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20 Alleged Election “Facts” That Don’t Pass The Smell Test

20 Alleged Election “Facts” That Don’t Pass The Smell Test

Tyler Durden

Mon, 11/30/2020 – 12:27

Authored by Andrea Widburg via AmericanThinker.com,

Americans have common sense, so they can understand when they’re being played (for example, when politicians place Americans under house arrest and then ignore their own rules to party and travel). And they know that there is no way on God’s green earth that decrepit, demented, corrupt, and terminally stupid Joe Biden fairly won this election. This post assembles various election anomalies that don’t pass the smell test.

J.B. Shurk, who frequently publishes at American Thinker, wrote a knock-out article for The Federalist about Joe Biden’s magical performance in the election. You should read the whole article, but here are four things that don’t pass the smell test:

1. Biden allegedly got 80 million votes, which is more than Obama received at his peak, in 2008 – and Biden did this despite losing minority voters to Donald Trump and trailing Trump in voter enthusiasm.

2. Biden broke 60 years of precedent by winning nationally despite losing prodigiously in bellwether states and counties. The last time this happened was when the mafia got out the vote for John F. Kennedy in 1960.

3. Trump had extraordinary coattails, so much so that even the New York Times admitted that the “Democrats Suffered Crushing Down-Ballot Losses Across America.” Think about that: Biden had no coattails and no enthusiasm, yet he allegedly won a record number of votes. Smells fetid to me.

4. Biden barely made it through the primaries, while Trump soared, with Trump’s performance being a historically sure sign of voter enthusiasm and probable victory – yet Biden, again, allegedly scored an equally historically strong victory.

At The Spectator, Patrick Basham, a professional pollster, also felt that Biden’s alleged win cannot pass the smell test. Again, this is a summary, so you should read the original article:

5. Trump exceeded his original vote count by the largest margin for any incumbent in American history. He got 10 million more votes than before; by contrast, Obama, in 2012, got 3.5 million fewer votes than in 2008.

6. Trump’s support among blacks grew by 50%, while Biden’s fell below the important 90%-mark that Democrat candidates need to secure victory.

7. In the Rust Belt, Biden lost black support everywhere except in Detroit, Philadelphia, and Milwaukee. In those cities, every single black person apparently voted for Biden.

8. While pollsters can and do manipulate polling outcomes, non-polling metrics (historical norms such as the economy, enthusiasm, etc.) have never been wrong – only we’re being told that this year was the exception.

Then there are the indicia of fraud that Dr. Navid Kershavarz-Nia detailed:

9. The fact that Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Arizona, Nevada, and Georgia simultaneously pretended to halt ballot counting while continuing to count is evidence of election fraud collusion.

10. Optical scanners were set to accept unverified, un-validated ballots.

11. The scanners were almost certainly programmed to fail to keep audit records.

12. In the contested states, the voting machines were alleged to have processed hundreds of thousands of ballots within a short time, which is a physical impossibility.

And here are a few more indications of fraud:

13. In Pennsylvania, statistically impossible numbers of late-arriving mail-in votes went to Biden.

14. Dominion and ES&S voting machines were created to have back doors and specific functions to manipulate votes either at the machine or over the internet.

15. Fox News’s behavior on election night (refusing to call pro-Trump outcomes while prematurely calling Arizona for Biden) was so abnormal that Vegas oddsmakers instantly assumed that the fix was in.

16. The allegedly late-arriving mailed-in ballots increased Biden’s equally alleged lead with statistically impossible perfection and stability.

17. There were anomalies in Virginia that suggested that computers were subtracting votes from Trump and, sometimes, giving them to Biden.

18. One analysis shows that voting machines in Michigan systematically removed votes from Trump and handed them to Biden. I saw a rebuttal (which I cannot locate now) that purported to debunk this but did so by using a different scale on the X-axis, which I found inherently suspicious.

19. Over 100,000 Pennsylvania absentee ballots were returned either a day after they were mailed out, on the day they were mailed out, or on the day before they were mailed out.

20. In all the contested areas, and at Dominion’s website, Democrats have been systematically failing to create or have destroyed all data that could be used to demonstrate fraud. This creates the legal presumption that the data do, in fact, show fraud.

On behalf of all Trump voters, I say to the Democrats who are trying to gaslight us: Don’t spit in my face and tell me it’s raining.

