Month: November 2021

Authored by ‘Shinobi’ via BitcoinMagazine.com,

A shortage of semiconductor production is at the forefront of geopolitics and it’s inevitable that this issue’s relation to Bitcoin mining will be as well.

Supply chain shortages are starting to reveal many geopolitical dependencies on external actors for different resources, and the overall fragility that those dependencies can create for any given nation when supply chains are stressed.

All it takes is for one little domino to tip and problems cascade through the entire system. It should come as no surprise that nations are starting to view these compounding problems as national security issues and responding accordingly.

ADDRESSING THE SEMICONDUCTOR SHORTAGE

For instance, the U.S. Department of Commerce under the Biden Administration has become very involved recently in addressing supply chain issues, specifically in the context of semiconductor shortages. As far back as April and May 2021, it has been meeting with semiconductor companies involved in different points in the supply chain to better understand and address the issues underlying these supply shortages. In the wake of the most recent of these meetings in September, the Commerce Department sent out a request for information to all semiconductor companies across the entire supply chain in order to gain more insight into the specific bottlenecks and flows of the supply chain as a whole.

It wants to know where companies fit in the supply chain, the node nanometer (nm) size of their chips, the type of chip or products they produce, estimated sales, backstocks of products, etc. It is a very comprehensive request, essentially asking for everything there is to know about companies’ products, sales, stock numbers, and anything related.

Effectively, what it is trying to do is establish a baseline for a live view into the logistic flow of everything from fabrication to product packaging and delivery.

This request has been met with serious backlash in both Taiwan and South Korea, highlighting the massive geopolitical importance of chip fabrication capacity in the global economy.

THE GEOPOLITICAL IMPORTANCE OF CHIP FABRICATION

The South Korean Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy as well as the Taiwanese Ministry of Economic Affairs have both expressed serious concern over the scope of the information requests. Specifically in Taiwan, where the largest chip fabrication company TSMC is located, politicians have gone so far as to question whether complying with the informational requests could give up information ultimately threatening TSMC’s global dominance in the future.

In-depth information such as nm size, types of chips being produced or who is purchasing them, could all theoretically be used to position investments in infrastructure to effectively snatch customers away from TSMC and successfully meet all of their needs. For a country like Taiwan, the importance of the semiconductor industry is potentially a major factor in disincentivizing attacks from China. To lose that dominance is possibly of much more importance than just the economic considerations.

Given that the United States Senate has recently passed the “U.S. Innovation and Competition Act,” which will spend $52 billion dollars on increasing domestic semiconductor fabrication capacity, and the “CHIPs for America Act” being introduced in the Senate to create income tax credit for semiconductor companies, Taiwan’s fears might not be unfounded.

The U.S. has been working to rebuild its semiconductor industry domestically since the Trump administration, and ironically a TSMC fabrication plant in Arizona negotiated under Trump just began construction this summer. Action in that direction has rapidly accelerated after the supply shortages due to lockdowns, as the modern day computer chips are required for all kinds of things you wouldn’t expect, like kitchen appliances, cars and even lightbulbs.

BITCOIN AND SEMICONDUCTOR SECURITY

Semiconductors are the oil of the digital age. Every nation is going to need their own national security plan around semiconductor supply reliability in the way that they have plans around energy reliability. It is a reality that cannot be put off acknowledging any longer.

So, what does any of this have to do with Bitcoin? ASICs. Mining hardware is useless if you don’t have the energy to power it, but energy to power miners is also useless if you don’t have miners themselves.

As far as 7-nm-or-under fabrication capacity goes (the cutting edge), the only games in town are Intel, Samsung and TSMC. This leaves these companies with a lot of political weight to throw around in terms of manufacturing cutting-edge ASICs.

The dynamics of who can and can’t produce semiconductors in general is already coming to the forefront of politics as nations realize the importance of minimizing reliance on foreign actors to maintain such capacity. It is only a matter of time before how these issues relate to Bitcoin mining starts to come to their attention as well.

What form will that take? Who knows. Maybe it acts as another accelerant for larger nations to expand their domestic fabrication capacity. Maybe nations with capacity ban exports of miners to enemy nations. Maybe nations engage in espionage to acquire intellectual property relating to cutting-edge fabrication techniques.

