Archive for 2020
November 5, 2020
SHOCKING NEWS FROM THE WORLD OF SCIENCE: Pandemic lockdowns made it harder to lose weight, study says. I actually lost a bit of weight during the quarantine — just a few pounds, but still, I hit my lowest weight in recent memory — and I know others like that. But for most people it was either gain or lose. My best investment was getting a doorway chinup bar and doing chinups every day. That was always a weak exercise for me, but not anymore.
SCHADENFREUDE FEVER: Dude—Where’s My Landslide? “Biden Looks Screwed Even If He Wins.”
Related: The best outcome imaginable.
In a bizarre late-night appearance, President Trump and his campaign seemed poised to challenge the results and vote-counting methods. While there may be questions to be asked of Michigan and Pennsylvania, Biden is closing the gap beyond a margin of error, making Donald Trump a one-term president, just as liberals had hoped.
So why are Democrats still acting deflated? For starters, Republicans look poised to hold the Senate, rendering any Biden agenda dead on arrival. Filibuster remains. No Green New Deal. No court packing. No statehood for Washington DC and Puerto Rico and with them four new Senate seats. No massive defunding and restructuring of police. Nothing. The activist left has been neutered for now. Thanks to a newly tilted Supreme Court, Biden’s attempts to executive-order his way around Congress have been severely crippled as well. Biden will occupy the Oval Office while the national media gives Kamala Harris the presidential treatment. This should suit the political right just fine. A Mitch McConnell-led Senate will also force a President Biden to moderate his Supreme Court choices.
And as a result: Stocks continue election rally as Wall Street anticipates gridlock.
Or not: Senate on the line: Are we heading for two runoffs in Georgia?
Mitch McConnell went into Tuesday night with a 53-seat majority, which included both Georgia seats. He lost two — Cory Gardner and Martha McSally (provisionally) — and picked up one in Alabama, where Doug Jones got clobbered by Tommy Tuberville. Susan Collins’ surprise win in Maine left many reassured that the GOP would control the Senate with a 52-seat majority no matter how the presidential race shook out.
Now, however, it looks like McConnell may be back down to 50 if Republicans can’t convert in a special election two months from today. That essentially gives Democrats full control of Washington, as Kamala Harris could cast tiebreaking votes to put Chuck Schumer in charge of the floor and pass whatever rules and legislation Democrats want. Either McConnell would need to get Joe Manchin to flip — which seems pretty unlikely — or get ready to fight for converts on every vote that takes place. And thanks to the 2013 nuclear option and the 2017 expansion of it, Biden could appoint nearly anyone he wants to any position he wants in that scenario.
At the end of his administration, Calvin Coolidge was quoted as saying that its greatest accomplishment, particularly in comparison with the disastrous Wilson administration of the previous decade, was “minding our own business.” Cocaine Mitch needs control over the Senate to ensure that’s the de facto outcome of a potential Biden administration as well.
WORST WHITE SUPREMACIST EVER:
JOEL KOTKIN: So Much for Turning Texas Blue.
President Trump won the state easily over Joe Biden, though his margin this time was just seven points, down from nine in 2016. Demographic changes seem to be part of the reason, as Texas becomes not only more urban—more than 85 percent of the population lives in cities—but also more heavily minority. Urban areas like Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston, notes demographer Wendell Cox, have become enormously attractive to the foreign-born, whose numbers have grown at twice the national average.
Yet diversity turns out to be a lot more diverse than pundits think. Hispanics now outnumber whites, and the nonwhite population, including many African-Americans, exceeds 57 percent. Yet Texas minorities tend to be less rigidly Democratic than those in places like California and New York. Indeed, Hispanic voters in Texas broke far more for Trump than expected, giving him a remarkable 40 percent of their votes, even in the longtime Democratic bastion of the Rio Grande Valley.
Texas’s Zapata County, which hasn’t voted Republican in a century, is 93.3 percent Hispanic and went for Trump 52.5 percent. Kenedy County, 76.7 percent Hispanic, went 65.5 percent for Trump; and Cameron County, 88.1 percent Hispanic, gave Trump 44.4 percent of the vote. In Starr County, a 95 percent Hispanic county and one of the nation’s poorest, Hillary Clinton won in 2016 by 60 points; Trump reduced that margin in 2020 to just 5 points. The number of voters leaving down-ballot races blank indicate that many in the county turned out just to vote for president.
This shift among Latinos comes just in time for the GOP, whose leaders fret about losses in the still largely white middle-class suburbs, with their generally well-educated voters, who have dominated growth in Texas.
Someone still needs to implement my Welcome Wagon Project.
CHANGE: Blue Angels to Conduct Final Flight on Legacy Hornet.
They’re upgrading to the F/A-18 Super Hornet, not the F-35C. That’s just fine because the Hornets are pretty in a way the stealthy Lightning II can’t be.
OLD AND BUSTED: E Pluribus Unum.
The New Hotness? The Gap’s Effort to Bring Red and Blue America Together Just Made Everyone Mad.
What is it about clothes that constantly brings out the 21st century left’s insanity?
RICHARD FERNANDEZ: Revolt of the Deplorables: A new correlation of forces.
The 2016 loss might have been accounted a lucky punch but 2020 was a set piece maximum effort by progressives backed by money, gangs, social censorship and deep state support on a massive scale; yet it didn’t move the needle. It should have impressed, rather it showed the limits to the power of the American elite.
