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Pollsters Get Lucky in New Hampshire

America’s pollsters can breathe a sigh of relief: The outcome of last night’s New Hampshire primary largely mirrored the trend their polls had been finding in the state. Donald Trump won big, while the remaining support was badly splintered among the four main “establishment lane” candidates in John Kasich, Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush, and Ted Cruz.

But make no mistake: This salutary result from a survey researcher’s perspective was mostly a matter of good luck.

The big problem with horse-race pulse taking, especially during primary season, is found in the very form of the question being asked: If the election were held today, for whom would you vote? But of course, polls are taken days, weeks, and months before people actually cast their ballots.

As any honest survey researcher will tell you, polls are not supposed to be predictive, though we’ve collectively come to treat them like they are. The best a poll can do is to accurately measure attitudes right now. But even a methodologically flawless survey that perfectly captures current voter sentiment runs the substantial risk that people could change their minds before Election Day.

That’s exactly what went wrong in Iowa last week. Trump had been enjoying a solid advantage in the polls. But as the cliché goes, the only poll that truly matters is the one that happens at the ballot box, and among those who made up their minds at the last second regarding who they would support, more than 85 percent went for someone other than the real-estate mogul. That late shift (paired with the fact that an estimated 80,000 people turned out to caucus for the first time this year) proved to be enough to erase his lead completely.

Interestingly, more than half of New Hampshire Republicans also waited until the final days to decide who they’d support, according to the exits. But unlike in Iowa, where people broke away from how they had been telling interviewers they were planning to vote, here they came down in proportions closer to what pollsters had been gauging.

CNN New Hampshire 2016 primary exit polls

The pre-election RealClearPolitics average had Trump getting about 31 percent of the vote. Among those who made up their minds “just today” or withing “the last few days,” 24 percent and 21 percent respectively went to Trump. In other words, yes, last-minute deciders fell off somewhat from the frontrunner, but not at nearly the same level they had in the Hawkeye State. Meanwhile, Kasich overperformed among late-breakers, boosting him unexpectedly (but not exactly shockingly) into second.

One lesson is this: The last few days of a campaign can matter quite a lot, as they did in Iowa, where Trump made the fatal mistake of “snubbing” voters by skipping the last debate. Had things played out otherwise this week in New Hampshire, we could be looking at a totally different set of results. But it’s only in hindsight that you can really discern whether the polls in a state are wrong or right.

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The Lies of UVA’s Jackie: Read All the Catfishing Texts She Sent Her Crush

It’s already well established that the lies of “Jackie”—the false accuser at the center of Rolling Stone’s gang rape hoax—grew out of her efforts to catfish Ryan Duffin, a boy she had a crush on. Recently released text messages between the two don’t add much new information, but they continue to confirm the almost unfathomable level of deliberate deception to which Jackie resorted.

The texts were released by a local news station, CBS 6. They comprise messages exchanged between Duffin and “Haven Monahan,” a presumed alias of Jackie’s. Haven pretended to have a romantic interest in Jackie as a means of gauging Duffin’s level of interest. Duffin, for his part, at first pretended to be a girl in Haven’s class—he was on orders from Jackie to find out whether Haven liked her. Eventually, Duffin admitted to Haven that he was the male friend whom Jackie likes—something Haven, who is actually Jackie, already knows—and Haven pretends to be furious.

There are 22 pages of texts spanning from September 5, 2012 until October 7, 2012.

Some other interesting highlights:

Jackie’s Haven frequently uses coarse language, referring to the person Jackie likes as “the faggot first year.”
Other lies quickly take shape. Haven claims that Jackie is ill and frequently hospitalized. He eventually claims he met her in the hospital.
Jackie’s penchant for crying wolf is also evident. Haven claims he doesn’t know where Jackie is, that she was last seen with another male, and tells Duffin that he intends to call the police. Duffin rejects his concerns.
On October 7, Duffin finally appears to catch on to the act, and demands to speak to Haven over the phone. Haven, for his part (“his”), already seems to be spinning the rape lie. He alludes to something bad happening between them, refuses to talk about her, and claims that he has agreed not to contact her. He accuses Duffin of working for the University of Virginia and acts like he is afraid of getting in trouble for misbehavior.
Duffin remains polite—almost to a fault—throughout. They have no further contact after October 7.