Whatever form the realization takes when it happens, it will happen, and the effect on the mining ecosystem will be interesting to say the least.

Over the weekend the US flew a B-1B strategic long-range bomber over the Middle East, and specifically over the Strait of Hormuz near Iran, in what the US Air Force called a “presence patrol” to send a message to Tehran. The Air Force revealed details and photos of the provocative fly-over on Sunday.

Importantly at various points along the route, which went from the island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean to Yemen and then through Israel and Jordan and then over the Persian Gulf, US allied fighter jets escorted the bomber – most notably aircraft from Israel and Saudi Arabia.

Politico noted based on the US Air Force statement “Fighter jets from Bahrain, Egypt, Israel and Saudi Arabia flew alongside the bomber” in different intervals and locations.

The report further recalled that “The Strait of Hormuz has been the scene of attacks on shipping blamed on Iran in recent years, while the Red Sea has seen similar assaults amid an ongoing shadow war between Tehran and Israel”; however, it remains “The Islamic Republic has denied being involved in the attacks, though it has promised to take revenge on Israel for a series of attacks targeting its nuclear program.”

The flight mission was a rare one given the bomber took off from the remote Diego Garcia outpost, given the B1-B’s present deployment to the island was a recent first in the past 15 years. 

The US Air Force described what was essentially a circumnavigation of the entire Arabian Peninsula as follows:

The flight was a five-hour, non-stop multilateral mission with participation from air forces to include: Bahrain, Egypt, Israel and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia…. Multiple partner nations’ fighter aircraft accompanied the B-1B Lancer at different points during the flight, which flew over the Gulf of Aden, Bab el-Mandeb Strait, Red Sea, Suez Canal, Arabian Gulf, Strait of Hormuz and the Gulf of Oman before departing the region.

Following the Abraham Accords, which involved the Gulf countries of the UAE and Bahrain signing a historic peace treaty with Israel in 2020, there have been growing calls for Saudi Arabia to also normalize relations with Tel Aviv.

That Saturday’s US bomber flight involved the participation and cooperation of both the Israeli and Saudi militaries is also somewhat unprecedented, and suggests a deepening and continuing de facto military and intelligence relationship between the two (especially since the war in Syria).

pic.twitter.com/NFRJDeaG7d

— Israeli Air Force (@IAFsite) October 30, 2021

Meanwhile the US and Israel have vowed to pursue “other options” should there be no restored nuclear deal to come out of Vienna talks. This new B1-B flight is a clear message to Iran as part of the continuing pressure campaign to get Iran back to the table after talks have stalled since June. 

Authored by Tate Fegley via The Mises Institute,

Over the course of this year, conservatives have expressed a number of grievances they have with the US military. Tucker Carlson delivered a monologue questioning Joe Biden’s emphasis on the issuance of flight suits designed for pregnant women.

(Noteworthy is that Tucker is not against women in combat roles per se, since he states, “If the Pentagon can show that pregnant pilots are the best, we will be the first to demand an entire Air Force of pregnant pilots.” I don’t believe anyone has accused Tucker of thinking carefully about tradeoffs.)

Other conservatives, however, do express disagreement with filling combat roles with women. A recurring demand in pursuit of egalitarianism is extending mandated registration for the Selective Service to young women, opposition to which is typically due to the prospect of drafting women to fight, rather than the morally correct position of opposing involuntary servitude for anyone.

A further gripe is the trend of the military’s embrace of wokeness, as evidenced by statements made by General Mark Milley defending the teaching of critical race theory at West Point and the need to “understand white rage,” as well as the approach taken in recent recruitment ads. While Chinese and Russian military recruitment campaigns appeal to a sense of patriotism, one US Army ad features a woman inspired by the activism of her two moms and who feels the need to compete with her sorority sisters in doing something meaningful with her life. How she does this through operating Raytheon and Lockheed Martin’s Patriot Missile Defense Systems is left unexplained.

