You can work over 100 hours a week and put an organic, gourmet meal on the table every night. My mother did. That’s what crockpots are for.

I have always considered it my extreme fortune to be from a family that has spent many, many generations in the Bay Area, because along with that comes a multitude of Chinese-American family members. It is such a privilege to grow up with East Asian family, enriched by Chinese holidays and culture, with an…

No one is asking you to believe any governments or news or any group of human beings with an agenda. The virus itself is telling you that it wasn’t “circling around” a lot longer than anyone knew. It’s telling you with its phylogeny. And it doesn’t know how to lie. Scientific experts have a clear idea of when,…

So...viral phylogeny tells us that what you’re suggesting isn’t true.  But you want us to entertain the possibility anyway?  That isn’t how science works.  

The Chinese government reported the outbreak on December 31st and confirmed its first death on January 11th. The United States had its first confirmed case on January 21st, in a traveler from Wuhan. That isn’t four months. That’s an expected timeline. There’s no conspiracy to be found here.

It almost certainly was not.  But when serology testing becomes widely available, you’ll find out.

Epidemiologists *are* doing that work. That is what they do. The most important piece of information from the above article is that the samples of the strain in the initial Wuhan cluster in December were very closely related to one another. That tells you everything you need to know about whether that was the…

I think this is true and not true. There’ve been thousands of volunteer health care workers who traveled to New York to assist who weren’t deployed. The situation has been so disorganized that it isn’t clear to me whether a nurse anesthetist assisting on an IVF procedure would actually otherwise be assisting with…

Would a simultaneous, nationwide rank-choice vote result in the candidate who is most electable and best reflects the Party’s platform? The one with the broadest and deepest coalition of voters? I honestly do not know! I’ve tried to spell out why I think that isn’t *necessarily* the case and arguably what value…

Perhaps you are right! And perhaps we should adopt the system you propose. I’d love to see some analysis as to whether such a system could have produced greater success on the national level in past elections.  Any changes or adoptions should be evidence-based.  And I think that if the Party were to adopt a system…

I’m not sufficiently educated in political science to thoroughly answer this question. All I can say is that historically, youth vote turnout is low, and therefore they aren’t a reliable demographic to include in a model for victory. Can that change? Will that change in the distant future? What can be done to…

Compared with Sanders, Biden’s policy positions enjoy more popularity in nationwide polling, and his coalition is both stronger and broader (the power and depth of his coalition speak to the issues of state residence, voter turnout, and electability). The polling data and primary voting data are public and widely…

It isn’t true that it was always intended to be a democratic process. Actually, it is far more democratic now than it ever was. The Parties exerted much more control in the past, and Party leaders originally just sat in a room and decided, with zero outside input (not necessarily zero consideration of outside…

Perhaps. Perhaps not.

The primary was never designed or intended to be a democratic process. That is not its purpose now and never has been.

*If* it was true that you were never going to vote for anyone but Bernie in the general, *then* it would be a reality that the Democratic Party would never have had your vote in the general. That’s a conditional statement. If the premise is false, the supposition based on that premise is false (or at minimum not…

I understand why it *feels* shitty. But as I’ve said elsewhere, the purpose of the primary is not to enable each primary voter to cast a vote for every member of the original candidate lineup. And it doesn’t actually serve the ultimate interest of the voters for that to be a priority. The purpose is to produce a…

But that is not the purpose of the primary. The purpose of the primary is to produce a Party nominee with the greatest viability in the general while reflecting the Party’s platform.

Obama isn’t an “idiot” for attracting young voters. That doesn’t change the fact that young voters tend to exhibit poor voter turnout and that they cannot be relied upon in a model for victory. If they do show up, wonderful! But it would be foolish to count on them. That was one of Sanders’ mistakes from the start.

We will have to respectfully agree to disagree that timing is a factor in his political leverage.  I am convinced that it is.