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/33M64Ef Tyler Durden

Americans Are Starting a Staggering Number of Businesses During the COVID-19 Pandemic

iiphotos008630

Thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic, many Americans found themselves with unexpected amounts of free time this year—and many have turned to entrepreneurship to fill the gap.

According to data from the Census Bureau, the number of new business applications filed in the United States surged during the third quarter of this year to nearly double the quarterly average of the past decade. The Census Bureau’s data, which are aggregated from various mandatory filings that businesses must make with the IRS in order to obtain a tax identification number, show that more than 1,500,000 business applications were filed between July and September of this year. It’s a dramatic spike in new business applications, which average about 800,000 per quarter and rarely deviate very far in either direction regardless of macroeconomic conditions.

Perhaps even more encouraging is the fact that the number of what the Census Bureau calls “high propensity applications” has shot upward too. Those are businesses that have already surpassed several hurdles in the IRS application process and are deemed to have a “high propensity of turning into businesses with payroll.”

There’s more good news: The growth in new business applications isn’t concentrated in any particular part of the country. In fact, the Midwest led the way during the third quarter and every single state reported an increase, according to the data.

Like the record-shattering number of unemployment applications documented earlier this year, the Census Bureau’s data about business formation provide a useful snapshot of just how completely bonkers 2020 has been. The pandemic has shifted how Americans work, eat, play, and socialize, and it has upended consumers’ demand for products. That disruption has created opportunities for new businesses, and entrepreneurial types have responded in droves.

“The talk is that a lot of folks who became unemployed, alright, most regrettably, but they’re sticking with it and they’re going out and starting new businesses,” Larry Kudlow, director of the White House’s National Economic Council, said last month. He predicted that the “gales of creative destruction” would blow through the U.S. economy as the recovery kicked in.

Of course, this isn’t really “creative destruction” in the way that Joseph Schumpeter originally described it—that is, as the usual churn of the business cycle that sees new ideas and innovations sweep aside older ones as a matter of course. More than 11 million people are out of work right now, and even though that figure has been falling in recent months, it remains more than twice as high as it was in February. The number of businesses to permanently close during the pandemic continues to grow, and those closures could accelerate as a surge in cases prompts new governmental restrictions on economic activity.

But the number of new startups in the pipeline isn’t just a silver lining. It’s also a way forward.

“There’s been this enormous shock to how we interact with each other, and it’s a positive sign there are lots of entrepreneurs out there trying to respond to that,” John Haltiwanger, an economics professor at the University of Maryland, told Bloomberg. Haltiwanger, a former chief economist at the Census Bureau who helped launch the agency’s tracking of business-creation data, says there’s a marked contrast between what’s happening now and what happened after the previous recession when startups “got clobbered” and were slow to recover.

That’s probably due to the nature of the two economic downturns. The Great Recession was the result of a banking collapse and credit crunch that made it more difficult for startups to borrow money. That’s not been the case this time around, thankfully, and the recovery should be relatively quick once the acute public health crisis is behind us.

Economic data aside, the number of new businesses might also say something positive about America’s resilience in the face of a once-per-century catastrophe. Yes, unemployment, depression, and suicide rates are rising. Still, starting a business is a fundamentally optimistic endeavor—a bet that things will get better and that there is money to be made in doing so—and more Americans than ever before are taking that shot right now.

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Americans Are Starting a Staggering Number of Businesses During the COVID-19 Pandemic

iiphotos008630

Thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic, many Americans found themselves with unexpected amounts of free time this year—and many have turned to entrepreneurship to fill the gap.

According to data from the Census Bureau, the number of new business applications filed in the United States surged during the third quarter of this year to nearly double the quarterly average of the past decade. The Census Bureau’s data, which are aggregated from various mandatory filings that businesses must make with the IRS in order to obtain a tax identification number, show that more than 1,500,000 business applications were filed between July and September of this year. It’s a dramatic spike in new business applications, which average about 800,000 per quarter and rarely deviate very far in either direction regardless of macroeconomic conditions.

Perhaps even more encouraging is the fact that the number of what the Census Bureau calls “high propensity applications” has shot upward too. Those are businesses that have already surpassed several hurdles in the IRS application process and are deemed to have a “high propensity of turning into businesses with payroll.”

There’s more good news: The growth in new business applications isn’t concentrated in any particular part of the country. In fact, the Midwest led the way during the third quarter and every single state reported an increase, according to the data.