One of the latest controversies involving the military is Joe Biden’s vaccine mandate, which leaves service members potentially facing a dishonorable discharge if they refuse to be vaccinated. Hundreds of thousands of US troops have not yet complied with this mandate. While it is unlikely that all of them would continue to refuse if the alternative were a dishonorable discharge, a significant percentage will. Hundreds of Navy SEALs who have refused the vaccine are currently considered undeployable.

Many believe that some or all of these issues hurt troop morale and render the US military a less capable fighting force. This is unambiguously the case when discharging or not deploying personnel who are otherwise qualified and on whom millions of dollars have been spent to train.

It serves as an illustration of something those of us skeptical of US military adventurism already knew: Americans in the continental US are incredibly geopolitically blessed in terms of being able to live at peace with the rest of the world, if only those with political authority allowed it. We have mostly friendly neighbors to the north and south, no one who poses a threat close by, and thousands of miles of ocean between us and everyone else. And because of this the US military has the luxury of engaging in terrible, wasteful decision-making that undermines effectiveness without much cost in terms of domestic civilian lives lost from foreign aggression (with the exception, of course, of blowback caused by US foreign policy).

So why would the US military embrace wokeness and other policies if they could possibly come at the slightest cost of effectiveness or morale?

The military is a bureaucracy (or rather a set of bureaucracies) and the primary institutional goals of bureaucracies are to preserve their own existence and increase their budgets. Fully embracing the cultural concerns of establishment leftism certainly doesn’t hurt in terms of encouraging the mainstream Left to forget their former opposition to Bush’s wars. Congressional Republicans will present no serious opposition to wokeness in the military, certainly not in terms of reducing their budgets. The CIA seems to be employing a similar strategy. Promoting the fact that they hire gay people covers a multitude of sins, such as assassinations, torture, and regime change. Furthermore, vaccine mandates help purge the military of personnel willing to question certain types of orders.

Indeed, pursuing this strategy seems to come with little downside risk. If it does, in fact, reduce the ability of the military or intelligence agencies to protect Americans (to the extent that that is still considered part of their purpose) and results in civilian deaths, their budgets are far more likely to be increased rather than decreased. Their failure to prevent the deaths of thousands of Americans on 9/11 led to unprecedented increases in their powers and resources. We are now told that their failure to prevent whatever you want to call what happened on January 6 (setting aside their role in facilitating it) justifies further increases in their powers. For them, failure is success.

Thankfully, the veil is being lifted and those with previously promilitary sensibilities are seeing that the military is not unambiguously their friend. This is a necessary step to achieve the ends of peace and a noninterventionist foreign policy. Questioning the military is increasingly considered within the realm of reasonable discourse for those who consider themselves patriots. Polls have traditionally found that the military enjoys among the highest levels of trust among the general public. This is changing and that’s a good thing.

So much for climate change being humanity’s “greatest threat” – as President Joe Biden previously warned military service members just months ago. Here’s what he said in June…

“Y’know when I was over in the tank in the Pentagon, and I was first elected vice president with President Obama, the military sat us down to let us know what the greatest threats facing America were, the greatest physical threats.”

“This is not a joke. Y’know what the Joint Chiefs told us the greatest threat facing America was?“

“Global warming,” Biden said.

Biden appears to fall asleep during COP26 opening speeches pic.twitter.com/az8NZTWanI

— Zach Purser Brown (@zachjourno) November 1, 2021

Today, Biden was seen dozing off during the opening speeches of the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Glasgow, Scotland – an event widely dubbed in the media as humanity’s “last best chance” to reign in the “out of control” specter of incoming climate “disaster”. So much for that.

The video showing an apparently unenthused and unimpressed US president trying to initially fight sleep before succumbing completely – after which an aide has to come prompt him awake – has gone viral since being shared by The Washington Post’s Zach Purser Brown.

The question must be asked: does even the president himself or the administration really believe its own apocalyptic climate alarmist rhetoric? At the very least, the body language says no…. 

It must have been rather warm in the conference assembly room.

Fox News points out that Biden may have inadvertently “spoke” for the majority:

Former President Trump has long referred to his political rival as “Sleepy Joe” and Monday’s video presumably won’t help make that nickname go away anytime soon. However, many conservatives joked that Biden nodding off during the climate conference was the most relatable thing he’s done as president.

