NOTES FROM THE ELECTION

     These are four real names of people who signed in to vote at our polling station on Tuesday:

 

Alexander Calder

Sara Lee

Love Lady Belle Young

Zaw Oo

 

*

 

         Ratings for network TV coverage of election results plummeted this year.  Here’s the reason: it’s terrible.  Since 2016, it has been apparent that a bizarre set of protocols are in place that prevent them from reporting the truth about presidential elections. 

 

         You may recall that in 2016, it was obvious to everyone that Trump had won at about midnight on election night, yet no network reported the news until dawn.  This year, I knew at 10:15 on election night Trump had won, but the first network to “call” the presidential race was CNN at 5:30 AM, more than seven hours later.

 

         (One of the more laughable episodes can still be found online.  On CNN very serious-looking people in suits and ties and dresses and $300 haircuts are reporting Georgia results, specifically that Trump was holding a lead of 120,000 votes with only 100,000 votes yet to count in the state.  But instead of reporting, “Trump has taken Georgia,” they cut to Suzie or Sally or somebody, and she spent the next two minutes reporting on where those all-important uncounted votes would be coming from.)      

 

         I don’t have a good theory on why they do this.  Do they simply want viewers to stay tuned in as long as possible?  I understand it must be painful for some of them to say the words, “Trump has won,” but that doesn’t explain why Fox News wouldn’t call the election either.

 

         By the way, the best source for “who won” on a presidential election night is Pinnacle.com, the offshore international betting site that gives odds on thousands of sporting events and a few political races.  If you want to bet a million bucks on a soccer game in Pakistan, Pinnacle is where you go.  And if you want to bet on a U.S. election, Pinnacle (or a similar outfit), is where you must go because sports books in the U.S. cannot legally take such bets.

 

         Odds on the Trump-Harris race changed daily leading up to the election, and the final odds as the polls opened on Tuesday had Trump around a 3–2 favorite.  They continued to post odds all day. When the polls closed, the odds started changing as results came in.

 

         Then, about 10:15 PM, the odds on Kamala Harris winning shot up to 20-1.  Shortly thereafter, it was 50-1 for a few minutes, and then the odds board shut down.  At that point, Trump had won.  If Pinnacle was willing to take a $100 bet on Kamala winning, and pay you $2000 (or later, $5000), if she won, then Kamala no longer had a shot.  The race was over.

 

         This is why sports books like Pinnacle are so reliable.  A pundit or a polltaker who predicts a winner pays no price if they are wrong.  A sports book is putting millions on the line.

 

                                                      *

 

         For me, probably the most important reason I hoped Trump would win was to ensure the continued existence of Israel.  Second on my list, however, was the hope that rights of free speech in America would be restored, and that the new administration would try to protect them in the future.

 

         However, I will believe in the rescue of the First Amendment when I see it.

 

RFK Jr. definitely cares about this issue because he was silenced and his presidential campaign was destroyed by government censorship and de-platforming, with the help of social media moguls like Zuckerberg.  Musk, however, while he talks a good game, has a mixed record on the issue.  Yes, Twitter is not the outpost for the thought police it was before he took over, but content censorship has not disappeared from the platform.

 

As for Trump---well, free speech was never a major concern of his in the past, and he has never shown me that he understood the importance of it or of its role in our Constitutional system, so I’ll be watching what happens.  Today he gave a speech on his plan to dismantle the government censorship apparatus, and that’s encouraging.

 

                                             *

 

I worked the polls on Tuesday, something I had never done before, and it changed my perspective on the process somewhat.  It was a long day, from 6:30 AM to 8:30 PM, so I was glad when it was over, but it was a pleasure to pitch in with five strangers, all from different walks of life, all with different tasks, and get a job done.  It made me feel like a part of “the community” rather than a crank, which is what I am.

 

The polling station for the 38^th District, 13^th Precinct is in the Mifflin School in the East Falls neighborhood of Philadelphia.  There are five precincts voting in the school so there were about thirty poll workers and maybe 2000 voters.  It’s a heavily Democratic area, as is most of Philadelphia.  Our precinct recorded 336 votes for Harris and 73 for Trump, and the other precincts reported similar numbers.

 

 As the only Republican in our crew of six (my title was Minority Inspector), I was well-treated by the rest of the gang and I was grateful for that, and also for the fact that no issue of a partisan nature ever came up.  Over the course of our fourteen hours together, the one topic that was NOT discussed was politics.

 

Since the election was so fraught with tension, and since there is no shortage of loonies in the City of Brotherly Love, I was expecting (hoping?) there would be some sort of excitement or disruption or shouting, but there was nothing until about 7 PM when most of the voting was over and the crowds were pretty much gone.  A young guy in an Eagles shirt had just voted, and as he was leaving, he stopped in the middle of the voting operation and screamed “TRUMP!  TRUMP! TRUMP!” as loud as he could, then stood there for a few moments awaiting a response.  The boss of our little crew (the Judge of Elections), a woman about 5’2” who was 7 ½ months pregnant and wearing an N-95 mask, immediately got up and walked toward the guy shouting, “There’s no electioneering allowed in here!”  He was already headed for the door, however.

 

Shortly thereafter, we heard a car horn honking repeatedly outside and then an engine revving for ten or fifteen seconds.  Then, I think he left.

 

The next fifteen minutes were spent with election workers walking around sharing their outrage and expressing how frightened they were and how dangerous the guy was, and getting up their nerve to call the police.  (Remember---this incident occurred in Philadelphia, where most actual felonies are politely overlooked.)