It was the most anticipated, polled, forecasted and analyzed US presidential election in history and yet the expensive estimates proved to be worthless, a massive intelligence failure that paralleled Neil Ferguson’s ill-fated projections of the coronavirus pandemic. The limits of elite prescience of over complex phenomena were demonstrated for all to see. The embarrassing surprise cast doubt over ambitious progressive projects based on social, biological or climate engineering since the requisite degree of “scientific” certitude simply did not exist to predict even in a mundane election.
The populist uprising is now objectively too powerful for progressives to crush. The left must live with it, negotiate with it, coexist with it because they can no longer bulldoze it away. By the same token the populists must accept that progressives are similarly too powerful to ignore.
Indeed.
I’M TEMPTED TO ANSWER, ‘STEAL IT BACK’: What Can You Do About A Stolen Election?
NEWS YOU CAN USE? Don’t Spit in a Cop’s Face, Particularly During a Pandemic. ‘F*** you fascist’: Foul-mouthed female anti-Trump protester, 24, spits in cop’s face and is tackled to the ground in New York.
IN THE MAIL: Divided we Fall: One Possible Future.
VODKAPUNDIT PRESENTS YOUR DAILY INSANITY WRAP: Nate Silver Addresses His Critics, ‘F*** you, we did a good job.’
Insanity Wrap needs to know: When is it OK to make fun of a hardworking statistician like Nate Silver?
Answer: From here on out, all the time. Every waking minute, in fact, if you have any to spare.
Before we get to the sordid details, a quick preview of today’s Wrap.
- If the Devil went down to Georgia, he voted Dem with a frauduent ballot.
- Here’s spit in your eye, NYPD.
- An insane idea for cleaining up America’s urban voting mess.
And so much more at the link, you’d have to be crazy to miss it.
UPDATE: Link was missing before. Sorry!
JOHN DANIEL DAVIDSON: Yes, Democrats Are Trying To Steal The Election In Michigan, Wisconsin, And Pennsylvania.
It turns out, the vote dump was the result of an alleged typo, an extra zero that had been tacked onto Biden’s vote total in Shiawassee County, Michigan. It seems the error was discovered only because Davis and other Twitter users noted how insane and suspicious the vote totals looked, and demanded an investigation that uncovered what was either a typo or an incredibly clumsy attempt to boost Biden’s vote count.
There was also something suspicious about the vote reporting in Antrim County, Michigan, where Trump beat Hillary Clinton by 30 points in 2016. Initial vote totals there showed Biden ahead of Trump by 29 points, a result that can’t possibly be accurate, as plenty of journalists noted.
After the strange results caught national attention, election officials in Antrim County said they were investigating what they called “skewed” results, working with the company that provides their election software to see what went wrong. The county clerk said they plan to have an answer by Wednesday afternoon.
Then another mysterious all-Biden vote dump happened in Wisconsin. Biden miraculously overcame a 4.1-point Trump lead in the middle of the night thanks to vote dumps in which he got—you guessed it—100 percent of the votes and Trump got zero.
After complaining — wrongly — for four years that Trump was an illegitimate president, the Democrats are working furiously to illegitimately install one of their own.
SO MUCH FOR ACADEMIC FREEDOM. REMEMBER THIS TECHNIQUE. Professor group offers roadmap to fire tenured professor who studies race and intelligence. “The American Association of University Professors is kind of like the ACLU: Both used to make full-throated defenses of speech regardless of viewpoint, but now they invent excuses to selectively justify censorship.”
Of course, now that minorities are starting to vote GOP, Democrats and their academic apparatchiks will probably start arguing that they’re too dumb to vote, so just give it a while.
SINKING FEELING: ‘Déjà blue’: Professors NOT happy after Trump once again defies polls.
The media are the schwerpunkt in the political war, but the education apparat is the schwerpunkt in the culture war.
EARLY OPEN THREAD: Talk about stuff.
Meanwhile, here’s something from a friend on Facebook: “I don’t think we should lose faith. I think we should gird ourselves to keep up the fight and the hope. There was massive fraud. Trump is a fighter and a winner and he needs his people to back him in spirit and shout from the rooftops that we won’t stand for a rigged election.”
JOHN HINDERAKER ON MASSIVE VOTER FRAUD IN WISCONSIN.
IN COMMUNIST CHINA’S FACE: India’s Malabar 2020 naval exercise is another indication the Trump Administration’s decision to challenge China economically and diplomatically strengthened regional resistance to China. My latest Creators Syndicate column.
…the Trump administration’s American domestic economic revival and its hard-nosed trade agreements with China demonstrated that the U.S. could and would counter China’s economic hegemony. Washington used legal, financial and diplomatic instruments to penalize Chinese intellectual-property theft. It also targeted Chinese spying, which penalized lucrative Chinese companies like Huawei linked to espionage.
See another recent essay for more on countering Huawei and China’s bid for global information dominance.
VERY RELATED: An Indian Navy destroyer participating in Malabar 2020 photographed from the USS John S. McCain.
A DIPLOMATIC AND ECONOMIC EXAMPLE: The Philippines defies The Dragon in the South China Sea.
The government has decided to defy Chinese threats and proceed with oil exploration off Reed Bank, which is 148 kilometers west of the Philippines (Palawan Island) and well within the Philippines’s EEZ (Exclusive Economic Zone) that extends 360 kilometers from the coast. Although the EEZ is recognized by international law, and a treaty that China signed and uses to defend waters off its own coast, China says that does not apply here because all the islets in the South China Sea belong to China and there is no room for negotiation on that point. Most countries in the region, except Japan, which would rather not dwell on this, note that this was how Japan behaved before World War II.
I suggest you read it.