The Federalist co-founder Sean Davis responded, “Can you blame him?” 

MSNBC on Joe Biden falling asleep during climate change conference:

“These can be embarrassing situations.” pic.twitter.com/KRCKLH2mow

— The First (@TheFirstonTV) November 1, 2021

Indeed as we previously noted, the notion that anything “meaningful” will actually happen at this summit is almost laughable. The developed nations of the world haven’t even managed to reach their targets from the last major global climate conclave back in 2015, when the Paris Accords were signed.

Surprisingly, even MSNBC noted the “embarrassing situation”. The network’s correspondent said in a segment covering the moment Biden was caught dozing:

“Cameras are all around and the camera caught President Biden who turns 79 later this month with his eyes closed for a period of time. These can be embarrassing situations – you have the contrast of leaders including President Biden calling for the urgency of these issues of addressing climate, and a moment like that in an session can be a political obstacle.”

Biden was not alone in his sleepiness…

 

Authored by Mike Shedlock via MishTalk.com,

Voters in Minneapolis will decide whether to replace police in city charter with department of public safety workers.

Referendum on Banning Police

The first election in Minneapolis since the George Floyd killing is a Referendum on Ending the Police Force.

A ballot initiative would replace the police department in the city charter with a department of public safety that would take a public health approach to safety and include sworn peace officers if deemed necessary. The number of officers in the new department would no longer be set at a required level based on the city’s population. The plan would likely include more money for violence-prevention programs and the diversion of some police calls to social workers and others.

Despite calls from the city council to reimagine policing after Mr. Floyd’s killing in May 2020, activists say changes haven’t gone far enough. Crime has gone up and the police force has shrunk. Tuesday’s election will be the first time the voters will have a say in the future of Minneapolis since the upheaval began.

The ballot question has drawn big spending to the municipal election. Yes 4 Minneapolis, the group that wrote the ballot initiative, reported this week that it has raised $1.8 million this year, while All of Mpls, which opposes the initiative, said it has raised nearly $1.6 million.

In a poll sponsored by the Minneapolis Star Tribune, MPR News, KARE 11 and Frontline in September, 42% of the city’s Black residents supported the charter amendment, compared with 49% of voters overall. And 75% of Black voters wanted more police officers, not fewer, compared with 55% of voters overall.

Failed City

If the poll is accurate, the bill will fail. Curiously, more whites than blacks support the measure.

That close to 50% support this absurd measure is a sure sign Minneapolis is a failed city. 

Replacing police with “peace officers” whatever the hell that means is just plain nuts. 

Meanwhile, police have been quitting in droves. In 2019 the Minneapolis police force was 853. Today the police force is 598, a reduction of 30%. 

Crime, including homicides has soared. But hey. let’s replace police with peace officers. 

Part of me hopes this passes just to prove how stupid it is. But people’s lives are at stake, so hopefully common sense prevails.

*  *  *

Like these reports? If so, please Subscribe to MishTalk Email Alerts.

As we discussed over the weekend, in the last week front-end curves have experienced unprecedented volatility and even wilder P&L swings.

As DB’s FX strategist George Saravelos summarizes in a note “It’s a VaR shock now”, in Australia alone, we have added 75bps of hikes over the next twelve months in just three days. At the same time, the Canadian curve added nearly two upfront hikes following the latest BoC meeting. At the same time back-end government bond yields have moved lower in an unprecedented twist flattening of the curve.

As Saravelos first discussed back in May, and repeated against more recently last week, “the general flattening of curves is backed up by the very latecycle dynamics of the global economy plus our pessimistic view on global r*.” But what is happening now runs beyond macro and as the DB strategist writes, confirming what we said last week, “it is a plain and simple Value at Risk (VaR) shock driven by positioning and the inability to appropriately calibrate central bank reaction functions in such an uncertain environment.“

To put things in context: the Aussie bank bill yield rise is the largest 3-day change since 1996 and represents a 6 standard deviation move. In Canada, it is the largest move since 2009 and a 4 standard deviation move.

