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Good Friday Morning! Except to Will Smith the movie star. Variety published part of an interview with Men In Black director Barry Sonnenfeld, where he warned anyone from getting in a “hermetically sealed” environment with Smith. Why? That’s because Will Smith is a farter.
And not just a little farter, Smith is a big one. According to Sonnenfeld, during the first Men In Black filing, Smith ripped air so bad that Tommy Lee Jones was scrambling to get out of the set: “So we race the ladder over. Yeah, Tommy reaches his leg out as the ladder is coming over, races down the stairs. And what happened was, Will Smith is a farter … It’s just some people are. And you really don’t want to be inside a very small hermetically sealed space with a Will Smith fart. You don’t even want to be sitting next to him at the Disney ranch.”
They evacuated the set for “about three hours.”
This week, I’m exploring an equally smelly situation: the longshoreman strike and how it abruptly ended before impacting the election—links to follow.
Quick Hits:
- A few months ago, I wrote a newsletter on how Harvard was testing out the use of artificial intelligence in political polling. Using AI Agents, they created a simulation of a poll that created AI representations of actual voters. A few weeks ago, Semafor published a piece about two 19-year-old college dropouts who built such a polling company. Using their AI agents, they correctly predicted the results of a New York Democratic Primary within 371 votes. According to them, “The polls usually draw on responses from around 5,000 AI respondents, and it takes anywhere from 30 seconds to 1.5 minutes to conduct. Aaru charges less than 1/10th the cost of a survey of humans.” They’re still in the scaling stage, trying to see how well their AI Agents handle a larger race like the presidential campaign. And they’re using real polls to compare their results. I’m looking forward to seeing comparisons of their work post-election. It’s an interesting interview that I recommend. One of my notes about this is that these AI Agent polls likely only work when political polarization is high (like our politics right now). If people are less polarized, their voting choices theoretically become less predictable. If true, it could hamper the development of more nuanced AI Agent-driven polling.
- NPR published an utterly terrifying report on the privacy of genetic data stored by companies like 23andMe. You see, 23andMe is on the brink of bankruptcy. Instead of buying the add-ons the company sells, most people just buy the one-shot deal where they learn their genetic heritage by country. After that, they move on with their lives. That’s leaving 23andMe with a shrinking consumer base. That leaves the question: what happens to all that data if they go under as a company? The answer is unclear, and that’s making customers wary.
- After the Teamsters declined to endorse anyone for President, another union followed: the IAFF, the firefighters’ union. The IAFF has endorsed a Democratic candidate for President every year going back to Mondale, except for 2016. If you wanted another data point that this election was mimicking 2016, this would be an anecdotal piece of evidence to file away. Trump’s inroads with the union vote are very real.
Where you can find me this week
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Horse Race Ep. 011: Kamala Harris Is Tested | Hurricane Helene Hits Early Vote | Latest Polls
Biden’s Best Foreign Policy Moments Come When He’s No Longer In Charge – Conservative Institute
October Surprise Arrives And It’s Kamala Harris’s Fault – Conservative Institute
Israel Puts The Fear Of God In Iran – Conservative Institute
Biden-Harris Avert Strike Disaster – One Month To Go
I’m skipping over the Vice Presidential debate this week. The conventional wisdom is that Vance won, and Walz lost. That seems accurate but it’s small potatoes to other things happening. This week’s big news is that Biden and Harris avoided another strike during an election. This is important for several reasons.
A strike at the nation’s ports, which hampers supply chains (which we already witnessed), increasing unemployment, and creating economic chaos, is a disaster right before an election. We have averted that. I missed the importance of some very specific timing around this strike in my early analysis.
I’m writing on Thursday, but we will get the September jobs report on Friday morning. It will get watched like a hawk because the Federal Reserve is using these to dictate interest rate cut decisions. Reports showing any weakness will trigger market panic for more rate cuts.
Hurricane Helene hit too late to impact the September jobs report. All job losses from it will be reflected in the October jobs report, which is scheduled to drop on November 1, 2024, just days before Election Day.
The port strike started on October 1 and ended on October 3. Had the strike gone into next week, people would have been unemployed when the Bureau of Labor Statistics would have been in the field collecting unemployment statistics. If you combine the hurricane with a major strike at all the nation’s ports, the B.L.S. would have difficulty putting out a positive jobs report just before the election.
Notably, when Biden was asked about the strike, he said he wouldn’t invoke Taft-Hartley to end the strike. He said he didn’t “believe in Taft-Hartley.”
That was a lie. Biden absolutely believes in Taft-Hartley and invoked it in 2022 to force a cooling-down period on the rail strikers before the midterms. Before they could go on strike, Biden forced a temporary deal on the rail union management, which postponed a decision until after the election. After the election, when unions started rejecting his contract, he rammed that deal through Congress and ended any strike possibilities.
Biden used that template again, just not using Taft-Hartley this time. Note the wording of the International Longshoreman’s Association statement:
The International Longshoremen’s Association and the United States Maritime Alliance, Ltd. have reached a tentative agreement on wages and have agreed to extend the Master Contract until January 15, 2025 to return to the bargaining table to negotiate all other outstanding issues. Effective immediately, all current job actions will cease and all work covered by the Master Contract will resume.