The texts have emerged as part of UVA Dean of Students Nicole Eramo’s lawsuit against Rolling Stone.

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Rand Paul Is Out—But Libertarianism Is Finally Mainstream: New at Reason

Rand Paul is out. Donald Trump just schlonged the Grand Old Party in New Hampshire. And Bernie Sanders is setting dumpster fires in the hearts and minds of America’s youth.

Borrowing the sage words of moral philosopher (and round robin bowler)Walter Sobchak, I have to ask: Has the whole world gone crazy?

Matt Kibbe hopes to convince you that the answer is no. Despite ominous signs that the End Times near, everything’s going to be all right.

View this article.

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If Chesapeake Does Not Go Bankrupt In Just Over One Month, This Could Be The Trade Of The Year

Back in March 2013, when nat gas, and pretty much everything else, was trading far higher than where it is today, investors who believed in the vision of Chesapeake’snow long gone CEO Audrey McClendon had no problem writing a check for $500 million of other people’s money to the Oklahoma gas giant, hoping to generate a “whopping” 3.25% return by the time the bonds matured on March 15, 2016.

Sadly, since then things changed.

Chesapeake – as we previously reported – is now on the verge of bankruptcy having hired K&E as a restructuring advisor, and the bonds are currently trading at 80.5 cents on the dollar. As the chart below shows, this results in a yield that is about 100 times where it was at issue, or just shy of 300%!

Which brings up an interesting trade opportunity: yes, Chesapeake will default, but the question is when. For those who think the company will somehow survive for a more than a month without filing Chapter 11 or arranging some prepackaged bankruptcy, and actually repays the $500 million issue, this could be the trade that makes someone’s full year, because with a yield of 299%, and a cash on cash return of 25% (being paid par on March 15 for a bond that can be purchased today for 80 cents), it does look somewhat attractive, especially if hedged with a short on CHK stock, which at last check was trading at an implied market cap of $1.3 billion.

Will anyone break from the revulsion herd now that FOMO has been frozen in carbonite, and put this 299% yielding trade on now, when nobody wants to touch CHK with a ten foot pole (unlike 2 years ago when the bond was oversubscribed at a 3.25% yield) or will the yield keep grinding higher? And more importantly, if not, will Chesapeake be the biggest energy bankruptcy in the US energy sector to start 2016?

The answer to all, in just over one month.

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The Fed’s Zombie Economy: ROI Crashes 80% In 40 Years

Submitted by Daniel Drew via Dark-Bid.com,

Breaking the zero bound has become a rite of passage in the post-2008 world. As Mark Jeftovic noted, "Once a financial market hits the zero bound in interest rates, it's like crossing the event horizon of a black hole – there is no going back." Indeed, the number of government bonds trading at negative yields increases every day.

Negative Bond Yields

In the new bizarro world where you pay banks for the privilege of giving them your money, one has to wonder what will be the next thing to break the zero bound. When one of the largest corporations in America has over $100 billion in revenue but can't even make $1 billion in profits, it's easy to imagine a few possibilities.

American corporations have been playing a musical chairs game where the loser gets taken out back and shot. During the last 40 years, the life expectancy of firms in the Fortune 500 has declined from 75 years to less than 15 years. In what Forbes called "the most important business study ever," Deloitte released The Shift Index, which compiles the ROI of 20,000 US firms from 1965-2009. The chart shows an 80% collapse in the average ROI of American businesses.

Declining ROI

With negative interest rates around the corner, how long will it be until the Fed props up the zombie economy and pushes average profit margins below the zero bound?

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Top U.S. Official Admits – Government Will Use “Internet of Things” to Spy on the Public

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You can’t say you weren’t warned. The writing on the wall that “smart devices” would prove to be manna from heaven for spy agencies and hackers around the word has been obvious for a very long time.