 

Somebody did call the police and a cop arrived about an hour later, heard the story, took the list of witnesses that had been compiled for him, and departed.

 

 

                                             *

 

I wrote several articles in the lead-up to this election, and there are three things about which I was completely wrong.

 

First, Obama may not be the evil Svengali I thought he was, or perhaps he simply took his eye off the ball for a minute, but because he was in complete control of the Biden White House, I assumed he would be able to orchestrate the  transition, dump Joe cleanly, and replace him with a sentient being willing to serve as Barack’s figurehead from 2025 to 2029.  But events overtook him.  Kamala Harris was never the plan and Obama didn’t want her, but somehow she became the candidate.  Perhaps she was simply Joe’s revenge.  When Biden was finally forced to issue his resignation letter, there was no endorsement of anyone.  It was only a half hour later that he released his second bombshell of the day anointing her as his successor.

 

Next, I consistently criticized the Republican efforts to ensure a fair and honest contest.  They were taken so completely by surprise in allowing 2020 to be stolen that I had zero confidence in their ability or desire to clamp down on the cheating this time.  But they did.  The story of how that battle was fought and won is yet to be fully told, but they did it, and they deserve all the credit they have earned.

 

And finally, I was wrong about the senate race in Pennsylvania, where Republican Dave McCormick unseated Democrat Bob Casey Jr.  This result was much more surprising than Trump beating Harris in the state.  The name Casey (father and son) has been on the ballot for over forty years in Pennsylvania without a stain on their good names, and it never occurred to me a Casey could lose an election unless a massive corruption and bribery case suddenly appeared, or perhaps a Diddy-level sex scandal, and the chance of either of those happening was basically zero.

 

McCormick won because of Trump’s coattails, and because Casey is a very standard-brand Democrat in a year where that was not a good thing to be.  

 

                                             *

 

While working the polls at the Mifflin School, I was permitted to use the bathroom in the Teacher’s Lounge, and the experience shook me to my core.

 

If you are like me and 300 million other kids, you went to a school with a Teacher’s Lounge you were never permitted to enter, and to which the door was always closed.  Since I never saw the inside, and since I was a child, and since teachers were mysterious creatures, all I could do was fantasize about what the inside of a Teacher’s Lounge looked like, and over the course of the next sixty years of my life, these fantasies calcified themselves in my brain and became reality.

 

I was certain there were soft couches, a wet bar, a massage table so they could rub each other, a big TV, a pool table and a pinball machine or two, in addition to a luxurious washroom with perfumes and powders and beauty products.

 

Certain.  I was certain of all this. Then on Tuesday, I finally saw one.

 

It was a misshapen room, perhaps a hundred square feet, of obviously left-over space that couldn’t be used for much else.  There was nothing on the walls, a linoleum floor with a single throw rug, one frosted window looking out onto a dark interior courtyard with a couple trash cans in it, and two stuffed chairs with the stuffing coming out.  I have been interrogated by police in nicer rooms.

 

The tiny bathroom had an ancient toilet, a sink, a tiny mirror, paper towels and toilet paper.  The best I can say of it is that it was functional, and the sort of bathroom you would be pleased to find in a bus station because you would be expecting worse.

 

I am still processing this revelation and wondering about other mistaken fantasies I retain from my childhood.

 

                                             *

 

Usually, in presidential elections, there are a few swing states where both parties focus most of their time and money.  On election day, however, there are often a couple of surprises---states nobody thought was a “swing state” because everyone assumed Mr. X would win and Ms. Y had no shot.

 

There were no such surprises this time.  From 2020, there were seven swing states---Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada and Arizona.  Trump took Georgia then and Biden took the other six.

 

This time, Trump won all seven, but neither he nor Harris were able to flip any other states.  The seven swing states in 2020 were the only ones in play in 2024.  

 

                                             *

 

Of all the what-if questions about this election, one of the more intriguing is what if Harris had chosen Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro as her running mate.

 

No one can say whether it would have changed the outcome, of course, but I believe it would have improved the Democrats’ chances, for several reasons.

 

First, Tim Walz added nothing to the ticket, and no one can point to a place where he helped push the Dems over the top.  The results in Minnesota are revealing.

 

In 2020, Biden beat Trump by 233,012 votes, 52.4% to 45.3 %.  This time, Trump still lost, but he cut the margin to 138,145 votes, with 51.1% for Harris and 46.9% for Trump, even though Walz was, and is, the sitting governor in the state.

 

More importantly, dropping Shapiro from consideration because he is a Jew turned out to be not only embarrassing but ineffective.  It hurt Harris among Jewish voters of course, but it also did nothing to bring American Muslims to the Dems.  Dearborn, Michigan is the most Muslim town in the U.S., and it is represented in Congress by the radical Jew-hater Rashida Tlaib, (D., Hamas).  Yet Harris lost Dearborn.  Trump won there with 42%, Jill Stein took 18%, and Harris came in with only 36%.

 

Finally (and this is purely subjective), Josh Shapiro is an articulate, good-looking young guy who is generally well-liked in Pennsylvania while Tim Walz came across as a folksy doofus.  I can’t believe Shapiro would have done worse than Walz, and he could have done a lot better.

 

Copyright2024MichaelKubacki

OFTEN WRONG BUT NEVER UNCERTAIN

          I have gone both ways in my view of how this presidential election will play out, but now, with hours left until the polls open on November 5, I’m predicting Donald Trump will be inaugurated on January 20, 2025.  He’s going to win.