(emphasis mine) There is no agreement. The parts in bold are the only legally binding thing in this “agreement.“ All the news stories about wage increases and everything else are fluff. The only thing agreed upon, legally, is that they’ve extended their Master Contract to January – aka after the election and just before inauguration day. Everything else is negotiable, including those wage numbers.
No wages have changed, and nothing requested was given. They’ve punted the issue.
What happened? The Unions were shocked at the negative backlash against them. They represent the workers, and the White House/Democrats/media threw the union leadership under the bus. That’s never happened before.
John Konrad, editor of gCaptain, one of the top maritime news sites out there, said on X/Twitter:
A high-level maritime union source tells me ILA leadership didn’t expect this much public backlash, especially on TikTok and X.
So, will Daggett head to the negotiating table sooner, or double down?
They could also hire a pricey crisis management firm to reshape public perception via M.S.M.
What do you think the X effect will be?
His sources went on to say that the union would fight on, but less than 12 hours later, they caved and punted on a “tentative agreement.”
Those negative stories were no accident. Because the strike negatively impacted Democrats the most, those video clips and the painting of union leadership as being barely removed from mafia bosses happened for a reason. These unions, like most Democrats (see Biden, Joe), are used to having the press on their side. The press wouldn’t have a negative news cycle hit their precious Kamala Harris and helped push things along. The unions got treated just like Joe Biden when the media/Democrats needed him out of the story.
In truth, the union didn’t anticipate the hurricane, either. Everyone in the South needs supplies to recover. The press effectively painted the unions as preventing supplies from getting to hurricane victims. That’s a double-whammy.
Given the awful federal response, Biden and Harris didn’t anticipate needing to respond to a hurricane, either. That’s the wildcard in this entire scenario.
Avoiding the strike, though, prevents unemployment from spiking, which would make Harris look bad right before Election Day. It also avoids negative pressures on the economy. After the election, the deal will be negotiated during the lame-duck period of politics.
The great irony of Biden’s claim that he’s the most union-friendly President in history is that the exact opposite is true. He and Democrats treat them as expendable pawns to expand power and win elections – nothing more.
(Note: After doing the write-up above, John Konrad posted a thread on X/Twitter confirming my reading of the situation.)
Additionally, such events show how much power unions have lost in the past 50-75 years. They were once paragons of political power and influence. Now, they can’t even withstand withering news cycles on social media. It’s no wonder Trump is making serious inroads with the union vote because the actual union bodies themselves have little influence over their members.
One set of unions remains just as powerful as ever: public sector unions. These are your teachers’ unions and the unions representing federal workers. For instance, the I.R.S. Union endorsed Kamala Harris, which may be the best news for Trump all cycle.
F.D.R. famously opposed public-sector unions, and private-sector unions even started out hating them (that changed over time). Given that taxpayer money is involved, and public policy is supposed to be driven by legislatures and the executive branch, unions using their power to change these decisions remains a pox on politics that should end.
All that said, the strike went from a major crisis for Harris to a victory. Whether it’ll be a victory for the actual workers remains to be seen. They subverted their demands to the political demands of the Democratic Party. The rail workers did that and regretted it. I suspect the longshoremen will, too.
The race remains tight. On a national level, the first two polls (not named Rasmussen) we’ve gotten after the debate show Harris with a slim lead (Emerson is Harris +1; NPR/PBS/Marist is Harris +2).
There are signals in the Wisconsin Senate race that Democrats are floundering. Axios published a piece filled with panicking Democrats in that state. If Republicans win the Senate race, they’re likely to win the Presidential race, too.
We’re one month away from Election Day.
Links of the week
The Long Tail of Senate Elections – Sean Trende, RealClearPolitics
Dockworkers’ strike is splitting the Democratic coalition – Unherd
Did Tim Walz follow China visit security requirements? – John Schindler, Washington Examiner
The Democrats’ Hispanic Voter Problem Deepens: It really is getting worse. – Roy Teixeira, The Liberal Patriot
Harris stays quiet as California voters threaten to roll back sentencing reforms – Semafor
FL State Guardsman: What The Media Is Telling You About Helene Is Complete Bullsh*t, Politicians Don’t Have A Clue And Are Lying – RealClearPolitics
Doug Emhoff rep denies claim second gentleman slapped then-girlfriend at 2012 Cannes Film Festival – NYPost
Pilot flying Helene rescue missions in NC threatened with arrest – The Hill
X/Twitter Thread(s) of the week
Satire of the week
‘Damn, That’s Crazy,’ Announces FEMA In Statement – Onion
North Carolina Family Informed Their Insurance Policy Voided Once House Gets Wet – Onion
FEMA Reports They Spent All The Taxpayer Funding On A Sweet PowerPoint Presentation About Racial Equity – Babylon Bee
Tim Walz Polling Strong Among Men Who Choose Middle Urinal – Babylon Bee
Woman Who Normally Overreacts Worried That Normal Reaction Is Underreaction – Reductress
Give Me a Second Good Reason Why I Can’t Bring My Gun to the Haunted House This Year – The Hard Times
M. Night Shyamalan Reveals He’s Been Dead the Whole Time – The Hard Drive
Thanks for reading!