Only two Presidents have been elected to non-consecutive terms. The first was Grover Cleveland who served as 22nd (in 1884) and 24th (in 1892) Presidential terms (his two terms interrupted by Benjamin Harrison in 1888 even though Cleveland won the popular vote). Long time readers will know that Cleveland is very much a Friend of the Blog, being listed as one of the top US Presidents since forever.
The second, of course, is Donald Trump - Presidential terms 45 and (now) 47. We will see how history rates his two terms; 45 was pretty successful but with a lot of important stuff left undone. His great Presidential flaw was the people he appointed do implement his policies where they often submarined him.
We will see how much he learned from that. Glen Reynolds posts some interesting ideas (you should absolutely read the whole thing; it's certain that Trump's people have):
Last time around, Trump squandered his momentum. He passed the tax bill that the establishment GOP wanted, after which they didn’t need anything from him and turned to obstructing him. Here’ssomethingI wrote in 2017:
Like airplanes on a runway. Trump’s approach this time around should be what he should have done last time: Shock and awe. Shut down departments, fire bureaucrats, exercise emergency powers, all so fast that the establishment’s responses are saturated. Javier Millei’s whirlwind assault in Argentina should be the model, sometimes in specifics but also in general approach. Bureaucrats move slowly; Trump should move fast.
Elon Musk says he can cut $2 trillion easily; do it. Also, set bureaucrats competing with each other for what funds remain. Divide and conquer.
The interesting question here is how you scale this throughout all the
Federal Agencies. I think the answer is to use business-as-usual:
different offices play office politics against each other to get budget
and headcount. That's how the game is played. So set up an incentive
structure for Office A to rat our Office B's inefficiencies and
duplications to save their own skins. I expect that this would pay big
dividends.
So we shall see what we shall see. The results from last night were not the landslide I was sort of expecting (although it was a solid win). I expect there was some cheating but nothing like what we saw in 2020 - because as I've been saying, party apparatchiks saw the same Preference Cascade forming and a lot fewer were willing to risk jail to cheat for a loser.
But like Donald Trump, the USA dodged a bullet last night.
Well, and our precinct, at least. I'm not sure what that means - there's no way that Kamala Harris will win deep red Manatee County, Florida. But Republican voters seem eager to turn out and vote.
No, it's not because Harris is mad as a hatter on the Green New Deal or because Trump will kill all of this off - although both are entirely correct. No, this is thinking about the polling which shows the race to be neck and neck even though it is anything but.
Long time readers know how I bang on and on about the hideous data problems in today's Climate Science. I've been doing this for fifteen years - this post may not be the earliest where I delved into the problems in the climate databases, but it's one of the earliest. How To Create A Consensus On Global Warming:
We keep hearing people tell us that there is a "consensus" that the
planet is warming, because the "science is settled". Longtime readers
know my feelings on the latter, so there's no need to rehash old
arguments. Instead, I'd like to look at how one might go about
manufacturing a consensus. It's actually not hard.
Step 1: Change the data
[lots of details on data manipulation and shenanigans removed]
We see this in high fidelity in the polls for this election. There are a million ways to manipulate the polls to give you the results you want, such as estimates of Republican vs. Democrat turnout. In essence, I'm not objecting so much to the results of the polls, but rather to the assumptions that go into the sausage-making machine. Change the assumptions, change the output.
But my old post also highlights a key issue in play on today's polls:
Step 2. Fund only scientific research that confirms warming.
Who is paying for these polls, and what are their agendas? Quite frankly, we don't know either of these but the polls are acting in very close agreement. You could look at that as a measure of accuracy, or you could look at that as an outcome of the agendas - such as shaping public opinion and expectations.
Now I may just be nasty and suspicious but there is a way that we can test whether my suspicions hold water. It's the same thing we can do with Climate Science, to validate what we hear from the establishment scientists. All we have to do is ask a simple question: if the data are so settled, do we see lots of corroborating evidence or do we see a lot of evidence contradicting the establishment view?
In both cases, we see a lot of evidence contradicting the official narrative.
For example, for Global Warming, we see all sots of non-warming things:
You would think that if the science really were so settled that evidence for Global Warming would be falling off the trees. It's not.
And so with evidence for a "neck and neck election". If it were so settled - after all, essentially all polls say exactly that - then why all the evidence that says it's not?
Donald Trump campaigns for Arab-American vote in Detroit
LA Times, Washington Post, Gannet refuse to endorse Harris
All the betting sites have Trump not just ahead, but way ahead.
Even the crooked polls have Harris neck-and-neck, where both Hillary and Biden were up by 5 or 6
Barack Obama is trying to shame Black men to vote for Harris. And it's not working.
If it were a neck and neck race, you'd see a bunch of these on Harris' side, too. You don't.
Remember, we're in the middle of a preference cascade. Don't pay any attention to the polls which are trying to gaslight you. Pay attention to what you see with your own eyes. And as to the "margin of cheat" you can believe that a bunch of Democrat operatives are doing exactly that right now, and wondering if they want to risk 10 years in Club Fed to try to push a loser across the finish line. A bunch of them will take a hard pass on that.
An Extinction Level Event is when something - we typically don't really understand what - causes a mass die-off, with 60% or more of species disappearing. The most famous of these was the asteroid that finished off the dinosaurs (if you believe that; I'm skeptical that the answer to their demise is so neat and tidy).