 

         The question for me has always been whether the Republicans would be able to overcome the margin of cheating. That Trump would get more real votes from people who were entitled to vote, at least in the seven critical swing states, was never an issue.  But since Democrats cheat in every election, without remorse, the two practical questions in a contest like this are: 1) will the margin be so large that the Democrats cannot alter the result in Harris’s favor? and 2) will the Republicans do enough to prevent the Democrats from stealing enough votes to win?

 

         As I have written over the past months, I am unimpressed with Republican efforts to fight the cheating.  Yes, they are spending money and time and effort.  And yes, they have hired a ton of lawyers.  Unfortunately, what they have done is reactive, and it has been reactive to the tricks the Democrats were playing in 2020.  The Republicans have largely failed to anticipate the problems they will face in this election.  Much like the Pentagon, the Republicans seem focused on winning the previous war, not this one.  They have brought a great deal of money and energy to this fight, but that’s not enough to win.  You need to be smart.

 

         But this time, the Republican failure to fight the cheaters may not be fatal.  This time, Kamala Harris is so weak a candidate that the Democrats will not be able to cheat enough to win.

 

         What tipped me here was a comment from a co-worker at my big-box store.  I had asked him who he thought would win, and he told me he had heard there were “a lot of people” who voted for Trump in 2020 but who were switching to Kamala now.  “Give me a name,” I said.  “Do you know anybody like that personally?”  Well, no, he told me, but he had two uncles who were deeply involved in local politics and they said there were a lot of such people.

 

         Whenever I hear this sort of thing, I ask myself if I know any actual person in that category.  Have I met them?  Do I know their name?  And if the answer is “no,” I realize I have learned something.

 

         In 2008, there must have been twenty people who told me Obama could not be elected because of all the people who wouldn’t vote for him because he is black.  I didn’t know any such people, of course.  I still don’t.  There were none.   Plenty of people didn’t vote for him because he was a Democrat or a commie or a secret Muslim or they didn’t want universal health care or they hated his wife, but the idea there were people who would vote for Mondale and Bill Clinton and Gore and Kerry but drew the line at a (shudder…) BLACK MAN made me realize there are embedded fantasies that warp people’s ability to examine reality and think clearly.

 

         The “they-voted-for-Trump-but-now-they’re-for-Kamala” meme is just such a fantasy, and the realization of how silly it was served the function of a cold slap in the face.  It returned me to reality-land.  A simple lesson, really---tear away all the goofy stuff and what is left is the truth.

 

         All of which brought me back to the point I made in my article on September 14.  In the last two elections, 137 million people voted to make Trump president and nobody voted for Harris.  

 

When I wrote that, there were six weeks left in the campaign and anything might have happened.  She might have made the country fall in love with her.  She might have given great speeches or connected with the electorate.  She did none of those things.  I understand this was the plan---to fight a substance-free campaign---but it doesn’t seem to have worked.  Trump was a substantial (about 8-5) favorite in the international wagering pools, and he remains in that position on the eve of the election.

 

Up until now, I have predicted Harris would win.  In fact, the only money I have on the election is on her.  But I’m switching horses.

 

Of course, though I pride myself on my rationality, maybe this is just my emotions having their way with me at the last minute.  Perhaps I’m just so frightened of yet another Obama/Biden/Harris administration that I don’t want to face the possibility that all the horrors I have seen the Democrats do recently will continue, or even get worse.  To wit:

 

Putting elderly Catholics in prison for praying at abortion clinics,

 

Allowing important politicians to enrich themselves through secret knowledge and insider trading opportunities they obtain in their official capacities,

 

Providing money to terrorists who murdered entire families in their homes, killed young people at a music festival and raped Jewish women to death,

 

Quietly conspiring with criminal cartels in the abduction and trafficking of 300,000 children into working or sexual slavery,

 

Closing churches for two years,

 

Funding rogue government scientists in the creation of a deadly virus in a Chinese lab,

 

Silencing those who dissent from positions taken by the government on COVID or the climate or the number of sexes by removing those people from public forums, getting their professional credentials lifted and destroying their careers,

 

Holding hundreds in solitary confinement, without bail, for vandalism at the US Capitol,

 

Forcing a deadly and untested “vaccine” (which didn’t prevent anyone from catching the disease), on millions of people, killing untold numbers of them through dozens of side effects, many of which have never been seen before,

 

Permitting and encouraging the lucrative business of chemical and surgical mutilation of children’s sexual organs and sexual development,

 

Encouraging men to compete in sports limited to girls and women,

 

Recruiting millions of mostly military-aged young men (many with criminal records) into the country, commandeering hotel rooms for them and supporting them with cash payments,

 

Stifling energy markets and forcing me to pay an extra $20 whenever I fill up my car,

 

         Using the DOJ to investigate parents who objected to their 5-year-olds being taught about anal sex and labeling those parents “domestic terrorists.”

 

         Employing the criminal justice powers of the government to prosecute and attempt to impoverish Donald Trump, the primary political figure opposed to them,

 

         Jailing, disbarring, and impoverishing attorneys (and others) working for Trump because they had questioned the results of the 2020 election,

 

         Killing large marine mammals (and birds), by planting thousands of windmills just offshore on the continental shelf,

 

         Printing billions of dollars not authorized by Congress to spend on their political priorities,

 

         Carelessly allowing American soldiers to be killed by the Taliban and allowing thousands of American citizens and allies to be trapped in Afghanistan after America’s abrupt exit.

 

I could go on.

