Howard MacKinnon

2015 Federal Election Seat Projections

The notion of a herd of lemmings spilling over a cliff holds a certain fascination. Likewise an election. Especially when something the likes of Justin Trudeau is the favourite to win. Anyway, I can’t resist the number crunching and so, despite the risk of being embarrassed by polls which may prove no more accurate than they were in the BC, Alberta and UK elections, here goes nothing.

I’m basing these on the regional breakdown of the Nanos polling numbers for Sunday, Oct 18 and the tooclosetocall.com seat projection spreadsheet. I’ve used another poll, I thinf it was an Ekos poll, to help me figure out how to reconcile the fact that Nanos lumps all 3 Prairie provinces together where tooclosetocall treats Alberta separately. I’ve also had to extrapolate the regional Nanos figures from its 3 day averages using its national 1 day (Oct 18) figures. I’m using the 1 day numbers because it is a large sample and it has historically been more accurate than the last 3 day coverage.

The number is the number of seats the party should win in that province. The number in brackets is the number of those seats that are very close and could easily be lost.

Notice that despite leading in the most seats, the Liberals have the fewest close leads of the 3 largest parties. The NDP, with the fewest leads, have the highest percentage of close races. Thus, if the polls are off a little bit, or there is a slightly greater swing from NDP to Liberal between yesterday and today, the Liberals could get tantalizingly close to a majority.

Also note that there should be several exciting 3 way races to watch in Quebec and BC. The closest thing to a 4 way race in BC is Nanaimo where even the Greens, running fourth, are only 7 points back of the front running NDP. In Quebec’s Bueauport riding the Bloc is just 7 points ahead of the Liberals and Conservatives while the NDP is even closer just 3 back. Even closer is Chicoutimi where there is just 1 point between the parties in the following order: Bloc, Liberal, Conservative, NDP. Jonquière is also close with a 5 point spread between 1st (Con) and 4th (Lib/Bloc).

I won’t be shocked by a Liberal majority if we see Sackville and Funday go Liberal early, but I’ll stick with the prediction of a strong Liberal minority.

Why you shouldn’t vote

Does voting matter? Is your decision about who to vote for important? Then why are uninformed people allowed to vote? Why are they encouraged to vote?

Because the answer to the first question is “yes” and the second is “no” (except to the parties and candidates because they stand to gain or lose power to control our lives and property). But to the state and its political establishment as a whole it doesn’t matter who you vote for, just that you vote, because a vote, any vote, is a vote for preserving the system that enslaves you. Thankfully the days when this kind of support actually matters are coming to an end.

I want to re-emphasize this point. If how you voted really mattered there would be less noise about casting a vote and more about casting an informed vote. People who’s shallowness lets them vote based on a candidate’s personality, etc. thereby cancelling the vote of someone who has actually informed about the parties, candidates and issues, should not be encouraged to vote. They should be encouraged to become informed or else stay home and let the informed make this important decision.

But that’s not what happens because the agents of the state (including all the partisans) know that the overall support of the public for the voting charade is all important to maintaining their control over us. In other words, the Liberals would rather see the Conservatives win once in a while than see the public overcome their blind faith in the electoral system itself because if that happened, the Liberals would never be able to exercise the power over us that they lie awake at night craving.

The differences between the parties are illusions erected to justify elections. Who would come out to vote if the only choice on the ballot was “the state”. Yet that’s how every ballot should read if it was really accurate. The Liberals will add a few percentage points to the highest tax rate. The NDP will add a few more. The Conservatives will keep it as it is. A criminal gang whose members differ on how much loot they will steal and we’re supposed to think it matters which one gets to decide.

The Liberals want to decriminalize marijuana. But the CRTC controls what we can see on the TV, radio and Internet. The CBC spends a billion stolen dollars per year to make sure we have a channel showing content that obviously not enough want to watch or they wouldn’t need a subsidy. Health Canada forbids us from paying for medical services or medical insurance. In light of so many controls over our liberty who cares about whether someone sticks a burning weed in their face? And yet that’s the degree of difference between the parties that is getting people all hot and bothered. There’s bigger fish people!