This, as Saravelos writes, is the closest we can get to a distressed Treasury market and as the next chart shows Europe appears set to join the chaos as rate hike odds represented by 3M Euribor Dec 22s tumbled after last week’s dismal ECB press conference in which Lagarde failed to push back against market expectations for tightening, indicating the market is now also expecting higher rates in the eurozone, a move which suggests that the ECB – which has been adamant there will be no tightening for a long time – is also losing control of the front-end.

Commenting on this ongoing VaR shock, another DB credit strategist, Francis Yared, writes over the weekend that while it may be difficult to interpret from a macro economic perspective, if there was to a be an “original macro sin” for such moves, it would be the excessive reliance of central banks on forward guidance.

According to Yared, while forward guidance is hailed by central banks as a great monetary policy tool, “when close to the lower bound it suffers significant drawbacks. Indeed, using as an example the ECB situation as summarised in our ECB preview, there are intrinsic limitations to the forward guidance.”  Yared explains:

• First and foremost and as pointed out by former Fed governor, Jeremy Stein, forward guidance may end up being self defeating: “There is always a temptation for the central bank to speak in a whisper, because anything that gets said reverberates so loudly in markets. But the softer it talks, the more the market leans in to hear better and, thus, the more the whisper gets amplified. So efforts to overly manage the market volatility associated with our communications may ultimately be self-defeating. “
• Second, to be more “credible” the ECB would need to adopt a calendar based forward guidance (or equivalently as the RBA did a target for e.g. 3-year rates). However, this will imply a degree of certainty that central banks should be wary of pretending to have. It would be the equivalent of doubling up in a difficult position. It could solve the issue in the short term, but will increase the stakes when either (1) time will comes from exiting this reinforced forward guidance or (ii) facts challenge the forward guidance (cf. the RBA).
• Third, the forward guidance is ultimately based on the ability to forecast inflation. A lot has been written as to why inflation has been low in the past decades. Inflation expectations being adaptive, the conclusions have been extrapolated to the indefinite future. But little credit has been given to the fact that inflation is subject to regime shifts which can be generated by (a) monetary and/or fiscal policy shifts or (b) exogenous supply shocks. In particular, coordinated monetary and fiscal policies is the textbook way of generating inflation. Therefore, in presence of a very pro-active fiscal policy following Covid, introducing a new monetary policy framework predicated on years of low inflation is the theoretical perfect combination to create a challenging environment for forward guidance. Some credit should also be given to the uncertainty generated by the potential negative supply shock associated with addressing climate change.
• Fourth, in the case of the Fed, the forward guidance is also predicated on the ability to forecast NAIRU. A causal look at historical revisions of estimates of NAIRU highlights the degree of uncertainty associated with it. In fact, as NAIRU is derived ex-post from the combination of the observed level of unemployment and inflation, estimates will turn out to be backward looking and ignoring the regime shifts that could impact inflation. For instance, the US labor market is currently behaving as if was through full employment.

As Yared concludes, it may very well turn out that following the US mid-term elections a significant fiscal tightening will force inflation back lower. But no matter the outcome, it “should not distract from the fact that an excessive reliance on  forward guidance is not the silver bullet that current central bank rhetoric suggests.” To this, one can only add that if central bank guidance can not be relied upon – i.e., if central bankers are just as clueless as everyone else – then this is actually wildly bullish for risk assets and hyperinflation, as it means that when the inevitable policy error hits and both the economy and markets swoon, these same central bankers will unleash much more of the same “wealth effect” in hopes of undoing their current round of errors, which will do nothing to actually normalize a market that is beyond broken and do everything to push asset hyperinflation to never before seen highs.

This dynamic will continue indefinitely – as there is nothing preventing the Fed from creating a few more trillion or quadrillion in fiat “money” with the push of a button – and the only possibly constraint for future such catastrophic behavior is when the class inequality finally leads to mass riots and the appearance of the proverbial pitchforks in front the Marriner Eccles building.

Op-Ed submitted by Elizabeth Vaughn,

Former President Ronald Reagan once famously said: “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.”

Notwithstanding the Cold War, Reagan’s words may have been considered somewhat hyperbolic at the time. Today, they are especially appropriate.