 

Copyright2024MichaelKubacki

ELECTION UPDATE 10-26-24

With ten days before the presidential election, the odds listed on Pinnacle.com, one of the world’s largest offshore betting sites, make Trump a 4-7 favorite to win the election, and Harris a 7-4 underdog.  Through most of September, Harris was favored.  Then, in late September and early October, the two were rated even.  Since then, Trump has slowly edged into favorite status.

 

         (I find the large international betting sites to be far more reliable than polls for predicting election results, though some polls are better than others.  With so many polls, it’s hard for a layman like me to distinguish the real polling efforts from the partisan ones designed to shape the results rather than report on them.  Also, even honest pollsters can be incompetent, so even if I were certain which polls were honest, I wouldn’t know which ones were done correctly.  Also, I find betting sites to be just plain more serious.  If they are wrong on the odds, a savvy bettor can take them for a lot of money, so it is safe to assume they at least want the truth and make genuine efforts to figure out what it is.)

 

         In other words, Trump appears likely to win this election.

 

         Because of that, and because of Harris’s steady drift downward, I have been expecting the Democrats to do something different, to change their strategy somehow.

 

         It’s not easy, of course.  Just as Trump is Trump, Harris and Walz are Harris and Walz, and the nature of the candidates are largely baked into the campaigns.  Nevertheless, though no major changes are possible, it is always possible to tweak the campaign slightly, even at this late date.  And I’ve been expecting the Democrats to do that.

 

         For one thing, I think it has been apparent for some time that the physical image of Kamala Harris does her no good.  The earth-tone pantsuits she wears on every occasion effectively turn her into the “Black Hillary,” and that comparison does not help her.  Her handlers have succeeded in getting her to stifle the annoying laugh (something Hillary never did), and that has helped somewhat, but the reminders of Hillary in Kamala’s wardrobe are unmistakable.

 

         Instead, they have apparently decided to double-down on the Trump-is-Hitler theme.  General John Kelly, who was Trump’s Chief of Staff in the White House in 2019, now reports that Trump once said he wished he had some of Hitler’s generals because they were so loyal and obedient.  These are the guys who repeatedly tried to murder Hitler, by the way, but I guess Trump is not expected to know any history.  Also, among students of military history, the German military command was never admired for their unthinking obedience, but rather for their independence and resourcefulness.  But I guess Trump is not expected to know that either.

 

         In any event, the Trump-is-Hitler theme won’t work.  It hasn’t worked and the Democrats have been throwing it at him since 2016.  If this is the best they can come up with to turn the tide, the Democrats may be cooked.  The evidence from polls and betting sites is increasing that Trump will get more votes than Harris in every swing state and may even win non-swing states like Virginia.  The desperation revealed in the return to the Trump-is-Hitler message tends to convince me the Democrats may be out of vote-getting strategies.

 

         Which doesn’t mean Trump will be our next President.

 

         The war over electoral fraud and cheating in the swing states is happening behind the scenes, it is waged differently from state to state, and almost nothing is being reported publicly about it.  Therefore, while I can tell you Trump will get more actual votes than Harris in Georgia and Michigan and Pennsylvania, I have no prediction to make on who will be declared the winner of those states on November 5 or December 2 or January 1 or whenever.

 

         The seven swing states are Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.  All except North Carolina ultimately went to Biden in 2020, but none of the Biden states had a declared victor on election night.

 

        As in 2020, the key metric for predicting shenanigans will be the date on which victory is declared for Trump or Harris, either by election officials or a major news organization.  If a state is “called” on November 5, the date of the election, there will likely be little controversy about it.  But once the sun comes up on November 6 with no official results, I personally will suspect the necessary Democratic ballots are being found in order to flip the result to Harris, because that is what happened four years ago.  The earliest any of these swing states were called was three days after the election.  Nevada was not decided until November 24th, with a ruling from the state’s Supreme Court.  And that seems to be what is happening again.

 

          Election officials in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona and Nevada have already announced that they do not expect to be able to call a winner in the presidential race on election night.  Arizona reports that its Maricopa County will not have results until ten to thirteen days after the election.  (A tip to my betting public:  you can get better than 2-1 on Kamala winning Arizona.  Grab it.) 

 

           The one swing state I know something about is Pennsylvania, and I have no confidence the vote and the counting will be fair.  In fact, like last time, I’m convinced the Democrats in Philadelphia and Delaware County and in a few other places are already working to deliver sufficient fraudulent ballots to win Pennsylvania for Harris.  The Republicans have spent enormous amounts of time and money and effort in very publicly and noisily battling for honest counting on November 5 and beyond, but most of their work has focused on things (like proper dating and sealing of mail-in ballots) that will make no difference.

Copyright2024MichaelKubacki        

PANDEMIC OF THE UNVACCINATED

         

        Back in mid-2021, after the mRNA vaccines had been approved for emergency use, the authorities (including the pharma companies), presented a number of arguments to boost acceptance of these products.  One was the claim that unvaccinated people in hospitals were more likely to die of COVID than vaccinated patients.  A friend recently asked me about this argument, and this was my response. 

         The claim that COVID deaths in hospitals were more likely to be unvaccinated people than vaccinated ones is no longer being made by anybody who has looked at what happened.  Even the pharma companies that are still pushing RNA vaccines seem to have abandoned this bogus claim.

         I remember the vaxxed death rate versus the unvaxxed death rate as part of the “pandemic of the unvaccinated” scare campaign.  This was when Biden and Walensky and Jimmy Kimmel and Rachel Maddow and all the news anchors were telling people that once you got the shot you would never get COVID, and that people like me should be fired from jobs and denied medical care and barred from restaurants and public transit.

