Nov 7 2020 15:00
A lot of people say “this will not end well”. That may well be, but such events are not foreseeable, let alone creatable by human volition. I can’t see the future and the boarded up stores and busted polls suggest neither can anyone.
It may well be that in a shockingly short time the left wing rioters will be back chanting not against Trump, but Biden as they try to collect on IOUs he has no money to pay. DT was not a one-off “Hitler” but a symptom of the establishment’s bankruptcy and self-poison.
There is in humanity a deep desire to get back to ordinary life. The great subliminal message of Biden was “I will bring back normal. I will make it like it used to be.” Unfortunately that is probably a promise he had no right to make.
Nov 7 2020 14:00
This is the time, if any, to focus on the voting system issues. It is a legitimate hill to stand on with both defensive and offensive potential. Crossfire Hurricane gave a mere illusion 3 years of artificial life. Yet this seismic event is already being buried. The challenge is to resist being buried alive.
There’s nothing more pesky than a corpse sitting up at a coroner’s inquest. Ordinarily the media can get away with “moving on” but not if the corpse follows — with a sequence of exposes.
Nov 7 2020 12:30
It’s important that the legal fight continue till it’s official because the possibility of cheating is not forgiven and an issue in itself.It’s not the first nor the last time cheating is alleged. And it could victimize the Democrats too.
Cheating has become an increasingly frequent allegation in elections. Gore in 2000. Hillary 2016. The entire Mueller investigation was an election fraud case that went on for 3 years. Newsweek’s top 5 rigged US presidential elections.
As a practical matter no stable political solution can be safely founded on news agency projections, not after such a bruising fight. Otherwise we will forget cheating and harvesting not just this time but until the next time it haunts us again.
Things that are real become more convincing the closer you inspect them. Trust not doubt should grow.
Nov 7 2020 05:30
Joe Biden’s self-declared victory and calls for an end to “the anger and demonization” in politics are a backhanded acknowledgement that he has no choice but to coexist with a truly powerful foe.
Biden can’t coexist while his left wing thirsts for revenge. As Nassim Taleb notes:
AOC, must we then compile a blacklist with the names of the 70 million who voted against your preferences?
Must we not also compile the list of elected representatives proposing Soviet-style purges?
If Biden wants peace shouldn’t he have a word with AOC? Who runs the Democratic party anyway?
Nov 6 2020 22:15
Democrats and Media Collude to Steal Presidential Election by Michael Walsh. Trying a stunt like this risks escalation and things may be on that path. The Chicago Way leads to catastrophe.
Dwight Eisenhower, no mean strategist, counseled “If you can’t solve a problem, enlarge it”. Unfortunately in 2 person zero sum games both players can do that.
Also: AOC says: “Lincoln Project should take the L and publicly pledge to give a lot of their fundraising to the people who actually made a big difference.”
The Lincoln Project got $67,000,000 to do literally nothing and the Black organizers that helped Biden win probably are short on rent this month.
Nov 6 2020 18:40
Our old friend “preference falsification” may make an encore before the end. It is hard, as the pollsters discovered, to read the secret hearts of men. We know our own true feelings but those of others are masked. The source of risk is you can’t predict reactions exactly.
Nov 6 2020 15:45
The Supreme Court ordered Pennsylvania election officials to separate ballots arriving after 8 p.m. on Election Day and to count the late ballots separately.
Alito order: “… neither the applicant (PA GOP) nor the Secretary has been able to verify that all boards are complying with the Secretary’s guidance, which, it is alleged, is not legally binding on them.”
Locking barn after horse is out. : just b/c PA *promised* to segregate late-arriving ballots, didn’t guarantee they would so. Now, Justice Alito has ordered them to do it … but have they been doing so?
The terrible “ifs” accumulate, and while everyone thinks they are calmly ready for the verdict many are oddly grateful for any minute of reprieve. In truth, all outward confidence to the contrary, we are in uncharted territory.
There was the hanging chads crisis, but there was more confidence in institutions then. Now, if by some reversal of fortune Trump wins it will be as valid as a Biden victory. Whoever wins the system lost.
Nov 6 2020 15:35
Check out the LA DA elect’s reforms. The trick to marketing a progressive agenda is to convince the buyer it will happen to someone else.
Nov 6 2020 15:00
What are the odds this disrupts the world? Starlink satellite connectivity is coming online.
According to some early speed tests done in different locations around the US, users are getting anywhere from 100 to 203 Mbps on downlink and around 15 to 33 Mbps on uplink. Meanwhile, the latency varies between 20 to 45 milliseconds, which is pretty much in line with SpaceX estimates.
One of the enablers of the anti-cheating protesters is cell phone video recording and sharing capability. Even Twitter, FB and Google can only delay but not prevent data from spreading. What if this capability were global?
Related: the “many eyes hypothesis”
A second potential anti-predator effect of animal aggregations is the “many eyes” hypothesis. This theory states that as the size of the group increases, the task of scanning the environment for predators can be spread out over many individuals.
Nov 6 2020 11:00
The decision to fight the 2020 presidential election counts to the last legal motion may not stop Biden from acceding to the WH but it will succeed in exposing an extravaganza of cheating allegations. Inevitably, a significant % of the U.S. and world audience will or already have concluded the election was stolen.