How do the parties decide what they stand for? Take it from a disillusioned insider, the parties make a show of letting party members decide the party’s policies but then the party bosses veto anything they don’t want and insert what they do. There is no democracy in party politics. At the local level it is all about securing a place at the trough for your share of the slop – i.e. tax dollars by way of political appointments, jobs, handouts, favours, etc. Take as much power and money from everyone and dole it out to those who will hale you as their leader. This is politics in a modern “liberal” democracy.

I’m barely getting started but there’s work to do. Maybe I’ll vent some more before Monday’s big joke.

Bourque: an unwitting and witless tool of the state.

Neither the right of self-defence, nor the right to property, includes the right to pose an immediate threat to another’s life. In the absence of circumstances which would justify the need to carry loaded, high-powered weapons around other people, the implied threat to those other people in having the immediate ability to inflict serious harm or death upon them is a violation of their right to life and liberty.

Justin Bourque (the Moncton shooter) is not a defender of liberty, he is a violator of liberty. He is abusing his own liberty by threatening that of others. By doing so he forfeits the claim he has on others to respect his rights. It is irrational for anyone to conclude that the rest of us are safe merely because he is shooting at state agents. That is far too fine a distinction to make when your life may depend on it. What if he is looking for whatever target of opportunity present themselves? What if he mistakenly takes you for a state agent? What if he decides you pose a threat to his rights and decides to execute his judgment against you right on the spot? What if he is simply deranged? High? Intoxicated?

Even in my perfect political model, if I see Bourque walking around as he was, I call whatever agency is obliged to defend me. In fact, I would be justified, once I see him actually initiating deadly force against others, to use it against him.

Anarcho-capitalism is based on the right to do what you want with what’s yours – not the right to hold the lives of others on the thinnest of treads that you can snip on a whim.

Consider the perspective of the woman who phoned in the complaint. She did not see Bourque and think, “I believe he is breaking the firearms laws. I must report him.” She saw him and thought, “There are no wild animals about, there are no criminals, no invaders. I see no possible threat to this man that could justify him walking about with a deadly weapon. Perhaps he sees me as a threat or perhaps he is the one about to initiate violence.” Under the circumstances, for her to have taken the chance that he possed no threat of initiating violence, when she might never have a chance to reconsider, would be unreasonable to the point of insane.

Even if we assume we were endowed with some super power of perception that assured us that his only targets were state agents, and that he would not misidentify anyone as a state agent, we should not condone his actions. Just as electoral politics is a deceptive shell game rigged to ensure statist outcomes, surely armed revolution is even worse. If it comes down to a matter of who can exert the most force, the state clearly wins. What is so attractive about the agorist position is that, over time, given the rapid pace of technological change that empowers the individual vis a vis the state, the power and therefore authority of the state will inevitably whither and die. The only thing that could interfere with that is if the state’s pseudo-authority to use force were bolstered by people worried about idiots like Bourque roaming the streets.

Nothing can set the cause of liberty back so efficiently as a good scare. Remember 9-11?

Marketplace Hatchet Job: Yellow Journalism

Marketplace is a show produced by a state-owned TV network that owes its existence to massive subsidies of money stolen (taxed) from people who would otherwise not watch it and to regulations designed to crush and eliminate its competition in the “marketplace”. Therefore it comes as no surprise that this show would stoop to crass manipulation of statistics in order to egg on fellow-travelers over at Health Canada to squash a highly effective product that dares to treat Canadians as intelligent adults capable of making up their own minds as to what remedies to use to prevent and treat cold and flu symptoms.

Specifically, at about the 10 minute mark of this hatchet job, a U of A expert is cited for the proposition that a person would need to take Cold FX for 17 years (cold seasons) before it would prevent a cold. This is NOT what the expert said. She said the study showed Cold FX reduced the risk of a cold by 15%. That means it could help reduce the risk of 15% of those who take it, EVERY cold season. There are other interpretations as well. That marketplace decided to spin this statistic in the most unfavourable possible way shows that they do not have the interests of their consumers at heart but those of their masters – those who would be out of work if we no longer lived in the overtaxed, over regulated economy in which we do. Those, essentially – like themselves.

I will be continuing to take Cold FX, continuing to remain cold-free, and continue to hold Marketplace, and the CBC as a whole, in utter contempt.

Withdraw your support of an illegal state | DONT VOTE

Withdraw your support of an illegal state | DONT VOTE.

I just wrote this as a comment on Maxime Bernier’s blog.