Tag: trainwreck

The recounts are irrelevant

There is nothing in it. There never was.

Jill Stein has everything she needs to launch a presidential recount. She’s got the cash, the grassroots fervor and the spotlight of an adoring media. But there’s one thing she needs to overturn Trump’s victory: a calendar.

Stein missed Pennsylvania’s deadline to file for a voter-initiated recount. That blown deadline is a huge blow for Democrats who have pinned their hopes on recounts in the Keystone State, Michigan and Wisconsin.

“According to Wanda Murren, spokeswoman for the Pennsylvania Department of State,” the Philadelphia Inquirer reported Monday, “the deadline for a voter-initiated recount was Monday, Nov. 21.”

All of the dark conspiracy theories about overturning the election were nonsensical. Jill Stein’s call for a recount was driven by one thing: money. She raised far more money than was required for the Wisconsin recount, publicly stated that all the money raised would not be used for the recount, and publicly posted an incorrect date on the Pennsylvania deadline.

Cobb said they only factored in Wisconsin when they first publicized their $2.5 million goal on their website. Once the campaign realized the cost of a recount for other states, they upped the goal, he said.

The money will be used to pay off the Green Party’s campaign debt, which is to say, into the bank accounts of the staffers. It would be informative to know if they knew the November 28th filing date was inaccurate when they posted it.

And then, there is this:

Just two days after confirming that he would participate in Jill Stein’s recounts in WI, MI and PA, Hillary campaign attorney, Marc Elias, is now publicly calling on North Carolina Republican Gubernatorial candidate, Pat McCrory, to halt his recount efforts and concede his race.

Once you open Pandora’s Box, don’t think you can control the demons that are released.

Inquisition 2.0

Apparently, some people literally never learn:

For years, whenever Jews and Muslims engaged in dialogue and activism together, it usually concerned — or foundered — on one issue: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. With Donald Trump’s ascent to the presidency, that appears to be changing. Regardless of what’s happening across the ocean, Jews and Muslims in the United States are joining together to fight for shared domestic concerns.

“It is a perhaps growing recognition that [the Israeli-Palestinian conflict] cannot define how American Jews and American Muslims relate to one another,” said Rabbi David Fox Sandmel, the Anti-Defamation League’s director of interreligious engagement. “The shared concerns we have about prejudice, about bias, about threats of violence, about disenfranchisement — these are the kinds of things that can bring us together.”

On Monday, the American Jewish Committee and the Islamic Society of North America launched the Muslim-Jewish Advisory Council, a group of religious and business leaders from both communities who will help draft domestic policy legislation and advocate on issues of shared concern.

From Infogalactic:  For the most part, the invasion of the Moors was welcomed by the Jews of Iberia. Both Muslim and Catholic sources tell us that Jews provided valuable aid to the invaders. Once captured, the defense of Córdoba was left in the hands of Jews, and Granada, Málaga, Seville, and Toledo were left to a mixed army of Jews and Moors. The Chronicle of Lucas de Tuy records that “when the Catholics left Toledo on Sunday before Easter to go to the Church of the Holy Laodicea to listen to the divine sermon, the Jews acted treacherously and informed the Saracens. Then they closed the gates of the city before the Catholics and opened them for the Moors.”

White Christian Americans helped establish and fund and defend Israel. And this is the gratitude they receive? This is the thanks they get? ANOTHER Jewish-Muslim alliance against them in their own country? It’s not as if Americans don’t know who opened the gates in 1965.

Guess what’s likely to come of this sort of behavior. Come on, just one guess. And what sort of bizarre, ahistorical logic do people whose single metric is “is it good for the Jews” use to conclude that this behavior is, somehow, going to be good for the Jews? Epic stupidity doesn’t even begin to describe this.

An election metaphor

Sic semper stupidis. Question: did anyone happen to see a UT parking sticker on the bumper? Asking for a friend.

If you ever find yourself in a position where people are screaming at you, “get off the fucking highway”, you really should take it as a sign to seriously reconsider your life choices.

Throw out the OED!