A year ago, I published two articles on this topic. The first highlighted the revelation that Samsung’s Smart TV can and will listen to your conversations, and will share the details with a third party. The second had to do with the release of a high-tech Barbie that will listen to your child, record its words, send them over the internet for processing. If you missed these posts the first time around, I suggest you get up to speed:

A Very Slippery Slope – Yes, Your Samsung Smart TV Can Listen to Your Private Conversations

Big Barbie is Watching You – Meet the WiFi Connected Barbie Doll that Talks to Your Children and Records Them

Moving along to today’s article, we learn that the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, admitted that the government intends to use the “Internet of Things” for spying on the public. As Trevor Timm of the Guardian notes:

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Former Bush Attorney General Alberto Gonzales Calls for Criminal Justice Reform

The push for criminal justice reform in mainstream politics continues. Former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, who served from 2005 to 2007 under President Bush after being his White House counsel since 2001, penned an op-ed calling for criminal justice reform in today’s USA Today.

He began with an anecdote from his time as general counsel to George Bush when Bush was governor of Texas in the 1990s, and how he had to tell a young rape victim DNA evidence has revealed she identified the wrong man as her accuser. That man had been convicted and spent 12 years in jail before being exonerated.

“That story is not rare,” Gonzales wrote, pointing to statistics from the National Registry of Exoneration that identified 149 convicted defendants who were exonerated in 2015. “Even one mistake is one too many and a miscarriage of justice for the individual wrongly incarcerated,” Gonzales wrote. “At the same time, it is also a miscarriage of justice for victims like the one who sat in my office in 1997. For them, the guilty have gone free.”

Gonzales insisted he supports “tough justice,” but that any formulation of justice has to involve only the guilty being punished. He is no longer convinced “forensic science” is as solid as the law enforcement community has claimed:

Subjective, pattern-based forensic techniques such as bite mark, hair comparison and even fingerprint analysis might not have sufficient scientific foundation. Even certain types of DNA analysis are now open to reasonable questions about their capacity to connect a specific individual to a crime.

Former Reason editor Radley Balko, now of the Washington Post, has written extensively about flimflam forensics. The case of Cory Maye, an innocent man put on death row over the killing of a cop, involved forensics that was presented in a “downright misleading” way, as Balko reported.

Gonzales also pointed out the problem with public defenders and their role in contributing to bad prosecutions. Often, those accused and without resources cannot wait for a court-appointed lawyer because spending time in jail can cost their job,” Gonzales wrote. “They are forced to plead guilty though they have not committed a crime.”

Gonzales also brought up Guantanamo Bay and what he saw as the public’s misprioritization of constitutional rights. “There appears to be more public outrage over the perceived lack of constitutional protections for foreign terrorists held in the military facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, for acts committed overseas than there is for U.S. citizens wrongly convicted in this country,” wrote Gonzales. “That is a sad commentary.”

The evolving opinions of leading law enforcement figures like Gonzales matter, because they make it more difficult to relegate criminal justice reform to the fringes. Conversely, the devolving opinions of people like Sen. Ted Cruz, a Republican presidential candidate who attached himself to criminal justice reform before worrying, dishonestly, that such reforms would lead to violent felons returning to the streets. Such political posturing is dangerous because it feeds into the ill-informed fears of a gullible public. It’s certainly anathema to liberty, even as Cruz pushes hard to win the “liberty vote,” such as it may be.

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“It’s Worse Than 2008”: CEO Of World’s Largest Shipping Company Delivers Dire Assessment Of Global Economy

Earlier today, we highlighted the rather abysmal results reported by Maersk, the world’s largest shipping company.

To the extent the conglomerate is a bellwether for global growth and trade, things are looking pretty grim. Maersk Line – the company’s golden goose and the world’s largest container operator – racked up $182 million in red ink last quarter and the outlook for 2016 isn’t pretty either. The company now sees demand for seaborne container transportation rising a meager 1-3% for the year.

