An Astonishing Election

 

An Astonishing Election

A virtually unknown woman who was appointed as a candidate without a primary, came very close to winning the presidency of the United States, the most important elected office in the world. This, despite espousing remarkably sophomoric ideas like taking unrealized capital gains and national rent control, notions that barely qualify as ideas. And, running as a 'change' candidate despite being an incumbent.

Trump has won despite years of lawsuits, criminal cases, and revolving impeachments. He is brash and crass but, has driven the European Left back into the shadows with the opportunity to actually improve the country by reorienting it to the basics that created it. But the basics here, this strange conglomeration of voters, will have to be explained in order for this to be continued. (All of this will be hampered by his runaway personality.)

The Press will have to reassess itself. They have been more than wrong, they have been campaigning for the wrong side. And they have accepted mendacity as normal, as an acceptable technique. That is not viable in a viable democracy.

Election Day Edition

Election Day Edition

Has the country ever faced such important decisions between such flawed candidates? Usually, election day is a relief from the craziness. This time it might be just the beginning.

Nate Silver's 537 final Siver Bullet election prediction:
At exactly midnight on Tuesday, we ran our simulation model for the final time in this election cycle. Out of 80,000 simulations, Kamala Harris won in 40,012 (50.015%) cases. She did not win in 39,988 simulations (49.985%). Of those, 39,718 were outright wins for Donald Trump and the remainder (270 simulations) were exact 269-269 Electoral College ties: these ties are likely to eventually result in Trump wins in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Incendiary devices that ignited in Germany and the United Kingdom in July were part of a covert Russian operation that aimed to start fires aboard cargo and passenger flights heading to the US and Canada, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported.

A crew of four NASA astronauts was recently hospitalized without explanation after returning to Earth on SpaceX's Dragon capsule.

A warrant was taken out to capture and euthanize a family's pet squirrel in New York after a complaint from a Texas woman on the internet. The squirrel, Peanut, was kept as a pet by the Longo family for seven years and was a social media star with more than 692,000 Instagram followers. 12 armed men broke into the Longo home without warning and captured the squirrel, which was later killed.

“World War III has already begun. You already have battles on the ground being coordinated in multiple countries.”--Jamie Dimon

A Columbia, Tennessee man allegedly attempted to fly a drone packed with explosives into an energy facility before the FBI stopped him from destroying the critical infrastructure, according to the Department of Justice.

The problem with endlessly repeating that we live in a “democracy” is that ppl start to believe all political and legal legitimacy comes from 50 percent +1.--Harsanyi

Under Mr. Trump, expect me-me-me, mockery and misogyny. Under Ms. Harris, climate craziness, wokey woo-woo and pronoun patrols.--WSJ

An Idaho Republican, in a public forum, told a Native American to “go back where you came from.”

Plans by Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta to build an AI data centre in the US that runs on nuclear power were thwarted in part because a rare species of bee was discovered on land earmarked for the project, according to people familiar with the matter.

Math and Guidance

A study published in January by the German Association of Research-Based Pharmaceutical Companies (VFA), an industry body, found that were it not for the country’s above-average number of sick days, the German economy would have grown 0.5 per cent last year, rather than shrinking 0.3 per cent.

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Notre Dame Cathedral is reopening in December. The government wants to charge visitors five euros, but the Church is opposed.


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Math and Guidance

Calaway estimates that having a math mentor at a school, someone who runs a math club and organizes entry into top math competitions increases the number of students earning PhDs and pursing careers as scientists and professors. Not every school has such a math mentor but Calaway estimates (after taking into account underlying abilities, he’s not naive) that over 27 years, math mentors identified 9,092 American Math Competitions students (the cream of the crop) but there were 11,168 missing students of very high ability.

These 11,168 additional students represent the missing exceptional math talents who would have participated in the AMC and been identified as exceptional if they had access to a mentor…these mentors would have increased the number of these students attending selective universities (3,017 students), majoring in STEM (3,465 students), earning PhDs (1,652 students), and pursuing careers as scientists and professors (1,850 students) during this twenty-seven year period.