Former President Donald Trump says that if reelected, he’ll create a government efficiency task force — and that Elon Musk has already agreed to lead it. During a speech in New York on Thursday, Trump said the new efficiency commission would conduct a “complete financial and performance audit of the entire federal government” and make recommendations for “drastic reforms.”
There's no need to look at Tesla's 50% Electric Vehicle market share, or compare SpaceX's launch rate to, well, the rest of the world combined. Most relevant to this discussion is how Elon cut 80% of Twitter's headcount, turning the company around.
Even though reports have Government employees cutting back expenditures in anticipation of potential cuts, lots of folks are skeptical that this can be done at all.
I'm not one of the skeptics, because I've seen this my very own self, in my career at Three Letter Intelligence Agency. It was the mid-1980s and I was a wet-behind-the-ears Electronics Engineer in the COMSEC R&D organization. Their recent triumph was the introduction of the STU-III secure telephone.
The STU-III was a technological marvel, providing high level (Type 1) encryption in a telephony device that, well, worked like a telephone. And it was delivered 2 years early because of a manager who might be described as the 1980s COMSEC version of Elon Musk.
As Deputy Director of Communications Security in the early 1980s, Mr. Deeley pushed the development and deployment of the STU-III secure telephone, which has been called the most significant improvement to the security of government voice communications in fifty years. He perceived the need for a new approach, and deployed an affordable and effective telephone security system within two years.
...
Walter Deeley was known as a strong-willed manager who pushed his subordinates hard to get results. While a tough taskmaster, the technical advances and mission achievements he led made the United States more secure.
Bold added by me. Let me give some additional color around that. He was a legend in the COMSEC R&D organization. His reputation was equal parts admiration and fear - it was almost like he who must not be named. People remembered the careers he derailed in his quest for an encrypting telephone.
One story told to me by an old hand was how Deeley had come into the office one Saturday to see how the program was working. He called down to the program office, and the phone rang and rang and rang. Finally one guy who happened to be in the office on the weekend answered. Deeley asked for the Program Manager. When told that the PM wasn't in because it was a Saturday, Deeley told the guy who was there that he was the new PM and to see him first thing on Monday. It was very Elon-Must-at-Twitter.
True story - at least I believed it was. And I for sure wasn't the only one there who did.
So to those who say you can't change how the Government works, color me skeptical. I'm skeptical because I've actually seen it change (well, heard from people who did).
The interesting question here is how you scale this throughout all the Federal Agencies. I think the answer is to use business-as-usual: different offices play office politics against each other to get budget and headcount. That's how the game is played. So set up an incentive structure for Office A to rat our Office B's inefficiencies and duplications to save their own skins. I expect that this would pay big dividends.
It's sort of like setting one type of dinosaur against another, in a battle to the death.
UPDATE 28 OCTOBER 2024 14:51: Elon says they can reduce the Federal budget by $2 Trillion.
A Preference Cascade is when a large portion of the population begins to realize - despite relentless government and/or media propaganda - that a lot of other folks think like they do and that the propaganda is, well propaganda. This is almost always catastrophic for The Powers That Be, because Preference Cascades tend to accelerate. As this progresses, formerly reliable underlings begin to think that TPTB are going to lose, and start to refuse to stick their necks out to protect the current order.
It's one thing to stuff ballot boxes when you think that everyone on your side is on board and your guy is going to win - and any potential investigation will be done in the most slipshod manner. It's quite a different thing when you wonder just how many of the guys on your side are actually going to go through with this, and if the other guy wins will you be facing 20 years in Club Fed.
At the extreme, the security services join the preference cascade. They smell an emerging winner and want to be on side when that happens. At this point, things get pretty grim for TPTB.
And so it turned out to be, with a Palace Coup that forced Slow Joe from the race and handed the nomination to Kamala Harris. She rode a carefully orchestrated media campaign to some level of acceptance for a while, but the last couple of weeks have been a disaster for her, and the next two look to be worse.
It's a Preference Cascade in action, with each day adding new evidence to the fact that the country is in the process of rejecting her. Consider:
All she knows is to play the race and gender card. It isn't working at all. Obama even came out lecturing Black men on how they were all misogynistic or something - and he got scorched for his trouble. Even The View disagreed with Obama on this.
Blogger Ann Althouse looks at the cries of misogyny from the New York Times and doesn't buy it:
If Kamala Harris were a man, she would not have been chosen for Joe Biden's Vice President, and if she were not Vice President, she would not have been the one that the nomination that was stolen from him got handed to. She wouldn't be anywhere near the presidency.
Everything is breaking Trump's way as the majority of the undecided voters decide that she's a Dimwit. This is a Preference Cascade in action - despite the media gaslighting, despite Google and Facebook pushing Harris and shadow banning Trump, despite deceptively edited TV interviews, people are deciding that their gut feeling is the same as millions of other people's. They're realizing that they're not alone - and in fact are in the obvious majority - and are now no longer afraid to say this.
And potential political allies are slowly moving away from her. If we can see high profile ones like Senators, there are a whole lot more in the party doing it too. The number of Democrats who will put their necks on the chopping blocks is dropping like a rock.
My sense is that the whole thing is over, and this will be a landslide as the country shows that you can't beat something with nothing. Sure there will be a cheat, but it won't be as big or as blatant as in 2020 because the people you need to pull that off are already second guessing their support for her. How many will be willing to go to jail to cheat for someone that literally nobody has ever voted for? Each day, that list gets shorter.