Nigerian negresses will henceforth define all words in the English language. You can throw out your dictionaries now.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has no time for white men who want to redefine what racism is. The Nigerian feminist author appeared on BBC Newsnight on Friday with R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr., founder and editor-in-chief of the conservative magazine The American Spectator.

Discussing Donald Trump’s campaign, Tyrell argued with host Emily Maitlis’ comment that Trump’s language has been racist.

“Thats not true, he hasn’t been racist,” Tyrell said, but Adichie wasn’t having it.

“I’m sorry, but as a white man, you don’t get to define what racism is, you really don’t,” she said. “You don’t get to sit there and say he hasn’t been racist when objectively he has.”

Redefine? The negress obviously has no idea what the white man’s definition has been for decades. But the amazing thing is that she’s not even the most clueless one there. You simply must watch the video, as when Tyrell asks the woman from the BBC why the media always focuses on the KKK instead of the Knights of Columbus, her response simply has to be seen to be believed.

Now remember, these are the people who consider themselves to be the intellectual elite. Never forget this whenever you’re dealing with the media. They are uneducated midwits with less intellectual curiosity than the average alley cat.

Even his hindsight isn’t 20/20

Nate Silver takes great pride in being less completely wrong than some of the other pollsters, in an article entitled “Why FiveThirtyEight Gave Trump A Better Chance Than Almost Anyone Else (Except the LA TIMES/USC and IBD/TIPP Tracking, Who, Unlike Us, Actually Got It Right). NB: I added the bit in parentheses. At no point does Silver mention any polling organization, or individual, who did correctly predict the election results.

Based on what most of us would have thought possible a year or two ago, the election of Donald Trump was one of the most shocking events in American political history. But it shouldn’t have been that much of a surprise based on the polls — at least if you were reading FiveThirtyEight. Given the historical accuracy of polling and where each candidate’s support was distributed, the polls showed a race that was both fairly close and highly uncertain.

This isn’t just a case of hindsight bias. It’s tricky to decide what tone to take in an article like this one — after all, we had Hillary Clinton favored. But one of the reasons to build a model — perhaps the most important reason — is to measure uncertainty and to account for risk. If polling were perfect, you wouldn’t need to do this. And we took weeks of abuse from people who thought we overrated Trump’s chances. For most of the presidential campaign, FiveThirtyEight’s forecast gave Trump much better odds than other polling-based models. Our final forecast, issued early Tuesday evening, had Trump with a 29 percent chance of winning the Electoral College.1 By comparison, other models tracked by The New York Times put Trump’s odds at: 15 percent, 8 percent, 2 percent and less than 1 percent. And betting markets put Trump’s chances at just 18 percent at midnight on Tuesday, when Dixville Notch, New Hampshire, cast its votes.

So why did our model — using basically the same data as everyone else — show such a different result? We’ve covered this question before, but it’s interesting to do so in light of the actual election results. We think the outcome — and particularly the fact that Trump won the Electoral College while losing the popular vote — validates important features of our approach.

Translation:

  1. I’m a Gamma and I can’t admit that I’m wrong without explaining how being wrong only proves that I was right to do what I did. 
  2. Almost anyone else means anyone not KellyAnne Conway, Scott Adams, Nassim Taleb, Mike Cernovich, Vox Day, LA Times, IBD, or TPP Tracking.
  3. A 29 percent chance of winning is practically a near certainty. I mean, sure, you might have interpreted that to mean that Hillary was probably going to win, but that just shows how you don’t understand polling as well as I do. The fact of the matter is that we were closer to getting it right than everyone else who didn’t get it right.
  4. And by “29 percent”, I of course mean 28.6 percent.
  5. And by “such a different result” what I mean is “exactly the same result as everyone else, except those other guys who actually got it right and whom I will carefully refrain from mentioning.”

We strongly disagree with the idea that there was a massive polling error. Instead, there was a modest polling error, well in line with historical polling errors, but even a modest error was enough to provide for plenty of paths to victory for Trump. We think people should have been better prepared for it. There was widespread complacency about Clinton’s chances in a way that wasn’t justified by a careful analysis of the data and the uncertainties surrounding it.