While painting a dresser on Sunday, I listened to a replay of the previous night’s version of Fox News’ “Watters World.” When that video ended, an April 2015 speech from journalist Glenn Greenwald entitled “Edward Snowden and the Secrets of the National Security State” came on and covered with paint, I listened to it.

Greenwald discussed the National Security Agency’s collection of billions of communications of ordinary, law abiding U.S. citizens. He emphasized the point that, even then, six and a half years ago, America was closer to a totalitarian state than a democracy. Thinking about it, I realized he was right.

And if Greenwald was right then, how much more do his remarks apply today?

President Joe Biden has been in office a little over nine months and his administration’s actions have steered the country  on a direct path toward authoritarianism. His regime thinks it’s okay to force Americans into choosing between taking a controversial vaccine or losing their livelihoods, to monitor our bank accounts for all transactions over $600 and to sic the FBI on parents who confront school boards about their childrens’ curricula.

Needless to say, if the Trump Administration initiated any of those actions, he would have been impeached – again.

American politics have always been messy. But the corruption that began in the Obama Administration has deepened and accelerated to a dangerous level.

In 2015, the deep state began an effort to spy on potential 2016 Republican presidential nominees. After it became clear that Donald Trump would win the party’s nomination, Obama Administration officials sent spies into his campaign in an effort to derail his candidacy. The Hillary Clinton campaign and the DNC, which she essentially controlled after bailing them out financially, via Marc Elias, then a partner at the Perkins, Coie law firm, hired Fusion GPS to prepare a dossier of damaging stories about Trump.

Then-CIA Director John Brennan briefed Obama in July 2016 about Clinton’s actions and he did nothing to stop it.

Using this collection of false stories, the FBI, once a highly-revered U.S. institution, applied to the FISA Court for a warrant (and three renewals) to tap the communications of Trump campaign staffers looking for anything that might destroy his candidacy. They began investigations into Gen. Michael Flynn, junior campaign advisor George Papadopoulos, then-campaign manager Paul Manafort and others and after Trump’s victory, arrested them. And the FBI was aided every step of the way by a complicit media.

Following an interview with dossier author Christopher Steele’s primary subsource in January 2017, the FBI knew the allegations against President Trump were lies. Yet then-FBI Director James Comey weaponized his agency against him anyway hoping to force him out of office.

After Trump’s Attorney General Jeff Sessions was convinced by several DOJ insiders to recuse himself from the FBI’s investigation, the ethically challenged Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein appointed Robert Mueller to a Special Counsel. The ensuing investigation cast a shadow of illegitimacy over Trump’s presidency and facilitated a Democratic takeover of the House of Representatives in the 2018 midterms which led to two bogus impeachments.

The deep state conducted business as if they were leaders of a third-world dictatorship.

Next, skirting the state legislatures, Democrats used the pandemic to change the way elections would be conducted, allowing the introduction of mail-in voting on a massive scale. This opened the door to what I continue to believe was a stolen election.

No one has ever been held accountable for any of this malfeasance. In fact, the DOJ just reinstated the pension of former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, who was fired by Jeff Sessions after the DOJ Inspector General found he had lied repeatedly to investigators.

The dubious Biden victory has brought the U.S. closer than ever before to becoming a totalitarian state. The Biden Administration itself is the most serious national security threat America faces today.

What can we do about it?

Virginia and New Jersey voters can send a powerful message to this administration by getting to the polls on Tuesday to cast their ballots for Republican candidates Glenn Youngkin and Jack Ciattarelli. That would be a good start toward the restoration of sanity in the country.

The rest of us can continue to resist. We can and we must engage in civil disobedience.

Please follow me on Twitter.

Please visit my archives: American Free News Network and The Western Journal

This isn’t exactly going to help CNN win back the viewers who have been fleeing the network by the thousands.

In a classic gaffe for an American reporter to make (though it certainly isn’t ideal when the reporter making it is a cable news network’s senior political correspondent) CNN News Anchor Wolf Blitzer was criticized on Monday for “going to the wrong city” after he said he was reporting from Edinburgh (the Scottish city perhaps best known as the setting of the film “Transpotting”) instead of Glasgow, the site of the COP26 climate summit.

