CPA who likes to make sense of numbers in politics. If you like my posts please add me. Preferred Pronoun: Your Excellency or Your Highness ๐
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Joined September 2011
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Never forgive a western leader, left or right, who has imposed or suggested lockdowns, mask mandates or vaccine passports. These individuals are despots who are responsible for destroying the blessings of liberty & civil society over a virus that follows an actuarial life table!
I nailed the 2024 election (see below) partly because I spent a lot of time studying polling bias involving Trump. I concluded his actual support was running about 1.5 points above the RCP average.
I also looked at the relationship between the national popular vote and individual states. If the national vote is X, red states should generally outperform that number by a certain factor, while blue states should underperform it. This was a great way to identify questionable polling.
Whatโs strange about this election is how many statewide races are supposedly close in traditionally red states. We will find out quickly whether this predicted Democratic Senate tsunami is real.
NC is a key bellwether. I donโt think the Republican wins there. The GOP has done a horrible job recruiting candidates. But if the Democrat only wins by two or three points in an open-seat race, I suspect KS, TX, NE and OH wonโt be particularly close.
Iโve always distrusted polling, but historically accounted for that through the margin of error. The problem is that, except for 2022, polling errors involving Trump consistently ran in the same direction.
Most people misunderstand the margin of error. Itโs a statistical calculation based largely on sample size, not sample quality. A perfectly representative sample and a badly biased sample can have exactly the same reported margin of error. The formula doesnโt know whether youโve interviewed the right people.
Then thereโs polling methodology. Many pollsters are affiliated with universities, and organizations adjust their weighting models. I suspect thereโs considerable herding, where everyone produces similar results because nobody wants to be spectacularly wrong.
But something happened in 2024 that really bothered me.
Ann Selzer and the Des Moines Register released that infamous IA poll showing Harris ahead by three points. Trump won by 13. IA wasnโt even considered competitive, yet they generated enormous headlines.
Why would someone with Selzerโs stellar reputation publish such an obvious outlier? She could have questioned the sample or conducted additional interviews. Instead, she released it.
When Quinnipiac produces a questionable poll, Iโve come to expect it. When a losing campaign releases a shocking internal poll, I take it with a grain of salt. But Selzer was different. To me, that looked almost like a test run.
Now we have prediction markets, countless polling outfits Iโve never heard of, and supposedly competitive races in reliably Republican states. I canโt help wondering whether something funny is going on.
Of course, I could be wrong.
Maybe Republicans really are fed up with Trump. Maybe the Tucker Carlsons of the world have splintered the Republican coalition, and Republican voters simply wonโt show up.
Iโd put the odds of that at about 50%.
Itโs hard to imagine professional pollsters deliberately risking their reputations. Then again, much of academia despises Trump. Could some see discouraging Republican turnout as a political objective? I canโt prove it, but after IA, I donโt dismiss the possibility.
Tomorrow will tell us a lot.
If Republicans show up, it could be a very enjoyable night. If they stay home, we may be one presidential election away from European-style socialism.
Let's do covid mitigation
The year is 1873. Your wife tires easily and reads too much. The doctor prescribes the rest cure: six weeks flat in bed, no books, no visitors, fed on milk, forbidden to sit up without his permission. The man who devised it is the most famous nerve specialist in America, and the women come out of it quieter, which is taken as the cure.
The year is 1915. The hospital has a new way of delivering your child. Morphine, then scopolamine, and the mother wakes two days later with a baby she cannot remember having. They call it twilight sleep. The women are strapped into padded cots so they do not hurt themselves while they scream, and the straps are the modern part. The babies arrive blue and slow to breathe.
The year is 1945. The truck comes down your street fogging DDT, and the children run behind it in the white cloud because the man on the back says it is harmless. At the beach it is sprayed over the bathers on their towels. It goes on the cattle, over the barn, and across the kitchen table.
The year is 1948. Your son has trouble with his ears. The doctor slides a rod tipped with radium up each nostril and holds it there for the best part of ten minutes, and you bring him back three more times. Hundreds of thousands of American children get the same treatment. The cancers arrive in their fifties.
The year is 1962. The health visitor tells you breastfeeding is old-fashioned and the formula is scientific. By 1972 fewer than one American baby in four is breastfed at all. The formula is skimmed milk and sugar, with the milk fat taken out and vegetable oil put in.
The year is 1971. The family planning clinic fits a small plastic crab called the Dalkon Shield. Its tail is a bundle of fibres that wicks bacteria up into the womb. 2.8 million are fitted in America before it is withdrawn, and the company goes bankrupt under the claims. It had been sold as safe and superior.