Like the record-shattering number of unemployment applications documented earlier this year, the Census Bureau’s data about business formation provide a useful snapshot of just how completely bonkers 2020 has been. The pandemic has shifted how Americans work, eat, play, and socialize, and it has upended consumers’ demand for products. That disruption has created opportunities for new businesses, and entrepreneurial types have responded in droves.

“The talk is that a lot of folks who became unemployed, alright, most regrettably, but they’re sticking with it and they’re going out and starting new businesses,” Larry Kudlow, director of the White House’s National Economic Council, said last month. He predicted that the “gales of creative destruction” would blow through the U.S. economy as the recovery kicked in.

Of course, this isn’t really “creative destruction” in the way that Joseph Schumpeter originally described it—that is, as the usual churn of the business cycle that sees new ideas and innovations sweep aside older ones as a matter of course. More than 11 million people are out of work right now, and even though that figure has been falling in recent months, it remains more than twice as high as it was in February. The number of businesses to permanently close during the pandemic continues to grow, and those closures could accelerate as a surge in cases prompts new governmental restrictions on economic activity.

But the number of new startups in the pipeline isn’t just a silver lining. It’s also a way forward.

“There’s been this enormous shock to how we interact with each other, and it’s a positive sign there are lots of entrepreneurs out there trying to respond to that,” John Haltiwanger, an economics professor at the University of Maryland, told Bloomberg. Haltiwanger, a former chief economist at the Census Bureau who helped launch the agency’s tracking of business-creation data, says there’s a marked contrast between what’s happening now and what happened after the previous recession when startups “got clobbered” and were slow to recover.

That’s probably due to the nature of the two economic downturns. The Great Recession was the result of a banking collapse and credit crunch that made it more difficult for startups to borrow money. That’s not been the case this time around, thankfully, and the recovery should be relatively quick once the acute public health crisis is behind us.

Economic data aside, the number of new businesses might also say something positive about America’s resilience in the face of a once-per-century catastrophe. Yes, unemployment, depression, and suicide rates are rising. Still, starting a business is a fundamentally optimistic endeavor—a bet that things will get better and that there is money to be made in doing so—and more Americans than ever before are taking that shot right now.

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French Protesters Set Fire To Central Bank

French Protesters Set Fire To Central Bank

Tyler Durden

Mon, 11/30/2020 – 12:05

One of the recurring questions amid the year’s countless BLM protests and associated riots has been why instead of burning and looting innocent businesses, does the angry mob not target the source of all wealth, income and social inequality – not just in the US but the world – the US central bank, i.e. Federal Reserve (located at 2051 Constitution Ave. NW, Washington, DC 20418 for those wondering).

Yet while US protesters and rioters still need guidance just what buildings to burn down, their French peers are finally catching on.

Over the weekend, tens of thousands of critics of a proposed security law that would restrict the filming of police officers protested across France on Saturday, and officers in Paris who were advised to behave responsibly during the demonstrations repeatedly fired tear gas to disperse rowdy protesters. The controversial Article 24 of the bill seeks to protect police officers from doxing and harassment, and bans filming of cops on duty and sharing their images online with the “intent to harm.”

Civil liberties groups, journalists, and people who have faced police abuse are concerned that the measure will stymie press freedoms and allow police brutality to go undiscovered and unpunished.

“We have to broaden the debate, and by doing that, we say that if there were no police violence, we wouldn’t have to film violent policemen,” Assa Traore, a prominent anti-brutality activist whose brother died in police custody in 2016, told The Associated Press.

At least 46,000 people packed the sprawling Republique plaza and surrounding streets carrying red union flags, French tricolor flags and homemade signs denouncing police violence, demanding media freedom or calling for the resignation of French President Emmanuel Macron or his tough-talking interior minister, Gerald Darmanin.

The crowd included journalists, journalism students, left-wing activists, migrants rights groups and citizens of varied political stripes expressing anger over what they perceive as hardening police tactics in recent years, especially since France’s yellow vest protest movement against economic hardship emerged in 2018.

Violence erupted near the end of the march as small groups of protesters pelted riot police with small rocks and paving stone. The officers retaliated with volleys of tear gas, prompting minor scuffles.

What we found most remarkable is that as rioting escalated, the protesters set fire to the facade of the central bank.

