Election Day Prediction: Trump Wins

It is intellectually interesting to be going into an election with such strongly competing information about who is likely to prevail.  All but a few insurgent poll outfits show an easy Biden victory. If these models are in any way accurate, Trump has no chance.

The few insurgents, meanwhile, predict a massive Trump victory.

My sense is that the polls are models, and our ability to predict complex phenomena well enough to model it is quite weak. We think we can because we can model things like physics well enough to put a probe on Mars, or hit an asteroid moving a million miles an hour and millions of miles away. Yet those are relatively simple things to do, because the forces acting on the planet Mars or the asteroid are few in number.  You can model the increasing effect of gravity as the asteroid approaches the sun using an inverse square law we've known since Newton. 

Try modeling which way a small, light balloon will go in a windstorm here on Earth, though, and you can't model it accurately for a hundred yards. The fluid dynamics of the atmosphere are too complex. We deal with turbulence by the application of main force, not by understanding exactly how it will affect an aircraft. 

Our models of complex phenomena are reliably terrible. Viral models were wildly inaccurate; economic models are never any good; climate change theory is based around models we have no reason to trust, and good reasons to distrust if we are honest with ourselves about their predictive history since the 1970s or so. 

So I'm going to found my guess on what I think I know about American politics, rather than the modeled outcomes. What I think I know is this: 

* Americans hate political violence, and political violence by the Left has been ongoing since the summer. Democrats have actively abetted it in Democratic cities, as for example by not prosecuting rioters. Democrat-controlled cities are boarded up today, and everyone knows which side is the danger causing it. Americans will not like this.

* Though the police are having a bad year in terms of public confidence, they're still more trusted than any branch of elected government. Every major police organization has endorsed the President's re-election as a means of quelling the violence.

* Restrictions on freedom anger Americans, and the Biden campaign is promising new lockdowns and mandates if elected.

* Americans hate being told that they are racists, or that America is racist, and love being made to feel patriotic and hopeful. The Left has built its campaign around the 1619 Project and racial resentment, while the Trump campaign has been relentlessly patriotic and has engaged in positive outreach to minorities.

* Americans love economic booms and hate recessions or depressions. Trump presided over a wild economic boom until COVID, and even now we are in a V-shaped recovery that will flesh out into a boom if he is re-elected. Biden is promising economy-killing tax increases and lockdowns (and nobody loves paying more taxes anyway).

* Trump has started no new wars, and has slimmed our footprint in existing wars as far as he can manage. He has avoided creating pools of instability out of which things like ISIS can spring. He has also overseen the development of unheard-of normalization between Israel and Arab states, and economic normalization in the Kosovo region. Peace and Prosperity are hard to beat.

* The intense hatred facing Trump is largely a class hatred, and although this class controls nearly all of our media and much of our government, it is not large. Elizabeth Warren was the candidate of the college educated white women who make up its core, and she didn't even win her own state in the Democratic primary. They will doubtless persuade many voters through their relentless control of information, but many more regard them with scorn.

* Biden's record includes the 1994 Crime Bill, and repeated threats to cut Social Security. Even his own machine voters have to approach him out of a sense of party loyalty rather than personal affection. Trump, meanwhile, draws rock-star crowds everywhere he goes.

For all those reasons, then, I think Donald Trump will easily win tomorrow. Maybe I'm wrong; maybe the experts will prove right, and the models will work for once. 

If so, I'll be surprised. I've been surprised before; I was surprised that Trump won the Republican primary, and again when he got elected. I was surprised when he achieved a major development in Middle East peace, when he didn't start new wars, and when his Presidency was marked by effective outreach to non-white voters rather than a Brazilianization of our politics into racialized factions. 

He's surprised me a lot, in other words, but generally in ways that worked to his advantage. My guess is that the surprise that is coming will be for his opponents, as it has often been.

POSTSCRIPT: 

It occurs to me that the one factor I'm ignoring is the psychological effect of COVID itself. I don't watch TV, but when I speak to those who do it's clear that they're being subjected to an intense psychological operation designed to make this disease seem terrifying and momentous. In fact -- per Worldometer -- there are only ~85,000 serious or critical cases of COVID currently in the entire world. 99% of cases are mild, and even then it's only 11 million people suffering the mild symptoms in the whole world. Almost everyone recovers.

It's not worth our attention, in my view; just one more risk among the many we run every day, and far from the worst one. I'm excluding it from my calculations because I think it's worth excluding, and I'm outside the psychological bubble that constantly reinforces it as a concern. 

If Trump loses tomorrow, it'll be because of that psychological operation combined with the other ones that were designed to hide his accomplishments and play up his mistakes and bad behaviors. That will by itself be remarkable; it will underline that Americans are much more manipulable than is good for a free people. 

