I had to get the NYM site moved to a different (higher-priced) server in order to cause the Security Certificate to be automatically updated every 90 days, so as to avoid warnings from your browers about this being an “insecure site.”
Like most moves, it produced some problems, and –of course!– all this naturally occurred over the Thanksgiving Holiday long weekend when hosting service support is thin on the ground.
Patrick Basham, in the Spectator, does an excellent job of listing the very many reasons that the alleged result of the 2020 Presidential Election vote tally does not make sense.
To say out-loud that you find the results of the 2020 presidential election odd is to invite derision. You must be a crank or a conspiracy theorist. Mark me down as a crank, then. I am a pollster and I find this election to be deeply puzzling. I also think that the Trump campaign is still well within its rights to contest the tabulations. Something very strange happened in America’s democracy in the early hours of Wednesday November 4 and the days that followed. It’s reasonable for a lot of Americans to want to find out exactly what.
First, consider some facts. President Trump received more votes than any previous incumbent seeking reelection. He got 11 million more votes than in 2016, the third largest rise in support ever for an incumbent. By way of comparison, President Obama was comfortably reelected in 2012 with 3.5 million fewer votes than he received in 2008.
Trump’s vote increased so much because, according to exit polls, he performed far better with many key demographic groups. Ninety-five percent of Republicans voted for him. He did extraordinarily well with rural male working-class whites.
He earned the highest share of all minority votes for a Republican since 1960. Trump grew his support among black voters by 50 percent over 2016. Nationally, Joe Biden’s black support fell well below 90 percent, the level below which Democratic presidential candidates usually lose.
Trump increased his share of the national Hispanic vote to 35 percent. With 60 percent or less of the national Hispanic vote, it is arithmetically impossible for a Democratic presidential candidate to win Florida, Arizona, Nevada, and New Mexico. Bellwether states swung further in Trump’s direction than in 2016. Florida, Ohio and Iowa each defied America’s media polls with huge wins for Trump. Since 1852, only Richard Nixon has lost the electoral college after winning this trio, and that 1960 defeat to John F. Kennedy is still the subject of great suspicion.
Midwestern states Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin always swing in the same direction as Ohio and Iowa, their regional peers. Ohio likewise swings with Florida. Current tallies show that, outside of a few cities, the Rust Belt swung in Trump’s direction. Yet, Biden leads in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin because of an apparent avalanche of black votes in Detroit, Philadelphia, and Milwaukee. Biden’s ‘winning’ margin was derived almost entirely from such voters in these cities, as coincidentally his black vote spiked only in exactly the locations necessary to secure victory. He did not receive comparable levels of support among comparable demographic groups in comparable states, which is highly unusual for the presidential victor.
We are told that Biden won more votes nationally than any presidential candidate in history. But he won a record low of 17 percent of counties; he only won 524 counties, as opposed to the 873 counties Obama won in 2008. Yet, Biden somehow outdid Obama in total votes.
Victorious presidential candidates, especially challengers, usually have down-ballot coattails; Biden did not. The Republicans held the Senate and enjoyed a ‘red wave’ in the House, where they gained a large number of seats while winning all 27 toss-up contests. Trump’s party did not lose a single state legislature and actually made gains at the state level.
Another anomaly is found in the comparison between the polls and non-polling metrics. The latter include: party registrations trends; the candidates’ respective primary votes; candidate enthusiasm; social media followings; broadcast and digital media ratings; online searches; the number of (especially small) donors; and the number of individuals betting on each candidate.
Despite poor recent performances, media and academic polls have an impressive 80 percent record predicting the winner during the modern era. But, when the polls err, non-polling metrics do not; the latter have a 100 percent record. Every non-polling metric forecast Trump’s reelection. For Trump to lose this election, the mainstream polls needed to be correct, which they were not. Furthermore, for Trump to lose, not only did one or more of these metrics have to be wrong for the first time ever, but every single one had to be wrong, and at the very same time; not an impossible outcome, but extremely unlikely nonetheless.
Mike Franc, at Human Events in 2005, identified the real reason for celebration at the first Thanksgiving.
Writing in his diary of the dire economic straits and self-destructive behavior that consumed his fellow Puritans shortly after their arrival, Governor William Bradford painted a picture of destitute settlers selling their clothes and bed coverings for food while others became servants to the Indians, cutting wood and fetching water in exchange for capful of corn. The most desperate among them starved, with Bradford recounting how one settler, in gathering shellfish along the shore, so weak he stuck fast in the mud and was found dead in the place.
The colony’s leaders identified the source of their problem as a particularly vile form of what Bradford called communism. Property in Plymouth Colony, he observed, was communally owned and cultivated. This system (taking away of property and bringing [it] into a commonwealth) bred confusion and discontent and retarded much employment that would have been to [the settlers] benefit and comfort.
