the journey. The day after the baseball game was my last full day in Japan; I went to the Ota Museum and wandered around Shinjuku and Shibuya for a bit, before spending the evening hanging out with C. The next day, I went to the lovely Shinjuku Gyo-en National Garden in Shinjuku, before departing by train to Narita and leaving Japan at 6:20pm on Friday, arriving back at JFK at 6:15pm that same Friday. All in all, one of the best trips of my life and one I hope to repeat (with different specifics; I’d like to see Hiroshima, Kobe, Nara and/or Hokkaido if possible).

On The Road – Captain C goes to Japan: Second Tokyo 2Post + Comments (22)

On The Road - Captain C - Captain C goes to Japan:  second Tokyo, part 2 7
Shibuya, TokyoApril 3, 2019

While Tower Records is a late, lamented chain here in the US (and in most of the world), in Japan it survives, as their Japanese unit was sold off a few years before their bankruptcy. This particular one is eight stories high, and as I discovered when C and I visited it earlier in the trip, has an entire floor dedicated to K-Pop, and another to J-Pop. We went to the floor which had various Jazz, Blues, World, and Electronic music and spent some time there. As with Los Apson, I showed great restraint and only purchased 3 CDs (albeit 2 of which were 3-album sets): A 3-disc set by the Sun Ra Arkestra, a 3-disc set by Bill Laswell (including some Material), and a collaboration by Bugge Wesseltoft and Prins Thomas.

COVID-19 Coronavirus Updates: Wednesday/Thursday, Dec. 30-31

by Anne Laurie|  December 31, 20204:58 am| 69 Comments

This post is in: Foreign Affairs

We can save 60,000-100,000 lives in the weeks and months ahead if we step up together.

Wear a mask. Stay socially distanced. Avoid large indoor gatherings.

Each of us has a duty to do what we can to protect ourselves, our families, and our fellow Americans.

— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) December 30, 2020

show full post on front page

COVID-19 Coronavirus Updates: Wednesday/Thursday, Dec. 30-31Post + Comments (69)

The West Wing in 2020

by John Cole|  December 30, 202011:55 pm| 85 Comments

This post is in: Television

I’m trying to watch the West Wing again, which I used to love, but it is just so detached from our current reality that it seems like science fiction.

The West Wing in 2020Post + Comments (85)

On The Road – Karen H – Great Sand Dunes National Park

by WaterGirl|  December 30, 202010:00 pm| 29 Comments

This post is in: On The Road, Photo Blogging

I look at the last photo and I suddenly believe that spring and summer will be here soon.  ~WaterGirl

Karen H

In August of 2019, I spent a few hours at the Great Sand Dunes National Park in Colorado as a detour on my way to Taos and Santa Fe.  The first sight of the dunes is startling and the photos don’t begin to capture how immense they are.

On The Road – Karen H – Great Sand Dunes National ParkPost + Comments (29)

On The Road - Karen H - Great Sand Dunes National Park 7
Great Sand Dunes National ParkAugust 2, 2019

The approach to the dunes is across the Medano Creek, which was just barely running. In the spring the snow melt causes it to be a fast-flowing stream which makes it popular for water play.

Wednesday Evening Respite Open Thread: Rascality!

by Anne Laurie|  December 30, 20204:43 pm| 267 Comments

This post is in: Nature & Respite, Open Threads

I had an indescribably shitty day. This made me smile. https://t.co/jDRdWGX89S

— Dana Houle (@DanaHoule) December 30, 2020

Even on a normal-for-this-lousy-year day, the video still delights!

Wednesday Evening Respite Open Thread: Rascality!Post + Comments (267)

Race to the Bottom?

by Betty Cracker|  December 30, 20201:08 pm| 293 Comments

This post is in: Open Threads, Politics

Hawley of Missouri announced he’ll object to the certification of the Electoral College votes next week. David Plouffe thinks Hawley will have company in effecting a brief and pointless certification delay. Plouffe also predicts the spectacle will foreshadow a repulsive clown show in the next Republican primary:

Hawley willing to shred our democracy to improve his talking points for the inevitable QAnon Debate in Roswell, NM. They’ll all have to follow now. The 2024 GOP primary will be a race to the bottom like none we have ever seen.