The year is 1983. The doctor says your arteries are the butter's fault. The dripping tin goes in the bin, the yolks go to the dog, the margarine goes in the fridge, and you have the heart attack anyway, on skimmed milk, having done everything right.
The year is 2001. Your 15-year-old is low, and the doctor prescribes Paxil, because the trial in the journal says it is effective and well tolerated in adolescents. The raw data, reanalysed 14 years later, shows more suicidal thinking on the drug than on the sugar pill. The company pays $3 billion to settle. Nobody rings the house.
The year is 2009. The government has spent around ยฃ500 million stockpiling Tamiflu for the pandemic, on the strength of the manufacturer's trials. When the trials are finally prised loose five years later, the drug shortens flu by about half a day and nothing shows it keeps anyone out of hospital. The stockpile goes out of date in a warehouse.
The year is 2026. The doctor has ten minutes and a screen. The number is high, so the tablet is for life. The weight is high, so the injection is for life. The meat is bad for the planet and the oil is good for the heart, and the person in the chair is as certain as everyone who ever sat in it.
Every one of those was settled, by a committee, in a journal, with a doubter somewhere being laughed at. The rest cure, the straps, the fog, the rod, the formula, the crab, the margarine, the trial, the stockpile. All of it certain, all of it printed, all of it done to somebody who had asked for help.
You were never the one who was wrong. You were the one it was done to, and the only person in the story who did as they were told every single time.
The apology comes a generation late, in a footnote, addressed to nobody.
The next one is being drafted now.
Numbercruncher2012๐บ๐ธ๐ฎ๐ฑ retweeted
๐ฉต๐ค๐ฉต
I'm proud to be Jewish. Not quietly proud. Not privately proud. Proud, out loud, every single day.
No filter. No apologies. No exceptions.
Are you proud too?
โฌ๏ธโฌ๏ธโฌ๏ธ
Numbercruncher2012๐บ๐ธ๐ฎ๐ฑ retweeted
Reform gov't would undo damage done by Labour, Farage tells 'Post' - exclusive
jpost.com/international/artiโฆ
Numbercruncher2012๐บ๐ธ๐ฎ๐ฑ retweeted
PLEASE HELP MAKE THIS YOUNG MAN FAMOUS
Yotam Budnik is a 12th-grade student from Rehovot ๐ฎ๐ฑ just won a gold medal at the International Olympiad in Informatics in Uzbekistan but was not allowed to compete under the Israeli flag.
When Yotam was awarded his medal ๐
stepped onto the podium, pulled an Israeli flag out of his pocket and wore it in defiance of the Anti-Semitic discrimination.
While the medal ๐
was revoked from him for his courage, he has no regrets
"The law that prevents me from waving the flag is based only on politics, and I thought there was no place for that in a scientific competition", he said.
The organizers demanded that he return his medal.
Yotam said no.
Organizers took away his certificate and removed his ranking from the website.
Please help make sure the world knows the name Yotam Budnik and that he is not only a world class computer science genius, but also a man of courage and pride of the Jewish people ๐
Numbercruncher2012๐บ๐ธ๐ฎ๐ฑ retweeted
The fastest female, 100-meter sprinter in recorded history is American legend Florence Griffith Joyner. She set the world record of 10.49 seconds on July 16, 1988.
In 2026, there were over 1000 high school boys that beat this record! You read that correctly. In this year alone, there were over 1000 high school boys that beat the record of fastest woman in the world ever!
If just one of those boys, or a meager 1/10 of 1%, decided to compete as a woman, he would crush the womenโs world record!
Iโm not talking about a high school record or a college record or even an Olympic or professional record. Iโm talking about the womenโs world record that has held since 1988!
Remind me again, why youโre not supportive of womenโs rights.
Numbercruncher2012๐บ๐ธ๐ฎ๐ฑ retweeted
I still have nightmares from the things I witnessed as an RN during Covid.
I held the hands of elderly patients who didnโt understand why no family was by their side as they died. The sadness and confusion in their eyes was devastating.
I watched moms give birth and not be allowed to have their own mothers by their side as they brought new life into the world.
I saw patients get denied care for curable diseases because they didnโt want an experimental medicine and they were dead six weeks later.
I was there when mothers, fathers, husbands, wives, and children fell to their knees in grief as they screamed when they were denied access to their sick, injured, and dying loved ones.
I witnessed administrators celebrate the control, financial windfall, and power that Covid provided the system.
None of these things happened because of the virus or a pandemic. The tragedies were the willful infliction of distress on a vulnerable population all based on Fauciโs lies and a complicit healthcare system.