“The demand for transportation of goods was significantly lower than expected, especially in the emerging markets as well as the Group’s key Europe trades, where the impact was further accelerated by de-stocking of the high inventory levels,” the company said, in its annual report.

Just how bad have things gotten amid the global deflationary supply glut you ask?

Worse than 2008 according to CEO Nils Andersen who last November warned that “the world’s economy is growing at a slower pace than the International Monetary Fund and other large forecasters are predicting.” Here’s what Andersen told FT:

“It is worse than in 2008. The oil price is as low as its lowest point in 2008-09 and has stayed there for a long time and doesn’t look like going up soon. Freight rates are lower. The external conditions are much worse but we are better prepared.”

As FT goes on to note, “capacity in the container shipping industry increased 8 per cent in 2015” despite the fact that Maersk only sees global trade growing at between 1% and 3% in 2016.

Imports to Brazil, Europe, Russia, and Africa are all falling, Andersen warned. The company’s business, Andersen says, is suffering from a “massive deterioration.” That, you can bet, will likely lead to a “massive deterioration” in Maersk’s shares, which took a substantial hit on Wednesday in the wake of the quarterly and annual results.

Through it all, Andersen is attempting to strike an upbeat tone: “We are very strongly placed not only to get through this period but benefit from it. We are quite enthusiastic about it,” he said.

Check back in six months to see how “enthusiastic” Andersen is once he realizes the slump in global growth and trade is no longer cyclical but has in fact become structural and endemic.

via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1QVS5xz Tyler Durden

How Systems Break: First They Slow Down

Submitted by Charles Hugh-Smith of OfTwoMinds blog,

Alternatively, we can cling to a state of denial, and the dominant system will be replaced by archetypal systems that are not necessarily positive.

Understanding our current socio-economy as a system of sub-systems enables us to project how and when unsustainable sub-systems will finally unravel.

The reality that cannot be spoken within the conventional media is that all the primary financial systems we believe are permanent and indestructible are actually on borrowed time.

One way to assess this decline of resilience is to look at how long it takes systems to recover when they are stressed, and to what degree they bounce back to previous levels.

A compelling article on this topic was recently published by The Atlantic: Nature's Warning Signal: Complex systems like ecological food webs, the brain, and the climate all give off a characteristic signal when disaster is around the corner.

"The signal, a phenomenon called “critical slowing down,” is a lengthening of the time that a system takes to recover from small disturbances, such as a disease that reduces the minnow population, in the vicinity of a critical transition. It occurs because a system’s internal stabilizing forces—whatever they might be—become weaker near the point at which they suddenly propel the system toward a different state."

Recent email exchanges with correspondent Bart D. (Australia) clued me into the Darwinian structure of this critical slowing down and loss of snapback (what we might characterize as a loss of resilience).

Beneath the surface dominance of one system are many other systems that are suppressed by the dominant system.

As the dominant system weakens / destabilizes / slows down, these largely invisible systems compete to occupy more of the ecosystem.

An example in the financial realm is barter: in a system dominated by central bank/state issued money and digital transactions, barter still exists but on a very modest scale.

When central bank/state money loses its value and utility (due to hyper-inflation, etc.), then barter expands rapidly to fill the vacuum left by the demise of the dominant system.

The ecosystem example illustrates how critical transitions occur: as the dominant system loses resiliency and slows down, other systems fill the ecosystem spaces that are opened up by the weakness of the dominant arrangement. At some point, the balance or equilibrium of the ecosystem experiences a phase transition and a new balance of other dynamics become dominant.

In human systems, this process can be at least partially conscious: we can see the dominant paradigm weakening, and start developing other systems that can compete for the resulting openings in the financial/social ecosystem.

Alternatively, we can cling to a state of denial, and the dominant system will be replaced by archetypal systems that are not necessarily positive. I opt for conscious development of alternatives that can compete transparently for dominance as the status quo dissolves and is replaced by more resilient, sustainable systems.

This is the core purpose of my new book A Radically Beneficial World: Automation, Technology and Creating Jobs for All.