— David Plouffe (@davidplouffe) December 30, 2020

There’s good reason to suppose Plouffe’s prophesy will come to pass. Even elite invertebrate Marco Rubio is attempting to bolster his anti-elitist cred by slapping an 80-year-old physician around. It would work better if Rubio managed to land blows on Fauci instead of punching himself in the face, but Marquito’s pathetic antics aside, he does have an unerring instinct for following his party down identity rabbit holes, having latched onto and discarded every dominant strain of Republicanism in its turn.

There’s an interesting piece in The Atlantic that explores UC Berkeley sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild’s theory about Trumpism, i.e., the narrative Trump cultists perceive in our political drama, and how that might evolve when the object of veneration is sulking in Palm Beach rather than the Oval Office:

Hochschild is telling us that Trumpism is not just a garland of public-policy proposals that any other Republican can drape around his or her neck. And it is more complex than a personality trait, or a talent for saying mean stuff on Twitter. Rather, Trumpism is an emotional planet that orbits around Trump’s star. Breaking the connection between Trump and the better part of the GOP will require either that Trump disappears (an unlikely proposition) or that a larger star emerges from the Republican backbench (also unlikely).

At the end of our conversation, I asked Hochschild what she’s learned from the past four years. “I used to think of political identity as something more solid,” she said. “I now think of political identity as like water that’s always going somewhere, that needs to go somewhere, but where it goes depends on the lay of the land, the rock formations that stand in its way,” she told me. She’s still waiting to see where Trump moves the mountain.

Somehow, this made me feel better. I’ve been pessimistic about America ever since the election. I’m overjoyed that we’re getting rid of the buffoonish monster, of course, but it’s distressing that 74 million people voted for four more years of chaos and calamity. Or, to put in more accurately, 74 million voters no longer recognize chaos and calamity when they see it.

Hochschild’s quote about political identity as a fluid thing sounds right, but that said, I think it’s possible Trump won’t “move the mountain” at all. He’s a lazy fuck, for one thing, an obese, 74-year-old man with a poor diet and habits. He doesn’t give a shit about anyone but himself, so it’s hard to imagine him putting serious effort into grooming a successor. From Trump’s perspective, even Ivanker is just a reflection of his own greatness, not really a separate person with ideas of her own.

So, absent any credible sluices to channel it forward, maybe Trumpism just stagnates, like a fetid bog, while the country surges past it. Maybe we’ll be living in such a different reality three years from now that the thought of GOP primary contenders aping Trump will seem preposterous. I don’t know about you, but that possibility cheers me up a bit.

Open thread.

Race to the Bottom?Post + Comments (293)

Data quality, marginals and COVID

by David Anderson|  December 30, 20208:44 am| 68 Comments

This post is in: Anderson On Health Insurance, COVID-19

The COVID Tracking Project is showing a significant drop in reported new COVID cases with the seven day moving average peaking at about 213,000 new cases per day on December 17th down to 178,000 new cases per day on the 7 day moving average on December 29th.

Our daily update is published. States reported 1.2 million tests, 195k cases, 124,686 hospitalizations, and 3,283 deaths. Holiday reporting delays are still markedly affecting testing, case, and deaths figures. pic.twitter.com/oRB8RvvvBA

— The COVID Tracking Project (@COVID19Tracking) December 30, 2020

This is great news if it is not a data quality problem?

There is a pretty good chance that this is a data quality problem and it is a predictable data quality problem. We had a huge and well predicted discontinuity event that is likely messing up the data. Christmas happened. Testing dropped by at least 15% in the same time period.

We see this notably in North Carolina data. On 12/28, only 19,000 tests were reported back to the state with 3,888 people reported as positive on that day as well. On 12/21 (to control for day of the week seasonality) 4479 people were reported as newly positive on ~37,500 tests. Case counts went down significantly even as positivity rates increased by a lot in North Carolina.

What does this mean?