There is no such thing as a Palestinian country never was and never should be!
The truth. This book, written in Latin in 1695, describes the region called Palestine at that time.
Author Adriani Relandi was a geographer, cartographer, traveler, philologist.
He understood many languages, including Arabic, Ancient Greek and Hebrew.
He described nearly 2,500 settlements mentioned in the Bible, and made an approximate census according to settlements.
His notes;
1. Palestine is mostly empty, abandoned, sparsely populated. The main population is concentrated in Jerusalem, Akko, Tsfat, Jaffa, Tveria and Gaza.
2. The majority of the population is Jewish; almost everyone else is Christian. A very small part is Muslim, mostly Bedouin...
(Relandi refers to Muslims as nomadic Bedouins who come to cities only as seasonal workers in agriculture or construction.)
3. The only exception is Nablus, inhabited by about 120 members of the Muslim Natsha family and approximately 70 Samaritans.
4. About 5,000 people live in Jerusalem; almost all Jews, and a few Christians.
5. The names of most of the settlements are of Jewish origin, and some have Greek or Roman Latin names. Apart from the city of Ramla, there is no Arab settlement whose original name is Arabic.
Place names derived from Jewish, Greek or Latin are usually adapted into Arabic and meaningless...
6. Approximately 550 people live in Gaza, half of whom are Jews and half are Christians.
Jews were successful in agriculture, especially vineyards, olives and wheat, while Christians were engaged in trade and transportation..."
( Thanks to John Abeles )
And the majority of Europe and leftists hold Turkey to a higher standard than Israel and support the musings of its ever growing Islamist leader.
Onur Albayrak refused to photograph a wedding after discovering that the bride was only 15 years old.
Believing that photographing a child bride would be wrong, he decided to walk away despite having a contract with the groom. The situation quickly turned violent when the groom and his friends tried to stop him from leaving, leading to a fight in which the groom suffered a broken nose.
After the incident, Albayrak publicly stated that child marriage is a form of child ab*se and that nothing could convince him to take part in it. His stand received widespread praise and helped draw attention to the issue of child marriage in Turkey.
It also inspired many other wedding professionals to commit to refusing services for weddings involving underage brides.
Numbercruncher2012๐บ๐ธ๐ฎ๐ฑ retweeted
Hamas is choosing jihad over jobs, rockets over rebuilding, and terror over peace. telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/07โฆ
Numbercruncher2012๐บ๐ธ๐ฎ๐ฑ retweeted
Nakba didn't always mean what you think it means.
๐April 1948. Haifa's Jewish mayor is in tears, begging Arab leaders not to evacuate the city.
The British commander tells them...This is a mistake, and you'll regret it.
๐The Haganah puts it in writing. Every Arab who stays gets full equality. Full safety. Full rights as citizens.
๐The Arab Higher Committee in Beirut sends its answer back anyway: leave.
๐They left. Between 25,000 and 30,000 of Haifa's Arabs were already gone before most of the real fighting even reached their neighborhoods, because their own leaders had left first. The British High Commissioner wrote it down in a telegram at the time: the flight of Arab officials was "probably the greatest factor" in the collapse of the whole community.
๐And Haifa wasn't alone. Tiberias fell four days earlier, and the Jewish community there didn't want the Arabs to go. They said so publicly. A Jewish representative personally appealed to the British governor to stop the evacuation. It happened anyway.
๐This is one of the most documented moments of the entire 1948 war. It's also one of the least told.
๐The word "Nakba" wasn't coined by Israel. It wasn't meant as an accusation against Israel at all. A Syrian historian wrote it in August 1948, and he used it to indict his own side. He named the fake victories that Arab propaganda was feeding its own people while the war was being lost in real time. He demanded his region's leaders admit what they'd done.
๐An Arab newspaper in Jaffa, writing while the exodus was still happening, called its own fleeing residents a "fifth column." An Arab official told a Beirut paper months later that Arab states had agreed on the policy that created the refugees.
๐Somewhere between 1948 and 1998, the meaning got flipped completely. And the flip has a name and a date attached to it.
๐I wrote about the whole thing: the truce Haifa's Arab leadership turned down, what the Arab press admitted in real time, and the original pamphlet before the story got rewritten into something else.
๐(By Melissa Steinberg Brodsky)
#TruthBomb #IsraelStrong
Numbercruncher2012๐บ๐ธ๐ฎ๐ฑ retweeted
He told his students to go to the windows.
Get out. Jump if you have to.
