I like the idea that you expect to change your mind about things as your understanding grows. HCR quotes Benjamin Franklin: An 81-year-old man in 1787, he urged his colleagues at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia to rally behind the new plan of government they had written. “I confess that there are several parts of this constitution which I do not at present approve, but I am not sure I shall never approve them,” he said, “For having lived long, I have experienced many instances of being obliged by better information, or fuller consideration, to change opinions even on important subjects, which I once thought right, but found to be otherwise.”

I'm reading about polling methodologies in an age when no one answers their cell phone if they don't know the caller. Online polls are cheap to do so there are lots of new players. They solicit poll takers online and balance the results with some kind of statistical methods. Fivethirtyeight's list shows the most reliable polls based on past performance and methodology transparency. Nate Cohn in today's NYT explains how shifts in national polls can reflect changes in non competitive states without affecting the electoral count at all.

Commonground Fair is just the best thing, a big hippie celebration on the first day of fall. It lasts 3 days, but seems to take up the week before and the week after, with preparation and debriefing.

Small town library moment: kid comes in looking for second volume of Anne of Green Gables. I check the Amazon order and see that the six volume set got delivered. I zip to the post office. It's not out yet, but Barb goes in the back and finds it. I zip back, catalog it, and hand it to the kid.

I wish I had spaced my stickers closer together in the window that the driver cannot use. I have more opinions.

Harris crushed Trump in the debate and now there is much nastiness being spewed by him, especially the stupid lies about the Haitian immigrants who work in Springfield, Ohio. He will sacrifice a town to get a point ahead. Maine needs immigrant workers too. Revision Energy, a big solar outfit, trains Somali immigrants to install solar. Maine has an aging population and not enough workers. The economy depends on immigrants. The post-debate polls haven't come out yet, but Harris steadily rises in the national polls (no one trusts the polls). But there are so many ways to game the electoral college that only about 5 state polls count. Apparently, you can will the popular vote by 10 million and still lose in the electoral college. Hopefully more states will sign on to the national popular vote compact. So many vestiges of slavery in our country.

Book group is reading Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land written in 1961. The dialogue is like the snappy stuff from old movies, and there's some little micro-agression against women on every page. The lead female character was a nurse. Couldn't do it. 1961 was a shitty year. In new science fiction written by women, the lead female character would be a doctor or the head of the institute or a badass bionic time traveller. I know Heinlein was trying to suggest a different way of structuring society, but I couldn't hang on for that; besides he mixes it up with religion and free love. I couldn't grok it.

Thinking about Vance's conversion to Catholicism and thinking he can't be catholic because he didn't go to catholic school or sit through hours of the way of the cross or say a thousand rosaries or have a sodality outfit. It's like converting to being Italian. He has no experience of the culture. Had he spent any time with nuns, he wouldn't be spouting that nonsense about childless women. He is a strange and conflicted little man who longs for a time when everyone who wasn't a straight white man was stuck and miserable.

Harris just put out a comprehensive statement of her proposed policies and showed the contrast to Project 2025. I'm all in for it, including my new chucks. Bring on the debate.