We have a change in the marginal person getting tested. The over-exaggerated version of the story is that in mid-December, people who even thought they might have had an exposure or the sniffles or any reason to suspect that they might have COVID got tested. The positivity rate in North Carolina would still be high which implies a lot of people who are positive and infectious but non-symptomatic were out and about, but the marginal person getting tested had a good probabilty of being negative.

This story changed. Very few people got tested on Christmas Eve, Christmas Day or the day after Christmas. Again, exaggerating, but the only people getting tested on these days were already running a fever and hacking up a lung. The marginal person getting tested over Christmas is far more likely to be positive. This is driving up the positivity rate significantly even as the reported case count is dropping because the drop in testing overwhelms the increase in positivity rate. We are likely seeing a lot more people with either no or modest symptoms walking around without knowledge that they are positive right now.

We are likely to get another testing drought between New Years Eve through January 4th as people tend to not get tested as frequently on weekends plus the holiday will reduce testing. We probably won’t get good data that is comparable to mid-December data until the second week of January.

We do have some data that is higher quality. Our hospitalization data is decent. It has two major challenges. First, hospitalizations lag infections. Today’s record hospitalizations are a reflection of case counts in mid-December. Secondly, hospital admission data also has a changing marginal problem. When there is plentiful capacity, a patient who is a flip a coin decision to admit or keep for another night instead of discharging to home is probably a lot healthier than the patient who is a flip a coin decision to use one of the last three available beds in fifty miles. Patients who would have been admitted when daily hospitalizations were only running at 30,000, 40,000, 50,0000 hospitalizations per day probably are not be admitted when hospitalizations are running at 110,000+ hospitalizations per day. Sewage system data is reliable and near real time. But it is not universal.

So when we think about COVID data, we need to know about external shocks that change the nature of the current marginal in relationship to the previous marginal and also think about lags. Thinking about the quality of the data and its quirks helps with making effective interpretation.

show full post on front page

Data quality, marginals and COVIDPost + Comments (68)

  • « Go to Previous Page
  • Go to page 1
  • Go to page 2
  • Go to page 3
  • Go to page 4
  • Interim pages omitted …
  • Go to page 609
  • Go to Next Page »

Primary Sidebar

Image by WaterGirl (6/21/25)

Recent Comments

  • Geminid on Late Night Open Thread: Compare & Contrast (Jun 21, 2025 @ 10:00am)
  • jonas on Late Night Open Thread: Compare & Contrast (Jun 21, 2025 @ 10:00am)
  • schrodingers_cat on Saturday Morning Open Thread (Jun 21, 2025 @ 10:00am)
  • eclare on Saturday Morning Open Thread (Jun 21, 2025 @ 9:59am)
  • schrodingers_cat on Late Night Open Thread: Compare & Contrast (Jun 21, 2025 @ 9:59am)

Personality Crisis Podcast (Cole, DougJ, mistermix)

Balloon Juice Posts

View by Topic
View by Author
View by Month & Year
View by Past Author

Featuring

Medium Cool
Artists in Our Midst
Authors in Our Midst
No Kings Protests June 14 2025

🎈Keep Balloon Juice Ad Free

Become a Balloon Juice Patreon
Donate with Venmo, Zelle or PayPal

Calling All Jackals

Site Feedback
Nominate a Rotating Tag
Submit Photos to On the Road
Balloon Juice Anniversary (All Links)
Balloon Juice Anniversary (All Posts)
Fix Nyms with Apostrophes

Social Media

Balloon Juice
WaterGirl
TaMara
John Cole
DougJ (aka NYT Pitchbot)
Betty Cracker
Tom Levenson
David Anderson
Major Major Major Major
DougJ NYT Pitchbot
mistermix

Keeping Track

Legal Challenges (Lawfare)
Republicans Fleeing Town Halls (TPM)
21 Letters (to Borrow or Steal)
Search Donations from a Brand

Site Footer

Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

  • Facebook
  • RSS
  • Twitter
  • YouTube
  • Comment Policy
  • Our Authors
  • Blogroll
  • Our Artists
  • Privacy Policy

Copyright © 2025 Dev Balloon Juice · All Rights Reserved · Powered by BizBudding Inc