got my Parler badge

So I'm now a verified user on Parler. I got my badge. For some reason this pleases me. It's not difficult for regular users like myself to get verified on Parler. The process is straightforward.

the dysfunctional culture of the blue checkmark

Regular user verification is a good feature with Parler. Back on twitter there was a "blue checkmark" culture. This is elitist and ultimately toxic.

Everything seemed to revolve around the blue checkmark people and their posts. A distinct vibe that only the blue checkmarks really mattered, blue checkmark opinion was more important, only blue checkmarks are worth following. The blue checkmarks were of course presented as prominent, and some fraction of them I'd heard of in real life. Over the years the percentage of twitter blue checks whose names I recognized in real life declined.

followers and following

I'm up to 80 followers now on Parler, 11 days after joining. I am happy with that, find it pretty good. In 9 years on twitter I had 80 followers. Parler is a better site, friendlier and more outgoing, and no blue checkmark culture. There seems to be more of a followback convention there. Many people I'm following followed me first. I generally follow back.

Overall I follow a few more people than follow me. Mathematically this is how it should be. It was a twitter culture thing that it was somehow bad to be following more than follow you. twitter followers were often low quality: scammers, adult clickbait, spam, bots, business promotion.

In general, I'm pretty sure Parler and twitter followers are governed by Price's Law. That is, the square root of Parler accounts have garnered half of the followers. It's just the way it is. These are the big accounts with many thousands, or millions, of followers. These prominent accounts are unbalanced, with far more followers than they follow.

Now overall "following" and "followed by" have to balance out. The total of followed and followed by across the site is of course the same. So the natural result for us regular folks is then to be following a few more people than we are followed by.

COVID-19 and life expectancy

There's some interesting data now out of Florida around COVID-19 and life expectancy. With COVID-19, Florida Phoenix

The average age of death is 76.57, according to the data analyzed Sunday, with more men than women dying. More than 80 percent of deaths were those aged 65 and over.

Now outside of COVID-19, the average life expectancy is per Florida Sun Sentinel

Florida’s average life expectancy is 79.6 years old. That’s a little older than the national average of 78.8 years.

Finally some usable data.

so it appears the result on life expectancy from COVID is a decline from 79 to 76. Overall it's not actually that bad, as 76 is the COVID-19 number, thus it only affects those who die of COVID-19. Many elderly won't, and they will still get their 79 years average. So the 3-year decline in life expectancy from 79 to 76 actually only affects those who die of COVID-19. So the overall decline in life expectancy due to COVID will be less than three years.

The biggest issue with the decline in life expectancy and COVID is that it just appeared here in 2020. Thus the 2020 mortality will include

• those who were going to die in 2020 anyway, with or without COVID-19
• some people who would have died in 2021, but died in 2020 because of COVID-19
• some people who would have died in 2022, but died in 2020 because of COVID
• some people who would have died in 2023, but died in 2020 because of COVID

now in 2021 if nothing changes it should get better. the 2021 expectation becomes

• those who were going to die in 2021 anyway
• minus the 2021 who died in 2020
• plus some COVID who would have died in 2022
• plus some COVID who would have died in 2023
• plus some COVID who would have died in 2024

Now by 2024 all of the new excess mortality due to the sudden introduction of COVID and a 3-year life expectancy decline into the elderly population should have worked their way through. it should start improving in 2021, and be to the steady state by 2024. COVID-19 will just be another condition that old people die of, one of many.

old people get die. they just do

There are many serious conditions that affect the entire population. however they primarily affect the elderly, and can be a cause of death. This short list includes

• heart attack
• stroke
• heart failure
• cancer (many forms)
• diabetes
• ALS
• Alzheimer's
• dementia
• Parkinson's
• Huntington's
• liver failure
• kidney failure
• COPD / respiratory failure / sleep apnea
  
• the flu
• falls
• natural causes

now in 2020 this new condition has unfortunately been added to the list of health hazards faced by the elderly

• COVID-19

so of course masks, lockdowns, all that, will fail. there was a lockdown just a few weeks ago, and what do we have to show for that? now the same authorities who demonstrated their incompetence in the first failed lockdown, want to go back into lockdown. the insanity of trying the same thing again and again and expecting a different result

the reality is COVID-19 will in the near term reduce life expectancy of people alive today by something less than three years. that's the bad news. the good news is that life expectancy has been rising for decades, centuries now. so this immediate three year decline due to the sudden appearance of COVID-19 will be made up soon enough. other good news is that there is active research into vaccine and treatment of COVID. So the occurrence of COVID should decline, while survivability should increase.

 

the conservative parties of Canada

 so the conservative party of Canada has a new leader, Mr. Erin O'Toole.

O'Toole replaces outgoing leader Andrew Scheer. in the fallout from the 2019 federal election where the Liberal Party won a minority government, Scheer was out as leader. I didn't really follow the conservative party story too closely, just occasional headlines from TV news. O'Toole seems like a decent fellow.

I was disappointed to see Scheer removed after just one election. Scheer won the popular vote, held the Liberals to a minority, and nicely increased the number of conservative seats. In Canadian federal election history a majority government is virtually never defeated after one term. So it was not realistic to believe or expect Scheer should have won, or he somehow cost the conservatives the win.