While fire crews reached the central bank building on time, and it did not spontaneously collapse “due to the high temperatures” unlike some other structures, one wonders what happens during the next protest, or the one after. And when will US protesters figure out what the French already have: that burning and looting stores owned by fellow hard-working citizens only exacerbates the inequality. On the other hand, to really make a statement, a couple of Molotov cocktails aimed at the Marriner Eccles building just may attract some attention.

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/3oaIkRL Tyler Durden

Americans Are Starting a Staggering Number of Businesses During the COVID-19 Pandemic

iiphotos008630

Thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic, many Americans found themselves with unexpected amounts of free time this year—and many have turned to entrepreneurship to fill the gap.

According to data from the Census Bureau, the number of new business applications filed in the United States surged during the third quarter of this year to nearly double the quarterly average of the past decade. The Census Bureau’s data, which are aggregated from various mandatory filings that businesses must make with the IRS in order to obtain a tax identification number, show that more than 1,500,000 business applications were filed between July and September of this year. It’s a dramatic spike in new business applications, which average about 800,000 per quarter and rarely deviate very far in either direction regardless of macroeconomic conditions.

Perhaps even more encouraging is the fact that the number of what the Census Bureau calls “high propensity applications” has shot upward too. Those are businesses that have already surpassed several hurdles in the IRS application process and are deemed to have a “high propensity of turning into businesses with payroll.”

There’s more good news: The growth in new business applications isn’t concentrated in any particular part of the country. In fact, the Midwest led the way during the third quarter and every single state reported an increase, according to the data.

Like the record-shattering number of unemployment applications documented earlier this year, the Census Bureau’s data about business formation provide a useful snapshot of just how completely bonkers 2020 has been. The pandemic has shifted how Americans work, eat, play, and socialize, and it has upended consumers’ demand for products. That disruption has created opportunities for new businesses, and entrepreneurial types have responded in droves.

“The talk is that a lot of folks who became unemployed, alright, most regrettably, but they’re sticking with it and they’re going out and starting new businesses,” Larry Kudlow, director of the White House’s National Economic Council, said last month. He predicted that the “gales of creative destruction” would blow through the U.S. economy as the recovery kicked in.

Of course, this isn’t really “creative destruction” in the way that Joseph Schumpeter originally described it—that is, as the usual churn of the business cycle that sees new ideas and innovations sweep aside older ones as a matter of course. More than 11 million people are out of work right now, and even though that figure has been falling in recent months, it remains more than twice as high as it was in February. The number of businesses to permanently close during the pandemic continues to grow, and those closures could accelerate as a surge in cases prompts new governmental restrictions on economic activity.

But the number of new startups in the pipeline isn’t just a silver lining. It’s also a way forward.

“There’s been this enormous shock to how we interact with each other, and it’s a positive sign there are lots of entrepreneurs out there trying to respond to that,” John Haltiwanger, an economics professor at the University of Maryland, told Bloomberg. Haltiwanger, a former chief economist at the Census Bureau who helped launch the agency’s tracking of business-creation data, says there’s a marked contrast between what’s happening now and what happened after the previous recession when startups “got clobbered” and were slow to recover.

That’s probably due to the nature of the two economic downturns. The Great Recession was the result of a banking collapse and credit crunch that made it more difficult for startups to borrow money. That’s not been the case this time around, thankfully, and the recovery should be relatively quick once the acute public health crisis is behind us.

Economic data aside, the number of new businesses might also say something positive about America’s resilience in the face of a once-per-century catastrophe. Yes, unemployment, depression, and suicide rates are rising. Still, starting a business is a fundamentally optimistic endeavor—a bet that things will get better and that there is money to be made in doing so—and more Americans than ever before are taking that shot right now.

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Dr. Fauci Finally Confirms That Children Don’t Catch Or Transmit COVID-19 In Large Numbers

Dr. Fauci Finally Confirms That Children Don’t Catch Or Transmit COVID-19 In Large Numbers

Tyler Durden

Mon, 11/30/2020 – 11:45

Authored by Stacey Lennox via PJMedia.com,

Better late than never. Perhaps because he believes Joe Biden will be inaugurated in January, Dr. Fauci is finally admitting that children do not get terribly ill from or transmit COVID-19 in any significant way. Weird, since Switzerland figured this out in April. Detailed genetic studies in Iceland showed that children were not passing the virus to adults in any significant numbers in June. And German researchers asserted that children could actually act as a brake on transmission within the community.