Nevertheless, I don't expect it. I think the reason we keep hearing about the tyrannical governors and governments coming up with new restrictions is that most people -- not just most Americans -- have decided to proceed with their lives. They're not going to vote to cast themselves into a new darkness of suffering and poverty to address this annoyance. I could be wrong about that, too, of course; my tolerance for risk is very high.

Ray Wylie Hubbard

While he's not dead yet, let's let him tell the story about the late Jerry Jeff Walker's most famous song.

Going to get the beer was apparently a thing in the old days. "I've been beat up worse than that by bikers!"

Feast of All Souls

It was a remarkable Halloween, astrologically at least:  the first full moon on Halloween since 1944, and a blue moon at that. Mushrooms sprang up here like I've never seen, indeed that I've never seen.

I played chess with a child who is learning the game, and not too badly; he lost of course, but not without showing some class. I saw his mother, an old friend, and gave her a gift that I hope she'll like. Her children brought laughter to a meadow I know. 

Children remind you that we always live in the morning of the world. We grow too old to recognize it, if we don't have them around. But every morning is fresh and new, if your eyes are young enough to see it. Every mushroom is a miracle, and every leaf, and every blade of grass. Chesterton was good on this subject, but reading him only reminds you of the facts. You don't experience it until you see the child encounter it anew and for the first time.

But there's always a new child, and it is always fresh. In the mind of God perhaps it never grows old; as Chesterton put it, "Our father is younger than we."

Put the champagne on ice

"Americans value liberty; we will see to our own safety."

Tragic Week

 So, this week was tragic for Outlaw Country because we lost two of the greats. Jerry Jeff Walker died, and then Billy Joe Shaver.

Both of these men deserve stories told about them in their honor. There are two in those links; but you can find a lot more about both of them, and maybe especially Billy Joe. 

No, definitely about Billy Joe. 

Jerry Jeff did a bunch of good songs. Probably the most famous was Mr. Bojangles, but I always liked this one.

Billy Joe wrote a ton of songs, many of them great. You can listen to Waylon Jenning's best album, "Honky Tonk Heroes." He wrote almost every single one of those songs. Here's my favorite.

But this one is better, even if I don't like it as much.

That's Billy Joe in the white shirt. If you ever followed "Tales from the Tour Bus," Billy Joe has an episode devoted to him. The first season of that is fantastic. 

"Recruiting Challenges"

 A US Attorney asks people to please consider becoming police officers at this difficult time:

Challenge to recruit qualified police officers is real. Departures exceed recruits by large margin. National narrative, defund efforts and assaults on those in “Blue” dramatically harm recruiting.

I'll say it's challenging. Passing by Asheville on I-26 today I saw a billboard advertising immediate openings for new or transferred police officers —- in Fort Wayne, Indiana, four states and more than five hundred miles away.

Plausible deniability

The phrase that may define Biden's career as "modified limited hangout" defined Nixon's. There's still a nearly complete traditional press blackout of this story, the only exceptions being the New York Post and Tucker Carlson's show on Fox.

Flavors of political violence

You guys have probably already seen this AVI post, but I think it's brilliant, so I'm going to link it here. I've never gone deeply into "hole up and wait for the bad guys" territory, but I have to admit that I'm much closer to it this year than I've ever been before. I've never felt quite this betrayed by so many supposedly protective institutions at once. The press somehow managed to plumb deeper depths by memory-holing both the riots and the Hunter Biden bag-man-for-my-dad story more thoroughly than even I believed possible. I never believed elected officials could get away with wantonly destroying this many jobs at once. The craziness feels like it's mushroomed obscenely and is knocking even now at my front door. My neighborhood doesn't have a militia yet, but I'm beginning to wonder if we should. In past years, I suppose I always thought it was enough that we were ready to form one if needed. Well, hey, we have a terrible local prosecutor, but she'll be gone in a couple of months and will be replaced by a much better public servant that we went to a lot of trouble to find. So at least we don't have a Soros plant to contend with. We have a Sheriff about whom probably the worst thing you could say is that he's reluctant to use his power to the fullest to get repeat offender predators under control; in every other way he appears to be a good Joe who doesn't believe the government should overstep its bounds. Our county leadership is feckless and secretive but normally not too intrusive or power-mad. That won't help too much if the national leadership goes full psycho, but it may delay things for a while.

Eucatastrophe

One of the benefits of faith is that you need not trust in the powers of the world, because you can always hope for a miracle. If it turns out that a matter of honor saves our almost-fallen Republic, whose sons and daughters have all but forgotten honor's very name, it will be a miracle Tolkien himself would have appreciated. 

Bread still on my mind

THE BRONX, NY—AOC blasted election officials this week after discovering that people were actually waiting in line to vote rather than to receive bread from the government. According to sources, people are sometimes waiting up to 2 hours at polling stations, but are able to get bread within 5 minutes due to America's evil capitalist system.