Then Liviu Librescu walked to the classroom door and pressed his body against it.
He was 76 years old. He weighed 140 lbs
The gunman was in the hallway.
It was April 16, 2007. A Monday morning. Solid mechanics class at Virginia Tech, Room 204. Twenty-two students, most of them 19 or 20 years old.
At 9:45 AM, gunshots echoed through Norris Hall. Room by room, the shooter was working his way down the corridor.
Liviu heard it. He understood immediately.
He had survived the Holocaust. He had survived a labor camp. He had spent decades living under Communist oppression. He knew exactly what evil sounded like.
He told his students to escape through the windows. Second floor โ it was a drop, but they'd survive. Then he walked to the door and held it shut with his body.
The shooter tried to force it open. It wouldn't move.
He fired through the door. Wood splintered. Bullets came through.
Liviu stayed.
Behind him, students were climbing out the windows. Dropping to the ground. Running. One by one, all twenty-two of them got out.
The shooter kept firing through the door.
Liviu held it shut until every student was safe.
Then the bullets killed him.
When police arrived, they found his body at the door.
All 22 of his students survived. Not one was injured.
Liviu Librescu was born on August 18, 1930, in Ploieศti, Romania.
He was Jewish. In 1941, when he was eleven years old, Romanian authorities sent him and his family to a labor camp. His father died there. Liviu survived. When the war ended, he was fifteen.
He went back to school. Studied engineering. Earned a doctorate from the University of Bucharest.
But Communist Romania had no interest in allowing a Jewish intellectual to succeed. He was blocked from academic positions. Passed over for jobs he deserved. He applied to emigrate. The government kept refusing.
Finally, in 1978 when Liviu was 48 years old โ Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin personally intervened. Romania let him go.
He had spent most of his adult life trapped in a country that didn't want him.
In Israel, he taught at Tel Aviv University. Published over 300 papers. Became an international expert in aeroelasticity โ the science of how air flows over aircraft wings.
In 1985, Virginia Tech offered him a position. He moved to Blacksburg, Virginia. He taught there for 22 years. His students loved him โ demanding but kind, high standards, genuine care.
He was still teaching full-time at 76. Still publishing research. Still showing up every Monday morning for solid mechanics.
April 16 was the first day of Passover โ the Jewish holiday celebrating liberation from slavery and oppression.
Liviu Librescu died on the day his tradition sets aside to celebrate freedom.
He spent his entire life escaping death and oppression by luck, by persistence, by the intervention of others. And on his last morning, he chose to stand at a door so that twenty-two young people could have the future he had fought so hard to reach.
He could have run. He could have hidden. He could have climbed out a window with his students.
He chose to stay.
The Virginia Tech shooting killed 32 people that day โ the deadliest school shooting in American history at the time.
Room 204 had zero casualties.
Because a 76-year-old Holocaust survivor held a door with his body until every student behind him was gone.
His funeral was held in Israel. Students from Virginia Tech flew across the ocean to honor him. The Israeli government awarded him the Star of David Medal posthumously. Virginia Tech named a scholarship in his memory.
His son said his father died the way he lived โ protecting others.
A man who survived everything evil threw at him for 76 years.
On his last day, he made sure 22 kids survived too.
Professor Liviu Librescu. August 18, 1930 โ April 16, 2007.
Holocaust survivor. Labor camp survivor.
302 published papers. 22 years at Virginia Tech.
22 students out the window.
He held the door.
I do love our GOP bench, but Rubio is someone who has the political skills to be a transformative leader.
Hope the GOP voter see that come late 2027 and 2028.
Numbercruncher2012๐บ๐ธ๐ฎ๐ฑ retweeted
I gave CNN the very same messages, diaries, and sources I gave the New York Times.
NYT reported that my sources โcouldn't corroborateโ my claims.
Thankfully, CNN *actually called them* and verified that yes, they corroborated everything.
Western civilization is superior to all others. Exhibit A
๐จ This will make you angry, sick and for the very few, it may even open your eyes. Maybe.
Meet Ahmad, the Muslim man from Lebanon.
For Ahmad, a woman is just a commodity whose sole purpose is to fulfill his every demand, such as bringing water, bathing him (daily, sometimes publicly in the garden for others to see his โrespectโ), serving him, and providing sex on command.
He states that refusal justifies violence, including slaps and, explicitly, raping her โwith forceโ and โwith violence.โ He even demonstrates on a mannequin.
This is Islam. And itโs already in the West, raping your daughters.
They donโt deny it. Their book tells them they have the right to do whatever they want. And your laws protect their rights.
Why would you want this?