But good old “follow the science” Fauci was wringing his hands and hedging his bets in the media and during congressional testimony. Most notably, he got into a heated exchange with Senator Rand Paul, who is also a doctor.

Senator Paul correctly noted Sweden’s experience, which never closed their primary schools and did not see a spike in childhood illness. Germany also reopened schools in July with no significant issues. Since the summer, most industrialized countries have reopened schools, and many do not enforce distancing or mask-wearing. But this did not impress Dr. Fauci.

Paul noted the devastating effects of school closures, especially on disadvantaged children. It is only in the next decade that we will understand the impact of all the missed support services on these children. However, we do know many are not logging in for digital learning. Failure rates have also gone up where children only engage in distance learning.

Doctors and other agencies note increases in child abuse, depression, and other mental health issues in children. There has also been an uptick in self-harm and suicidal ideation. This, over a respiratory virus with an infection fatality rate (IFR) of 0.13%, according to the WHO, which is very stratified by age and tends to affect the very elderly.

This debate raged on through the summer, when President Trump said reopening schools was a priority. It became gobsmackingly stupid when mayors and governors began to convert public space to daycare centers where children could engage in distance learning. Yet, they would not reopen schools. State leaders who chose to, such as Georgia Governor Brian Kemp and Ron DeSantis in Florida, were widely criticized.

They were also widely covered for a bumpy first week. Then nothing bad happened. So, you really don’t hear about them anymore, likely because these states would blow up the preferred narrative. Your children can’t go to school because Donald Trump is president, basically. A health official in Los Angeles even said the quiet part out loud.

Because Dr. Fauci and other Health Experts™ would not realistically frame the virus’s risk for children, teachers’ unions used the pandemic as cover for their destructive political agenda. In many urban districts, they refused to return unless political demands were met. We also saw just how far left these organizations were when they joined radical protests with the Democratic Socialists of America and other groups. Their list of demands was a cornucopia of dangerous policies, such as defunding the police. Now, one of these radicals will likely lead the Department of Education. Fabulous.

But now that the Very Bad Orange Man is presumed to be leaving office, Dr. Fauci can report what this author and many other outlets have been reporting for months:

Actually, it was what anyone who was paying attention should have expected. By the time the virus ripped through Italy, it was apparent that the elderly and those with preexisting conditions were at the greatest risk. Dr. Birx was communicating that in the earliest briefings. Once the Iceland genetic and German studies came out, it should have been confirmed. As we watched other nations’ experiences, especially those that never closed schools, we could have made reasonable assumptions and moved forward.

But we didn’t. And our children will be paying for years to come in some of the more ridiculous areas of the country. New York City and Kentucky just closed schools again. Los Angeles has never opened them. One has to wonder what excuse they will use now—or if one is no longer necessary because they believe they won an election.

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/36ltKRb Tyler Durden

The Paranoid Style of American Politics—Presidential Election Edition

It is nearly a month since election day and yet discredited and debunked claims of election fraud or “irregularities” continue to go viral on social media platforms. Even some otherwise reputable commentators seem to get sucked in. What is particularly frustrating is that so many of these claims are easy to check, and yet so few bother to make the effort.

So, for example, various sites breathlessly report about thousands of absentee ballots in Pennsylvania and Michigan that were returned on the same day they were requested. How could this be?!? In both states, voters were allowed (and often encouraged) to request and return absentee ballots in person at local election offices. Indeed, in both states early in-person voting was conducted just this way. The voter goes to their local election office, requests an absentee ballot, receives it and fills it out on the spot, and then returns it, all in one visit (as both the PA and MI Secretary of State sites make clear). These were technically “absentee” ballots—and recorded as such—though used for early in-person voting.

Powerline posted on an allegedly anomalous voter turnout spike in Wisconsin that vanishes upon examination: The spike was caused by comparing turnout as a percentage of eligible voters for 2016 with turnout as a percentage of registered voters in 2020. The apples-to-apples comparison shows turnout increased slightly—as one would expect given the stakes of the election and how much easier early and absentee voting was this year—and the alleged spike disappears.

These are hardly the only easy-to-check claims that got spread before folks bothered to check the facts. Through a link on Instapundit, I found this American Thinker piece that is emblematic of the claims that purport to show “election theft”—and illustrative of how weak these claims are.