 

         I don’t think there was ever a serious study on the death rate issue, and there was certainly nothing that was peer-reviewed.  The claims were mostly official-looking press releases from a hospital or a few hospitals, and they never withstood much scrutiny.  For one thing, the definition of “vaccinated” tended to differ among these varying reports.  Some of the “unvaccinated” COVID victims had actually been vaccinated but were not counted as vaccinated for a number of reasons (too recent, wrong vaccine, etc.).  It seemed clear early on that the death-rate argument was not based in any kind of science since the data supporting the various elements of it was so questionable.

 

         First, the largest number of COVID deaths occurred in 2020 when the virus was most lethal since it had not yet started to mutate.  Because there was not yet a vaccine, all those early deaths were among the unvaccinated.  Were all those people included in the so-called studies?  And if so, doesn’t that skew the results toward the unvaxxed-death side of the equation?

 

         But that’s a minor issue.  The real problem is that we have no idea how many people died of COVID from 2020 to 2023.  We are just now finding that out from studies of the official death data and studies of the autopsies done at the time and filed away without analysis.

 

         As you will recall, the practice was to declare that any death of a person with a “confirmed case” of COVID was a COVID death (in other words, caused by the virus), even if the person displayed no COVID symptoms, was 96 years old, and had congestive heart failure.  This was entirely driven by financial incentives from Medicare and the pharma companies.  Any death that could conceivably be called a COVID death was called a COVID death.

 

         There was almost nothing the public health authorities would not do to inflate the number of COVID deaths so pretty much everyone who died “with COVID” died “of COVID.”  One of the more famous instances occurred when a man who died in a motorcycle crash in Orlando Florida was listed as a COVID death.  A public health officer in Orange County, Dr. Raul Pino, justified the result, stating that one “could actually argue that it could have been the COVID-19 that caused him to crash.”

 

         Then there were the flu deaths, which are counted and reported every year by the CDC.  Here are the official flu death totals from 2018 to 2023:

 

2018-19               27,000

2019-20               25,000

2020-21                    700

2021-22                 4,900

2022-23               21,000

 

Are we really supposed to think old people stopped dying from the flu in the two flu seasons from 2020 to 2022?  Or could it be there were just as many flu deaths, but they were called COVID deaths instead because of the extra money attached?

 

         Now, years later, it will be impossible to unravel all the poor science and outright fraud that went into the designation of COVID deaths.  The only thing we really know is that there were not nearly as many COVID deaths as we were told there were.

 

         The problem of determining how many COVID deaths occurred in hospitals brings with it an additional set of difficulties.  This is because, during the pandemic, anyone admitted to a hospital was required to take a PCR test for COVID whether they showed any symptoms or not.  The hospitals then, following CDC and WHO guidelines, defined a “confirmed case” as a person with a positive test result.  No symptoms were ever required.  Once you were a “confirmed case,” you were a COVID case, and if you died, you were a COVID death.

 

         This was a fundamental error.

 

         The basic mathematical principle, which has been understood for decades, is that a diagnostic test like the PCR should never be used on a population where only a very small percentage of the test subjects have the disease.  In 2021, a letter from the FDA to healthcare providers explained the problem: “As disease prevalence decreases, the percent of test results that are false positives increase.”  But though warned not to test for a disease in a low-prevalence population, the CDC decided to do it anyway.

 

         Here’s the problem.  If 1% of the population tested has the disease, there will be one true positive in every 100 subjects.  So even if your test is 99% COVID-specific (i.e., accurate), it will judge 99 of your 100 subjects correctly and there will be one false positive.  This means that among your 100 people, the test will give you one true positive and one false positive.  Thus, if you test positive for COVID, there is only a 50-50 chance you actually have it.  It’s a coin flip, and the test is worthless, even though it is 99% accurate.

 

         But in fact, PCR tests were quite a bit less reliable than that.  First, the rate of active COVID infection at any one time among the general population was always less than 1% (it was actually about 0.5%).  This could mean there would be fewer than 1 true positive in every 100 hospital admissions.  But even if people entering the hospital were ten times as likely to have COVID as the general population, that would still mean only 5 out of 100 would be true COVID cases.

 

         The real problem is that PCR tests were never close to being as accurate as in the example above.  Instead of being 99% COVID-specific, the CDC found they were only about 70% COVID-specific, meaning they would produce 30% false positives.  If there were 5 true positives and 30 false positives in every 100 hospital admissions, the false positives would be 85% of the total. Whatever the actual numbers were, a large majority of the positive PCR results were false positives and most of the “confirmed cases” in hospitals did NOT have COVID.

 

         The stated justification for this universal testing protocol in hospital admissions was that it would reduce widespread outbreaks in hospitals, though it is hard to see how falsely identifying large numbers of patients as having COVID would have that effect.  But the clear result was there were an enormous number of patients who had no COVID symptoms and did not have COVID, but were deemed to be COVID cases.  And when they died, they became hospital COVID deaths.  Some of them were vaccinated and some of them were not, but none of them died of COVID.

 

         The sum total of all this bad science piled on top of itself is that nobody now has any realistic measure of how many COVID deaths there were in hospitals or anywhere else, or whether most of the people who died of COVID were vaccinated or not. 

Copyright2024MichaelKubacki

2024 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION UPDATE

          I’ve been saying for eighteen months the Democrats were going to swap out Biden.  That was the easy part to foresee.  He was never more than a figurehead for the third Obama term as president, he was quite clearly suffering from some form of dementia in 2020 when they nevertheless managed to drag him over the finish line with the help of a few strategically-place ballot dumps, and he could no longer be presented to the public as a realistic candidate for president.