11,168 missing students of very high ability over 27 years may not sound like much but we are talking about the very top talent level. A footnote illustrates:

Sergey Brin (Google), Mark Zuckerberg (Meta), Peter Thiel (PayPal), and Sam Altman (OpenAI) were all top AMC scorers (Committee on the American Mathematics
Competitions, 1980–2023)

High-IQ individuals don’t simply vanish without mentorship; they likely still have decent careers. However, even if you are skeptical about the social value of earning a PhD, the number of mentored individuals who go on to start firms or earn patents appears substantial. Just as athletic talent can wither without guidance, it seems that intellectual talent may also be underutilized without proper mentorship, with many high-IQ individuals failing to reach their full potential.--Tabarrok

Americans believe in the inevitable progress of individuals and society if merit is allowed to prosper. But that doesn't mean it should ignore nudges and guidance.

Prescience:

Allan Lichtman: Harris will beat Trump on Tuesday, said Allan Lichtman

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Nate Silver: The latest Silver Bulletin forecast shows Trump projected to win the election, 53.8 percent to Harris' 48.8 percent. FiveThirtyEight's forecast model puts Trump as 51 percent likely to win the election, compared to Harris' 48 percent.

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Prescience

And...a special paranoia edition that bypasses predictions:

An ABC station ignited a flurry of conspiracy theories after it aired what appeared to be official election results for Pennsylvania showing Kamala Harris easily winning the key swing state — more than a week before Election Day.

The shocking result popped up at the bottom of the screen during Sunday’s broadcast of the Formula 1 Mexico Grand Prix by ABC local affiliate WNEP-TV, which serves the northern part of the Keystone State.

It showed the vice president capturing 52% of the votes, compared to 47% for Republican challenger Donald Trump, with 100% of the precincts reporting.

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WNEP-TV said the results came up on the screen in “error” and that they had been “randomly generated” as part of a test ahead of the Nov. 5 election.

Sat Stats

Adam Smith-Connor is an Englishman found guilty of silent prayer on the public street near an abortion facility, officially criminalizing thoughts.

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More than 6.1 million malaria cases, and 1,038 deaths, have been recorded in the country this year through the end of September, compared with 4.5 million cases, and 469 deaths, for all of 2023. Worse, cases are likely to soar far higher in the next couple of months because peak malaria season, driven by seasonal rains, begins in September and runs through the end of the year.

“We’re backsliding so fast — we’ve gone back a decade,” said Fitsum Tadesse, the lead scientist overseeing the malaria program at the Armauer Hansen Research Institute in Addis Ababa, the capital of the country.

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South Korea's fertility rate, already the world's lowest, dropped further last year, with the average number of expected babies per woman decreasing to 0.72 from 0.78 in 2022.


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Sat Stats

Nicolai Tangen leads Nordic behemoth Norges Bank Investment Management, which governs the revenue earned by Norway’s oil and gas resources, hoping to distribute its benefits fairly between current and future Norwegian generations.

Under Tangen’s leadership since 2020, and over the past decade, the $1.6 trillion fund has invested more heavily in the U.S. instead of its closer neighbors in Europe.

Tangen told the Financial Times America’s performance, particularly in innovation, is “worrisome” in contrast to Europe.
Part of comes down to mindset, Tangen added, and how accepting each continent is of mistakes and risk: “You go bust in America, you get another chance. In Europe, you’re dead,” he said. But there is a difference in the "level of ambition,” he added. “We are not very ambitious. I should be careful about talking about work-life balance, but the Americans just work harder,” Tangen continued.

Meanwhile, data from the International Labour Organization, last updated in January, showed the average hours workers clocked in the U.S. was 38 hours a week. However, of those employees, 13% worked 49 hours or more per week, which outstripped the majority of European nations.

Moreover, countries like the U.K. have a statutory requirement entitling staff to 28 paid days of leave a year—if you’re a full-time employee. In the U.S. it is not a legal requirement for staff to be given any paid time off; however, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average employee who is in their first year of service takes eight PTO days

Investments in the U.S. now represent 46.9% of Norges Bank’s portfolio, whereas a decade ago the U.S. represented just under 30%. Going back a further 10 years, in 2003, the organization’s investment in America made up just 26.3% of all investments.