The article starts off with the “stunning fact” that Pennsylvania sent out 1.8 absentee or mail-in ballots, logged the return of 1.4 million mail-in ballots, but counted 2.5 million mail-in ballots. This claim was made by Rudy Giuliani at the Pennsylvania “hearing” on election irregularities. And it turns out this “stunning fact” is not true. As the American Thinker piece concedes in an update, “contemporaneous data completely contradicts Giuliani’s statement.” Whoever fed Rudy this claim confused primary and general election data. 1.8 million mail-in ballots were sent out in the primaries, but 3 million were sent out for the general election.

Continuing through the piece things don’t much improve. There are various versions of purportedly anomalous “vote spike” claims (which ignore how vote tallies are reported in batches that, depending on the location, often swing heavily for one candidate or the other), and a credulous cite to the Ramsland affidavit, which purports to show vote fraud in Michigan by accidentally confusing Michigan and Minnesota county level data. (Practice tip: MI and MN signify different states.) And so on.

That batches of absentee ballots from deep blue precincts would swing heavily to Joe Biden should not surprise anyone. For weeks leading up to the election Democrats and media commentators urged people to vote early, while Trump surrogates dismissed the reliability of mail-in voting. Thus it was entirely predictable that mail-in vote totals in deep blue precincts were significantly bluer than election day tallies.

Conservative commentator AG_Conservative has a useful round up and debunking of other viral election fraud claims (with lots of links) on his Patreon page. Or, if you prefer an MSM outlet, USA Today has its own index of election fraud fact checks. And then there are the silly statistical claims, such as the contention that “Benford’s law” somehow shows Biden’s vote totals were too improbable to be believed.

Conspiratorial claims about election theft are hardly new to 2020. We saw outrageous claims about the 2016 Presidential election and 2018 gubernatorial race in Georgia. Partisans do not like to believe that their candidate lost and often grasp at straws to show that their loss was “illegitimate.”

As an Ohio resident, I still remember all the ridiculous claims made about Ohio in 2004, many of which were based upon ridiculous claims of statistical anomalies or concerns that vote totals didn’t correlate closely enough to the exit polls. Substitute “Diebold” for “Dominion voting Systems” and you’ll get the idea of the sorts of claims that were made. In the end, a few dozen members of the House and one Senator voted against certifying the election results in January 2005.

The claims Ohio was stolen spread more slowly, in part, due to the lack of viral social media channels. More importantly, political leaders and commentators showed more principle and character. John Kerry quickly conceded the election, and party leaders (with the exception of Rep. John Conyers) fell into line, throwing cold water on claims of a Buckeye State conspiracy.

The contrast to 2020 is striking. Kerry put country over party and personal interest. Trump has not. Instead, the President has refused to concede and party officials (encouraged and magnified by online grifters and media personalities) have stoked and spread bogus election fraud claims and pretended as if there is a way to overturn the election results in court.

We’ve learned not to expect any better from Trump. It is disappointing we cannot expect better from others who claim to act on principle and to care about truth.

 

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Rabo: The World Has Broken Down Into “Quantum States”

Rabo: The World Has Broken Down Into “Quantum States”

Tyler Durden

Mon, 11/30/2020 – 11:05

By Michael Every of Rabobank

Let’s start nice and light for a Monday morning. Most readers probably have a passing knowledge of quantum physics: that a “quantum state” is a mathematical entity that provides a probability distribution for the outcomes of each possible measurement on a system; or, in this case, that particles at the quantum level can exist in two different states at once –until measured— at which point they become “fixed” (and in the case of some particles, “entangled”). Think of Schrödinger’s cat or Heisenberg’s indeterminacy.

So? Well, a research paper published in 2019 but suddenly doing the social media rounds in 2020, goes a step beyond this: as the MIT Technology Review put in its headline, “A quantum experiment suggests there’s no such thing as objective reality”

The article underlines that…

“The idea that observers can ultimately reconcile their measurements of some kind of fundamental reality is based on several assumptions. The first is that universal facts actually exist and that observers can agree on them; [second] is that observers have the freedom to make whatever observations they want; and another is that the choices one observer makes do not influence the choices other observers – an assumption that physicists call locality.….If there is an objective reality that everyone can agree on, then these assumptions all hold.”

That all seems reasonable, right? But the results of the 2019 University of Vienna quantum experiment suggested that one or more of the above assumptions – that there is a reality we can agree on, that we have true freedom of choice, or that what one decides does not influence the decisions of others must be wrong. Pretty head-spinning stuff… unless you have spent any time near social media (slash media?), where all three are demonstrably false.