 

         That’s why he was forced by Obama and the politburo to participate in the debate with Trump on June 27.  Such a debate, before either convention had taken place, was unprecedented.  Its only purpose was to demonstrate for Democrats that Biden could no longer function and had to be replaced.  Biden himself never suspected this was the purpose since his massive ego was the only aspect of his personality still functioning.  He still believed he was the same Joe who could talk in public for ninety minutes and appear to have a working brain.

 

         The debate ploy was rather cruel, of course, but one must suspect Joe had made it clear he would not step aside voluntarily so Obama probably had little choice but to expose him as non compos mentis in front of the nation.

 

         The only thing that truly surprises me about what happened is that Obama did not have more control of the aftermath.  He could not possibly have wanted Kamala to step in as the Democratic candidate, but when Joe dropped out and endorsed her, the eruption of smiles and puppy dogs around her occurred so quickly Obama was powerless to stop it.  I believe his plan was to orchestrate the new candidate’s nomination at the Democratic Convention, but he quickly had to abandon that and fall in behind her.

 

         Timing was the problem.  With a month to go before the convention started, the Democratic untermenchen were going to try to find somebody, and Kamala Harris was the only obvious next-in-line choice.  The Dems had, largely through lawfare and threats, prevented anyone (e.g., RFK Jr.), from running against Biden in the primaries, so there was no logical replacement except the sitting VP.

 

                                               *

 

I have also long taken the position that Trump can’t win in 2024.

 

First, there is a hard ceiling on the support he can ever hope to achieve.  Everyone who likes Trump, more or less, will vote for him, but the hatred is just as large as his support and the haters are not going away.  In 2016, Trump’s 45.9% of the vote nationwide was sufficient only because the Democrats assumed Hillary would romp and thus did not bother to mobilize (or cheat), on her behalf.  In this 2024 campaign, there has been no reason to think Trump could ever achieve the 50% of the vote that would be the minimum for him to win.  Because of the millions of non-citizens voting and the “ballots” that will show up for the Democrats, he might need to get 52% or 53% of the (real) votes cast to overcome what is now called the “margin of cheating.”

 

But with Kamala at the top of the ticket, a Trump win now must be considered a possibility. She has some serious flaws as a candidate.  She’s something of a disaster.

 

I don’t like her much so I’m trying to factor that out of my analysis, but it’s hard to ignore the fact that most other people don’t like her either. Americans tend not to have strong feelings about Vice Presidents, but they certainly disliked Kamala up until her elevation to the presidential nomination.  On January 1, 2024, for example, her numbers were 35.8 % favorable vs. 53.6% unfavorable, which is quite a bit worse than either Biden (40.4-54.9) or Trump (42.9-52.8).  Mike Pence was always in the mid-40s in favorability when he was VP.

 

What do such things mean?  Who knows?  But more concrete measures of her extreme unpleasantness as a human exist.  As Vice President, 92% of her initial staff quit their jobs, mostly during the first two years.  Only 4 of the initial 47 people are still with her, and some who left have not been complimentary, describing an “abusive environment” where “people feel treated like shit.”

 

The same was true of the staff during her run for the 2020 presidential nomination.  Dozens left, dozens more were fired, and Kamala’s campaign came to an abrupt and chaotic end two months before the first primary.  She also had reportedly blown through her $35 million in early funding without putting a single ad on TV.

 

Her failed primary run in 2020, where no one even had an opportunity to cast a vote for her, brings me to a significant dynamic flaw in her current run for President.

 

In 2016, Donald Trump got 62,984,828 votes for President.  Four years later, 74,223,975 people went into voting booths and checked the box next to his name.  These 137 million votes do not even include the primary voters in those years who left their homes, went to the local firehouse or school, and intentionally voted to make him the Republican nominee.

 

By contrast, no one has ever voted for Kamala Harris in a national election.  (And no, you can’t count her votes for VP in 2020---those people were voting for Biden.)

 

People become accustomed to voting for certain politicians, and once they do, those politicians have a significant edge in future elections.  It’s one of the major advantages of incumbency---the fact there are lots of ordinary people out there who will recognize your name and think, “Oh, yeah.  That guy.  He seems OK.  I voted for him before.”

 

We have a perfect example of this phenomenon in the 2024 race for US Senate in Pennsylvania.  The Democratic incumbent is named Bob Casey Jr., and he was elected to the US Senate in 2008 and reelected in 2016.  Before that, he was the elected Pennsylvania Treasurer from 2005 to 2007.  His dad was Bob Casey Sr., who served as Pennsylvania Governor from 1987 to 1995.

 

Casey is a very reliable vote for the Democrats in the Senate, and he is otherwise unknown.  Many people outside the state, asked to name our senators, would quickly come up with John Fetterman but would whiff on the other one.  Casey never has an idea or proposes a bill.  He’s never on the Sunday news shows.  Also, he has been married to the same woman for 39 years and has four children who have never been arrested.  Casey has never been accused of putting his hand on the wrong buttocks or of taking a bribe.  He’s the most boring guy in Washington.

 

It's almost impossible to beat a guy like this.  Pennsylvanians have seen “Casey” in voting booths for two generations and they’ve clicked that box many times with no regrets.  His eldest son will probably run for governor someday and get elected by acclamation without even having to show his drivers license.

 

His opponent is a substantial sort of guy named Dave McCormick, a billionaire and global capitalist who speaks well and has no felony convictions and knows a few things and who does not have a chance in hell of beating Casey.  