Blitzer, a 73-year-old veteran broadcaster tweeted a photographer tweeted a photograph of himself in a studio in front of Edinburgh Castle, 50 miles away from where the event is taking place,

However, twitter users told the American journalists that he was “in the wrong city” with one saying “if you’re in Ediburgh, you’re in the wrong place fella.”

Another said: “Yeah, that’s just down the road from Glasgow. Why not pop over to Loch Ness at lunchtime for a spot of monster hunting?“

Finally, another roasted Blitzer with a “Morning folks! We’re here in Birmingham to bring you full coverage of the royal wedding in London!”

Another critic tweeted: “This reminds me of that time I went to NYC to visit the White House.”

As if to confirm his massive blunder, Blitzer tweeted today:

“I’m now reporting from Edinburgh in Scotland where 20,000 world leaders and delegates have gathered for the COP26 Climate Summit.”

I’m now reporting from Edinburgh in Scotland where 20,000 world leaders and delegates have gathered for the COP26 Climate Summit. COP, by the way, stands for “Conference of the Parties.” It’s the 26th time they have gathered to discuss and take action on this critical issue. pic.twitter.com/BGTAeU5cBy

— Wolf Blitzer (@wolfblitzer) November 1, 2021

Looks like the reporters were forced to fly into Edinburgh because the president was taking up all the airspace around Glasgow.

As we noted earlier, world leaders didn’t exactly start off the summit with the most upbeat tone. At least Wolf Blitzer could offer a little levity in contrast to Greta’s whining.

Authored by Mike Shedlock via MishTalk.com,

My analysis of the polls puts Younkin at slightly more than two percentage points in the lead.

Reflections on Early Voting 

The Virginia Gubernatorial election depends on total turnout, and independents, not early turnout. 

No, I don’t think this offers us very much information on the eventual outcome. More than anything, it probably just helps us interpret the results as it arrives on Election Night.

— Nate Cohn (@Nate_Cohn) October 30, 2021

Extrapolating election outcomes from partial returns is a very hard problem, and becoming harder in many ways, and one that your average political reporter or cable news pundit has no training in. The Needle isn’t the only approach. But you need some rigor, not just to wing it.

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) October 27, 2021

Extrapolating election outcomes from partial returns is a very hard problem, and becoming harder in many ways

Unlike Trump who told followers to vote on elections day (a mistake), Youngkin encouraged people to vote early. 

Candidates should always seek early voting for their side.  Those votes cannot be changed or taken away. 

At the last minute, some people who waited might change their minds or not vote at all.

Virginia Polls 

Poll Discussion

Here are all of the Virginia Polls.

I am a fan of weighting momentum and more recent polls over earlier polls. 

Nate Silver posts polls by release date. The key date is the date the polls were conducted. 

I favor the recent polls of shorter duration as opposed to polls over a long period time like the Oct 9-21 poll by Virginia Commonwealth.

• Oct 29-31 Trafalgar: Youngkin +2 LV

• Oct 27-31 Insider: Youngkin +2 LV

• Oct 27-29 Echelon: Youngkin +3 LV

• Oct 24-27 Fox News: Youngkin +8 LV, +1 RV

• Oct 20-26 WaPo: McAuliffe +1 LV, +4 RV

• Oct 21-24 Suffolk: Tie LV

Advantage Youngkin

The Fox News polls caused much discussion. +8 On Likely Voters vs. +1 Registered voters is such a huge discrepancy there may be a polling error or sampling outlier.

Mentally call the Fox outcome +2 or +2.5  for Youngkin if you like. 

That makes the 4 most recent polls approximately +2 for Youngkin. If we do the same for WaPo, the prior two polls are +2 for McAuliffe and a tie.

Momentum 

There is a small but clear advantage to Youngkin in the most recent polls. 

Moreover, momentum is also increasingly Youngkin’s way.

Mish Call

Nate Silver has Youngkin +1. To pick a specific number to one decimal place, I have Younkin +2.2 .

However, these numbers are all within margin of error. I will not be surprised by anything.

*  *  *

Like these reports? If so, please Subscribe to MishTalk Email Alerts.