Just how did the Pilgrims solve the problem of famine? In addition to receiving help from the local Indians in farming, they decided allow the private ownership of individual plots of land.
On the brink of extermination, the Colony’s leaders changed course and allotted a parcel of land to each settler, hoping the private ownership of farmland would encourage self-sufficiency and lead to the cultivation of more corn and other foodstuffs.
As Adam Smith would have predicted, this new system worked famously. This had very good success, Bradford reported, for it made all hands very industrious. In fact, much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been and productivity increased. Women, for example, went willingly into the field, and took their little ones with them to set corn.
The famine that nearly wiped out the Pilgrims in 1623 gave way to a period of agricultural abundance that enabled the Massachusetts settlers to set down permanent roots in the New World, prosper, and play an indispensable role in the ultimate success of the American experiment.
A profoundly religious man, Bradford saw the hand of God in the Pilgrims; economic recovery. Their success, he observed, may well evince the vanity of that conceit that the taking away of property would make [men] happy and flourishing; as if they were wiser than God. Bradford surmised, God in his wisdom saw another course fitter for them.
The real story of Thanksgiving is the triumph of capitalism and individualism over collectivism and socialism, which is the summation of the story of America.
C.J. Grover, in the Spectator, argues that links to Socialism, outside a few twisted urban enclaves are the kiss of death for democrats, and Biden’s support for the radical democrat party base’s noxious ideas was responsible for a bloodbath producing an “astonishing 17-seat gain for the GOP and the Democrats holding the smallest House majority in two decades.”
Why not use the GOP near-House-Majority to give the dems a bit more rope to hang themselves?
For Democrats to be truly honest, America deserves Speaker AOC. House Republicans should hand her the gavel.
The House Speaker is elected at the start of every new Congress by a simple majority of the Representatives-elect, meaning 218 votes in the 435-member body. As noted, the GOP stands to have 214 seats come January. Ocasio-Cortez’s Squad will have five with the addition of Cori Bush of Missouri’s 1st District. Ten if you count all successful candidates backed by Justice Democrats. The votes are there to be had.
Ocasio-Cortez is in open war with her party and hasn’t committed to supporting Pelosi for the job, while Justice Democrats have taken direct aim at Pelosi’s failed leadership. Few politicians since Washington have voluntarily refused power and rebuffing Republican overtures would mean passing on the chance to go from bartender to House Speaker in a mere four years. As Speaker, she would achieve in that short timespan what Bernie Sanders has sought for four decades in public office — actual congressional votes on socialist ideas.
Marcel Leyat was a French automobile manufacturer, born in Die, established by Marcel Leyat in 1919 in Paris. The automobiles were built on the Quai de Grenelle.
Leyat was a biplane designer before World War 1 broke out, but turned his hand to automobile designs, feeling that the aviation world had a thing or two to teach car designers.
First off, he saw early car designs as far too heavy and aerodynamically inefficient, problems that the aviation world had been working hard to solve. Secondly, he felt that driven wheels were another power-sapping exercise in needless complexity, requiring transmissions and clutches and drive shafts and differentials and all sorts of other bits and pieces.
Aircraft, on the other hand, were designed to be aerodynamic and lightweight from the get go, and a propeller could mount more or less directly to the engine’s crankshaft. So why not a wingless airplane for the road? These were early days for the automotive industry, and all sorts of different technologies were being thrown at the wall to see which would stick and which would slide.
Horsepower was a fairly scarce resource back in 1913 when Leyat built his first Helica, which used an 18-horsepower, 1,000cc Harley-Davidson v-twin engine in a lightweight plywood body that weighed just 550 lb (250 kg). His goal was to extract motion from that power in the most efficient way possible. In that respect, he did pretty well; a subsequent Helica recorded a top speed of 106 mph (171 km/h) in 1927, a terrifying speed for the time.
In other respects, Leyat’s propeller car, and several other designs not dissimilar to it, were a roundly awful idea from the beginning, because, well, they had great big propellers on the front of them. While this example is wire mesh shielded, that doesn’t appear to have been a feature of the original designs, so errant pedestrians and wayward pigeons alike could end up getting fed through a several thousand-rpm blender, showering driver and passenger with an exuberance of gore.
What’s more, the spinning mass of the wooden prop could turn into a highly energetic constellation of airborne shrapnel in the event of a rear-ender. When it wasn’t exploding in an accident, it was making one more likely by obscuring the driver’s view and blowing wind directly into his face at high speed. And if that weren’t enough, Leyat had also taken an aircraft-inspired approach to the steering, eschewing the complexities of a steering rack for a very simple, cable-operated rear wheel steering system that threw the back end out sideways to turn the car.