Translation:

  1. We strongly disagree with the idea that I could have been wrong. The Secret King is never wrong, by definition! You just don’t understand how the appearance of being wrong only shows that I was mostly right, and that just goes to show how much smarter I am than you. Still undefeated!
  2. Next time, don’t pay any attention to what I say before the election. Just wait until it is over, and then I’ll explain what I meant and how that proves I am right. Always.

Remember, at one point, Nate Silver and 538 gave Hillary Clinton an 87.3 percent chance of victory as recently as October 19. The good news for Trump, the Alt-Right, and even the Republicans is that these hapless morons are too proud to admit or learn from their mistakes, which means they are going to screw up just as badly, or perhaps even worse, in future elections.

“Cuck!” she urged, cuckingly

Why on Earth would anyone, especially Donald Trump, listen to the woman who twice voted for Obama, who didn’t see Trump winning the Republican nomination, and expected him to lose to Hillary Clinton?

It was a natural, self-driven eruption. Which makes it all the more impressive and moving. And it somehow makes it more beautiful that few saw it coming.

On the way home Wednesday morning I thought of my friend who runs the neighborhood shoe-repair shop. He is elderly, Italian-American, an immigrant. I had asked him last winter who would win the Republican nomination and he looked at me as if I were teasing. “Troomp!” he instructed. I realized at that moment: In America now only normal people can see the obvious. Everyone else is lost in a data-filled fog.

That was true right up to the end.

Those who come to this space know why I think what happened, happened. The unprotected people of America, who have to live with Washington’s policies, rebelled against the protected, who make and defend those policies and who care little if at all about the unprotected. That broke bonds of loyalty and allegiance. Tuesday was in effect an uprising of the unprotected. It was part of the push-back against detached elites that is sweeping the West and was seen most recently in the Brexit vote.

The previous 16 months were, for the Trump campaign, the victory project. What has to begin now is the reassurance project. The Democratic Party is in shock but will soon recover. Mainstream media, tired and taken aback, will reorient soon. Having targeted Mr. Trump in the campaign, they won’t be letting up now. Firing will quickly commence.

There is something I have seen very personally the past few days. The impolite way to put it is the left believed its own propaganda. The polite way is that having listened to Mr. Trump on the subjects of women and minorities, etc., they sincerely understand Mr. Trump and Trumpism to be an actual threat to their personal freedom. Trump supporters are overwhelmingly citizens of good will and patriotic intent who never deserved to be deplored as racist, sexist, thuggish. But some were not so benign or healthy.

The past few days I’ve heard from a young man who fears Jews will be targeted and told me of Muslim friends now nervous on the street. There was the beautiful lady with the blue-collar job who, when asked how she felt about the election, told me she is a lesbian bringing up two foreign-born adopted children and fears she will be targeted and her children somehow removed from her.

Many fear they will no longer be respected. They need to know things they rely on are still there. They don’t understand what has happened, and are afraid. They need—and deserve—reassurance.

What a terminally stupid woman. What an eminently characteristic cuckservative. This column clearly demonstrates three things:

  1. Moderates and cuckservatives have no idea how to win, and no idea what to do with a victory when someone else hands them one.
  2. Moderates and cuckservatives are always more concerned about the other side, and what it thinks of them, than they are about those whose side they claim, however nominally, to be on.
  3. Moderates and cuckservatives never stop to rethink their course no matter how often they were previously wrong.

And yet, I hope Mr. Trump listens very carefully to what the likes of Peggy Noonan advise him. Then, he would do well to review his decisions and make sure that absolutely none of his actions are in line with their advice. They are a reliable guide to failure.

Those who fear they will no longer be respected should understand they will not be respected. They will be rejected. The things they rely on will not be there. They will receive no reassurance from the Alt-Right. We are rising, we are winning, and we will not be merciful.