Yet quantum physicists saying there is no objective reality is perfectly 2020: making a terrible pun, we seem to have some ‘quantum states’ to worry about.

  1. The US election has two ‘winners’ – at least in the minds of the two main candidates who ran and the majority of the public who voted for them. Opinion polls show a very large number of Republicans believe President Trump when he says he actually won and it was all “rigged”; and the majority of Democrats of course believe former Vice-President Biden as he carries on assembling a provisional cabinet for January – and spraining his ankle playing with a dog. This week should see developments that will make the final outcome more “measured” in the quantum sense: will the Supreme Court or state legislatures prove wild cards?  On which note, I have been arguing for some time that in many senses we are heading back to a more 19th century world: a multi-polar environment of populism, nationalism, mercantilism, neo-imperialism, militarism, etc. In such a polarizing environment between and within countries, why *wouldn’t* US elections echo 19th-century (1824, 1876) templates rather than 2008 or 1980, etc.? There is also a story going round that Trump, if he loses, will hold his own shindig on inauguration day to announce the launch of his campaign for re-election in 2024: that certainly puts us straight into potential 1824 > 1828 territory, something Newt Gingrich has also tweeted about recently. While quantum physics knows as well as markets that past does not predict future, don’t forget the populist Andrew Jackson won in 1828 after claiming he was cheated in 1824.
  2. Brexit also has two (short-term) outcomes: a deal or no deal. It seems that if there is movement on fishing rights, then we get the former; and if there isn’t, then there isn’t: so is it a case of Schrödinger’s fish? Word at time of writing was that things were looking up. (Again, the British tone is all very 19th century, right the way down to the Brits no longer being funny anymore – except inadvertently.)
  3. China’s economy continues to power ahead, with bumper net exports and capital inflows and industrial profits all being recorded: and yet the PBOC just had to inject CNY200bn (USD30bn) in MLF a month ahead of the end of the year to ease liquidity tightness, and that on the back of CNY800bn two weeks ago. Yes, this is gross not net: but why the need for so much PBOC help when everything is going so well? Perhaps because Chinese banks are still trying to repay CNY3.7 trillion of short-term interbank debt and purchase CNY1 trillion of government bonds and repay maturing MLF injections,…and are worrying about SOE bond defaults. Again, everything is going so well though: there just isn’t any cash as a result. Isn’t the most dangerous part of the Heisenberg below the water?

In all three cases, markets decided which way to “measure” these quantum states weeks ago – and without digging down too many levels in detail, let alone to the sub-atomic. Should any outcome start to look indeterminate again, the current halo of market risk-on invincibility may slip.

Other matters, like the assassination of the head of Iran’s nuclear program Fakhrizadeh by a remote-control automatic weapon, and threats of retaliation from Tehran, can more easily be brushed aside by Wall Street, no doubt, after a brief knee-jerk risk-off response (as they were, correctly, back in January when Soleimani was assassinated).

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The Paranoid Style of American Politics—Presidential Election Edition

It is nearly a month since election day and yet discredited and debunked claims of election fraud or “irregularities” continue to go viral on social media platforms. Even some otherwise reputable commentators seem to get sucked in. What is particularly frustrating is that so many of these claims are easy to check, and yet so few bother to make the effort.

So, for example, various sites breathlessly report about thousands of absentee ballots in Pennsylvania and Michigan that were returned on the same day they were requested. How could this be?!? In both states, voters were allowed (and often encouraged) to request and return absentee ballots in person at local election offices. Indeed, in both states early in-person voting was conducted just this way. The voter goes to their local election office, requests an absentee ballot, receives it and fills it out on the spot, and then returns it, all in one visit (as both the PA and MI Secretary of State sites make clear). These were technically “absentee” ballots—and recorded as such—though used for early in-person voting.

Powerline posted on an allegedly anomalous voter turnout spike in Wisconsin that vanishes upon examination: The spike was caused by comparing turnout as a percentage of eligible voters for 2016 with turnout as a percentage of registered voters in 2020. The apples-to-apples comparison shows turnout increased slightly—as one would expect given the stakes of the election and how much easier early and absentee voting was this year—and the alleged spike disappears.

These are hardly the only easy-to-check claims that got spread before folks bothered to check the facts. Through a link on Instapundit, I found this American Thinker piece that is emblematic of the claims that purport to show “election theft”—and illustrative of how weak these claims are.

