Funk Babblings

I recently had some computer problems that climaxed in the case sounding an alarm like a European ambulance. I feared that I'd have to replace the motherboard and therefore pretty much everything else inside the case (I liken it to a head-and-spine transplant), but luckily some testing indicated that I had a bad memory module. Yesterday morning I ordered more memory from Crucial, with 2-day Fedex shipping.

This morning I was pleased to see on the Fedex tracker that my order was already in Columbus. Wow, I might get this today!

Nope. It soon went into a holding pattern: "At local FedEx facility / COLUMBUS, OH / Package not due for delivery"

In other words, they could deliver it today, but they don't have to until tomorrow, so why bother being early?

(I don't blame them for that and can think of various business reasons for it, but still.....)


At least the sun is out and the snow is melting. I can wait.

Warning: Politics again.

Sorry, I'm trying to stay positive, but this has been really bugging me. Of all the dumb things coming out of the Clinton campaign and some of its supporters, one stands out to me as the most maddenly, stupidly illogical.

That is the idea that a candidate's performance in the primary (or caucus) indicates how they'll do in the general election. That if a candidate loses a state's primary they can't do well in that state in the general election, and if a candidate wins a state's primary they can do well in that state in the general election.

This is stupid.

What group makes up the vast majority of voters in the Democratic primaries? Democrats.
What group makes up the vast majority of voters in the Republican primaries? Republicans.

Yes, depending on the rules in individual states and the current state of the race, independents and Republicans might make up some of the voters in the Democratic primaries. Some of those honestly vote for the candidate they like, others vote strategically in an attempt to make things worse for Democrats (either to extend the nomination campaign or to get the weaker candidate to win). Same goes for non-Republicans in the Republican primaries.

But by the very nature of the primary system, the overwhelming majority of the people voting in a party's primary, no matter which candidate they vote for, will vote for that party's candidate in the general election. And by design, the primary excludes most of the voters who will not vote for the party's nominee (as well as many who will).

As an extra bonus this time around, polls in this campaign have shown that generally Democrats are happy with their candidates, while Republicans generally haven't been happy with theirs.

Yet Clinton and her campaign persist in saying that the winner and loser of a primary is some indicator of how that candidate will do in that state when all the rest of the voters get to vote. They can only be either ignorant or intentionally deceptive. I don't believe they're ignorant, and this sort of deception demonstrates a remarkably low opinion of their audience.