The resulting vehicle looks, shall we say, rather exciting to drive, and thanks to the contemporary footage below assembled by Diagonal View, we can get an idea of how it handled. In even a slow-speed u-turn, the inside rear wheel lifts merrily off the ground, its front wheels wobble around like pin-fixed discs on a toy car, and the whole contraption does little to make us think propeller cars were ever the automobiles of the future.
“If I could work my will,” said Scrooge indignantly, “Every idiot who goes about with ‘Merry Christmas’ on his lips, should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart. He should!”
Campus Reform finds that Scrooge has been reincarnated and is teaching at Columbia.
A Columbia University faculty member has called for an end to the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree, calling the tree emblematic of an “absolutely toxic relationship” with nature.
Arguing that the tree is a “veritable island for wildlife,” Columbia University faculty member and environmental journalist Brian Kahn decried the loss of the ecological haven. Kahn is set to teach a class in spring 2021 titled “Applications in Climate and Society.”
He warned that the tree had lost its one “iota of dignity” it had in its previous home. …
Khan further argued that the Rockefeller tradition reflects how “we’ve subjugated nature to our whims.†He said the tree stands as “an icon of American exceptionalism,” pointing not only to the tree’s tie to filling the underground mall, thus “keeping the unnatural system alive,” but also to its place as a “paean to patriotism†following 9/11.
Khan added that watching the tree didn’t bring him “elation.†Instead, it made him feel “sad that we venerate the continued subjugation of nature at the expense of unfettered growth and consumption.†The tree is “a flashy, two-hour TV special,†which presents a “shiny veneer of corporate social responsibility and giving.â€
“But really,” he added, “it just illustrates our broken system and priorities that are also strangling the planet…”
Al Perrotta, like a lot of the rest of us, finds it hard to believe that Biden won on the up and up.
Joe Biden won crucial swing states fair and square — despite getting blown away in bellweather Ohio and Florida, despite being down by hundreds of thousands of votes until the mysterious shutdowns in counting, despite Trump outperforming Biden campaign’s own expectations, despite underperforming Hillary Clinton everywhere else in the country, despite not campaigning, despite having no ground game, despite having zero enthusiasm, despite losing support among minorities, despite pushing policies at odds with the desires of the public, despite aligning himself with BLM and Antifa. And despite having trouble executing a coherent sentence.
In the Spectator, Ron Liddle reports that, on Thursday next, November 26th, at Longborough University, Dr. Lenka VráblÃková will deliver a ground-breaking new lecture:
“Othering Mushrooms: Migratism and its racist entanglements in the Brexit campaign.”
Deploying the ambivalence of mushrooms in the cultural imagination as an analytical lens, and drawing from Sara Ahmed’s (2010) theorization of ‘othering’ as an embodied process, the presentation examines the Brexit campaign’s migratism and its racist entanglements. VráblÃková argues that research on how forests, mushrooms and their foragers have figured in the formation of white heteropatriarchy is vital for contesting the re-emergence of the right-wing populism that, in Europe, is exemplified by events such as Brexit.
I have long been of the opinion that the Brexit vote, along with the 2016 election of Donald Trump and the continued popularity of right-wing governments in Poland and Hungary, are almost entirely the consequences of the malign influence of fungi. I have attempted to advance this argument in political debates but am never taken seriously. Now at last I have some support. …
I have always had grave suspicions about the stinkhorn fungus: white, phallic and foul-smelling, just like Trump. If you see one of these mushrooms growing along the wayside, root it out and burn it, shouting ‘Die, Tory scum’ as you do so. Dr Vrablikova has not yet replied to my email — it will be interesting to see if her findings tally with mine.
We should attempt to examine all competing theories with dispassionate fairness, of course. One of these is that, rather than mushrooms, it is the existence of academics such as Dr Vrablikova which has persuaded vast swaths of the electorate across three continents to vote for people like Viktor Orban and Donald Trump. Had I invented her and her various exciting projects, you would have considered it heavy-handed satire and too ludicrous to make whatever point I was trying to make. But I did not make her up, any more than I made up Dr Alyosxa Tudor from the School of Oriental and African Studies, who has suggested that colonialism and racism were responsible for the gender constructs ‘men and women’: a theory which many historians would contest, I think.
Or the thousands of other similar courses and lectures taking place right now up and down the western world’s benighted campuses. The outpourings of unmitigated bilge from hundreds and hundreds of intellectually third-division chancers, mired in one or another imagined victimhood, all cordially loathing the government, economic system and culture of a society which has, ridiculously, afforded them academic tenure for these manifest idiocies, and who will surely pop up on Radio 4 or Newsnight at some point sticking it to whitey and the straights.