Conversely, in 2003, 59.5% of Norges Bank’s portfolio was invested in European countries, a figure that, by 2023, had fallen to 28.7%.

AI, a growing field of American-European disparity, is instructive. “I’m not saying it’s good, but in America, you have a lot of AI and no regulation; in Europe, you have no AI and a lot of regulation. It’s interesting,” Tangen added.

 

The Stealth Candidate

Orlando Police Chief Eric Smith said eight people were shot in downtown Orlando. Two of the victims died, six were taken to the hospital.
The police said the suspect is 17 years old and has a previous arrest record.

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Ford Motor is temporarily stopping production of its all-electric
F-150 Lightning pickup truck, an apparent response to slowing demand and high inventories.

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The Stealth Candidate

Kamala Harris has a deceptive persona. She seems to be a total ditz. She is inarticulate, overwhelmed, evasive, and vague.

But she has an undeniable history. Harris favors reparations. She plans some strange program that would financially support Black startups with forgivable loans. I saw her in an interview support the banning of meat. There is no Constitutional justification for any of this stuff. She also wants to pack the Supreme Court to bypass the judicial review system, malice disguised as righteousness.

She wants to expand the entitlement state beyond even what Biden has—for elder and child care, housing, a larger Affordable Care Act, and more. Her proposed tax increases are nearly as extensive as Biden’s, running past $4 trillion over 10 years. She shows every sign of wanting to expand and accelerate the climate corporate welfare and mandates that distort investment at enormous taxpayer cost but no benefit to global temperatures. And she wants to ban fracking.

She is certainly of the modern left, with its regulatory coercion, cultural imperialism, economic statism, and desire to strip judicial independence. She is vague about Israel and Ukraine. 

On the other hand, she has no opinion on the military, the decline of military recruitment or spending, the debt, AI, illegal immigration, cartels, drugs (although she wants a carveout for Black male marijuana distributors), or inflation.

Yet 1 billion dollars have gone into her campaign, presumably for abortion.

It's hard to imagine with this history she is flying under the radar.

Biopreparate, Part 2

So, if Trump wins but the Democrats take the House, will they impeach him right away?

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Quite an interesting Harris interview on the Shannon Sharp podcast. Harris said, among many strange things, that the GI Bill excluded Blacks from participation and that Trump favors overtime work without pay.

The mendacity of this campaign is stunning.

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Biopreparate, Part 2

The Russian site called Sergiev Posad-6 had been quiet for decades, but it had a notorious Cold War past: It had once been a major research center for biological weapons, with a history of experiments with the viruses that cause smallpox, Ebola, and hemorrhagic fevers.

Satellite imagery over two years — collected by commercial imaging firms Maxar and Planet Labs — shows construction vehicles renovating the old Soviet-era laboratory and breaking ground on 10 new buildings, totaling more than 250,000 square feet, with several of them bearing hallmarks of biological labs designed to handle extremely dangerous pathogens.

The images showed multiple signatures that, when combined, indicate a high-containment biological facility: dozens of rooftop air handling units, layouts consistent with partitioned labs, underground infrastructure, heightened security features, and what appears to be a power plant.

U.S. officials and arms control experts, noting the secrecy surrounding the military facility, say they are worried about how Russia intends to use the new labs. “This is where they weaponized smallpox,” Duitsman said. “New technologies could supercharge the capabilities of a revived program.”

The Soviet Union used a similar playbook in justifying a massive bioweapons program in the 1970s and 1980s. Soon after the United States outlawed biological weapons and destroyed its Cold War stockpile in the late 1960s, Soviet leaders began putting tens of thousands of military and civilian scientists to work on an expanded program to weaponize diseases such as anthrax, smallpox and the bubonic plague. Russian defectors, including several of the program’s top scientists, revealed the existence of the illegal weaponization project in the late 1980s. Many said the work was driven by a conviction — promoted by Kremlin officials — that Western countries were making the same weapons in secret.--from WashPo