Predicting the Outcome of the US Elections?

I'm probably one of the few people who has said for months that Romney would win, and it wouldn't be close. I mean -- who said this long before the debate the other day when Obama did so poorly. Then I saw Roger Kimball had said this, to derision, of course, especially from Europeans. The reason some people feel so sure Obama will win, of course, is because of the polls -- the polls even in those "swing states" like Ohio.

But did you know that only 9 percent of American people are actually polled? That is, whenever you read a poll about 52% of this or 45% of that (like the 45% who think Obama has done a bad job on jobs) you're only getting the responses of the same 9 percent -- because most people don't answer the phone or hang up on pollsters. I have never in my life gotten a phone call from a pollster. So my lack of trust in polls is in part simply a flat statement -- they don't reflect my opinion, I'm not in them. The sampling and weighting is more of an art than a science, yet we constantly hear the left claim that skepticism about polls is a refusal to be in touch with reality or even conspiracy-mongering. Pew Charitable Trust -- one of the polling outfits that always feels a bit skewed to me because of their timing and framing of questions -- has subjected its ownself to a poll about its reliability, and found this fact that only 9 percent are reached and polled satisfactorily.

If polls were enough, we wouldn't need elections -- ballot boxes, and secret ballots, and the electoral college. Of course, some of the technocommunist geeks want just that very thing -- to substitute the messiness of representative democracy, with political figures and elections -- with something they think is "more direct" and "scientific". I find this the worst sort of Marxist totalitarian bullshit, but then, you knew that.

So look, how can we predict who will win the elections? I have ESP myself -- but as I've noted before, it's the most exasperating sort of ESP where I can usually only see a little way into the future -- it doesn't even count, because it's more like paying attention to the present-- real hard. So 20 minutes before something happens, I get a preview of it, but what use is that? It's like feeling on September 9 as you land in a plane a terrible heaviness that something awful is going to happen, but it isn't *that* plane, and then everything thinks (if you tell them), well you must mean *that plane* -- and then two days later, who would think to listen to you that it was *another*?

So anyway, I decided to visit my Magic Compass, which is a much more primitive form of the Golden Compass, which I first made in The Sims Online, and see what it had to say. It's up on one of the higher floors at Pharos Island -- where there's the Tower of Alexandria replica.

The first thing to do is place a possession of the person whose fortune you wish to tell on the center of the board. So in Obama's case, I took a "Hope" poster copy that somebody made in 2008.

Then, you roll the dice. This will tell you the compass direction. The first roll tells you where you are now -- your current state. In Obama's case, he (in absentia, with me telling his fortune) rolled South East, to the party hat. Now, these simple objects can in fact yield many meanings and associations. And I can only tell you the associations that I come up with, such as they are.

When I saw the party hat, then I saw that "his party is having a party," that is, he has been winning -- he's been president and won the last elections. Will he win these?

The next roll is "the bridge," as I think of it. It is what is contained in the past that will make up the future. Sort of like "the ingredients". I wonder if the reason I (or anybody) can't tell the future is because *it's not there*. It doesn't exist yet! Now, people become hobbled on this thinking about eternity. But I've always visualized eternity as merely the quilt or the afghan that gets made out of the threads of the present. That is, there are the basic threads and the frame of that tapestry or quilt. But how they get woven together on the frame is the job of the present -- and your free will. It all makes sense to me, these two clashing prospects, free will/the present and eternity/the future.

But those ingredients are like the magnet filings on those old magnet-pictures of Nancy, the cartoon character, or the man with the mustache. Something has to draw them to their positions! Or like a kaleidoscope.

So here, the dice roll goes due East, to the bed. The bed can be all kinds of things. "You made your bed and now lie in it" or love and marriage. But...none of those came up for Obama in my head. Instead, there was the word "Embedded" as in war, as in journalists going with armies as "embedded" reporters. And I saw him as the Embedded President, stuck in these three (at least) wars and very much defined by them. The other day, I saw that parody of him saying "I have a drone" instead of "I have a dream" like Martin Luther King, Jr. If you don't like Obama on the right, you have to realize they don't care for him at all on the far left and have gotten actively nasty and mean at this point. So this bridge isn't the greatest.

Now, for the punchline -- the future. What will Mr. Community-Organizer-in-Chief draw here?

And I must be honest -- he rolled South, which is the Lonely Chair. The Lonely Chair is really the worst space in my Magic Compass game. It's not good. It's Lonely as in "the cheese stands alone" or "the US is the only one voting against the Right to Development at the UN Human Rights Council". (Good!).

Usually the Lonely Chair is a bitter fate, not a positive fate, but at least an independent one -- it comes with its blessings, I suppose.

But to be honest, the association that popped up with Obama's roll was that this could be his throne. And that could well mean he will win. No, I didn't have a thought in my head at the time about Clint Eastwood's empty chair gag -- honestly, I didn't. It's funny to think that maybe that *is* what the Magic Compass is trying to tell me! But I have to report what did pop up -- this *could* be his throne.

Well, what else?

Well, there's more.

There are two additional readings that give the depth, so to speak, of these other past, present and future readings. They are like those new things they've found to add to the sense of taste -- have you heard? There used to be only four types of taste when we were kids: sweet, sour, bitter, salty. But just like they went and lost the planet Pluto, now they've added another thing called "unami" after a Japanese word to describe what a Japanese guy discovered about this new thing about taste which is its..."pleasant savoury taste". I don't know what -- besides Japanese foods like miso soup -- have this property, which I would describe as "round".

OK, so the first thing to add to the "taste" of this fortune is achieved by sorting your inventory by date, and then going into lost and found, and pulling out the first thing in there (hopefully it will not be some 365 prim clump like the Lindens return, but if so, it would be the first thing spied in that clump). This is, in a way, something that might have to be let go, or lost, before this fortune comes to fruition, or something overlooked about it.