The article starts off with the “stunning fact” that Pennsylvania sent out 1.8 absentee or mail-in ballots, logged the return of 1.4 million mail-in ballots, but counted 2.5 million mail-in ballots. This claim was made by Rudy Giuliani at the Pennsylvania “hearing” on election irregularities. And it turns out this “stunning fact” is not true. As the American Thinker piece concedes in an update, “contemporaneous data completely contradicts Giuliani’s statement.” Whoever fed Rudy this claim confused primary and general election data. 1.8 million mail-in ballots were sent out in the primaries, but 3 million were sent out for the general election.

Continuing through the piece things don’t much improve. There are various versions of purportedly anomalous “vote spike” claims (which ignore how vote tallies are reported in batches that, depending on the location, often swing heavily for one candidate or the other), and a credulous cite to the Ramsland affidavit, which purports to show vote fraud in Michigan by accidentally confusing Michigan and Minnesota county level data. (Practice tip: MI and MN signify different states.) And so on.

That batches of absentee ballots from deep blue precincts would swing heavily to Joe Biden should not surprise anyone. For weeks leading up to the election Democrats and media commentators urged people to vote early, while Trump surrogates dismissed the reliability of mail-in voting. Thus it was entirely predictable that mail-in vote totals in deep blue precincts were significantly bluer than election day tallies.

Conservative commentator AG_Conservative has a useful round up and debunking of other viral election fraud claims (with lots of links) on his Patreon page. Or, if you prefer an MSM outlet, USA Today has its own index of election fraud fact checks. And then there are the silly statistical claims, such as the contention that “Benford’s law” somehow shows Biden’s vote totals were too improbable to be believed.

Conspiratorial claims about election theft are hardly new to 2020. We saw outrageous claims about the 2016 Presidential election and 2018 gubernatorial race in Georgia. Partisans do not like to believe that their candidate lost and often grasp at straws to show that their loss was “illegitimate.”

As an Ohio resident, I still remember all the ridiculous claims made about Ohio in 2004, many of which were based upon ridiculous claims of statistical anomalies or concerns that vote totals didn’t correlate closely enough to the exit polls. Substitute “Diebold” for “Dominion voting Systems” and you’ll get the idea of the sorts of claims that were made. In the end, a few dozen members of the House and one Senator voted against certifying the election results in January 2005.

The claims Ohio was stolen spread more slowly, in part, due to the lack of viral social media channels. More importantly, political leaders and commentators showed more principle and character. John Kerry quickly conceded the election, and party leaders (with the exception of Rep. John Conyers) fell into line, throwing cold water on claims of a Buckeye State conspiracy.

The contrast to 2020 is striking. Kerry put country over party and personal interest. Trump has not. Instead, the President has refused to concede and party officials (encouraged and magnified by online grifters and media personalities) have stoked and spread bogus election fraud claims and pretended as if there is a way to overturn the election results in court.

We’ve learned not to expect any better from Trump. It is disappointing we cannot expect better from others who claim to act on principle and to care about truth.

 

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Watch Live: Trump Lawyers Address Arizona State Legislature On Election Integrity

Watch Live: Trump Lawyers Address Arizona State Legislature On Election Integrity

Tyler Durden

Mon, 11/30/2020 – 10:55

The Arizona State Legislature is scheduled to hold an election integrity hearing this morning that will include President Trump’s lawyers Jenna Ellis and Rudy Giuliani.

Notably, officials are expected to certify the state’s election results today and give Arizona’s 11 electoral votes to President-elect Joe Biden.

Trump’s legal team dropped its lawsuit in Arizona after it was rendered moot, and a state judge threw out a lawsuit filed by the Arizona Republican Party seeking an audit of the votes cast on Election Day, according to CNN. The Trump team has since adjusted its tactics, attempting instead to convince state legislatures to select representatives to the Electoral College that would overturn the results of the election and vote for Trump.

State Rep. Mark Finchem confirmed the hearing on Friday:

“After a review of the statistical anomalies, and there are to numbers [sic] to count, affidavits of improper actions, and community outrage that has grown out of what appears to voters to be an attempt to throw the election through a number of fraudulent efforts, we decided as a Members [sic] of the Legislature, and not as members of any specific committee, that we should move forward with a public hearing.”

Watch Live (due to start at 11amET):

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