Don’t hesitate to fling their failure in the faces of your friends, family, and colleagues who are freaking out on social media and in your social circles. Fan their fears. Encourage them to expose themselves. Stoke their panic. Don’t let them think that you agree with them, or respect their opinion. They’ve rubbed their opinions in your face for years, for decades in some cases. Now it is time to return the favor, with interest.

Remember, you cannot convince such people of the truth through reason. You know that. They cannot learn through information. That is why this is the time to strike, and strike hard. Only now, when they are reeling in emotional pain and confusion, can the rhetoricals be convinced and reprogrammed. And through their need to escape the pain, they will learn to love the God-Emperor as passionately, and as mindlessly, as they once loved the false gods of the Left.

DNC implosion

This actually didn’t go quite as bad for the DNC interim head as I’d expected:

On Thursday, Democratic Party officials held their first staff meeting since Hillary Clinton’s stunning loss to Donald Trump in the presidential race. It didn’t go well.

Donna Brazile, the interim leader of the Democratic National Committee, was giving what one attendee described as “a rip-roaring speech” to about 150 employees, about the need to have hope for wins going forward, when a staffer identified only as Zach stood up with a question.

“Why should we trust you as chair to lead us through this?” he asked, according to two people in the room. “You backed a flawed candidate, and your friend [former DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz] plotted through this to support your own gain and yourself.”

Some DNC staffers started to boo and some told him to sit down. Brazile began to answer, but Zach had more to say.

“You are part of the problem,” he continued, blaming Brazile for clearing the path for Trump’s victory by siding with Clinton early on. “You and your friends will die of old age and I’m going to die from climate change. You and your friends let this happen, which is going to cut 40 years off my life expectancy.”

Zach gathered his things and began to walk out. When Brazile called after him, asking where he was going, he told her to go outside and “tell people there” why she should be leading the party.

I’d assumed Hillary and John Podesta were going to sacrifice Brazile and Wasserman Schultz to Belial, given the way in which Moloch let them down.

But Zach should settle down. He’s not going to die from climate change. He’s much more likely to fall into the hands of the God-Emperor’s Own Ordo Malleus.

No wonder it’s in decline

The NFL won’t give a gold blazer or a ring to Ken Stabler’s family:

Election to the Pro Football Hall of Fame creates virtual immortality. But actual immortality may be required to achieve the full benefits of the recognition.

As noticed on the Twitter feed of Mike Freeman, whose biography of Ken Stabler will be released this month, the powers-that-be at the Pro Football Hall of Fame have declined to give a gold jacket or a so-called Ring of Excellence to Stabler. Presumably because he’s not alive to wear them….

Why shouldn’t the family of the Hall of Fame be able to own and display the gold jacket and the ring? The Hall of Fame doesn’t confiscate those items when living Hall of Fames die; the Hall of Famers shouldn’t deny a jacket and ring to those who didn’t win enshrinement during their lifetimes.

What a weird, nasty, small-minded organization. No wonder they consistently make stupid and self-defeating decisions these days. Not that I care about Stabler, much less his family. But I’ll bet Raiders fans do. This isn’t a big deal, except in that it demonstrates the utter tone deafness and lack of common sense that characterizes the Roger Goodell NFL.

Kim Kardashian robbed in Paris!

Yeah, right.

To return to matters of actual interest to me, it’s interesting to see how, despite authoring two volumes of a significant new book, Francis Fukuyama’s public relations efforts appears to have been sidelined into an ongoing defense of the indefensible, which are his collective attempts to defend and retroactively redefine his increasingly ludicrous End of History thesis:

In the summer of 1989, the American magazine the National Interest published an essay with the strikingly bold title “The End of History?”. Its author, the political scientist Francis Fukuyama, announced that the great ideological battles between east and west were over, and that western liberal democracy had triumphed. With anti-communist protests sweeping across the former Soviet Union, the essay seemed right on the money. Fukuyama became an unlikely star of political science, dubbed the “court philosopher of global capitalism” by John Gray. When his book The End of History and the Last Man appeared three years later, the qualifying question mark was gone.