Scheer was well on track to follow the Stephen Harper 4-election strategy. When Harper became conservative leader he was facing a popular Paul Martin majority that appeared set to govern for a good decade or longer. In the Harper strategy

• election 1: hold the Liberals to a minority
• election 2: win a minority
• election 3: win a larger minority
• election 4: win a majority

In 2019 Scheer successfully completed step 1: nicely. But it is what it is. I understand some of the anti-Scheer faction want the conservative party to move toward the centre-left. If I'm following, the theory seems to be this is needed to win in urban Toronto (the GTA), Ottawa, Montreal, and the Maritimes.

With the rise of the Green Party, Canada already has three left-wing parties: Liberal, NDP, Green. the leftist worldview seems to be very well represented in Canada. I'm not sure if the left-leaning voter in Canada really needs or wants a fourth option, some kind of Red Tory, left-lite?? thing.

the other conservative party

The 2019 election featured the electoral debut of the People's Party of Canada (PPC). Maxime Bernier was able to get the new party launched, field a candidate in every riding, and win 1.6 percent of the vote. They cost Scheer a few seats, but not enough to tip the final 2019 result Liberal minority win.

Not too bad for a party only founded in 2018. How long and how many elections did the Green Party exist in Canada before they won their first seat? Bernier and the PPC don't seem to be going anywhere soon. PPC today is an option for the right-leaning voter in Canada. I'm guessing the legacy conservative party hopes PPC will turn out be this generation's National Party. Some good ideas, charismatic leader. Didn't form critical mass, failed and dissolved in a few years.

the long game in Canada

I'd suspect the PPC wouldn't mind following a trajectory broadly along the lines of the Reform Party of Canada. Reform was founded in 1987. By 2006, Stephen Harper of the conservative party, the merged Reform/Progressive Conservative Party entity, won a federal election. So 19 years, about a generation. The long game in Canada sometimes isn't all that long. In the mean time as I noted, there was generally fairly good government in Canada under Jean Chrétien / Paul Martin.

joined Parler

I've decided to give Parler a try. I'd heard about it for the last few months. I'd been on Twitter since 2011.

I signed up recently. It's been fun there so far. At the time of this writing I have zero followers on Parler, lol.

Parler does some things well. The site is a bit glitchy at times, so was Twitter in the earlier days, and through to today for that matter. What they are trying to build is a hard problem. On Parler a tweet is called a Parley, and a retweet is called an Echo. One of those good to know things.

Dilbert is there yay. some other unpersons who I used to enjoy following on Twitter before they mysteriously vanished are over on Parler. so it's a bit of a reunion. hopefully I've joined Parler during the fun time, the good time, while it lasts. I can remember when there was good time on Google, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter too.

Well maybe you will stop by. My Parler username is same as on Twitter, @tookalito.

if the election was stolen

Trump was well ahead and pulling away in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Then count updates ceased. Then we're told counting had been stopped and would resume the next day.

The next day awake to hear that overnight, despite counting being supposedly "stopped", still they had all "flipped" through the dark of night over to Biden.

And so it goes. It is what it is. Joe did brag during the campaign that he had the greatest voter fraud organization ever created.

I'm inclined to take him at his word. There's some appearance that they pulled it off for Joe. That's what it could be seen as.

So where to from here for the deplorables

So this election could usher in effective one-party rule in America, under the Democratic Party.

In the three boxes progression, this is where things are now at then
the ballot box
the jury box
the cartridge box

I don't expect rioting or violence in the near term from the chumps. That's the Antifa way. The deplorables are builders, not destroyers. There's no real history of it among the Trump supporters. There may be some more quiet or passive, personal type resistance. Less volunteerism, less civic participation, pessimism, cynicism, tuning out, more openness to at least listen to perhaps less mainstream solutions. But as long as paycheques (mostly comparable to the Trump era for most), social security and medicare keep flowing; then it may be the continued ongoing decline of certain demographics, after the renewed vigour of the Trump era. fewer children, declining life expectancy, opioids and alcoholism, declining standard of living, failed relationships.

So what could this new era look like. One-party or similar rule is hardly new to democracy.

In Japan the Liberal Democratic Party LDP

has almost continuously been in power since its foundation in 1955—a period called the 1955 System—with the exception of a period between 1993 and 1994, and again from 2009 to 2012

Japan has done pretty well for itself during that time. I somewhat remember the 1993 turfing out of the LDP, though I didn't realize how quickly they were back in office.

In Russia the Soviet Union Communist Party ruled for about 70 years. Back in junior high in the early 1980s I remember a teacher insisted that the Soviet Union had democracy, despite "elections" only containing one option on the ballots. She said that within the Party, there was competition and democracy/voting to advance into leadership positions. So the "democracy" happened within the Communist party, which was of course tightly integrated with the leadership and management of the Soviet State.

In modern Germany it is a duopoly, a modified form of one-party. After each proportional representation election, the Christian Democrats and Social Democrats form a governing coalition. The only thing that may change from elections is which of them leads.

Germany and Japan are modern prosperous first-world nations. More homogenous, less diverse, both in demographics and geography than the USA today. The Soviet Union was geographically and ethnically diverse, a military superpower, and an economic second-world nation. The Soviet Union failed in 1991.

One thing that I'd expect to see under Democratic Socialism Party USA is more of a move toward international world government, with less national sovereignty. Perhaps a kind of global federalism model, where individual sovereign contries today are more like States or Provinces under an overarching global federal government. It's not yet clear what form this increasing globalism would take or the speed at which it would be implemented.