 

The Trump-Harris race is not analogous and I’m not saying it is.  But Trump has received 137 million votes in national elections and Harris has gotten zero.  In 2020, Trump got the second most votes for president in American history (or the most if you believe Biden’s total was a crock).  He will get 75 million or more this time from people who have voted for him before.  For Harris, the task is to get more than that from people who don’t know much about her except that maybe she worked the fry machine at McDonalds.

 

So I give him a chance now.

 

*

 

         And a caveat.

 

         When people like me get together with other people like me, the first question we ask each other is whether the election this time will be fair.  It won’t, of course, but the real question we are asking is whether the RNC and various state Republican party orgs are working to make sure they are ready for the shenanigans that will occur.  And I doubt it.

 

         The rap on the Pentagon is that they are always studying ways to win the previous war so they are never prepared for the next one.  I fear that is what is happening with the Republican preparations for November 5.

 

         There is nothing that can be done about the millions of non-citizens that have been registered and the smaller number who will actually vote.  In addition, nothing will be done about the “traditional” cheating that occurs in corrupt Democratic-controlled cities like Philly, Cleveland, Detroit and St. Louis, where poll workers cast votes for neighbors who died in 2008 or neighbors who moved to Panama in 2016.

 

         But what about the ballots of imaginary people, the ballots that turned up by the thousands at 3:00 AM on election night in 2020?  I’m not convinced the Republicans have thought this through and have a plan to deal with it.  Yes, there will be Republicans in the counting chambers at 3:00 AM watching for truckloads of ballots to show up, but that just means the cheaters will find a different way to get their dirty work done.  I would really like to think the Republicans have some master plan but I see no signs of it.  In Pennsylvania, the big election news at the moment is about court cases over what to do with mail-in ballots that have not been properly dated by the “voter.”  This issue, and the hoopla surrounding it, is pointless.  In this state, it might affect a few hundred or a thousand votes.  The fact that Republicans are wasting their time and resources on it is depressing to those of us who would someday like to see a fair election.

 

         I follow these anti-fraud efforts closely, though I’m not an insider.  But I sincerely doubt there has been any effort to effect one simple and obvious change to the counting process.  In every election since I was born, all the votes in rural (mostly Republican-leaning) counties in Pennsylvania are reported long before the votes from Philadelphia are.  Only when the tallies from Beaver County and Tioga County, and Union and Elk and Fayette come in do the Democrats in Philly understand how many votes they need to carry the state.  And they find them.  Somehow.  The exact same process happens in Georgia and Michigan and Arizona and Wisconsin.  For some reason, Atlanta and Detroit and Phoenix and Milwaukee are the last places to report in those states.

 

         All that is needed is for the RNC to instruct every Republican city or town or township or county in swing states to hold back their results until after the huge Democratic city in their state has reported.

 

         Not only would this protect the integrity of the election, but it would also expose the big-Democratic-city cheating that has been happening forever, especially when those cities start howling about the late returns from the boondocks.

 

Copyright2024MichaelKubacki        

ST. PATTY (Again)

          Today, March 16, 2024, marks the fourth anniversary of COVID lockdowns in the state of Pennsylvania.  The sudden shutdown of the economy, church services, and all social interaction (with the exception of leftwing street demonstrations), was our introduction to the world-wide “pandemic response,” a years-long campaign of edicts, propaganda, and censorship by government executives and bureaucrats, pharma companies, social media, and the state-run broadcasters.

In the U.S. and almost every Western nation, there was suddenly an official story, and any attempt by citizens or responsible doctors and scientists to question the authorities or suggest alternative courses of action was stifled by police, military, regulatory and taxing authorities, and the state-sponsored demonization of dissenters as dangerous, stupid, uncaring people.

No one has been held to account for the COVID security state that was created, or the millions it killed and continues to kill.  In fact, much of the legal infrastructure to reconstitute it still exists, and the official position of the American and other governments is that the totalitarian “pandemic response” actually saved lives.

I first published this short piece a year ago:   

 

         On March 16, 2020, the day before St. Patrick’s Day, Pennsylvania went into lockdown for COVID.   Most businesses, including bars and restaurants, were closed indefinitely by order of Governor Wolf.

           I remember it vividly.  The lockdown was to go into effect at 5 PM, so at 2 PM, I raced over to Billy Murphy’s Irish Saloon, at Conrad St. and Indian Queen Lane in Philly.  My plan was simple: get a drink before the world, or something, ended.  Nobody knew what was coming, but I didn’t like the look of it.

           The door was locked.

           I stood at the door and heard muffled voices inside.  I later learned they had closed early and were having a staff party, both to celebrate the Saint and to mourn the lockdown.  In a way, it was a perfect Irish moment, composed of equal parts laughter, melancholy, and alcohol.  Standing there, I thought about pounding on the door and trying to talk my way in, but I didn’t.  It was their bar.  It was their party.  I’m not even a little bit Irish, I don’t celebrate St. Patty’s Day, and it wasn’t even St. Patty’s Day yet.  Still, knowing they were there and wanting to join them but not being able to, I don’t think I ever felt more Irish.  And I don’t think I have ever wanted a drink more than I did at that moment.

Copyright2023MichaelKubacki

CHANGING MY TUNE

         It’s time to admit I was wrong. 

         From the beginning of Twitter in 2006, I was a complete fan and devotee of social media.  I didn’t use most of them, but I believed the creation of Facebook (2006), Instagram (2010), MySpace (2003), and others were a wonderful development in the spread of free speech and open expression.  I cherished the cacophony of voices because almost anybody in the world could say whatever they wanted and have it broadcast around the planet, without the intervention of governments and censors and other poopheads. 