It my case, it was...the dice. I had deleted an extra one. So that let me know just how much chance there is, just how loosely those threads are in the carpet, just how, well, dicey this whole Obama win is. There it is, kids. I thought that the Compass might be telling me to roll again -- which I did, producing the Measuring Tape, which let me know just how much "hanging chad" kind of stuff there might well be around this very close election (except both Roger Kimball and me think Romney will win big.)

But there is more. There's the other "taste" aspect of the future, part of the whole, round picture, if you will, which is achieved by pulling out the first thing from your inventory in "objects" which will tell you what assist this fortune in coming true.

And there I pulled out my Belarus Chicken Tracker with the Russian maiden looking out across the steppes or into the future, her hand shielding her eyes from the glorious sun of the revolution, I guess.

Somehow, "Belarus" and "Chicken" didn't seem to "speak to me" about Obama, but "Tracker" did. That is again, it's about measurement, about counting, about something related to the actual numbers. Think tracking!

So, next, I went over to the Eight Ball. It was no help. It said ask again later.

Then, on to the Quiji Board. For some reason, the letters that came up were SEIU, and it stopped. That seemed to be nonsense -- well, sometimes it is. I made a note of it. Then I realized that those were the initials for the left-leaning Service Employees International Union -- in fact, they have some real socialist cadre types among them. So enamored are they of Occupy Wall Street, that they have a banner saying "We Are the 99%" on their building in Washington. I wonder if they will change this to "47%" now that our socialism has been discounted.

Hmm, SEIU. Something dramatic relating to them, and the measurement or tracking issue?  Go to Youtube and type in "SEIU" and you get this: "Obama Protesters at Romney Rally admit that they are from SEIU and Paid by SEIU at $11.00/hour.

Well, that doesn't seem like much of a scandal. So what? Lots of agitators and protesters are paid, probably on the right too.That's hardly a story that will have much impact on the elections. What more is to come from that quarter, I wonder? We'll see.

There's more -- the Tarot, the Runes -- but it's lost in my inventory. Back later...

Comments

[Amanda Dallin]

Interesting and about as accurate as most polling.

[c3]

just ask Jesus...;)

anyhow... without a "national emergency" to define things "code red"....(like the red thing)?

the question is how far down the rabbit hole of "virtual" has the american mind gone?

Dinkens, Bradley, and Carter all were one termers in a time before "social media" as defined by the use of people as slaves/fodder/sales pieces as accepted today as "business as usual and profitable as fact"

ironic that two were black. the other a plantation owner from an old beaten south..... beaten by a Hollywood image/creation/avatar. shiny/ new...even at 70.;)

we have the "avatar" as president now... the question is "as much as romney attempts to be a "cypher"-anonymous avatar..will the american people replace one avatar with another. or just like in SL, suffer and defend the dream.

till it all closes down.

i dont think clinton or bushjr were avatars btw-- they both were way to ego driven. they never saw the avatar as more than a curser.;) authentic sociopaths... we love authenticity above all in the america of dreams..

[melponeme_k]

I don't believe in ESP. I believe in history repeating itself.

Right now we are at the apex of cannibal capitalism. The same as it was before the French Revolution, Russian Revolution and any revolution in history. The elites have decided that they are above the state.

It doesn't matter who is elected. They serve the same people. And those people right now are shaking in their shoes over their own stupidity, greed and hubris at sending the US/their industrial base to Asia.

China is going to nationalize it all, and the elites will force us to WWIII.

[GreenLantern Excelsior]

I think polls are tiresome, especially so when that's all you hear about day after day. People love to cite polls when their guy is winning. It's like they're saying "See? My guy is ahead. Your guy can't win. You may as well stay home on election day." Then if the polls shift the other way and their guy isn't winning any more, they will publish statistics about which party is under-represented in the poll, or the low number of people sampled, or the part of the country where the poll was taken.

The voting itself isn't simple these days, either. Both sides have armies of lawyers on standby for every election. No matter which guy wins, get ready for a court challenge. What bothers me are stories about busloads of people arriving at polling places, all registered at the same address (that's where the SEIU vision comes in). Or you will often see more total votes in a precinct than there are registered voters. Circumstances like that are probably why the lawyers are needed.

Whether you live and die by the polls, or you roll the chicken bones to get your results, there will be surprises on election day. My plan, as usual, is to not pay much attention to the poll numbers. I will vote my conscience on election day no matter what the polls say.

And I'm not going to vote for the empty chair. :)

[Micha Sass]

Capitalism has died already. It died when governments bailed out the banks/corporations with taxpayer money. Socialism is also dead, with governments in huge deficit after bailing out favoured major corporations there is no money in the pot, austerity policies are now the king.

Win-win for elitism. Those at the top will suffer the least.

Romney or Obama?..It will make not one shit of difference. At least Obama was attempting to create a single payer healthcare system to help the poorer citizens. Hisssss..god damn commie bastard.

*Facepalm*

[cube3]

gotta say tonights FRONTLINE was enlightening on both obama and romney.

if either really had guts and either really wanted to live up to their "missions"..

they should meet over coffee next week... agree to join into one ticket.... donate all the money raised to finance the single payer system BOTH wanted as their legacies... and run the executive office as a joint affair... frankley they both seem to have the same non ideologies.... and together they could force a middle back into congress... and force bi party legislation to happen vs relying on the paid off corporate courts to make the laws by individual decry.

[Chicken Soup]

interesting article... thanks for sharing

[GreenlightRedlight]

Wow, scary accurate. Seriously though, have you ever found yourself in a situation where you were actually right about anything of consequence? I mean even a broken clock has a chance, that has to give you hope right?