The “end of history” thesis has been repeated enough to acquire the ring of truth – though it has also, of course, been challenged. Some critics have cited 9/11 as a major counterexample. Others have pointed to the rise of Islamic fundamentalism and the Arab spring as proof that ideological contests remain.

But Fukuyama was careful to stress that he was not saying that nothing significant would happen any more, or that there would be no countries left in the world that did not conform to the liberal democratic model. “At the end of history,” he wrote, “it is not necessary that all societies become successful liberal societies, merely that they end their ideological pretensions of representing different and higher forms of human society.”

Fukuyama was talking about ideas rather than events. He believed that western liberal democracy, with its elegant balance of liberty and equality, could not be bettered; that its attainment would lead to a general calming in world affairs; and that in the long run it would be the only credible game in town. “What we are witnessing,” he wrote, “is not just the end of the cold war, or a passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalisation of western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”

Fukuyama drew on the philosophy of Hegel, who defined history as a linear procession of epochs. Technological progress and the cumulative resolution of conflict allowed humans to advance from tribal to feudal to industrial society. For Marx, the journey ended with communism; Fukuyama was announcing a new destination.

For a long time his argument proved oddly resilient to challenges from the left. Neoliberalism has been pretty hegemonic. Over the last three years, however, in a belated reaction to the 2008 bank bailouts, cracks have started to appear. Global Occupy protests and demonstrations against austerity have led many commentators on the left – including the French philosopher Alain Badiou in The Rebirth of History and Seumas Milne in his collection of essays The Revenge of History – to wonder whether history is on the march once again. “What is going on?” asks Badiou. “The continuation, at all costs, of a weary world? A salutary crisis of that world, racked by its victorious expansion? The end of that world? The advent of a different world?” He tentatively regards the uprisings of 2011 as game-changing, with the potential to usher in a new political order. For Milne, likewise, developments such as the failure of the US to “democratise” Iraq and Afghanistan, the financial crash and the flowering of socialism in Latin America demonstrate the “passing of the unipolar moment”.

What remains an open question is whether these developments – dramatic as they are – will actually result in anything.

Frankly, the whole thing is somewhat of a disappointment to me. To discover that Jesus Jones’s conception of “watching the world wake up from History” is both more sophisticated and accurate than Fukuyama’s is devastating to anyone who would fancy himself an intellectual.

Fukuyama’s mistake was to apply History’s end to liberal democracy rather than to Marxism, where it belonged.

Anyhow, both Fukuyama and Marx were wrong. They went full-Hegel. Never go full-Hegel. And you can’t bring back ideology in multicultural societies where identity politics are destined to rule until they are homogenous again.

Beyond tone deaf

Seriously, who is advising Hillary Clinton? It’s like a parody of a presidential campaign:

Hillary Clinton trolled two White House opponents with a single response, dinging Gary Johnson and Donald Trump by naming Angela Merkel as her favorite world leader.

The Democratic presidential nominee on Thursday joined the discussion about politicians’ favorite world leaders, a topic that went viral when Johnson, the Libertarian nominee, drew a blank when asked Wednesday to name a world leader he looks up to and respects.

“Oh, let me think. Look, I like a lot of the world leaders,” Clinton said, bursting into laughter initially when asked about her favorite world leader during a gaggle with reporters aboard her campaign plane in Chicago. “One of my favorites is Angela Merkel because I think she’s been an extraordinary, strong leader during difficult times in Europe, which has obvious implications for the rest of the world and, most particularly, our country.”

Clinton praised the German chancellor’s “leadership and steadiness on the Euro crisis,” while adding that “her bravery in the face of the refugee crisis is something that I am impressed by.”

Hillary might as well have promised that she’ll import 2 million Syrian refugees next year. Merkel is HATED in Germany to such an extent that I’ll be surprised if she even tries to remain as the CDU party leader in the next election cycle.

The thing is, Hillary is a nanny-state Mutti Merkel-style politician. Trump is more in the mode of Putin and Duterte. The former is a globalist who has lost half her historical support. The latter are nationalists who are both extremely popular in their countries.

That’s why the Trumpslide is inevitable.