 

         I didn’t care that much of it was lies or propaganda or the rantings of crazy people.  I could handle that.  In a sense, that is part of the truth also.  Since I haven’t awarded unthinking belief to anything I have heard on radio or TV or the internet for decades, I was never going to fall into a false reality constructed by a political party or the CIA or the climate-changers or Obama or Rush Limbaugh or the WEF or NBC or Anthony Fauci or Anderson Cooper or anybody else.  I don’t care what any individual tells me.  All I want is sources, and social media provided millions of them.  If you have enough sources and they can speak freely, you can learn the truth, and I generally do.  I guess it’s ironic, but if you don’t believe anything you are told, then ultimately, the truth will emerge. 

 

         And that’s what I loved about social media, and Twitter in particular.  It was especially useful for following live events like the terrorist attack on the Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, England, because you would get tiny pieces of the story from cops and firemen and worried parents and injured people and even the bad guys and their sympathizers.  The official story, of course, gets all cleaned up and you don’t see it until the next day, but the real human story was being told by hundreds of people in a line or two of text.  This sort of information had never existed before, and I was fascinated by it. 

 

         Then I read the Coleman Hughes book “The End of Race Politics.”  (Highly recommended.)  In it, Hughes discusses “neoracists” like Ibram X. Kendi, Robin DiAngelo, Nikole Hannah-Jones and others who use social media to indoctrinate those who might be susceptible to their message. 

 

         The centerpiece of his theory is polling on Americans’ feelings about race relations. Until 2013, well over two thirds of Americans believed race relations were good, and improving.  Then, the bottom fell out.  By 2015, the percentage of Americans believing race relations were good had fallen below 50% and has continued to fall.  He attributes this to the emergence of a critical mass of people with video-enabled smartphones and social media, which increased the speed at which “news” (i.e., lies), could spread around the country. 

 

         The point Hughes makes is that people whose political success depends on their ability to create rage now have a built-in advantage, and they use it routinely.  When a story taps into emotional triggers (e.g., white cop/black perp, violence, etc.), it spreads immediately to hundreds of millions, but the more-nuanced reality-based version may take months to appear, by which time most of the original audience have no interest in what really happened. 

 

         The example he uses is the Michael Brown story from Ferguson, Missouri in 2014.  The “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” version of this tale was embraced instantly by neoracists and progressives and BLM supporters, and it still is.  It took months for the Eric Holder Justice Department report to appear, and for some of us to learn Brown didn’t have his hands up, he punched the cop, he tried to steal the cop’s gun, and that the cop had no alternative but to shoot him.  But that report made little difference.  Today, years later, “Hands Up Don’t Shoot” is still chanted regularly at BLM and other race-activist demonstrations. 

 

         Another example, perhaps even a better one, is the story of Donald Trump’s comments after the Charlottesville clash of white supremacists and antifa demonstrators in 2017.  The cause of the controversy was the city’s decision to take down a statue of Robert E. Lee.  Concerning the issue of the statue, Trump said, “…[Y]ou also had people that were very fine people, on both sides.” 

 

         This was reported around the world on social media and TV and newspapers as Donald Trump stating that the white supremacists were among the “very fine people,” even though he had already repeatedly condemned them.  Though the transcript of his press conference was available, almost no one reported what he had actually said, which was that there were “fine people” who wanted to take the statue down and “fine people” who thought it should stay up.  To this day, despite the efforts of many journalists and commentators to correct the story, most Americans (including every Trump-hater), believe the original falsehood. 

 

         In other words, my dream of the internet and social media as a forum for truth and free speech has been dashed by the facts of life.  The mob is still the mob, and the mob is not searching for truth.  It’s usually seeking to have its basest and most vicious beliefs validated: skin color matters; Jews are evil; the “experts” have our best interests at heart; scientists have no biases; capitalism makes us poor; the government just wants to help.  I can still use Twitter and other sites as resources in my search for the truth, but I must accept that most people have no interest in doing that.  

 

Another phenomenon has occurred that is even more troubling and dangerous.  In 2016, two events changed the view of Western governments toward the internet and social media.  These were, in June, the Brexit vote in the UK, and in November, the election of Donald Trump in the U.S.  These events shocked the globalists, the leftwing NGOs, and the buried elitist bureaucracies in the U.S., European governments, and the E.U.  It was at this point that the apparatus for censorship of social media began to be built.

 

Government censorship has focused primarily on two topics: COVID-19 and the 2020 presidential election, and any dissent to the official government narrative on these topics has been ruthlessly suppressed on-line---this is the subject of the case Missouri v. Biden, currently in the US Supreme Court. * 

 

So I was wrong.  (That was the point of this article---remember?)  The internet is not the boon to free speech I had hoped it was.  In fact, the totalitarians and censors are taking it over.  They get to talk and the rest of us don’t.  We just spout “misinformation,” you see, so they must shut us up.

 

Still, it’s not over.  Elon Musk seems to have a genuine commitment to free speech, though he is under attack by governments around the world.  But even if his efforts are shut down---well, there will be alternatives.  It may be more difficult to find the truth these days but it’s not impossible.  And if the situation gets even worse, we will still be able to talk to our friends or post our diatribes on telephone poles.

 

I hope.    

 

 

 

Copyright2024MichaelKubacki

 

 

*The process has been described in detail by Mike Benz in interviews, podcasts, and at 

foundationforfreedomonline.com, the organization he leads.