An exceptional candidate

Congratulations to our newest Supreme Court Justice, Amy Coney Barrett. She's not the first Justice to serve alongside a Justice for whom she had clerked--that was Gorsuch, who clerked for Kennedy--but she's the first one to have been sworn in by that Justice (in this case, Clarence Thomas). I'm not convinced Justice Barrett is a conservative in the usual sense of the word. I think she's a textualist, which will lead her to many results embraced by conservatives and some that will drive conservatives crazy. Her decisions may also remind us that some changes are supposed to be brought about by legislation and, if necessary, by constitutional amendments, rather than by judges.

Mountain Folk, II

 You know, this sounds pretty familiar too. 

Mountain Folk

If you've been around the Hall for a long time, you've read about shootings before. I heard about another one today, a man up by Bates Gap who shot his own nephew. They were McCalls, I hear. Allow me to reproduce a bit of that history:

This is a derivation of the personal name "Cath-mhaol" which translates as "Battle Chief", or in this case "son of Battle-chief". An Alternate possibility is that it may be a variant of the patronymic Mac Cathail, "the son of Cathal" from the Olde Welsh "Catgual" meaning "war-wielder". Either way it is clear that the first nameholders were very much descendants of fighting men. The 'modern' surname is first recorded in Scotland in the latter half of the 14th Century, and is very much connected with Dumfriess. Early examples of recordings include Finlay MacChaell, who was bailie of Rothesay in 1501, and Finlay Makcaill, who was recorded in Bute in 1506. In 1607 Matthew McCall of Mayhole, Dumfriess, was charged with assisting the rebels, probably the Clan MacGregor, who had been outlawed by King James V1 of Scotland for persistent acts of violence against the government.

Now that about tells you what you need to know about this part of the country, which was settled by Scots who drove out most but not all of the Cherokee. The toughest bunch of them, the Eastern Band, are here yet. Good people, both sets.

I can't say too much about it. My grandfather once chased my cousin out of his house with gunfire from a .38 revolver. The old man was right, and the boy had it coming. I don't let him come around here. 

The neighbor who told me about it turned it into a disquisition on "White Liquor," which was apparently made everywhere up here in the old days. It still is, on a smaller scale. I know a neighbor I can walk to who has a still. I brew mead out of the local honey myself -- legally, of course. Picked a bunch of cider apples this week. 

Asheville Gallery of Art

 My wife’s work is now hanging there, if any of you pass through. 

Johnny Motorhead

"If somebody hates you for no reason, give that sucker a reason."

A Gentle Question

So, without doubt this "I had to remind him he was black" bit is racist (and probably not the persuasive argument she thinks it is). Everyone seems to realize that, to judge from the reception it's getting online.

How to account for her closing argument, that she 'might be willing to seal the deal in more ways than one' if he changes his vote, though? No commentary I've seen addresses what is really a vicious argument in several ways:

1) It assumes his moral judgment about how to vote is for sale, and not even for cash, but for a mere night's pleasure;

2) It proposes that her sexuality is for sale, and not even for cash, but for one vote out of tens of millions in a state that is all but certain not to be swung by his vote nor even his influence;

3) It suggests that his morality is therefore cheaply bought;

4) ...and that her sexuality likewise. 

It is not extraordinary that someone might make a proposal like this, but it is extraordinary that they would do so in public -- without shame -- and be called on it by no one whatsoever as far as I can tell. This seems to be quite in alignment with our self-declared elite's mores on sexuality.

How do we deal with this?

The staff of life

I'm still experimenting with bread. My new King Arthur yeast works much better than the packets that probably spent too much time in a hot warehouse. Now I'm working on making the dough wetter, for a larger "crumb," and leaving the loaf in the oven longer to get a deeper crust. We're getting a cold front in a few days and plan to get the wood-fired outdoor oven cranked up again, which should also help with the crust.

This loaf is about 4 hours start to finish, with only one kneading at the beginning (10 minutes in a mixer) and a few minutes of effort every hour or so after that. All it takes is flour, water, salt, and yeast, and the oven just as hot as you can get it. The loaf takes 6 cups of flour; my hand is in the picture for some scale.

Wolf Lake

From the Panthertown Approach.

On the Lake, One.

On the Lake, Two.

Gorge Spillway.

Wolf Lake is one of three lakes built in these mountains for aircraft aluminum production during World War II. Aluminum requires vast amounts of electricity to produce, so they built new hydroelectric dams to create the power. The others are Bear Lake and Cedar Cliff Lakes, both of which have names that are appropriate to their environments. Wolf Lake refers to a species of wolf, the Red Wolf, that hasn't been around here for a long time. 

This Seems Apropos in Our Current Time

 "For better is a laudable war than a peace which severs a man from God: and therefore it is that the Spirit arms the gentle warrior, as one who is able to wage war in a good cause"

-St. Gregory of Nazianzus

Brave Sir Robin

I apologize for posting this link without first supplying you with context that will make you feel safer.  I don't think Snopes has had time to fact-check it yet.