It’s an actual guarantee of chaos—and that’s what we had and have.
No one will ever really know what happened.
Paradoxically, it is easier for a clearly dominant player to warp the process in his favor than it is for a party at near parity or slight inferiority to attempt the same. If you try a fast one on someone as big or actually bigger than you it becomes very risky.
The pre-election polls suggested an overwhelming Biden overmatch, where leveraging sloppy election practices, or whatever you want to call it, either wouldn’t matter or wouldn’t be accepted in the face of manifest superiority. But the polls were way wrong and the consequences unexpectedly disastrous.
The was the danger of overreach I warned about and now it’s here.
Nov 6 2020 03:00
Elon Musk yearning for a return to sanity.
A New Banner is needed Neither hard left nor right
The left’s banner is poised to claim credit for what was left of the old centrists. You will not be so easily rid of them. Maybe the best bet is your original idea: to create a self-governing society on Mars. The other option is to raise the new banner on a virtual, internal planet, which exists on earth but is a world unto itself, like the fancy hotel John Wick goes to. Maybe that’s what freedom means in this 21st century. One’s very own Mars. Shangri-la my Shangri-la.
It is well that the universe is so big. For there are always people half a step behind you whose life’s mission is to tell you what to do, what to say, what to think. Mars is definitely not far enough, not in the long run anyway.
Nov 6 2020 02:45
Europe is shuttered for the second time against the coronavirus, this time facing public opposition. University students have torn down lockdown fencing in Manchester, England. In London, 104 were arrested at an anti-lockdown protest.
Nov 6 2020 02:25
A stronger, mutated form of the coronavirus has developed among Danish mink.
Denmark will cull all its mink – as many as 17 million – after a mutated form of coronavirus that can spread to humans was found on mink farms.
Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said the mutated virus posed a “risk to the effectiveness” of a future Covid-19 vaccine.
Denmark is the world’s biggest producer of mink fur and its main export markets are China and Hong Kong.
Nov 6 2020 02:15
Biden aiming to close out. ABC News:
BREAKING: Biden has overtaken Trump’s lead in Georgia by 917 votes.
Nov 6 2020 00:25
I am reading the manuscript of Michael Walsh’s Last Stands (due out December) and one of its main themes is that among the most lasting victories in history are defeats. Thermopylae, Masada, Roncesvalles, the Alamo to name a few. The most dangerous and unkillable thing on earth is a legend.
Nov 5 2020 23:25
Just because something is buried by the papers doesn’t mean it’s dead. That kind of memory often goes underground and becomes part of ghost stories.
I’m supposed to believe after Democrats spent $47 million on a 2 year investigation
With nonstop coverage on almost all major left wing broadcast networks
To convince us that election fraud/interference was a serious threat
But on Nov 3rd, 2020 the threat suddenly went away?
The interesting question is whether they’ll come back to haunt those who buried them. A lot of these accounts and videos live on in messaging apps, without dates or context. They are like the body parts of a dismembered narrative.
Nov 5 2020 23:10
Unlike the progs, who know what’s going to happen, the future is veiled from most of us. The only rule to follow is: keep making the right move, rinse and repeat and hope for the best.
Nov 5 2020 22:45
The biggest downside to censorship, shadow-banning, and other methods of distortion and thought-control is it destroys information. This is one of the fundamental reasons why the progs do so badly against Black Swans. They can’t conceive them or think outside the box to solve them because they have destroyed the information that might have enabled them.
But it’s worse than this. They have a tendency to throw printed money at problems and since printed money is, in a sense, nothing but misinformation, the real amount of reliable data falls even more. One reason why the election polls were so bad was that they were recording self-noise.
Nov 5 2020 22:00
“Weaponizing free speech” is already trademarked. Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan:
“Blasphemy in garb of freedom of expression is intolerable”
Nov 5 2020 21:45
“Incendiary rhetoric” vs. “mostly peaceful.” ABC News:
“There is growing concern” among law enforcement officials about the “incendiary rhetoric” coming from the Trump campaign because “it could inspire fringe elements” to act, @PierreTABC reports.
Steve Bannon’s Twitter account suspended. Progressives will probably unleash some degree of reprisal against their foes. When you’re described as a “conspiracy theorist,” “racist,” “dangerous,” or “inflammatory” that’s probably a hint. Terms like this can be thought of as the pixels of the narrative. They are the units of conception deeper than which the reader is not supposed to go. The media prides itself in being nuanced but how often do they think in cartoons?
Nov 5 2020 21:00
It’s amazing how many elite resources were used to take down a man (and not down yet) described as unfit and a moron. The explanation for the massive disparity in force is that there is something wrong with the population. What happens if the elite come up against someone they frankly admire as competent? Andrew Sullivan writes:
Trump just proved that all our fears about his utter indifference to liberal democracy were and are valid. Pathological narcissism and delusion. Unfit. Always was.
Part of the reason the elites have such a hard time dealing with Trump is they’ve defined him as a simpleton A one-off, a freak. But he is more likely an instance of unforeseeable events thrown up by nature, popularly known as Black Swans. And the system has been doing very poorly against Black Swans like covid, Brexit, etc. It’s not like they are failing only to cope with Trump. What happens when they meet the next surprise?
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